Assignment in Brittany

Another of the movies that I needed to watch before it expired from my cloud DVR is an MGM World War II morale-builder, Assignment in Brittany.

The movie doesn't start in Brittany, but in North Africa, where the allies are fighting the Germans. Captain Metard (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is a spy doing espionage work, dressed as one of the local Arabs. However, it's a ruse to murder a Nazi officer, and one that works. Metard, being French, can't go back to France since the Nazis occupy it, so he returns to the London headquarters of the Free French. But they have a plan for him that's going to allow him to go back to France, as if you couldn't tell from the title of the movie.

Bertrand Corlay is a farmer and poet from Brittany, but he was believed to have been collaborating with the Nazis since they occupied France. The British got him, and found out that he and Metard look surprisingly alike. So perhaps the British and Free French can train Metard in what Corlay is like, so that he can go back to Brittany as Corlay and move around the area the way that Corlay could to get vital information that the Allies want. Now, to me, it seems silly that somebody like Metard could learn to become Corlay in the short time period that the movie requires, but in those days apparently it wasn't considered so far-fetched.

Now, you might guess from my comment that Metard is caught out fairly quickly, but that's not the case. Only Mme. Corlay (Margaret Wycherley) figures out the deception right away. She's opposed to the Nazis even though here real son isn't, so she's not about to betray this interloper. The bigger issue is that Bertrand had a fairly complicated personal life. He's got a fiancée, Anne (Susan Peters), but also has a mistress in Élise (Signe Hasso). And everybody around knows that Bertrand Corlay is liked enough by the Nazis to be able to go to Paris (which is how the British are able to make the switch).

However, since this is a World War II movie and the Nazid obviously can't win in the end, we can assume that Metard is able to get information, which is that the Nazis have taken a seaside village, Saint Lumaire, and turned it into a port for their U-boats, forcibly evacuating all of the locals. Metard has to get the information back to the Allies, and that's going to require a radio broadcast. If you've seen enough World War II movies you know that the Nazis and Allies were going around searching for the location of illicit transmitters. This results in Metard getting captured, and the movie reaching its climax.

Assignment in Brittany is typical for the sort of movie released during World War II and dealing with resistance to the Nazis. It's well enough done, although it was designed to be jingoistic in order to keep up the spirits of the people on the home front. Audiences of the day probably would have enjoyed it, although watching 80 years on it might appear dated to some.

Invaders from Mars

I didn't pay much attention to the 2024 selection of films to the National Film Registry when those selections were announced back in December. Apparently, one of the films named was the science fiction film Invaders from Mars. That would probably explain why it's shown up multiple times in the past several years on TCM. It's got yet another airing coming up, tomorrow, April 5, at 1:45 PM, which means it's time for me to watch it and do a review on it.

Child actor Jimmy Hunt plays David MacLean, one of those space-obsessed kids of the 1950s, although in his case it's slightly more understandable since his father George (Leif Erickson) does some sort of classified space research at one of the nearby military facilities. Mom Mary is slightly worried about the kid's overactive imagination, thinking that the kid needs more sleep. One night during a thunderstorm, David looks over to the sandpit just across a field from his bedroom window, and sees what for all the world looks like a flying saucer coming to rest behind the fence. David tells Dad, who suggests he and the kid go out and look in the morning. But Dad goes out alone, and when he gets to the sand, he suddenly falls through.

Dad isn't back by morning, so Mom calls the police, with two policemen showing up, only for them to fall through the sand too. By this point Dad returns home, although to David it seems like something has changed, as Dad has no emotion other than anger at David for asking questions about that supposed spaceship. Dad also has some strange scar on the back of his neck. Worse, David also sees his friend from nearby, little Kathy, fall into the sand. And when she comes back, she burns down her house!

