Parky at the Pictures (DVD 21/6/2012)

The sole survivor of the sunken SS Lady Vain, Richard Arlen is rescued by Arthur Hohl, who is travelling aboard the trading vessel SS Covena. However, Arlen is left behind after Captain Stanley Fields unloads his cargo of wild animals and the castaway is horrified to discover that his host, Charles Laughton, has utilised his bio-anthropological research into the evolutionary process to create a race of man-beast hybrids that slavishly do his bidding, while adhering to laws explained by factotum Bela Lugosi that forbid running on all fours, the spilling of blood and the consumption of flesh.

Unaware that she has been fashioned from a panther, Arlen becomes smitten with Kathleen Burke (Laughton's sole female creation) and tries to flee with her into the jungle when he discovers the unspeakable things that Laughton does to his subjects in the laboratory he calls the House of Pain. However, he realises her origins when her hands begin to revert back to claws and is torn between helping her and surrendering her to a monster bent on keeping Arlen captive so he can mate him with Burke.

Meanwhile, Leila Hyams has convinced Captain Paul Hurst to help her find her missing fiancée. She is reunited with Arlen, only to be attacked in the night by man-beast Hans Steinke, who kills Hurst on Laughton's orders as the visitors prepare to leave and his creatures feel betrayed by his disregard for their code and they drag him to the House of Pain for retribution. Arlen is keen to take Burke with him, but she sacrifices herself in a struggle with the pursuing Steinke and proves the nobility that Laughton was convinced he had awoken within her.

Strikingly designed by Hans Dreier and draped in Expressionist gloom by cinematographer Karl Struss, this caused as much fuss on its release as Tod Browning's Freaks (1932) and A. Edward Sutherland's Wylie co-scripted Murders in the Zoo (1933), which similarly explored the themes of `otherness' and the exploitation of animals. In an age of legalised genetic engineering, such `mad science' has lost much of its power to shock and repel. But the theory that mammals have the potential to evolve in the same manner as humans retains its potency, as does the simmering undercurrent of bestiality.

Cast after a nationwide talent search sponsored by Paramount, dental assistant Kathleen Burke acquits herself admirably as the sensual, but vulnerable `Panther Woman' and more than holds her own against such inveterate scene-stealers as Laughton and Lugosi. Arlen is more stolid as the square-jawed hero, while Hyams makes little impression as his loyal sweetheart. But Wally Westmore's make-up is as impressive as his designs for Fredric March in Rouben Mamoulian's take on Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and Kenton (whose later career was rather curiously divided between Lon Chaney, Jr. chillers and Abbott and Costello comedies) handles sequences such as Lugosi's recitation of the laws and the whip-wielding Laughton's climactic showdown with his vengeful grotesques with a graphic boldness that would soon be outlawed by the imposition in 1934 of the draconian Production Code that prevented the adult exploration of contentious issues by the Hollywood studios until 1968.

Laughton is on more genial form in Leo McCarey's Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), which started life in 1914 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post before being adapted into a bestselling novel by Harry Leon Wilson, who also wrote the stage play that took Broadway by storm in 1915. The story of a butler who braves the Wild West was first brought to the screen three years later by Lawrence C. Windom, while Edward Everett Horton reprised the role originated by Taylor Holmes in James Cruze's 1923 remake. Bob Hope and Lucille Ball would team for George Marshall's 1950 musical reworking Fancy Pants. But, having been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, this remains the definitive version, with its social satire matching anything being produced at the time by the likes of Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava and Mitchell Leisen.

On a trip to Paris in the spring of 1908, George Van Bassingwell, the Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young) loses faithful manservant Marmaduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton) in a game of poker with the coarse, but affable millionaire rancher, Egbert `Sourdough' Floud (Charles Ruggles). Delighted at the prospect of being able to dazzle her snooty neighbours in Red Gap, Washington with a genuine English servant, social climber Effie Floud (Mary Boland) insists that Ruggles attempts to turn her husband into a gentleman. But Ruggles is so impressed with Floud's egalitarian ideals that he forgets his own manners and conspires with his new employer to pass himself off as a honoured guest rather than a lackey.

