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The Year in Pictures

I think &quot;writers_reign&quot; is being rather too hard on this short. The original story was just something to fill in a commuter journey and this is the film equivalent. Implausible? Of course. Badly acted? I thought not. I did manage to suspend disbelief for a while, and that is entirely due to the smooth professionalism of Wolfit, Medwin and Losey, and the splendid seaside photography. The film tells a story coherently, and maintains tension. We know the wicked Max must in the end be foiled but we are puzzled to know how this will be achieved, and the film&#39;s ending is more successful than the original story. Nor do I find it completely unlikely that somebody in a dim interior where the lights don&#39;t work would always realise that his host, who finds his way around confidently, is blind.

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A Man on the Beach

After a man robs a casino disguised as a woman (the *man* was disguised as a woman, not the casino, silly!), he escapes to the beach with his co-hort, whom he kills. In the process, he is shot in the arm. He wanders around the beach until he finds a shack. There he meets an interesting recluse who holds the key to his future. This was a weird one. 3/4 of it feels like the middle act of a movie, but then has a conclusive ending. The man in the shack also has a secret that&#39;s revealed at the end, but it&#39;s not so much revealed as &quot;duh&quot;-inducing. Still, an interesting, well performed, fairly entertaining short.

There seems to have been no reason to make this short film other than the need to do so after the contracts had been signed. The acting is convincing. Though some of the fight scene&#39;s movements are unnaturally staged. Medwin in profile, in the charmingly civilised moments in the casino manager&#39;s office, whilst posing as a rich English lady who, (&#39; I fear not &#39;), had had no luck at the roulette wheel, could easily be mistaken for Alec Guinness&#39;s Lady Ascoyne D&#39;ascoyne from &#39; Kind Hearts and Coronets &#39;. Donald Woolfit is convincingly miserable as a former surgeon. Although now a drunken wreck of a man, his former profession as a surgeon must have been a highly-celebrated one, as, although he now spends his time in a near-permanent state of embittered, self-exiled, English inebriation on the French coast, such were his previous skills, when sober, that he is still able to perform, though now blind, a procedure on an unconscious Medwin with such a remaining deft touch as to finish it without waking him from his sleep; a great loss to the surgical profession, indeed ! Curious that anyone should think it was worthwhile to make at the time. It&#39;s value now I think is that it&#39;s yet another film for admirers of the many busy character actors of the time.

Incredibly this piece of cheese was the first British movie on which Joseph Losey got a director credit under his own name, one I&#39;m fairly sure he would have been happy to forego. Jimmy Sangster provided not so much a screenplay as a king-sized colander with implausibility leaking out of every hole and inept acting doing nothing to plug the gaps. Outside a casino presumably in Northern France, chauffeur Michael Ripper, waiting for his employer, asks a group of children not to laugh at the lady again, telegraphing that there is something peculiar about her. Cut to the casino where the lady in question, clearly Michael Medwin in unconvincing drag, is at the tables. He finishes playing and is invited into the Manager&#39;s office where, inexplicably there is a large amount of cash - clearly several thousand pounds - lying on the table. The manager offers champagne to what is clearly a regular patron whereupon Medwin knocks him out, puts the money in a case and leaves, pausing only to tip the croupier. Ripper drives him to the airport and they pause near a beach to enable Medwin to change out of drag. Having done so he pulls a gun on Ripper rather than sharing the loot. Ripper runs away, they struggle and Medwin is shot. Nevertheless he gets the better of Ripper, places him behind the wheel and pushes the car off a cliff. Then he finds a house on the beach with nobody home. Eventually Donald Wolfit, clearly a blind man, shows up and incredibly Medwin does not peg him as a blind man. The local seagulls dined on better garbage than this.

User reviews

A Man on the Beach

Undemanding entertainment

Just beachy

A Little Tedious.

Beached Wail

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