So Far

The tendency of a very famous film like The Third Man is to gather layer upon layer of apocryphal stories so that it becomes increasingly hard with the passing years to unravel what really happened. So I was pleased a few days ago to hear an intelligent, reasonably accurate discussion of the film on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast. But a notable lapse was its account of David Selznick, who was the American co-producer of the film. The show’s guest, Misha Glenny,

Scrawled on the other side of this photograph are the words, “Sleeping in Lindsay’s office”. The woman in the picture is Lois Sutcliffe (later Lois Smith), who in 1948 persuaded Lindsay Anderson to make films. Perhaps one reason why those films turned out to be so extraordinarily good was that he had to be persuaded to make them. He was not a careerist. He was a passionate, humane, sometimes angry human being who wanted to change the world for the better: he knew that what y

The brilliance of Dead of Night, Ealing’s celebrated omnibus of supernatural tales (not a horror film as contemporary commentators tend to call it) lies less in the individual episodes than its connections. It benefited hugely from the presence of the director and producer Alberto Cavalcanti, who understood the importance of how things fit together. He directed probably the most praised episode in the film, “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”, but took much more pride from his impact