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Enticing Titles...

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May 10

Of the many unregarded art forms to perish under the grinding wheels of heartless Progress, only hopeless nostalgics (thank you) will spare too much grief for the B-Movie, the economical second feature and programme filler that achieved its peak in the 1950s.

I am especially fond of the British efforts, and even fonder of their wonderful titles, promissories of strange and harrowing emotion employing delightfully doom-laden language.

Nothing was original about the B-Movie, and this style came from that class of excitable fiction books soon made redundant by the screen, and of course from Hollywood, especially the high-wrought melodramas of brave betrayed women and stark and cruel fate made by Douglas Sirk (1897-1987), like so many other directors, a German refugee. Try these titles: ‘All I Desire’, ‘All that Heaven Allows’, ‘Written on the Wind’, and ‘The Tarnished Angels’. Oddly if predictably, this age now hails Sirk as a genius; no call for recognition has yet come for the British B-Movie.

But how can you not relish titles such as these (the plots and the acting do not generally reward more than the passing attention they gained in the cinema at the time):

Guilt Is My Shadow She Shall Have Murder Hold Me Forever

Death Is a Number Night Was Our Friend There Is Another Sun

To Have and to Hold The Good Die Young Time to Kill

Time Is My Enemy The Weak and the Wicked Before I Wake

They Can’t Hang Me The Flesh Is Weak Fortune Is a Woman

Kill Me Tomorrow Another Time, Another Place Once a Sinner

Hell is Sold Out The Stranger Came Home My Wife’s Lodger Dead Men are Dangerous Three Steps to the Gallows The Wind of Change

So Evil So Young Time Without Pity A Gentleman After Dark

My Death is a Mockery Tomorrow We Live The Stranger Came Home

Cast a dark shadow Time to Kill Turn the Key Softly

Mention must also be made of some excellently engaging horror film titles:

Corridors of Blood 
Maidens from Space
Devil Girl from Mars
The Brother from another Planet
The Haunted Strangler

Nor were main feature immune (there are a few in the B-Movie list). A favourite is ‘In Which We Serve’, a doughty, stiff-upper-lipped naval war film starring and written by a slightly unlikely Noel Coward. It was followed by ‘We Dive at Dawn’, immediately and informally rechristened ‘In Which We Submerge’.

Coward was also much taken with the title of another sea saga, ‘The Sea Shall Not Have Them’, with equally improbably rugged stars, Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde: ‘I don’t see why not; everybody else has’.

Elsewhere, you will of course remember that the film of Alan Bennett’s play ‘The Madness of George III’ was retitled ‘The Madness of King George’ for release in the United States lest the locals thought it a sequel.

I have made up a couple of the B-Movies, by the way.