Woman of Straw

Gina Lollobrigida died early last year, and TCM ran a programming tribute to her in May. They ran a bunch of movies I hadn't seen before, so I recorded quite a lot to get through. Next up from the Lollobrigida tribute is Woman of Straw.

Ralph Richardson plays Charles Richmond, a fairly nasty man, but one who did well in the business world and lives in a big manor house someplace not too far from London. He treats everybody around him badly, including his nephew Anthony (Sean Connery). But Charles has a bad heart and requires a live-in nurse. His nasty personality has driven off a bunch of nurses, and Anthony is bringing in another one on a trial. This one is a foreigner, Maria Marcello (Gina Lollobrigida).

Charles is a widower with no children of his own, and Anthony has done the best he can managing his uncle's business affairs despite Charles thinking Anthony is no good. To that end, Charles has only left a paltry portion of his eight-figure fortune to Anthony in his will. Anthony chafes at that, and would like to inherit more of his uncle's estate, but how to get at that money? Anthony has an idea, and it's part of why he brought in the beautiful Maria to try to be Charles' nurse.

If Charles only has his nephew, he can dispose of the estate pretty much however he sees fit. But if he has a wife, British inheritance law will make certain the widow gets some of the estate. So Anthony wants Maria to marry Charles, which should only be a relatively short marriage since he's in apparently poor health. Anthony will get Maria to agree to marry Charles and get Charles to change the will such that Maria will inherit everything. Maria will then agree to give Anthony £1 million out of that fortune.

Maria, despite having walked out on Charles already, eventually agrees to the deal! She returns to the estate, and sets about getting Charles to fall in love with her so that he'll propose marriage. That, and get Charles ready to go on his luxurious private yacht on a cruise to the Mediterranean. And wouldn't you know it, but on that cruise Charles eventually does propose marriage to Maria, and then does write a new will on Mallorca.

However, there's one catch, which is that the will apparently needs to be registered in the UK to be valid under UK law. And Anthony is worried that his uncle won't survive long enough for them to get to dry land and Charles' solicitors to have the will registered. Sure enough, the morning that they're supposed to dock, Charles is found dead in his stateroom on the yacht. So Charles comes up with a ridiculous plan to presage Weekend at Bernie's and fool everyone for one day that Charles is still alive.

Things start to go south, however, when it's determined how Charles died. And then there's the question of whether anyone saw through the ruse about Charles' being alive until they got him home. Worse for Maria is that her story and Anthony's are really not agreeing....

Woman of Straw is, to me, very much a product of the 1960s, in that it feels like it's trying to keep up with the changing times, but at the same time there's somethign decidedly old-fashioned about it. The first half of the movie is rather slow to develop, and then once Charles dies the story veers in ways that are both unpredictable and credulity-straining.

Still, all three leads give entertaining performances and just about make the story work in spite of all the things that shouldn't make sense. It's not the best movie any of the three leads made, but it's still definitely worth one watch.

Our Man in Havana

I've stated on several occasions before that I'm not the biggest fan of those "serious" 1960s spy movies. One (well, technically not a 1960s film) that's not quite so serious, although also not a spoof like the Matt Helm movies, is the 1959 film Our Man in Havana. I had actually never seen it before, so when I noticed it was available on one of the streaming services, I decided to watch.

The movie informs us that it was set before the "recent" revolution in Cuba finally succeeded -- the movie was made on location in Cuba but based on a 1958 book by author Graham Greene. It tells the story of James Wormold (Alec Guinness), who is working as a vacuum cleaner salesman for a British company's Havana office. You would think that this is a job that doesn't pay all that much money, and to make matters worse, James is a widower with a teenaged daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) who has expensive tastes.

Somebody in MI6 back in London, most likely spymaster "C" (Ralph Richardson) has come up with the brilliant idea that they should recruit spies from among normal people, because apparently the professional spies aren't getting the job done and all the professionals on the other side know who the British professionals are, anyway. So the head spy in the Caribbean, Hawthorne (Noël Coward), code number 59200, approaches Wormorld with a proposition to do some spying for his motherland. Wormold isn't so sure, but he could use the extra money, so he takes up the offer.

Of course, part of what is supposed to be the humor in the movie is that Wormold has no idea what he's doing, since he hasn't been given much instruction by Hawthorne. And Wormold is expected to recruit his own spies, like some sort of twisted multi-level marketing scheme. So after a bit of picking the mind of a friend, the American doctor Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), Wormold decides that he's just going to make crap up.