David is understandably fearful that something has gone terribly wrong, so he runs away to the police station to look for help. The police bring in a doctor, Pat Blake (Helena Carter), who gets the impression that perhaps David is telling the truth when she learns that he has a bit of a scientific bent and is not known to be given to making stuff up. She talks to a friend of the MacLeans, astronomer Dr. Kelston (Arthur Franz), and brings up the idea that not only is there life on Mars, but that they may well already be sending research ships to Earth. The working theory is that the Martians have already arrived, and they have a way of controlling the minds of earthlings.

Thankfully, there's a lot of military around that they can bring manpower and weapons to the situation, as well as the scientific minds of David, Blake, and Kelston. Sure enough, there are Martians in that field, although the Martians aren't stupid and have moved to a different part of the field. What's left behind is the tunnels they've left. The search is on for the Martians, and that search gets more desperate when David and Dr. Blake fall into another of the traps the Martians have set up.

Invaders from Mars was directed by William Cameron Menzies, who is probably more prominent for his set designs although he also directed the 1930s scifi film Things To Come. It's that earlier film I found myself thinking of as I was watching Invaders from Mars. The underground Martian sets are imaginative, while the sets above ground are decidedly 1950s B sci-fi stuff. But, with Menzies at the helm, we're given to some imaginative camera work as well. That's definitely a good thing, since the story is rather straightforward and resolved way too quickly. Reading reviews from people who first saw the movie as a kid, they say they were frightened by the film, and I can see why. As an adult, however, it's not scary but just another fun 50s scifi genre film. Definitely worth watching.

Margie

Tomorrow on TCM is a morning and afternoon of movies with screenplays written by F. Hugh Herbert, not to be confused with character actor Hugh Herbert. However, there's a movie airing on TCM on Saturday, April 5, that I'm planning on doing a blog post about tomorrow, so F. Hugh Herbert gets a mention today. As it turns out, I have one of his movies on my DVR, although it's not one of the movies that TCM is showing tomorrow. That movie is Margie.

The credits are done as something that wasn't uncommon for book adptations, which is the turning of pages with another batch of credits on each page. However, in this set of opening credits the pages are pages of a scrapbook with old photos on the pages accompanying the credits. After the credits, the camera pans into the attic of the house where Margie (Jeanne Crain) lives, together with teenage daughter Joyce (Ann E. Tood, not the same person as Ann Todd despite the middle initial E not being in the opening credits). Joyce finds some of Mom's old stuff from the 1920s when Margie herself was a teenager in the same small Ohio town where they still live, such as a scrapbook, and an old pair of bloomers. Joyce asks Mom to tell her about when she was in high school, so we get the requisite flashback....

The flashback is to 1928, since Herbert Hoover is running for President, although this seems a bit off since the movie was released in November 1946 which means Margie would have had to get married immediately out of high school and been knocked un her wedding night to satisfy the Production Code and have a 16-year-old daughter. Margie is in high school, living with her grandmother (Esther Dale) since Mom is dead and Dad (Hobart Cavanaugh) has to travel a lot for business. Margie has a best friend in Marybelle (Barbara Lawrence) who has a boyfriend Johnnie while Margie doesn't (yet) have one.

That pair of bloomers Joyce found is about to play a part in the plot. The elastic is no longer holding as it used to, and since is the 1920s, it's not as if you can go to your local big-box department store and buy a half dozen pairs of underpants cheaply, which is why the same pair of bloomers keeps falling down and causing all sorts of trouble for poor Margie. She escapes into the library, just as the school's new French teacher, Mr. Fontayne (Glenn Langan) comes in. Margie claims she's doing research for the upcoming debate, but she's as taken with the hot (by the standards of 1940s teens as Hollywood saw them) Fontayne; indeed, all the girls are talking about him.

Margie thinks she's in love with Fontayne, even though he's entirely the wrong age for her. Perhaps one of her fellow classmates would be better, even though she thinks they're all immature. She does have a crush on Marybelle's boyfriend, while pursuing her is nice but inept Roy (Alan Young). Over the course of the movie, Margie prepares for the big debate, on the topic of whether the US should have troops in Nicaragua; goes ice skating with her fellow students; and worries about who's going to take her to the big dance. It all leads up to the reveal at the end of the movie of which of the men she wound up marrying.

