Vendredi treize

This movie pops up now and again on the ABC in Australia at about 3 am in the morning.

It starts off with the scene of a bus crash in London.

The films has got flashbacks of each character as the film progresses, plus the lapsed photography of Big Ben winding back, to symbolise what events occurred thirteen hours ago, up until the bus crash.

It took me a while to understand it, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

If Sean Cunningham and Quentin Tarrantino got together and made a film, this may be the result - due to the flashbacks and small stories tying in, and deaths.

I am unsure of the main characters, as it has been a while since I have seen it, but a rare gem indeed.

This film has an excellent premise and is really crying out to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. As I recall (and it's a few years since I've seen the film) the action starts with a London omnibus filled with people. There is an horrific crash and one passenger dies. The rest of the film is then told in flashback, with 13 characters who were on the bus getting their recent lives explored in intricate detail. At the end of the film we return to the crash and find out which of these chirpy, vivid characters has met a gruesome end. Great stuff, a little like a good tabloid news story fleshed out in precise, even handed detail. If only it were available on video...

Interesting mix of Hitchcock-type of mystery and early film noir has a London bus careering down the road, on a rainy Friday the 13th, at 11.59pm, when lightning strikes causing an accident which kills two on board. Big Ben winds backward, and we're taken back to Thursday the 12th and shown (in far too much detail?) the lives of the people involved in said bus accident. This series of vignettes ties together each individual's story, placing them together on this doomed bus ride. The mystery comes from wondering which of the two passengers perish in the accident.

A bit of fun is had along the way at the expense of ridiculous clichés and superstitions (seven years back luck, throwing salt over one's shoulder, the film's date of occurrence) and the last scene, with the small boy and the old lady, is most amusing.

Why Jessie Matthews, one of Britains top musical stars, was in this movie in between her sparkling "The Good Companions" and the classic "Evergreen" is a good question? When I first saw it I was really disappointed. I wanted to see her sing and dance - she was billed as "Millie - the non - stop variety girl" but there was more stop than variety.

Now I see it as a good little drama.

It is about a bus crash and the stories, leading up to it, of the people on the bus.

Apart from Jessie Matthews, who is great as Millie - Sir Ralph Richardson plays her fiancée ( yes, that's right).

Edmund Gwenn - who went to Hollywood to co-star in Lassie movies and also with Natalie Wood in "Miracle on 34th Street", plays a grumpy businessman. Gordon Harker is his very annoying partner.

Emlyn Williams - who wrote "Night Must Fall" was the black - mailing villain and Frank Lawton, who went to Hollywood and appeared in "David Copperfield" and "The Devil Doll" is the young man in trouble. Sonnie Hale who was married to Jessie Matthews at the time played the bus conductor.

I recently saw this ancient British film again after a 30 year hiatus.

Luckily it was the recent DVD from NETWORK with possibly the best surviving print that I saw. I won't repeat the complex plot (every reviewer on IMDb seems compelled to reprise film plots for some reason), apart from saying that the narrative binds together a group of disparate characters over a 24 hour period, each with his/her own story, much like the later films TALES OF MANHATTAN (1942) FLESH AND FANTASY (1943) DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) BOND STREET (1948) etc. This film is probably the first talkie to use such a device and its cast is stuffed with famous stars of the early 1930s. Which makes spotting familiar faces (if you are a film buff) part of the fun of watching this.

Its main attraction for me though, is that it offers a tantalizing glimpse of London as it was almost 90 years ago, a London and a way of life in Britain that has vanished completely. The street and railway station scenes, the atmosphere on a typical London bus of that time with a conductor, and the whole ambiance of the film are priceless.

It also provides Max Miller with perhaps his best screen role, allowing him to demonstrate his astonishing facility for rapid-fire dialogue that would not have been out of place at Warner Brothers in the mid 1930s.

Think Pat O'Brien and James Cagney in such films as BOY MEETS GIRL and CEILING ZERO and then watch Max do his stuff. He's terrific and easily competes with them.

Some scenes creak today as one would expect, but for the most part, this is a vivid, highly entertaining little film that deserves to be far better known than it is.