Cloudburst

Cloudburst (1951)

A great title, and a curious, odd little film that is commanding at times and well filmed throughout. And it has some real surprises, so good drama.

The big surprise is near the beginning and I don't want to give anything away, but there is a deeply romantic core to the entire movie. This is most of all about a man who loves his wife. Both man and wife are involved in the British top secret code breaking operation of WWII, and the movie begins in fact with a tour of the code-breaking room. But then it shifts to our two leads, the man a hale and handsome Robert Preston, the woman a cute and slightly mysterious Elizabeth Sellars. They're going to have a baby, life looks perfect ahead.

But things take a sudden turn, and Preston is off on a solitary manhunt. His lonely quest and his isolation from his friends make this a kind of British film noir, a post-war malaise hanging over the film (it's set in 1946). There is a more than slight improbability to some of the revenge he wreaks (the victims seem a hair willing to just stand there and take it) but if you accept this as just part of the drama, the rest of the film in all its small details is really great, really compelling.

In a way, the movie is a metaphor for the whole war, both on the grand scale (hating the Germans) and on a personal level (hating particular crimes, specific deaths). And if retribution occurs, a higher order of justice is inserted, too. And honor, or a sense of doing the right thing based on conscience. Preston pulls off all sides of this dilemma well. He's warm and he's cold, he's smart and he's flawed. And in the end he's sentimental, too. The final reading of the code, once it's broken, is a touching triumph.

And what about the character Sellars plays? "My hatred would overwhelm me like a cloudburst," she says, explaining not only the title, but the theme of the movie, retribution from the gut. She inhabits the film very much, but from the opposite side of things than Sellars. As you'll see. The film does move slowly at times. The war is over, that kind of high drama is past, but in its smaller goals it never stutters, it never fails to know what it wants and how to get there.

The American actor Robert Preston (who because of his accent was excused in the story as someone who grew up Canada) stars in this British film which has a genuine noir story and atmosphere, similar to the Americans noirs of the time. It was written jointly by ex-spook Leo Marks and the director, Francis Searle. The next year, 1952, Searle is said to have directed a 30-minute film entitled BULLDOG DRUMMOND, starring Robert Beatty as Drummond. IMDb records no further information about it, and there is no record of its having been released or transmitted. This situation is a strange one, because Robert Beatty starred as Bulldog Drummond five years later in a 30-minute film entitled BULLDOG DRUMMOND AND THE LUDLOW AFFAIR (1957, see my review) directed by David MacDonald. (It was the 22nd of the 25 Drummond films, if one disregards the Searle film.) That 1957 film, which I have seen and reviewed, was a poor TV pilot film. Could the two 30 minute films have been confused with one another perhaps? Or could the 1952 attempt by Searle have been recut for the Rheingold Theatre series by the TV series director David MacDonald (who retired in 1963) and Searle's name taken off? This latter suggestion seems the most likely to me. In other words, the original would have failed as a pilot so that no Drummond series was commissioned, but the pilot was disguised as something new and stuck into another series as a one-off. The coincidence of the same duration and the same star and the same decade are too much. But that is enough about Searle. Returning to this film, it is very good and has an air of authenticity about it. Preston's wife is played by the weird Elizabeth Sellars, who speaks in a semi-articulate and languid manner as if she were slurring her speech through a wall of medication. She is bizarre but fascinating to look at, in the way that an animal which was not quite true to type might be, if studied closely in a zoo, while scientists speculated about what had gone wrong with its DNA. However, the weirdness of Sellars works very well with the story, and in any case she is killed off early on, so that she cannot become too irritating. Sellars was not always as weird as this, for she appeared in 62 films and generally managed to do very well and appear quite normal. She was, for instance, excellent in THE CHALK GARDEN (1964, see my review). In this story, Preston is madly in love with her and the film turns into a revenge tale where he determines to avenge her death by a hit-and-run driver. Her death is particularly poignant in that, the horrors of the War being finally behind them (the story is set in 1946), she is looking at a field which Preston wants to buy as part of their happy future. And then she is without warning run over by two criminals escaping a crime scene at speed. So what could be more noirish than that? The despair of the War, having been lifted momentarily, then turns into a lasting doom. This was why noir was noir. And it is rare to find the essence of noir so well expressed in a British film, as the English being far more stoical than the Americans (the makers of most noir), they tended to express their angst with less fervour and gloom, as they were so much more used to everything going wrong anyway, including their nearest and dearest being suddenly killed without warning in the bombing of London. This film is a notable addition to the list of good British films of the early fifties.