I've mentioned in the past that the post-war years at Fox saw a series of nostalgic musicals that were either straight-up biopics, or biopic-like movies. Margie isn't really a musical, although one might be forgiven for thinking you're getting into a musical. Fox probably didn't mind the confusion back in the day since those musicals seemed to be successes and I think audiences of the day liked the nostalgia value of a simpler time. If you're up for nostalgia, Margie certainly fits the bill. However, at the same time I have to say it's dated and definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody. It's not bad by any means; it's one of those things where I think there are other movies from the era that would be easier for people not necessarily fans of old-time stuff to get into. (For Jeanne Crain, Leave Her to Heaven immediately comes to mind.)

Piranha (1978)

Roger Corman died last year, and TCM did a programming salute with three nights of movies that he either directed or produced. I still have a couple I want to get through before they expire from the DVR, both some of the Vincent Price horror-type stuff from the 1960s and some of the later drive-in B fare. Up next is one from the late 1970s, Piranha.

OK, with a title like Piranha going into it there's probably a lot that you can already guess what's going to happen at the end of any given scene, starting with the opening pre-credits scene. A young man and women are going hiking in the a backwoods mountainish area when they come upon a fence that has an old "no trespassing sign". Naturally, they trespass, and quickly find a pool that's not a traditional swimming pool, but something they're not certain what exactly it's used for. Since this is a low-budget horror film, these two strip down to their undies and start swimming, only to be killed by somthing they have no idea what it is, although we can obviously guess since we know the title of the movie.

Maggie McKeown (Heather Menzies) is sent by her boss, private detective Earl Lyon (Richard Deacon), to try to find the two missing people. We then get a scene with some of the locals whom Maggie will be meeting, Paul (Bradford Dillman) and Jack (Keenan Wynn), talking about how idyllic life is up here on the mountain with the river going by their cabins. When Maggie's jeep breaks down, she goes to Paul's cabin. He informs her that it's just his and Jack's cabins. Well, those two cabins and a secret military facility that was closed down some years back in conjunction with the US ending its official involvement in the Vietnam War. Once again, you can guess that they too are going to go to the military facility.

Unsurprisingly, they don't find the two missing people, since we know they're both very much dead already. But they do find a piece of jewerly the woman would be missing. So they look for a way to drain the pool, thinking that perhaps the dead bodies wouldn't have floated to the top yet. And they also find they're not alone, which should have been insanely obvious the minute they discovered the place still had electric service. There are mutant creatures, as well as a man who tries to stop them from draing the pool.

That man is Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy), a scientist who was working at the facility when it was closed down, and stayed on in part to be a caretaker and in part because he wanted to keep working surreptitiously on that research. What he was working on was breeding piranha to be extra vicious, to release them in Vietnamese rivers and kill Communist resistance or some such. And Maggie and Paul stupidly released those piranhas into the river....

Sure, the plot of Piranha is dumb and unoriginal, but one goes into a movie like this looking not for intelligence or new cinematic vistas, but for entertainment. And Piranhas certainly entertains enough. On my first run-through, I was going to argue that there was a big plot hole as to how the piranhas survived all these years: wouldn't they have starved or something? But now the plot hole is how Dr. Hoak got the money to keep the place going, which I'd guess you could claim is because some arm of the government was funding it through a slush fund. Heaven knows the events of the past few months have given people enough evidence to believe the US government maintains a plethora of such slush funds.

But Piranha doesn't really have any of the sort of political overtones my previous paragraph might have implied. It's just dumb mindless entertainment for the drive-in crowd back in the day, or people who want to sit around a bowl of popcorn with friends today.

Criminal Court

Someone whom I haven't given much attention to over the many years that I've done this blog is Tom Conway, brother of more prominent supporting actor George Sanders. But Conway was more than capable of doing a good job and bringing energy to an otherwise pedestrian movie. A good example of this would be the RKO B movie Criminal Court.