But for better or worse, Wormold is good at coming up with plausible secrets. The folks back in London believe the secrets, while the Cubans think Wormold has come up with something even though he hasn't. With that in mind, the British send a secretary, Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara), out into the field to assist Wormold. The Cubans, meanwhile, assassinate of one Wormold's underlings, and the Cuban authorites in the form of Segura (Ernie Kovacs) start to put the pressure on Wormold. Wouldn't it just be easier to declare him persona non grata and deport him back to the UK?

The big problem I had with Our Man in Havana is that it felt like one of those stories that was trying to be too clever by half, and as a result winds up not being all that great, despite the presence of a pretty good cast. It's not as bad in that regards as the grimmer spy tales of the 1960s, but it still didn't work for me. But because of the cast, Our Man in Havana is one of those movies you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Northern gothic

Katharine Hepburn has been TCM's Star of the Month this month, which gave me the chance to record one or two of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these was the adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night.

The play deals with the Tyrone family, and one day in their life in the summer of 1912. The story is loosely based on Eugene O'Neill's own family, and set at a time when he would have been in his mid 20s. Here, that character is the younger brother Edmund, played by Dean Stockwell. Edmund has spent his adult life trying to escape the long shadow of his family, mostly doing so by becoming a merchant marine. He's recently returned home to the family's summer place in Connecticut, and there's some worry that his persistent cough is in fact tuberculosis, often referred to in those days as consumption.

Hepburn plays Edmund's mother Mary; she doesn't want to hear of her son having consumption. Understanding this and trying to protect Mary is dad James Sr. (Ralph Richardson). He was a stage actor who's reaching the age where he should retire and try to live off his savings. Not as though an actor can have that much savings, so he's always trying to save a few dollars wherever he can. This is another source of rancor between various pairs of family members, as it also leads to Dad's distrust of doctors that may have consequences for Edmund, and definitely already did for Mary.

Part of Mary's backstory is that she had a difficult pregnancy with Edmund and the postpartum issues nearly killed her; as a result she was prescribed morphine. The only thing is that she got herself addicted to the morphine, and the rest of the family is dancing around that fact trying to keep her off the drug while she thinks (not entirely wrongly) that the rest of the family is spying on her.

And then there's elder brother Jamie (Jason Robards), who is enough older than Edmund that he's had a much more mature look at the breakdown of the family and how each parent's different view of the two sons has also caused all sorts of problems with the brothers' relationships with their parents along with the two brothers' relationship with each other. So there's a lot of pent-up resentment here and opportunity for them finally to get all that resentment off their chests.

And boy do they spend a lot of time getting that resentment off their chests. They talk, and talk and talk some more, and when they're done talking, well, they're never done talking and getting to -- and going past -- the point of no longer caring whether they piss off the rest of the family by revealing uncomfortable truths.

It's that talkiness -- and director Sidney Lumet decidedly felt that the original play should be edited as little as possible for the movie -- that may make the movie a tough slog for many viewers. It goes on for well over two and a half hours, and the characters are, like the ones in Sweetie, not particularly sympathetic. If you know that going in, and you're up for a movie that's more of a master-class in acting, then you'll probably highly enjoy this adaptation of Long Day's Journey Into Night. If that's not your thing, then consider this review a warning.

For those who like John le Carré

The 1960s was a time of dark, cynical spy movies, in no small part thanks to writer John le Carré and the movie adaptation of his book The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Recently, I came across another movie based on one of le Carré's books that I hadn't heard of before: The Looking Glass War. So I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie starts off in Finland, a country that was nominally neutral in the Cold War because of the conditions imposed upon it by the Soviets after Finland lost in its little part of World War II. At the airport, a pilot hands over a roll of film in exchange for some cash; the goy who receives the film gets hit by a car walking from the airport to his hotel. (They make a point about his not having taxi fare, but not even bus fare?) We then learn that the roll of film is supposed to have photos suggesting that East Germany was building missiles based on the old Nazi V-2 rockets, with help from the Soviet Union.

This information, unsurprisingly, is concerning to the intellegence community and people like Leclerc (Ralph Richardson). They need to find out whether the information on the film is real or whether they're doctored images. That means getting a physical asset on the ground since they apparently didn't have good enough satellite imagery in those days. But whom to risk? Fortunately, they find somebody they can sacrifice easily if necessarily.

