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.

A 1951 British film noir starring Robert Preston. Preston is a Canadian living in Merry ol' England, married w/a young one on the way. He served w/the Brits during the war as a cryptologist (code breaker) & still toils in that craft as a career. Tragedy strikes when one night while out on a walk w/his wife, played by Elizabeth Sellars, near their home a speeding car strikes & kills her but not before in desperation Preston grabs hold of the driver begging him & his companion for help before they flee away. Preston then sets out on a road for revenge by corralling some of his old running mates from the service to provide him w/info & tools to find the errant killers (we learn they were racing from the scene of another murder before hitting Sellars) but after Preston dispatches the driver (he runs him over w/his car) a perverse game is enacted as he leaves a note w/an encrypted code which the investigating officer brings to his office to decode. As the narrative runs down, Preston sets his sights on the driver's companion who has been taken into protective custody w/the detective putting together all the pieces to figure out who the culprit is. Preston is fantastic here as man of action working through his anguish where his goal will not bring him the satisfaction he thinks he'll get.

Cloudburst is written and directed by Francis Searle and adapted from the novel by Leo Marks. It stars Robert Preston, Elizabeth Sellars, Colin Tapley, Sheila Burrell, Harold Lang, Mary Germaine, George Woodbridge and Edith Sharpe. Music is by Frank Spencer and cinematography by Walter J. Harvey.

Preston plays John Graham, a Canadian World War II veteran working for the British Foreign Office who trawls England looking for the two hit and run killers who callously murdered his pregnant wife.

Violent, grim and utterly wonderful! Cloudburst is the sort of British noir just crying out to be discovered by more classic film fans.

London 1946 is the backdrop, a changing post war landscape, and we are introduced to John and Elizabeth Graham, both war vets, and in Elizabeth's case, a survivor of torture at the hands of the Gestapo. These are two tough characters without doubt, but the love between them positively bristles on the screen, it feels genuine, it is touching and Searle does a great job of building up the bond between the two before tragedy strikes and sends John Graham on a mission from which he doesn't care if he returns.

Everything's dark isn't it?

John is ex-forces trained and a specialist in cryptography (medal winner for bravery), he not only has the skills for tracking people down, he also has friends willing to do anything for him. We are left in no doubt that he is admired by his ex-army buddies, they would run through brick walls for him, while Carol's family adore him and obviously share his grief. The police are led by intrepid Inspector Davis (Tapley), who in a delicious kink in the narrative seeks out the help of John to catch John himself!

You killed the three of us that night...

With Leo Marks being a real servant of WWII as head of the Special Operations Executive, you can easily grasp the narrative sting involving the horrors of war and post war survivors who returned battered and bruised but unbowed. Further thematic thrust comes by way of vengeance and the perfect noir area where moral killings come to the fore. John Graham becomes an obsessed man, a dangerous weapon who will stop at nothing to achieve his aims, his fall back option should the need arise is a cyanide pill pinned under his jacket collar.

When you're being tortured, remember the first lie's the most important. You may never get a chance to tell another.

As Harvey photographs it in moody black and whites, Searle adds a doom laded atmosphere with close ups, where sweat, smoke and pain are thrust to the front of the screen. The fights are well staged, a torture scene excellent because it seeps with menace without having to hit us in the face, and in Lorna Dawson (Burrell) we have one cold bitch who leaves an indelible impression with the minimum amount of screen time. Cast are great, especially Preston, while Spencer's score dovetails smartly with the changing tones of the plot.

Codes, both moral and cryptic, come crashing together in a must see for anyone interested in British film noir. 8.5/10

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.

I read the other two "reviews" here - the first written by someone who seems to have seen a different film than the one actually in front of his eyes, and the other by someone who doesn't really get one of the major plot points. But, this is the IMDb so what else is new.

I'd never seen or heard of Cloudburst prior to the recent showing on TCM. It's quite a good little film - well directed by Searle, whose work I don't know at all, with a top-notch score by Frank Spencer, a composer I also don't know. Preston is very good, as are the rest of the players, especially the actor who plays the Inspector. The storytelling is compelling, and there's a surprising complexity in Preston's character. Leo Marks, from whose play this was taken, was a fascinating writer and person - as one of the others points out, he really did work as a decoder during the war - and this isn't the only film he wrote where the central character is a decoder - he also wrote Sebastian, in which Dirk Bogarde plays a decoder. And, of course, Marks gave us the brilliant script to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.

Worth catching if you can find it.