Conway plays Steve Barnes, a defense attorney who has a reputation for producing theatrics and gimmicks in the courtroom. He's currently defending a man who is accused of a gangland killing. This defendant isn't so important; what is important is the fact that the defendant has run afoul of underworld king Vic Wright (Robert Armstrong). Barnes is hoping to use this case as a jumping-off point in his campaign to become the new district attorney, running on a clean government campaign since the current DA is using "witnesses" paid for by Wright.

Complicating things is the fact that Barnes has a girlfriend, Georgia (Martha O'Driscoll), who is an aspiring nightclub singer. She's about to get an interview for a job... at a nightclub owned by Vic Wright. Steve isn't particularly thrilled with this, although he also realizes that he can't really get in the way of his girlfriend's career. She makes it past the first test and gets an interview with Wright himself later that evening.

But she's not the only person who's going to be seeing Wright at his club in the evening. Barnes has come across some pictures of Wright's kid brother Frankie (Steve Brodie) that will put a big dent in Vic's career. Not only that, but he plans on showing them at a campaign event. Vic tries to bribe him, and when that doesn't work, claims that he's got some sort of incriminating evidence of his own that Barnes really ought to come over and see.

The meeting doesn't go well, and devolves into a struggle between Vic and Steve, although it's also witnessed by Steve's secretary Joan since she's also on Vic's payroll to feed information from Barnes' office to him. She slips out the back way just as Steve comes in to Vic's office, but stays to listen. She knows that durin the struggle, Vic pulls out a gun, and the two men try to grab it since it's now clearly a matter of life and death. The gun goes off in such a way that Steve isn't really guilty but that could destroy his campaign. Vic gets shot and killed.

Worse, after Steve leaves, who should show up but Georgia? She sees the dead body and rather stupidly panics, picking up the gun. Dumb, dumb, dumb, although I suppose you can't fault her for panicking. But with her having been seen in Vic's office and having been seen by Frankie with the gun, she's an obvious suspect. Steve could get her off for reasons the audience knows why, but of course nobody in the film but Steve knows what those reasons are. Well, almost nobody.

Criminal Court is a B movie that doesn't cover any new ground. It was actually released in 1946, but has the feel of something that would have been right at home in the 1930s. This doesn't mean it's bad; instead, I'd say it feels overly familiar. We've seen all these plot devices before, but thanks to Tom Conway and director Robert Wise early in his career, the material is still entertaining enough.

My Beautiful Laundrette

TCM ran a double feature of films starring Daniel Day-Lewis a while back. I already did a post on My Left Foot, and now it's time to do a post on the other film they ran, My Beautiful Laundrette.

Day-Lewis plays Johnny, who is squatting in a derelict apartment building somewhere in London together with his friend Omar (Gordon Warnecke), at least until some sort of thugs come in and drive all the squatters out, forcing Johnny and Omar to beat a hasty retreat out the back window. Johnny is a sort of street punk who goes back to his all-white gang, while Omar goes back to see his alcoholic father Hussein and take care of him. Hussein and Omar are part of the Pakistani immigrant community, but Hussein is the sort of immigrant who believes in whatever the British equivalent of the American Dream for immigrants is, where you assimilate and the children's generation becomes wealthier, not having to do the terrible physical labor that immigrants generally have to do.

With that in mind, Dad wants Omar to go to university. To help with that, Dad thinks Omar should have a stable job in the off term. Omar's brother Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey) is the sort of immigrant like the brothers in Avalon who worked hard and became a success, now having a finger in multiple pies. Nasser, in fact, also has a white British mistress. Nasser offers Omar a job detailing cars at the car park he runs, London being one of those big cities where people don't have their own dedicated parking spaces outside their houses.

Omar takes to the work, but is also confronted by the presence of his cousin Salim. Salim is one of those children of immigrants who takes a different view of life as an immigrant and ethnic minority from people like Omar. Instead, immigrants should take what they "deserve" from the host country by whatever means, even if those means are scammy, and keep up ties with the old country to the extent of practically being bi-national. (Nowadays, you wonder if a character like Salim would become more of an Islamist, but that theme isn't explored in My Beautiful Laundrette.)