Floud's brother-in-law, Charles Belknap-Jackson (Lucien Littlefield), is disgusted by Ruggles's behaviour and turfs him out of the house. Undaunted, however, he borrows some money from Floud and his mother-in-law, Ma Pettingill (Maude Eburne), and makes plan to open a restaurant with local widow Prunella Judson (ZaSu Pitts). However, shortly before the grand opening, Burnstead shows up hoping to talk Ruggles into returning to Europe and he is forced to follow the American precedent and declare his independence.

Smitten with local dancer Nell Kenner (Leila Hyams), Burnstead has nothing but admiration for his emancipated retainer. But Belknap-Jackson remains an insufferable snob and denounces the earl for consorting with a woman well beneath his social station. Refusing to allow prejudice to blight his big night, Ruggles ejects the poppinjay. But he returns to the kitchen distraught at ruining his prospects by offending the local bigwigs. However, he is reassured when a speech in his honour by Burnstead is followed by a rousing rendition of `For He's a Jolly Good Fellow'.

Charles Laughton always claimed this was his favourite role, although he nearly withdrew from the project when Paramount refused to hire Ruth Gordon as his cook consort. However, it's impossible to envisage this cordial comedy without ZaSu Pitts or Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland, who would make 14 features together in all, invariably being cast as bickeringly devoted couple.

Considering he spent much of the shoot being inconvenienced by a rectal abscess, Laughton is on fine form as the re-evaluating valet, with his delivery of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the Silver Dollar saloon being one of the picture's highlights. However, credit should also go to director Leo McCarey, who not only tolerated Laughton's tantrums, but also worked with him on his comic timing and allowed English friend Arthur Macrae to polish the dialogue so it better suited Laughton's style.

What is so fascinating about Hollywood features in the so-called Golden Age is their willingness to accept that not every American is a solid citizen. Indeed, modern viewers will doubtless be amused by the disapproving depiction of the rich and complacent at a time of economic strife. Yet, even during the Second World War, the studios continued to stress the darker side of human nature and, in Lifeboat (1943), Alfred Hitchcock shrewdly contrasts the petty and divisive concerns of the American survivors of a mid-Atlantic submarine strike with the single-minded determination of their German prisoner.

When a freighter bound from New York to London is attacked by a U-boat, the Allied crew retaliates and both vessels are destroyed. Alone in a lifeboat, journalist Tallulah Bankhead is relieved to be joined by oiler John Hodiak and radio operator Hume Cronyn. However, she is furious that Hodiak knocked her 16mm camera into the water on pulling Cronyn aboard and she remains testy as Army nurse Mary Anderson and wounded sailor William Bendix scramble into the cramped boat and only perks up when she recognises wealthy industrialist Henry Hull and African-American steward Canada Lee.

The mood soon darkens again, however, when Anderson realises that the baby newcomer Heather Angel is coddling has died and Cronyn explains that she is a shell-shock victim returning to her family in Bristol. But the survivors are quickly distracted by the arrival of Walter Slezak, a German who appears not to speak English. Given his Czech heritage, Hodiak wants them to cast him adrift, but Bendix and Hull recognise their duty to save a fellow human being and persuade the others to vote him aboard before coaxing Angel into letting her baby slip into the water.

The next morning, Angel has disappeared. But the discovery that Slezak was the captain of the submarine focuses everybody's minds, especially an argument with Hodiak breaks out as to who is in command of the boat. Having performed an impromptu operation on Bendix's badly injured leg, Slezak earns the trust of his fellow castaways and they continue to accept his stewardship - even after Cronyn realises he is steering them away from Bermuda and back towards the German convoy - after he steers them through a storm. But, while Hodiak and Bankhead and Cronyn and Anderson become romantically preoccupied with each other, Bendix notices that Slezak has a hidden water supply and, when he murders Bendix to keep his secret, all but the dismayed Lee turn on him.

Eventually, the desperate passengers spot the German ship in the distance. However, it comes under attack and Hodiak despairs when helpless seaman William Yetter, Jr. tries to pull a gun on them as he is pulled into the lifeboat. Lee disarms the youth and they await rescue contemplating the ferocity of the enemy and how long it might take to vanquish them.

