Friday the Thirteenth (1933)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This film is a splendid achievement, weaving together satisfactorily as it does the stories of a group of people preceding their coming together one fatal evening on a London Number 134 bus. The evening is that of Friday the thirteenth, and disaster occurs, as lightning strikes a crane and causes it to come crashing down onto the bus. Two people are killed, but we are not allowed to know which two until the end of the film's multiple flashbacks. Numerous well known actors of the period appear in this ensemble drama. One character, a slippery and unctuous crook named Blake who 'lives by his wits', is superbly played by Emlyn Williams, who also wrote the electric and crackling dialogue for this film. The wit and quickness of the complex dialogue helps to give this film a much deeper dimension. The young female lead is played by Jessie Matthews, who is as charming as her audience at the time would have expected, considering how popular she was then, and indeed deserved to be. The film is wonderfully directed by Victor Saville. He had already worked with Matthews and would do so again, as he would with Emlyn Williams the following year. The multi-stories are really well-structured and take place in a variety of locations. This gives us a treat, for we are able to see many areas of London as they were in 1932. I noticed for instance that the price of a payphone call at that time was only tuppence. And on the bus itself, someone asks for 'a penny ticket' but then realizes he has been robbed of all his money before boarding the bus, so Emlyn Williams, feeling flush after a blackmail payoff, holds up a single copper and gives it to the bus conductor. Yes, bus conductors! And how we miss them! They were always good for a laugh and some banter, as well as useful advice on which was really the best stop, and how to change, and how long everything would take. I am only surprised that bus conductors, although long gone, have not also been replaced by call centres in India so that people are asked on their mobile phones to press 1, 2, 3, or 4, for their travel advice nowadays, since humans have gone out of fashion. There are many fine performances in the film, such as by Ralph Richardson and Max Miller the music hall comedian. We see extensive shots of the old Caledonian Market at its original site off Caledonian Road in Islington, which closed when the Second World War began. (After the War it reopened at Bermondsey.) There is indeed a great deal to see of Pre-War London, and a great deal to enjoy from a very fine film.

Despite its age, this film retains its undoubted charm and attraction, and is a fine, surviving example of early British cinema. It has an underlying air of eeriness, interspersed with shafts of humour which are not out of place, and serve to demonstrate the assured direction & production values involved. So many episodic type films are disjointed and untidy, but this is not one of them. The standard of acting helps a great deal, and the various disparate characters come across as interesting and believable. All in all, this long-forgotten little gem is well worth anyone's attention, in spite of the one jarring note in the film which, surprisingly, escaped the censor's attention!

An early connecting lives film, much like a 1930s 'Pulp Fiction' without all the vulgar language and violence, it is very well done in most aspects, and considering when it was made, it is well ahead of its time. The film editing and the acting - especially from Gordon Harker and Robertson Hare - are particularly strong points of the film, and the overall product is engaging the whole time through. Arguably there are at least one too many characters, which complexes the film much more than is necessary, however this hardly subtracts from this very unique and highly interesting, but too often forgotten, early British film.

Absolute grabber of a movie, and given its age, years ahead of its time. I first saw this the week my dad came home with a neighbor's TV, that the guy had thrown on the scrap heap. A tinkerer with all things electrical, dad had it working inside two days. This was July 1955...and then probably only the third house in the street to HAVE television! Pretty much the first thing we ever saw on that grainy and flickering old 12-inch screen was THIS film. "It's pretty OLD dear," I recall my mom telling me!Almost 50 years on, and it doesn't seem any older - rather like World War I in that respect! Terrific little fantasy about a London omnibus carrying thirteen passengers, that crashes, killing one of their number. Then, in flashback we pick up on the lives of these people and what brought them to being on this bus that very day.Returning to the crash at the end of the film, the victim's identity is revealed, perhaps the inspiration behind the 1960 movie THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER.If ever you come across this little gem, I suggest you watch it!