Old England

I watched a couple of old movies this week. From this distance, they view like propaganda material for the austerity years immediately after the war.

"The Nanny" is set in 1960, and stars a painfully controlled Bette Davis as an ultimately murderous, insane household employee. It's very difficult to like this movie or any of the characters in it. The son is an impossibly spoilt brat, the father is a distant foreign office apparatchik, the mother a hysterically tearful bag of nerves, her sister a pill-popping casualty of the permissive scene. At the finale, the boy enthusiastically embraces this family, saved from the homicidal machinations of the nanny, who we (very late in the day, and in a clumsily inserted flashback) discover is motivated by the death of her daughter, who had been abandoned and was pregnant when she died, having fallen in with the 'bad crowd' of legend.

Credit to Davis for taking a role in which she not only plays an insane, morally decrepit child murderer, but also carries the can for the suffering in a toxically repressed middle-English family.

"The Blue Lamp" is watchable only on the back of an early Dirk Bogarde performance as an unstable desperado, trying to get a toe hold in London's early 50s crime underworld, and some interesting period footage of the Edgeware Road. Other than that, the film's main function is a unabashed publicity and recruiting tool for the Metropolitan Police.