Leiser (Christopher Jones) is a Polish sailor who because of his job has had the ability to move about the world. On a previous occasion when he was in the UK, he knocked up a woman (Susan George, whose character only seems to be credited as "The Girl"). Now, he's like to stay in the UK to raise the baby. But there are immigration laws, and no certainty that Leiser would be admitted to the UK, so he does the logical thing, which is to try to enter the country illegally. Unfortunately for him, this was an era when there weren't a whole swath of NGOs and media outlets actively campaigning for people like him to enter the country illegally, so he was summarily arrested and put in detention to be deported. Leclerc has found out about all this, and so approaches Leiser with the proposition that if he goes on this spy mission, Leclerc will help him get UK citizenship.

However, during the training for the mission, Leiser learns that his girlfriend has had an abortion, so no no baby for him. This sours him somewhat on the mission, but he still undergoes it, going to East Germany where things immediately start to go south.

The problem with a movie like The Looking Glass War is that in the end, it's hard to really care for any of these characters or whether the missiles are real. It's as though the movie is trying so hard to show a dark, cynical attitude that it's too much of it for the movie's own good. Jones as Leiser is too much of a cipher, and it felt to me like there were too many plot holes.

I should add, however, that I'm not the biggest fan of these cynical spy movies from the 1960s; I've never particularly warmed to The Ipcress Files either. So people who like the works of John le Carré and the other movies in the 60s spy cycle will probably have a more positive reaction to The Looking Glass War than I did.

Greystoke

During one of the previous free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the movie Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan. It's going to be on again this week, first tomorrow at 12:06 PM on ActionMax, and again on Friday, so I recently watched it to do a review on it here.

Now, most of us probably have certain ideas in mind when we think of Tarzan: athletic figures like Johnny Weismuller and the cheesy sets of the 1930s, or the even more muscle-bound actors of the 1950s. But this movie is more of an origin story for Tarzan, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' book Tarzan of the Apes. The movie starts off with a brief establishing scene in equatorial western Africa (these scenes were filmed in Cameroon) in 1885, before switching to Scotland just before those establishing scenes. In Scotland, the 6th Earl of Greystoke (Sir Ralph Richardon in his final role, as he died not long after filming wrapped) is seeing his son and daughter-in-law off. They're going to Africa, presumably one of the British colonies. But their ship is shipwrecked, and the husband and wife are the only two survivors.

Well, not quite, as the wife is pregnant, eventually giving birth to a baby boy. In order to survive, the husband has built a Swiss Family Robinson-type house in the rainforest canopy. But one day apes overrun it, finding the mom having just died of malaria (well, not that the apes know what malaria is) and killing the dad, leaving only the little baby as the survivor. One of the apes has just lost her own offspring, so she takes the human baby as her own. It's highly implausible, of course, but without that we wouldn't have much of a movie.

The movie proceeds slowly from here, showing several stages in the young human boy's development, when in the real world he would have either been killed directly by the apes or left to starve. But the boy grows, finds where his parents died althogh he doesn't realize these were his parents, and eventually grows up. After about 20 years of this, a party of British game hunters looking for specimens for a British museum comes through, led by a Belgian ship's captain Philippe d'Arnot (Ian Holm). African natives ambush the expedition, killing everybody but Philippe, who escapes until he is discovered by the now adult grandson of the Earl of Greystoke (played by Christopher Lambert).

After a fair bit of time, Philippe is able to put all the pieces together, and discover that this young man who rescued him is the heir to British nobility, so he gets the name John after his late father. John is also a natural mimic, being able to mimic a whole bunch of animal sounds but also human words, which is how he's able to pick up languages (even though that wouldn't happen either in real life if the right part of the human brain isn't developed by a certain age). Philippe is eventually able to recover, and he takes John back to Scotland.

Of course John doesn't know anything of civilization, but his grandfather is thrilled to see him. The Earl also has a ward, Jane (Andie MacDowell), who is about the same age as the young John. Jane takes a liking to John, trying to teach him to socialize, which is difficult for John. Some of the other people around the Earl of Greystoke see John more as a novelty, but also expect him to become civilized and either don't see or don't care why John has the issues he does. Things become more tougher for John when he learns how the British treat the apes, and when the Earl dies in a tragic accident....