Made to answer critics back in Blighty that Hitchcock was doing little or nothing for the war effort, Lifeboat was intended as a microcosm of the war and a summation of the director's changing attitude to the Germans he had feared as a boy, admired as a young man and now thoroughly detested. As he later told François Truffaut: `We wanted to show that at the moment there were two world forces confronting each other, the democracies and the Nazis, and while the democracies were completely disorganised, all of the Germans were clearly headed in the same direction. So here was a statement telling the democracies to put their differences aside temporarily and to gather their forces to concentrate on the common enemy, whose strength was precisely derived from a spirit of unity and of determination.'

However, few viewed the matter as straightforwardly as Hitchcock. The Office of War Information complained that `the group of Americans in the lifeboat paint a picture which the Nazi propagandists themselves would like to promote', while Bosley Crowther seethed in the New York Times that Hitchcock had `sold out democratic ideals and elevated the Nazi superman'. Even John Steinbeck, on whose story the screenplay was based, took exception to it. Amidst the benighted hubbub, only the great News Chronicle critic, Richard Winnington, recognised that Hitchcock had delivered some `good and timely propaganda' and he was rewarded for his efforts with an Oscar nomination.

Confining himself to a cameo in a photograph for a dietary aid on the page of a newspaper, Hitchcock reins in his natural tendency to combine suspense with mischief. Yet there is still plenty of gallows wit in this bleak tale, with Bankhead (a stage star suspicious of the camera) timing her quips to perfection, whether she is chastising Hodiak for his socialist stubbornness, berating Slezak for his ruthless cunning or siding with Lee, the ultimate outsider in the most enclosed of spaces. However, each performance is superbly judged, with Oxford-born Heather Angel underplaying disconcertingly as the woman protecting a baby that may not even be her own in a bid to find something to cling to amidst the madness.

The most significant turn, however, is Slezak's Nazi, who is not only intellectually superior to his fellow occupants, but he is also the most emotionally stable and nautically aware. Yet, even though he makes several wise decisions and displays heroic tenacity in weathering the storm, he is not quite clever enough to conceal his rank, his knowledge of English or his water bottle. Thus, even though Hitchcock presents him as a worthy adversary, he also reveals him to be flawed and beatable. Yet he also cautions against the mob mentality that overtakes the good guys in the rush to punish Slezak and it's typical of Hitchcock that the ringleader should be the prim nurse (who has actually been exposed as the mistress of a married man) and that the one looking on aghast is the God-fearing black man who would be no stranger to lynch law.

As if to prove the point about evil not being an exclusively Axis trait, Billy Wilder demonstrates what happens when lust gets the better of an average Joe in Double Indemnity (1944), an adaptation of a James M. Cain novel that was scripted by the director in conjunction with Raymond Chandler. Since reworked in numerous guises, the best of which was Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), this variation on Emile Zola's La Bête Humaine is consciously set in July 1938, as though Paramount was keen to suggest that nobody would behave in such a callous and recklessly foolish manner in wartime. However, it established the crepuscular look and lowering mood that would become synonymous with the films noir that exposed the scarred psyche of a nation that might have secured victory, but which was scarcely at peace with itself.

Right from the outset, this is a story that cannot end well. Bleeding from a gunshot wound, Fred MacMurray staggers into his office at the Pacific All Risk Insurance Company and starts dictating a message to his boss, Edward G. Robinson. He cannot remember the precise details, but he knows it began some time in the spring when he drove out to the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles to remind Tom Powers that his car insurance needed renewing. The door was opened by his younger wife, Barbara Stanwyck, clad only in a towel and MacMurray beat a hasty retreat.

However, he had clearly made an impact, as Stanwyck connives to meet him again and inquires about the possibility of taking out a life insurance policy on her husband without him knowing. Professional scruple persuades MacMurray to beat a retreat. But Stanwyck comes to his apartment and protests that Powers beats and undermines her and she admits that she would kill him if it wasn't for the fact that he has left everything to his daughter Jean Heather, who despises Stanwyck and would never give her a cent.

