jakeboy

The Green Man is one of those movies that used to get a good deal of play on PBS stations but now seems to have disappeared. Too bad. It's a very funny example of wicked British black humor. The always excellent Alastair Sim plays an assassin attempting to blow up a fatuous politician who has found a hide-away for a tryst with his timid secretary. Raymond Huntley (perhaps best known as the family lawyer in "Upstairs, Downstairs") delivers the most hilarious soliloquy ever heard on the practices of English gastronomy in general and chopped toad as a delicacy in particular. Colin Gordon, familiar as one of the few actors to appear twice as Number Two in The Prisoner, does a send up of a rather precious poet who resembles T. S. Eliot. Wish this would appear on DVD.

As is mentioned in the IMDB entry for actor Paul Frees, he often relooped other actors dialogue in the fifties and sixties. If you have a good ear you'll hear his voice throughout this movie, although he's not in the credits. It's not surprising that he was called upon to do the voices for some of the cameo stars who appear in disguise, but what is really bizarre is how his voice will appear, sometimes in mid-monologue for actors like Jacques Roux.

This film is justly famous for its acting, script and direction but if it had none of those qualities it would be noteworthy for James Wong Howe's magnificent high-contrast black & white cinematography. So many dazzling shots I hardly know what to single out - but the shot looking down on Broadway lit up at night is awesome. These things are hard to quantify, but if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to correctly name the most beautiful cinematography in American film, I'd have to go with this.