This version of the Tarzan story is, as I said, quite different from most previous film versions. It's beautifully made, in line with the cycle of period pieces coming from British producers of the era; indeed, the director here, Hugh Hudson, had previously done Chariots of Fire. The characterizations are also well done. But boy does the movie move at a sedate pace. (And Wikipedia claims there was a fair bit cut before release.) That slowness is something that might make Greystoke a bit difficult for some people to sit through.

Exodus

TCM's Monday night lineup is a bunch of Paul Newman movies. Well, not that big of a bunch since some of the movies have long running times. But I've got a movie airing elsewhere early Tuesday that's going to be the subject of tomorrow's post, so I'm posting about a Monday night movie a bit early. That movie is Exodus, at 10:30 PM Monday.

It's 1947 in Cyprus, and Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint) is a widowed nurse visiting as a sort of respite from traveling around the world and ministering to people affected by the war. If you know your history, Cyprus was a British protectorate at the time. General Sutherland (Ralph Richardson) is one of the commanders of the British military garrison. This was also the time when Jews who had survived the Holocaust and were refugees were trying to get to Palestine, still under the British mandate. The British were trying to prevent them from getting to Palestine and screwing up the demographic situation; when they intercepted a ship carrying Jews they brought the Jews to Cyprus.

Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) is the son of Barak Ben Canaan (Lee J. Cobb) who had emigrated to Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Barak made a life for himself as a farmer, but Ari has decided to join the Haganah, a group of freedom fighters who are not quite as violent as the Irgun or the Stern Gang, who were the Jewish groups more likely to cross the line into terrorism. There's a big UN vote coming up on whether to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, and Ari wants to make certain that the UN will vote for partition.

With that in mind, he shows up on Cyprus with a daring plan. A ship called the Star of David has recently been intercepted, with 611 Jews on board. Ari and his confidants intend to break those 611 Jews out of the refugee camp and get them on board a ship that will break the British blockade of Palestine. One of those is a teenager named Karen (Jill Haworth), who had been smuggled out to Denmark where she lived with a Christian family. She hopes to go to Palestine in the hopes that her father is there She also has a boyfriend in Dov Landau (Sal Mineo) who survived Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, Kitty, having seen the conditions under which the Jewish refugees are living, has decided that she's going to spend the rest of her "vacation" tending to the people in the refugee camp who are clearly in need of more medical care than the limited number of doctors and nurses there can provide. This is how she meets both Karen and Ari, and decides that she's going to bring Karen to America with her if she can get the paperwork done; perhaps she'll later adopt Karen. So Kitty might not be so happy at first when she learns that Ari is planning to bring Karen to Palestine.

Eventually, Ari gets all the Jews on a boat, but the British find out and blockade the harbor, to which the Jews respond by throwing all their food overboard and going on a hunger strike. Kitty, being a Christian, is the only one who's able to get on and off the boat, and by now is beginning to develop some sympathy for the Jews, helping to get the British to relent and let the ship go to Israel.

But that's not the end of the movie, not by a long shot. There's still the independence drive, which isn't going to be easy. Karen and the other kids are taken to a kibbutz not too far from where Barak Ben Canaan lives. Their land was deeded to them by a local Arab leader, Taha (John Derek), who believes in living in harmony with the Jews. But of course, with partition, that's simply not going to be possible. Dov wants to join the Irgun, claiming to be an explosives expert. And Kitty finds herself falling in love with Ari -- and the future is mutual -- even though their differences cause all sorts of difficulties.

The Irgun carries out terrorist attacks, most notably the bombing of the King David Hotel. But as we know from history, the UN does eventually vote in favor of partition, and the two sides try to get as much territory on the ground so that the UN will be forced to give them more under the de facto partition. The Arabs attack, but the Jews had been defending themselves, and to be fair, both sides were going to want as much of their territory to be contiguous as possible,something that wasn't going to happen at all with the UN partition plan.

As far as I understand it, Exodus gets the big outline of history correct, although once it delves into putting fictional characters into the flow of history, it's going to get things less than correct due to the need for narrative tension. The narrative mostly works here, anchored by strong performances from Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint

.

If there's a problem, it's that the movie runs 208 minutes, and that's with the intermission stripped out. At least, the last time TCM ran it, there technically was an intermission card, but that ran about 10 seconds, and was well over halfway through the movie, and well into the Israel part of the movie. Quite a few of the characters are only in one of the two story lines, which don't get an equal amount of time. I can't help but think the screenwriters should have come up with a way to make two movies out of this, one dealing with the ship blockade (and flesh that one out to just under two hours), with a second movie dealing with the struggle for Israeli independence -- the story is wrapped up too quickly even for a movie running three and a half hours.