One night while Omar is driving Salim around London, the car is surrounded when it's stopped at a light. Wouldn't you know it, but the gang that surrounds them just happens to be Johnny and his friends. Johnny and Omar are able to resume their relationship, which as it turns out is more than just a friendship as the two have homosexual feelings for each other. Omar realizes that having Johnny around as a bit of "muscle" could be a good thing, and Nasser starts to give Omar bigger duties, such as trying to turn a laundrette (laundromat for American viewers) profitable. Omar is bright and hardworking, but also finds he has to get a bit of money via illicit means to make things work, which could get him in trouble with Salim.

My Beautiful Laundrette is an interesting if uneven movie. It presents a lot of ideas that in the wrong hands wouldn't just be controversial, but used as a laundry list for a morality play; think the movie No Down Payment that I blogged about back in 2013. Here, though, a lot of the stuff (homosexuality being the obvious one) are just presented as this is what the characters are and the viewer has to have the intelligence to figure out how this would play out in real life.

One thing I do wonder about as an American, however, is how much the director and screenwriter might have been trying to make a commentary about the Britain of this time. Being 1985, it was smack dab in the middle of Margaret Thatcher's time as Prime Minister, and as with Donald Trump here in the US, her being in power drove the arts "community", or the people in creative arts fields who saw themselves as a "community", hysterically around the bend. If there is commentary, however, it's certainly not to the level you see from contemporary Hollywood. And in any case, My Beautiful Laundrette is definitely a worthwhile, offbeat movie.

March 2025 end of month briefs

It's been a while since I did a briefs post, since I've been a bit busy trying to keep up with watching stuff before it expires from the DVR as well as putting in some overtime out in the real world. Heck, I don't think I even did a post for the clock change on Daylight Savings Time a few weeks back, although it's really more important to do a post when the clocks go back since that's when there's an extra hour in the schedule to fill.

The first order of business would be to mention the passing of actor Richard Chamberlain, who died yesterday at the age of 90. I think he might be better remembered for his TV work, especially the early 1980s TV miniseries Shogun. But TCM fans may recall that Chamberlain did a Star of the Month piece on Claude Rains, with whom he worked at the end of Rains' career making Twilight of Honor. Unfortunately, I don't think that piece seems to be on YouTube, although Warner Bros. does have a preview for Twilight of Honor.

Tonight's Silent Sunday Nights feature is the Clara Bow film It, starting at midnight. YouTube TV has it as a 72-minute movie in a 2-hour slot, which of course led me to wonder whether there would be a short to fill out the time slot. A two-reel silent would make sense, but as it turns out the short is 24 Hour Alert, supposedly starting at 1:25 AM and leading up to the 2:00 AM start of TCM Imports. TCM's site actually does have shorts listed at least a couple days out, and at least for the daily schedule; as far as I can tell they still only have a monthly "highlights" listing rather than a full monthly schedule.

Monday morning and afternoon on TCM are dedicated to director Lloyd Bacon in honor of his birthday on December 4. Wait a second, that wouldn't be his birthday. But since he worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s it's easy for TCM to do a programming salute to him, starting at 6:00 AM with the Joel McCrea film Kept Husbands. Also of interest might be Marked Woman at noon. If you've seen the piece on Bette Davis that was done for one of her turns as Star of the Month, they use a clip of her from Marked Woman where she talks about being smart enough to know all the angles. Watch enough TCM, and you'll know exactly the clip I mean.

Tuesday is April 1, which means the start of a new quarter. I can't tell if FXM's Retro block as any new movies in the rotation, mostly because I haven't been paying close enough attention since I've done posts on the vast majority of what that block airs. Not their fault so much as it is that there are only so many films Fox made. Titles that I did posts on ages ago that are showing up in April where I don't believe I've seen them show up recently include Something for the Boys and Satan Never Sleeps.

