kennethwright45

While perfectly enjoyable as a camp comedy of manners (that element comes courtesy of director James Whale) and as an elegant, low-key horror, The Old Dark House can best be appreciated when you know a little about JB Priestley, author of the source play Benighted. (Or was it originally a novel? It definitely exists as a stage play, at any rate.)

Priestley was an English playwright, novelist, radio broadcaster and journalist who became very well known in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s for presenting a kindly, commonsensical version of socialism and community spirit to a nation battling through the Great Depression, the Second World War and its aftermath. Several of his plays combine a supernatural or at least mysterious strain with an allegorical message about the importance of unselfishness and people working together to help one another. If you watch The Old Dark House with these points in mind you may see it in a more moving and profound light. Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls are similar examples of his work, still popular in Britain with amateur drama groups and touring theatre companies.

If you can, see Old Dark House and Whale's later Bride of Frankenstein as a home video double bill and compare Ernest Thesiger's delightfully feline and remarkably similar performances as Horace Femm and Dr Praetorius. "Have a potato" and "Have some gin" may well become part of your private family language for ever after.

Perhaps the sweetest, saddest and kindest of all talkie comedies. Its shameless sentimentality could have been cloying but for the way the gently kooky script squeezes the odd dash of lemon into the cocktail; similarly, its fine balance between naturalism and fantasy allows it to get away with things that would have been embarrassingly maudlin in a more literal-minded film. That's why I always seem to get something stuck in my eye when Elwood P Dowd goes into his "Harvey and I have things to do ..." speech.

Among a great ensemble cast, I'd like to drop down the credits a little to say a word for Harry Hines in the small but delightful role of Mr Miggles, the ageing jailbird whom Elwood invites to dinner. (He's been away for a while, "doing some work for the government ... making licence plates".) This was Hines's film debut at the age of 60, and it started him off on a busy and distinctive career in character parts as mildly disreputable but good-hearted old geezers, with hardly a change in costume or make-up from one film to the next. You can see him in the finale of Strangers on a Train as the old carny hand who crawls under the speeding carousel to stop the ride.

Here's a wicked little thought to close with: I'd love to see a TV channel or repertory cinema show Harvey as the top half of a drinking man's double bill ... with The Lost Weekend as supporting feature.

Though the best part of three hours long, The Shining simply flies past like an Andy Warhol triple bill: it's the very slowest commercial film I ever did see. Made by the world's most overrated director (who directed the world's most overrated film, 2001), with the world's second most charmless star (Jack Nicholson narrowly loses out to Marlon Brando in the Face You'd Never Tire of Kicking stakes), from a tuppenny-ha'penny shocker by arrested adolescent Stephen King, its reputation and popularity make a depressing comment on the decline of the movies.

Depressing also describes the film itself: it's far too ponderous and literal ever to be pleasurably scary, settling instead for presenting a succession of predictably edited horrors that each go on for a sadistically long time. A handful of bravura visual touches only help draw attention to the miles of slow-motion stodge separating them. However, I will allow that connoisseurs of the thrills to be savoured from watching women and children being systematically terrorised are in for the treat of their lives.

The Shining pretty much signalled the end of the intelligent and tasteful horror/spook film as a paying proposition, speeding the genre's descent into gore, grue and titillation. But it does improve one's appreciation of an earlier and less pretentious era of trash horror, typified by the films of William Castle and Roger Corman. Beside The Shining, drive-in teensploitation flicks like The Tingler and Fall of the House of Usher seem as scary as Don't Look Now, as funny as I Married a Witch, as poignant as Bride of Frankenstein, and - best of all - as short and fast as an episode of The Addams Family. Y'know what? They're just not making good rubbish like they used to ...