Still, if you haven't seen Exodus before, it's certainly worth a watch, in no small part as a document of how academic and cultural elites still viewed Israel favorably before the revolutions of 1968 led to a complete sea-change in elites' opinions.

Happy movies are all alike

A year ago, I blogged about the 1935 Hollywood version of Anna Karenina which aired as part of a night of literary remakes on TCM. I didn't want to blog about the 1948 British version of Anna Karenina right away, but I see now that it's going to be on TCM tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM as part of another day of Russian literary adaptations, so now would be a good time to blog about it.

If you remember the 1935 version, or ever had to read the book, then you probably know the basic story. Anna Karenina (Vivien Leigh) is married to Andrei (Ralph Richardson), a relatively senior civil servant in the Tsarist government in St. Petersburg. She's got a brother Stepan Oblonsky living in Moscow who is currently having some difficulties with his wife Dolly (Mary Kerridge), so Anna is invited for a visit to try to smooth things out.

On the train to Moscow, Anna meets Countess Vronsky (Helen Haye, no S on the end), mother to a military officer, Count Andrei Vronsky (Kieron Moore) who will be meeting Mom at the station. Anna sees Vronsky, and there's immediately a spark between the two because, after all, young Vronsky is universally described as dashing. And since the Karenins and Vronskys are in the same echelon of society, they're bound to meet each other over and over again at the high-society parties held in Moscow and Petersburg.

With Anna and Vronsky continually running into each other and with Anna not making any attempt to hide what she's feeling about Vronsky, it's no surprise that her husband is going to find out what's going on. Karenin is a relatively austere and highly moral man, at least as regards Tolstoy's warped view of Christiantity. Never mind that the Production Code in Hollywood and the less oppressive British board would insist Anna be punished for her since, Tolstoy demands it too.

Andrei Karenin thinks about filing for divorce, but the Orthodox Church is fairly specific on what grounds are acceptable for breaking what is, after all, supposed to be a sacred union. When he goes looking for letters, Anna decides she's going to run off to Italy with Vronsky to get away for a while, which is even more scandalous, and potentially harmful for Vronsky, whose mother wants him to have a respectable wife. That desire, combined with Karenin's attempts to keep Anna from seeing their son, eventually drives Anna to the eventual end of the story.

I found that both this and the 1935 versions of Anna Karenina had things to recommend them. Being based on a novel by Tolstoy that runs to 800-plus pages, you can't fit everything into a two-hour movie, and that means that the philosopher-farmer character of Levin gets excised. That's not such a bad thing since in the book Levin is another peg for Tolstoy's proselytizing of his beliefs, and drags the book down.

The acting in this version is good, and the technical production values are not quite up to MGM's, even 13 years later. This is particularly noticeable in the rear-projection scenes, which don't seem to have advanced since 1935.

When TCM ran this back at the end of 2019, they put it in a 150-minute slot. IMDb lists a running time of 139 minutes, so 150 minutes would be right. But the movie ended after about 112 minutes. It turns out that for the American release, a bunch of stuff was cut to get the running time down to that 112 minutes, and this is the print TCM ran. This time around, the movie is in a two-hour slot, so I'd assume we're getting the 112-minute print again.

There are a bunch of versions of Anna Karenina available on DVD, but this 1948 version doesn't seem to be in print, at least not legitimately. So you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.

The Holly and the Ivy

I hadn't intended to blog about a pair of Ralph Richardson movies in fairly close succession, but since The Holly and the Ivy is a Christmas movie I decided I should probably watch and blog about it at Christmastime rather than waiting until sometime in the new year. This even though I recently watched Home at Seven. I had actually planned to do it at the start of the Christmas season, but it had been sitting on my old DVR for a year after TCM premiered it last Christmas. The movie finally got a DVD release about a month ago, which was why I was finally set to watch it, but then the old DVR died. Thankfully, TCM ran it again this year, so here we are.

Ralph Richardson plays Rev. Martin Gregory, a vicar in a small town in Norfolk in December, 1948. We see the Christmas messages he's sending off, which happen to be to his relatives in various parts of England. First off are his two sisters-in-law, Lydia (Margaret Halstan), a widow who wasn't certain she was going to be invited to Christmas dinner this year because her sister, Martin's wife, had died; and bitter Bridget (Maureen Delaney), who is a spinster because she was the one who drew the short straw in life of having to take care of her mother at the end of life.