In England during the war, John Graham (Robert Preston) works to decode enemy communication. A couple hits and runs on his beloved pregnant wife. They callously run her over to death in order to escape. With the car's license plate, he tracks down the killers without telling the police.

I really wish that she could fall more naturally. Carol's fall is almost comical when the scene calls for something brutal and devastating. Backing up over her is utterly barbaric. It's a sequence that needs to be executed at a high visual level. It's her fall. She can't be doing the silly girlie fall.

After that, the film brings out John's single-minded determination. He's like a British shark locked on his target. The police investigation is a lot less compelling. It's uncovering things that the audience already knows. It is interesting to have the police get ahead of John but the revenge climax is problematic and conveniently staged. The movie is better off staying with John as he burns a path of destruction searching for that woman. That would have been amazingly brutal. It needs to follow the brutal example of running over that boxer guy. It's such a compelling scene. It's savagery at its finest. If only, the movie could maintain that level for the full length.

In Cloudburst Scotland Yard Inspector Colin Tapley describes the man he is looking for as a man who was trained with the skill to take vengeance on his own. That in fact is Robert Preston who is a Canadian with experience in special Ops during the late war and skill as a cryptologist.

Robert Preston after being cut loose from his Paramount contract and five years away from his career role in The Music Man was getting work where he could find it. Cloudburst is a British film with Preston in the lead to insure box office clout abroad and as usual for Americans, he plays a Canadian.

While in the country looking over some property Preston bought, Sellars is run down in a hit and run. The perpetrators were Harold Lang and Sheila Burrell who just committed a robbery where they also killed a night watchman. Preston gets a good look and even a license number. If he had just gone to the authorities, Scotland Yard would have nailed these two. But Preston has other plans.

Too many flaws in Cloudburst to keep it from becoming a noir classic. Preston leaves a really incriminating clue at Lang's gym (he is a boxer) that sends Tapley in Preston's obvious direction.

Still a good performance by Preston masks a lot of flaws over and makes Cloudburst a good British noir film.

The next movie watched for the "House of Hammer" Podcast is "Cloudburst", a 1951 film, notable for being the first one Hammer made at Bray Studios following their acquisition of it.

In post war Briton, John Graham (Robert Preston) and his team continue to undertake cryptography work for both the Police and for British Intelligence. His seemingly settled life is devastated when his wife Carol (Elizabeth Sellars) is killed in a hit and run accident. Broken, and out for revenge, he uses contacts within the Police department to track down his wife's killers. Bringing them to justice though, isn't exactly what he has in mind.

Adapted from a play by Leo Marks, who would later provide a screenplay for Michael Powell's seminal "Peeping Tom" "Cloudburst" marks, to my eyes anyway, a big step up in the quality of filmmaking we've seen from Hammer studios. It maybe was that I was watching a print that had been worked on, that might help explain how good the film stock looked or the step up in sound quality - but that wouldn't explain the sudden move to exterior shots, multiple locations, camera's attached to cars for visual effects.

Nor would it account for bringing over Robert Preston to feature as the films lead. This was before he would gather acclaim in "The Music Man" or his Oscar nomination for "Victor/Victoria". Preston is really good here, a proper presence as the devastated leading man. Whilst I appreciate the noir, and indeed general darkness of the picture as a whole, I do wish that it held together a little better. In retrospect, I wish that Graham's skills had tied more into how he tracked down the pair, or even how he covers up what happens to them.

It's not that I disliked it because of this, it's more that I wished that the plot had matched the characterisation, because there's a real depth of backstory to the leads.