Actor

Rex Harrison

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Blithe Spirit

David Lean · 1945

David Lean’s 1945 Blithe Spirit adapts Noël Coward’s stage comedy with formal care and muted energy. Shot in Technicolor by Ronald Neame, it preserves the play’s wit and structure while adding exterior scenes and a controversial new ending. Margaret Rutherford’s Madame Arcati anchors the film, but Rex Harrison and Kay Hammond struggle to translate their stage roles to screen. The film’s strength lies in its textures — domestic detail, vocal rhythm, restrained visual effects — not in narrative drive or emotional revelation. Though commercially disappointing in 1945, it endures as a document of mid-century British craft and constraint.

13:00

Major Barbara

Gabriel Pascal · 1941

Gabriel Pascal’s 1941 adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara is a rigorously faithful, studio-bound rendering of the 1905 play. Starring Wendy Hiller and Robert Morley, it stages a moral contest between Salvation Army idealism and industrial pragmatism, filmed in London during The Blitz. Ronald Neame’s cinematography and William Walton’s score serve the text, not the image. It is talk-driven, structurally intact, and intellectually uncompromising — a rare case where fidelity is both method and meaning.

13:00

Night Train to Munich

Carol Reed, Edward Black, Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder · 1940

Night Train to Munich (1940) is a British spy thriller directed by Carol Reed, written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder. It follows a British agent’s mission to rescue a Czech scientist and his daughter from Nazi custody, culminating in a tense train journey to Munich and a daring escape across the Alps. Starring Margaret Lockwood and Rex Harrison, it balances suspense with wry humour and prioritises plot logic over psychological depth or historical detail.

13:00

Unfaithfully Yours

Preston Sturges · 1948

Preston Sturges’ 1948 comedy follows Sir Alfred de Carter, a world-renowned conductor who, suspecting his wife of infidelity, imagines three elaborate responses — murder, magnanimous forgiveness, and Russian roulette — each triggered by a piece of classical music he conducts in concert. Back home, his attempts to enact any of them unravel in farcical detail. With Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell and Alfred Newman, it is a formally inventive, musically anchored satire of ego, creativity and self-deception.