Indeed, Martin's got a daughter Jenny (Celia Johnson) who's drawn a similar short straw, having taken care of her recently deceased mother and now helping Dad run the vicarage. Her friend David (John Gregson) loves her and the feeling is mutual; in fact they'd be happy to get married although there's the problem of Jenny having to take care of Dad. In some ways that shouldn't be much of a problem, except that David has gotten an excellent job offer to take an engineering position -- in South America. If Jenny were to marry David and go with him, who would take care of Dad?

Well, Jenny has two siblings. Michael (Denholm Elliott) has been drafted into the Army, and is lucky to get leave to be coming home for Christmas. The expectation for him is to go on to university to study, but he believes he isn't cut out for it. Then there's sister Margaret (Margaret Leighton). She has a secret from the war that left her devastated, to which she took up drinking as a response, this even though she's a successful fashion reporter in London. In fact, her drinking prevents her from coming home at first, with cousin Richard (Hugh Williams) having to bring the bad news.

So, as you can see, everybody in the family but Dad has secrets, and nobody feels they can tell their father since they feel he's concerned more with his parishioners than them and because they're afraid of his opprobrium for their wayward actions. So when they get home for Christmas there's bound to be tension. Will anybody be able to reveal their secrets? Will Jenny be able to ask Margaret if she can take care of Dad? If so, would Margaret accept?

Things get more complicated when Margaret actually shows up; apparently she wasn't as sick as Richard suggested. She was of course just drunk. And she's going to get drunker when she and Michael go down to the pub after claiming they're going off to the cinema. Both of them get home drunk, and that's really the catalyst for the final showdown with Dad.

The Holly and the Ivy is a well-acted movie, showing an England that doesn't exist any longer, making it an excellent little time capsule. It's also for the most part not a neat little piece, which would be a plus. But then everything gets wrapped up suddenly in the last five minutes or so, much too quickly and neatly, which is to the film's great detriment, undoing a fair bit of what it had built up. One other flaw is that Johnson is really way too old for her role; she's 44 playing 31 (and looking it, sorry to say) and only six years younger than Richardson. But her acting is good enough to overlook it for the most part. I hadn't heard of either of the actresses playing the aunts, but they're quite good too.

Overall, The Holly and the Ivy is certainly worth watching, although with the Christmas season fast coming to an end you may not want to see it until next Christmas. Still, with it now on DVD it's certainly worth putting on your list to think about for next year.

Murder on Monday

One of my recent DVD purchases was the barebones Reel Vault release of the British movie Home at Seven, and not long ago I sat down to watch it.

Ralph Richardson plays David Preston, who works at a bank in London and lives in one of the suburbs, arriving home at 7:00 PM every evening. One day he comes home to find that his wife Janet (Margaret Leighton) is frantic. David doesn't understand why, insisting that today is a day just like any other, in which he did his exact same routine. But it turns out that something happened. David comes home with Monday's newspaper, while Janet shows him Tuesday's. Obviously David spent 24 hours somewhere, but where?

The first thing to try to do is to get David's memory back, to which end his physician, Dr. Sparling (Jack Hawkins) is brought in. But there's only so much that David remembers before everything gets hazy. One possible clue is that there's no dirt or anything on David's suit and overcoat to suggest that he was outside for a long period of time, but that's nowhere near enough. The police have been called in.

The police are about to make life rather difficult for David, too. David is one of the officers at a gentlemen's club (not the euphemistic kind) along with his neighbor, Major Watson (Michael Shepley). Watson stops by to ask David what happened last night, to which David has to try to come up with an excuse despite not remembering anything. And David better have a good excuse: another officer with access to the club safe has been found murdered, with over £500 missing!

David also hasn't been helping himself by telling some little white lies. One he's been telling his wife for years because he doesn't want to alarm her, while another one about where he was last night is to try to keep any controversy from falling on the couple, what with the probity bankers are supposed to have. Of course, once David tells one of those lies to the police, you can expect that things are going to get rather worse for him.

Ralph Richardson directed, and did a quite good job making a really engaging little movie. There's not a lot of action as most of what happens is confined to a couple of sets, but the intelligent script and good acting make for what is an excellent programmer. Home at Seven is a movie that deserves to be much better known.