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret

I've mentioned several times how I've got quite the backlog of foreign films to get through on my DVR before they expire, and frankly, I don't think I'm going to get through all of them. But with that in mind, I figured it's time I at least try to watch some of them. Up next is a film from a country whose movies I rarely frequent: the Israeli film The Band's Visit.

The movie was released in 2007 although it's supposedly set about a decade earlier; in any case I didn't notice any obvious signs that would point to precisely when it was set. The band in question is the Alexandria Police Orchestra, whom as you might have figured out from the name are actually Egyptian, from the large port city. They've been invited to appear at the opening of a new Arab Israeli cultural center in the city of Petah Tikva (remember, even disregarding the Palestinian areas Israel gained control of in the Six Days' War, Israel has a population of something like 15% non-Jewish Arabs). As the movie opens, the Egyptians have landed at Ben Gurion Airport, only to find that nobody has come to pick them up. With that in mind, they go to the bus terminal to inquire about a bus to where they're going.

Unfortunately, they not speaking Hebrew -- apparently modern Egyptian Arabic has trouble with the voiced P sound -- the destination they ask about gets them sent to a place called Bet Hatikva, which is well into the Negev desert in the south of the country, completely in the opposite direction from Petah Tikva. The band is unceremoniously dropped off in the middle of nowhere and make their way to a small cafe which is one of the only signs of human activity. There, shop owner Dina tells the orchestra's head Tawfiq that they've come to the wrong town. Worse, there are no more buses leaving tonight: when Tawfiq makes a comment about the cultural center, Dina says that Bet Hatikva has no culture.

Eventually, Dina comes up with a plan, which is to find several of her acquaintances and put the musicians up by ones and twos, since the orchestra only has eight members. It's an awkward and sudden imposition, considering that while Dina lives alone, everyone else has a life. One person's family is holding a birthday party; another guy was about to go on a blind date; and the like. But it's only for one night, and thankfully most of the people speak something close enough to English that they can all communicate with one another. Little things happen to everybody until the band is put on the right bus the next morning and are able to play at the cultural center that afternoon.

The Band's Visit is one of those little movies where not much happens. As such, it's a movie that's not going to be for everybody. Even with a modest running time just under 90 minutes, it can still feel slow. But it's the sort of movie you should stick with, because it really does work in the end, as you come to learn about all these characters' lives and how they feel like real people, warts and all, with lives that, like real life, are often boring with little going on.

At least somebody laughed

Some time back TCM had a two-movie salute to actor John Ritter, who is of course better known for his TV work on Three's Company than the movies he made, so both of the movies were new to me. First up will be the bittersweet comedy They All Laughed.

The movie opens up with John Russo (Ben Gazzara) taking a taxi down to the heliport in New York City. John is a divorcé and private detective who is going to the heliport in order to see, or at least watch, Angela Niotes (Audrey Hepburn). Angela is the subject whom John is investigating, as Angela's husband is worried that she might be having an affair. In addition to his work, John is carrying on a romance with country singer Christy (Colleen Camp). But it's a long-suffering romance for her, as John seems to be unable to make a committment. As a sign of this, John almost immediately asks his cab driver, "Sam" (real name Deborah although John keeps calling her Sam) on a date.

Also working at the detective agency is Charles Rutledge (John Ritter). He too is following a woman whose husband is worried that his wife, Dolores (tragic Dorothy Stratten) is having an affair, this one with a man names Jose nicknamed "The Gaucho" (Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey's real-life son). Charles and another colleague at the agency, Arthur, follow Dolores from a Broadway show to a hotel where she meets Jose, and then eventually back to an apartment where Dolores and Jose enter through different doors but have a way of getting into each other's apartment from the inside. So they're clearly having an affair.

But things get complicated. Charles finds himself falling in love with Dolores, which is a fairly obvious ethical problem for him. Arthur makes things even more difficult by arranging for Charles to meet Dolores up close and personal. I guess in some detective work that would make sense, but it does make things a mess for Charles. Meanwhile, John finds himself falling for Angela, and Arthur comes up with a ruse for John and Angela to meet. And, of course, John is also already in multiple other relationships. Christy realizes what's going on, so she decides that she's going to try to get back at John by starting a relationship with Charles. And there's still the issue that Charles and John are supposed to be private investigators following women they're falling in love with.