Hatching a plan to dupe Powers into signing auto and accident insurance forms, MacMurray is temporary foiled when his intended victim breaks a leg. However, he is finally fit enough to travel by train to a business appointment and MacMurray strangles Powers from the back seat of the car as Stanwyck drives to the station. MacMurray then poses as Powers on the train and jumps from the observation car so that fellow passenger Porter Hall thinks he has fallen and been killed.

Stanwyck plays the grieving widow to perfection. But Robinson has doubts about paying out because Powers failed to claim on his leg break. Moreover, he is suspicious about the double indemnity clause in the policy that ensured a bumper payout in the case of an unexpected tragedy. Finally, even MacMurray begins to see the light when Heather pays him a call and confides that she thinks Stanwyck murdered her mother six years earlier when she was working as her nurse. Moreover, she claims that Stanwyck has stolen her boyfriend, Byron Barr, and intends to use the money for them to run away together.

As angry at himself as Stanwyck, MacMurray urges her not to press for the payment. But she ignores him and scornfully informs him that she had never loved him. Gunshots are exchanged before MacMurray makes his way back to the office, where Robinson overhears the conclusion of his confession. Pitying the poor sap who allowed his heart to rule his head, Robinson lights him a cigarette and hopes nature takes its course before the police arrive.

Although John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) pipped it to the title of `prototype noir', this remains one of the undisputed classics of the hard-boiled, cold-blooded style of crime melodrama that suggested that America was overrun by gold-digging femmes fatales, who could twist pathetic palookas around their pinkies while a exchanging meaningless sex for a little larceny or a homicide. The dialogue crackles with the sense of danger and innuendo that is reinforced by Miklos Rozsa's score, while John F. Seitz's camerawork alights teasingly on the temptations contained within Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira's sets and Edith Head's costumes. Moreover, this winds up being as much a bromance as a thriller, as Robinson tries to avoid reaching the conclusion that his protégé is a cynical killer.

Dividing critics in 1944 because of its cool cruelty and relentless despair, the picture landed eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and two for Wilder and one for Stanwyck. But, while the luckless MacMurray missed out, he always regarded this as his finest performance and the project that persuades the Paramount front office that he was capable of more than romantic leads. It also helped Robinson reinvent himself after almost a decade of playing gangsters. As for Wilder, he never made another straight thriller, although there were elements in Ace in the Hole (1951), Stalag 17 (1953), Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). But, rather than return immediately to the comedies for which he will forever be remembered, he turned his attention to another problem that America was doing its best to ignore: alcoholism.

Reuniting with Seitz and Rozsa, Wilder resumed his writing partnership with Charles Brackett to adapt Charles R. Jackson's novel, The Lost Weekend (1945). Tackling the topic of alcohol abuse would have been courageous for any Hollywood movie at any time. But to do so just as thousands of GIs were returning from Europe and turning to booze to cope with the nightmares caused by witnessing the carnage on battlefields and in concentration camps was extremely courageous. Moreover, Wilder was taking a considerable risk in confronting the powerful drinks lobby. But, by producing an authentic, yet sympathetic study of a man driven to the edge of the abyss by despair and regaining control of his life by recognising the harm he is doing to himself and others, Wilder forced Americans to discuss a taboo that destroyed families because alcoholics and their victims alike were too ashamed to admit there was a problem.

Having failed to build on the promise he showed in college, struggling New York writer Ray Milland has become increasingly dependent upon rye whiskey. Brother Philip Terry tries to keep an eye on him, but he can always manage to steal some money and find a hiding place for the next illicit bottle. Girlfriend Jane Wyman refuses to give up on him, however, and Milland feels deep remorse as he tells barman Howard Da Silva about how they first met at the opera and how he drunk himself into a stupor instead of meeting her parents (Lewis J. Russell and Lillian Fontaine). Yet she had stuck by him and Da Silva wonders whether she would bother if she knew that Milland also flirts regularly with good-time girl Doris Dowling.

