Critical Eye UK

Passably watchable old-style Western not quite as bloodless as others of the early 1950s but entertaining enough if one factors in that Don Siegel, never one to shrink from the gratuitous, is its director.

Pleasing to see a disturbingly youthful Audie Murphy again, if only for the nostalgia kick, as well as an emergent Lee Marvin, poised and ready to dominate both the movie and the entire industry.

By contrast, bafflling to see what appears to be a change of actor playing Johnny Sombrero one third of the way through the movie, with. Eugene Iglesias seemingly not stepping into the role until then -- and, to add to the confusion, being repeatedly filmed in close-ups such as to display an uncanny resemblance to a young Kirk Douglas.

Other than that (all of which is actually more than enough entertainment to be derived from just one fillum), 'The Duel at Silver Creek', despite its title's wholly unnecessary definite article, is naively entertaining enough to divert attention from a predictably wooden Stephen McNally performance and the tedium of all those speeded-up tracking shots of galloping horses.

About as dire as the worst of British film-making can be, 'Blithe Spirit' is a joyless, mirthless travesty of Noel Coward's original stage play unredeemed by anything in the way of discernible quality in screenplay or direction.

An aspirant comedy,it provokes hilarity only on the basis that its makers were not only deluded enough to have this drivel exhibited at California's Mill Valley Film festival -- an event not usually renowned for applauding the third-rate and unoriginal -- but also had hopes of a full theatrical release, until COVID19 shut down all the cinemas that might've been unlucky enough to screen it.

One doesn't need a medium to foretell that word-of-mouth recommendations for 'Blithe Spirit' would have been precisely zero.

Without a trace of the urbane wit essayed in all Coward's work, nor much grasp of how Coward was at his most libertarian and subversive in this now sadly-dated play (which it is indeed: dated; a Cowardian capering among the dead, a trivialising of mortality itself to scandalise the last lingering vesitages of Britain's hypocritical Victorian-era preoccupation with the dignity of death and the magnitude of loss), the film relies for what minimal appeal it possesses on an all stops-out performance by actor Dan Stevens that varies from A (Basil Fawlty) to B (Bertie Wooster) and back again, as well as a miserably understated performance by a miscast Judi Dench, evidently brought in because of the latter day misapprehension about Dench's cinematic 'star power'.

Stevens' predictable performance as well as Dench's underplaying, could and should have been picked up on by director Edward Hall, son of the Royal Shakespeare Company's famed Peter Hall.

Unfortunately, although one might've thought Hall to have the art and craft of his calling imprinted in his genes, he here gives every indication of being unable to direct an envelope through a letterbox, still less an entire movie.

The only noticeable momentum in a largely immobile piece is a homage to the John Cleese/Connie Both masterpiece where Cleese attacks his recalcitrant Austin 1100 with a tree branch, only in this instance it's a demented Stevens runnning past the window of a room full of people, waving either a hammer or a mallet in an attempt to strike down the already-dead yet wonderfully animated Elvira (a role thankfully played to the hilt by Leslie Mann: without her, this film would've been dead on its feet within the first quarter hour.)

Snapped up by Britain's Sky TV, a Murdoch company which profits enormously from inflicting the mediocre and often downright awful on its gullible 'Sky Cinema' subscribers by raiding as many remainder bins as it can, 'Blithe Spirit' is another warning of the paucity of talent not merely at the top of Sky TV (home to 'Riviera', the worst TV series ever screened) but also the talent vacuum now so distressingly evident in contemporary British movie-making..

Quite how this version of Coward's beyond-its-sell-by-date work ever made it to the screen is a mystery, seeing as how the three writers that it took to actually 'adapt' Coward's play seem never to have met -- go on, count' 'em: Nick Moorcroft, Piers Ashworth and Meg Leonard -- one consequence of which is that their version of medium Madame Arcati saddled Dench with a car crash of a part that she could do nothing to repair.

Lacking the signature eccentricities of a Dame Margaret Rutherford, so 1,000% gloriously over-the-top in David Lean's typically skillful 1945 film version of the play, Dench brings little to the mess, and as the director can't decide if her character is one to be feared /admired/pitied or scorned, and as the script saddles Dench with mourning for a long dead husband (a cliched pathos Coward himself would've vigorously scormed) it's no wonder that in this offering Madame Arcati, as played by Dench, is a charmless and painfully ageing irritant.

An undistinguished back-up cast -- describing it as 'lightweight' would be a serious over-estimation -- does nothing to help, whilst the movie's idiotic references to a film world of which it itself doesn't deserve to be a part make one yearn for the days when British film making was as good as it gets, compared to this example of what happens when British film making is as bad as it gets.