2012 - II: The House Across the Lake (Ken Hughes, 1954)

Or, rather, Heat Wave, a title that sounds rather more like a Fritz Lang film than a Hammer production which, oddly has two surprises in it. Firstly, Sidney James is pretty good in a straight role (but then again, at this point he hadn't had the decade of Carry Ons), and secondly this is the noir version of The Great Gatsby. Or at least the set up reminded me of parts Gatsby, which I haven't seen or read for twenty years. But surely the British title offers an echo of it?

This is one of the Hammer attempts at noir - directed by Kenneth Hughes rather than Terrence Fisher - with two American import actors, Alex Nicol as writer Mark Kendrick and Hillary Brooke as the femme fatale, Carol Forrest. Kendrick, struggling to finish a novel, becomes friends with Beverly Forrest (Sidney James), who is clearly already disillusioned with his second wife, Carol. Mark and Carol have an awkward relationship which heads towards an affair, as she decides that it's time to murder her hubby to guarantee her inheritance. As in so many of these films, we have a screwed on over character (Mark) telling the story in retrospect.

James's performance is great - the man who has made it and is not comfortable, who has punched above his weight. It's a story that must exist in a hundred American variants (The Postman Always Rings Twice, to some extent Double Indemnity, but here we have a British version - I'd not heard of High Wray, Ken Hughes's own novel, named for a real place in the Lake District where this film (and presumably novel) is set. Mark clearly allows himself to be led astray - his lust for women and drink, or at least one woman, is what gets him into trouble.

2012 - III: The Hide (Marek Losey, 2008)

Essentially a two-hander which demonstrates its theatrical origins - Tim Whitnall's 2005 play The Sociable Plover - but also uses them to good advantage. The film is set in a hide on the Suffolk coast (actually the Isle of Sheppey and Pinewood), with some rather grisly flashbacks which brings a sense of the macabre which comes rather too close to foreshadowing.

In a sense we're in Pinter territory, as two strangers meet, each afraid of the other, and the dialogue shifts between black humour, obsession and menace, implied or otherwise. Losey's grandfather knew his Pinter, of course. On the one hand we have Roy Tunt, smartly dressed, looking older than his years, a birder in search of his final tick on his British bird list, the sociable plover, and ever so slightly anally retentive. On the other hand there's Dave John, possibly not a real name, who shows up at the hide, starving, with a bird tattoo, and seeming to have flashbacks. Tunt doesn't immediately warm to Tunt, and less so when he discovers (in a The Real Inspector Hound moment) than a wanted man is on the run in the area. We were right to fear John.

Curiously, though, his is the lesser role, and one originally played by Whitnall in the stage version. He is a character with secrets, which are slow to be given up, and I was left with the sense that he was less than he actually seems. Phil Campbell doesn't seem to have done anything else of significance. But I think this is largely because the screen is stolen by Alex McQueen as Roy - from The Thick of It and (apparently) Holby City, a regular as a one-off character representing humourless officialdom. Tunt is pedantic, nerdy, conservative, particular and clearly - having been cuckolded - on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

I confess that three-quarters of the way through I did begin to wonder if we'd been meant to jump to the conclusion that John was the man on the run, and that Tunt was the subject of the man hunt. Indeed, the balance of power does shift between the two, with not quite the ending you'd suspect. He is too good a character to be just a victim; it would be tedious for a hood to off the naif he'd stumbled across. And it's this sense of uncertainty with the obvious that keeps two men in a hut compelling for eighty minutes.