John Barber

Excellent suspense thriller, Joan Crawford’s last popular success until ‘Whatever Happened To Baby Jane’. Crawford rose to prominence in the silent era, and as much of this film plays out without dialogue, she is given the opportunity to display her absolute mastery of mime again, decades later. Her performance is intense, emotionally committed and technically expert. Jack Palance is great too, as the manipulative younger man who exploits her vulnerability as a single middle-aged woman in a pitilessly ageist and sexist era. Gloria Grahame is compelling as always. As the tension mounts, director David Miller cleverly and clearly establishes the geography of each interior and San Francisco location, maximising the effect of all the stalking, chasing, hiding and subterfuge. The plot has its contrivances and gimmicks, but these do not detract, because the whole film plays out in a heightened manner, sometimes even slipping woozily from the main character’s melodramatic reality into fantasy and dream. Even inanimate objects, like a key, a dictaphone and a clockwork toy participate in the drama. This film is weird and wonderful.

‘Fun and Fancy Free’ is a minor post war morale-booster, a commercial rag-bag of cartoons, music and live-action puppetry. It looks gorgeous, with vibrant colours and background art, especially in the ‘Bongo’ sequence, where the natural world is depicted in a loving way that is reminiscent of ‘Bambi’. But the ‘Bongo’ episode is overlong, even a bit boring, the songs are forgettable, and modern audiences might find Lulubelle the love-interest hard to take. Jiminy Cricket, the overall narrator, then leads us into a bizarre live-action sequence in which he goes to a party hosted by child star Luana Patten, whose only guest is popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his puppets, which photograph surprisingly well, but film cruelly exposes Bergen’s technical shortcomings. He narrates the second cartoon, a version of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ featuring Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Goofy. As usual, Donald is the most entertaining of the trio, and Willie the Giant is a wonderful creation. At the end, the film returns briefly to the party, to show that the giant was not killed after all, and is last seen, bizarrely, rampaging through the streets of late 1940s Hollywood. Then the film abruptly ends. ‘Fun and Fancy Free’ is short and certainly worth a look, but it’s not classic Disney.