Wyman has always known that there are two Millands: one who wants to succeed and the other who is paralysed by self-loathing and doubt. She keeps urging him to make himself the subject of his writing, but he always finds a way to foul things up. At one point, he tries to pawn his typewriter and eventually ends up in a clinic after he is arrested for stealing a woman's purse. Nurse Frank Faylen warns Milland that sobering up will be an excruciating experience, with the worst part being the `disease of the night' known as delirium tremens. Terrified by the prospect, Milland purloins a doctor's white coat and tries to find refuge at Dowling's apartment after making his escape. But her landlady turns him away and he is grateful to find Wyman waiting for him at home, where he has a gruesome vision of a mouse being savaged by a bat that finally enables him to hit rock bottom and begin the slow climb upwards.

Although Wilder had hoped to cast José Ferrer as the writer, he had enough faith in Milland to guide him to the Academy Award for Best Actor and was rewarded with wins in the Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay categories. Directing only his fourth feature, Wilder showed great restraint in depicting Milland's skewed vision of the world. He drew on the same kind of hallucinatory effects devised by FW Murnau for The Last Laugh (1924), which had been one of the key examples of silent German Expressionism. But this is always a film rooted in the real world and Wilder used a candid camera to capture Milland's travails on streets packed with unsuspecting passers-by.

Milland himself went on a drastic crash diet to achieve a suitably gaunt look and studied the behaviour of patients on an alcoholic ward in Bellevue Hospital. Yet the first preview audience initially mistook the picture for a comedy, while many more left in protest at what they considered sensationalism. So Miklos Rozsa ditched his original score and devised an experimental soundtrack that made use of a theremin to convey Milland's sense of disorientation. Nevertheless, the liquor trade and the temperance movement still denounced Wilder and it was word of mouth that was primarily responsible for The Lost Weekend's success and its powerfully positive influence on American society.

It has long been a Tinseltown maxim that actors stand a much better chance of scoring an Oscar nomination if they play a character with a physical or psychological ailment. Humphrey Bogart certainly gave one of the performances of his career as Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg in Edward Dmytryk's interpretation of Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny (1954). Produced by Stanley Kramer and expertly played by a stellar ensemble, this account of the court-martial of two officers aboard a US Navy destroyer minesweeper during the Second World War touched upon the issues of shell shock and depression that John Huston had examined in the 1946 documentary Let There Be Light, which had been withheld even though it had been commissioned by the US Army Signals Corps. But traumas that had been deemed too distressing to show on a real psychiatric ward became the stuff of gripping entertainment in this intense, sincere and laudably compassionate study.

When Ensign Robert Francis joins the crew of the USS Caine at Pearl Harbor, he is surprised to discover how sloppy a ship Lieutenant Commander Tom Tully runs. Dress and disciplinary codes seem to have been discarded and executive officer Van Johnson and communications officer Fred MacMurray seem utterly unconcerned. Things change, however, when Humphrey Bogart is transferred from the US Naval Academy and starts to impose his will.

Unfortunately, Bogart gets off to a bad start when he is too busy dressing down a rating to prevent the Caine from severing a towline during a gunnery exercise and few of the officers are impressed when he tries to place the blame elsewhere. There are more grumblings when he insists on conducting a full inquiry into the disappearance of some strawberries, even though everyone knows they were consumed by some mess boys. But, when Bogart withdraws short of the shore when escorting some landing craft, MacMurray tries to persuade Johnson that they should relieve Bogart of his command on the ground of mental instability.

MacMurray begins keeping a journal of Bogart's orders and considers making an official complaint to Admiral William F. Halsey before deciding that the skipper's actions might be favourably interpreted and their own misgivings be construed as a conspiracy to mutiny. However, when Bogart loses control during a typhoon, Johnson assumes command, only to be court-martialled along with Francis.

Lieutenant José Ferrer is the only lawyer prepared to defend the pair and things look grim when MacMurray proves a fickle ally in the witness box and doctor Whit Bissell declares Bogart to be fit for duty. But, on taking the stand, he is crippled by paranoia and start accusing his subordinates of deliberately seeking to undermine him. Having made such a sad spectacle of himself, Bogart is escorted from the courtroom before Johnson and Francis are acquitted. However, as they celebrate their victory at a nearby hotel, Ferrer berates the entire crew for failing to provide Bogart with adequate support and obedience. But he reserves his special ire for MacMurray, whom he brands a coward for his insubordination and self-serving timidity.