They All Laughed is the sort of movie where you can see why director Peter Bogdanovich wanted to make material like this. However, the production was tragic as Bogdanovich fell in love with Stratten and her estranged husband killed her and himself before the original schedule release of the movie, which as a result was dedicated to her. (Dorothy Stratten's tragic end is, of course, the subject of the Bob Fosse movie Star 80, which is definitely worth watching.) As a result, the release was held back, and limited, with nobody really wanting to see it.

It also doesn't help that Bogdanovich, being the director and having co-written the screenplay (with the actor who played Arthur, a man I didn't recognize and didn't go on to big things), made it way too complex for the film's own good, as though he was making a film to please himself without paying heed to the idea that it would need to pay back its costs at the box office. There are a lot of good ideas here, but they don't jell as well as they probably should or might have had Bogdanovich had stronger studio heads overseeing the project.

Those who love New York City, as well as those who like Peter Bogdanovich and/or Audrey Hepburn, will definitely like They All Laughed. But it's not quite going to be to everybody's taste.

The Chalk Garden

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies directed by British director Ronald Neame. This gave me the chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before, such as The Chalk Garden.

Deborah Kerr is the star here, playing a woman named Madrigal. As the movie opens, shows up at one of those big old houses that looks like it's on the coast of Devon or Cornwall. The house is owned by the elderly Mrs. St. Maugham (Edith Evans), and she's put a help wanted ad in the papers looking for a governess for her adolescent granddaughter Laurel (Hayley Mills). Laurel, it seems, is quite the handful and has driven off several prior governesses in prior succession. Indeed, Miss Madrigal isn't the only prospect showing up on this day; as the servant Maitland (Hayley Mills' real-life father John Mills, although Maitland is not Laurel's father in this movie) talks about Laurel, the other prospect isn't so sure she wants the job. But Madrigal is badly in need of a job, even though she's never been a governess before and has no references. But she has firm opinions on how to deal with Laurel and even speaks candidly about the state of the garden and how it's a metaphor for Laurel's upbringing, so Mrs. St. Maugham gives Madrigal the job.

Laurel sets out trying to destroy Madrigal the same way she has all the previous governesses; never mind her other misbehaviors like being a firebug. She's also a chronic liar, saying that her father killed himself and that Mom abandoned her and basically drove Dad to kill himelf. She also claims that Maitland killed his wife and child. As for Laurel's mom, she's gotten remarried and is at the point where she could legally file for custody of Laurel since she is, after all, the kid's biological mother. Mrs. St. Maugham doesn't seem to want that to happen, while Madrigal is more non-committal, even though Laurel is still clearly trying to snoop around into Madrigal's past.

With a custody battle looming, St. Maugham brings in a judge friend of hers, McWhirrey (Felix Aylmer), for advice. McWhirrey may recognize Madrigal; in any case it seems clear that Madrigal recognizes the judge and is thoroughly disconcerted by that. Laurel picks up on this, and because the judge is talking about a murder case involving a female defendant who would have been the right age for that defendant to have been Madrigal herself, gets the idea that Madrigal's past involves murder. And she may just be right. But what good will it do her if she is right and exposes the fact that Madrigal's past is as a murderess?

The Chalk Garden feels like it was based on a stage play, which is because it actually was, one by Enid Bagnold, a name you may recognize from having written National Velvet. Neame and the screenwriters try to open up the action both with scenes in the garden and with an excursion into town. They're not particularly successful in hiding the legacy of a stage play, but that doesn't mean the movie is bad. It has uniformly fine performances, although Hayley Mills' character is so darn nasty that she's tough to like. That can make the movie a bit hard to take at some points.

The Chalk Garden is definitely a movie worth watching thanks to those fine performances.