Several compromises had to be made by Columbia boss Harry Cohn to secure the co-operation of the US Navy in making this hard-hitting film. Indeed, an opening caption was inserted to make it clear that there had never been a mutiny on an American naval ship, while numerous incidents in Wouk's novel were either jettisoned or toned down to appease the top brass. Nevertheless, his first draft would have resulted in a 15-hour film and, without the slightest trace of irony, he was quietly sidelined. However, this was not an entirely heartless production, as MacMurray was cast in a villainous role to distract him from the grief of losing his wife, while a young Lee Marvin (who had served in the Navy) was given a minor role in return for unofficial technical advice.

Despite boasting some fine special effects by Lawrence W. Butler, this is unusual for a war film in its focus on the mental state of the crew rather than their heroics. However, the basic premise later resurfaced in Robert Wise's Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), which saw Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster battling for hegemony on the submarine USS Nerka, and Tony Scott's Quentin Tarantino-scripted Crimson Tide (1995), in which the combatants aboard the nuclear craft USS Alabama are Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington. Notwithstanding some powerhouse confrontations in the latter pictures, the performances in Caine are superior in every regard, with MacMurray and Johnson's spineless schemers being trumped by Bogart's magnificent display of petty tyranny, which was more than matched by another veteran Warner Bros gangster, James Cagney, in John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy's Mister Roberts (1955).

The son of the actor Walter Huston, writer-director John Huston was another Warner alumnus, who had collaborated with Bogart on some of his finest features, including The African Queen (1951). Always something of a maverick, Huston was an interesting choice to make Freud (1962), which reunited him with Montgomery Clift, with whom he had worked the previous year on The Misfits, which proved to be the final outing of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.

The action opens in 1885, as 30 year-old neurologist Sigmund Freud (Clift) opts to take a sabbatical from Vienna General Hospital after feuding with superior Professor Theodore Meynert (Eric Portman) about the causes and manifestation of hysteria. Relocating to Paris, Freud studies the effects of hypnotism on inducing and treating diseases with Dr Charcot (Fernand Ledoux) and, following his marriage to Martha Bernays (Susan Kohner), he collaborates with Dr Joseph Breuer (Larry Parks) on the case of Cecily Koertner (Susannah York), whose paralysis, impaired vision and insomnia have baffled the very best medics.

During the course of therapy sessions, Freud notices similarities between Cicely's state of mind and that of Carl von Schlossen (David McCallum), a young man who had assaulted his father because of a fierce fixation with his mother. Freud deduces that the key to understanding the neuroses of each patient lies in unlocking their repressed sexual memories, but his theory is so revolutionary that he is branded a charlatan by several colleagues, including Breuer.

Undaunted, Freud abandons hypnosis in favour of free association and he starts to analyse Cicely's chance remarks about her father Jacob (Joseph Furst), as well as to interpret her dreams, and she starts showing signs of gradual recovery. The results astonish the medical fraternity and, even though his lectures on the Oedipus Complex and psychoanalysis are still interrupted by catcalls, Freud is acclaimed for having transformed scientific attitudes to the subconscious mind.

Couching an intellectual quest in terms of a medical mystery, this is hugely ambitious and surprisingly accessible film recalls such William Dieterle biopics as The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935) and Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), which was produced by Warners while Huston was establishing himself as a screenwriter. Carefully steering Douglas Slocombe's monochrome camera around Stephen Grimes's evocative interiors, Huston generates a palpable atmosphere of pioneering inquiry. But, while Charles Kaufman's and Wolfgang Reinhardt's Oscar-nominated script ably recreates the confrontations between Freud and his detractors without excessively dumbing them down, this would be much heavier going without the subtle intensity of Montgomery Clift's performance and it is a shame that on-set tensions led to a law suit with Universal that kept him off the screen until Raoul Lévy's The Defector was released posthumously in 1966.

It also helps that neither Susannah York and David McCallum overdo their big scenes as Keira Knightley did to such detrimental effect in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. But how much more fascinating this might have been had Jean-Paul Sartre taken Huston's invitation to write the scenario beyond producing a synopsis and a rough draft that ran for some seven hours.