Pig Suckler (1994)

D. Olaf Signussen
Colour
I’ve been trying to work out how big a deal Tony Blair was in Scandinavia in 1994. As this film, made the year Blair became leader of the Labour Party, features an actor who looks like a taller, blonder version of the man himself. Anders Lindqvist seems to have spent the rest of his career in Swedish television or theatre, but for one brief moment in 1994 he was able to capture the future British Prime Minister in a way which is so physical and so precise it’d give Michael Sheen nightmares. But how deliberate is this? Surely Blair at this point was just one of many overseas politicians who wouldn’t be that a big noise in another country. He didn’t even become leader of his party until halfway through the year. So unless this film was put in rapid development, to try and capture a hitherto obscure overseas politician for a domestic audience (which I admit, seems a tad unlikely), then this is a case of fate and karma playing deliciously weird games. As the politician at the centre of this film not only looks like Blair, he could actually be Blair.

The politician we have here is smiling and obsequious to a fault. We follow him on the campaign trail as he meets supporters, debates with opponents, shakes hands and kisses babies. Throughout he is smiling the kind of big grin which would make you think twice about any used car salesman you encountered, let alone a bloody politician. He has a glint in his eye as he wheedles and obfuscates, telling people what a good man he is and how trustworthy; while at the time telling them exactly what they want to hear with lashings of snake oil. He is forever telling the world what a righteous man he is, what a committed churchgoer he is, but he is forever compromising and bending the truth backwards and forwards and even wiggling it side to side. Whatever his loyalists want to believe, he tells them; whatever the more unconvinced need him to do, he will do. Of course, he frequently tells one person X and another person Y, and the two things are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t matter as he is one of life’s good guys and you can trust his word and he is someone you can rely on. As the campaign goes on, he demonstrates this incredible need to win, to get himself to a position of power.

Of course the title gives away where all this is going to end up, and that does mitigate against the shock somewhat. But it’s fascinating to watch the process whereby this Tony Blair figure glides by on his charm, states again and again how good a man he is and what a successful leader he will be, and in the face of cynicism performs this incredible demonstration of how far he’ll go to get the voters’ support. As this film ends with the lead character’s shirt undone and a piglet attached to his male nipple, but he still keeps grinning and talking and trying to tell the world what a good and trustworthy guy he is. He doesn’t actually say “pretty straight sort of guy”, but it’s close enough to send a shiver down the spine of anyone alive in Britain from 1997 onwards.

Tony apparently liked ‘The Queen’, I wonder if he ever saw this?

Hey, I Used To Write Books (2005)

D. Peter Bogdanovitch
Colour


I’d like to think that Robert De Niro saw the irony in making this little seen film. I’d like to think that he approached it with a degree of self-awareness about what he was doing, an understanding of what he was taking on. I hope he didn’t arrive on the first day treating it in exactly the same bored and disinterested way he no doubt treated the other fourteen films he was appearing in that year. As even though the name of the character is wrong, even though the profession is wrong, this film is almost ridiculously autobiographical for Bobby De Niro. It’s a movie which is reaching into the soul of its star and trying to display it to the world. And I just hope that Bobby figured that out, that the irony of playing this character with these problems wasn’t lost on him in his usual of haze of disinterestedly going through the motions.


Bobby is Toby Rushkin, a one-time brilliant and fêted young novelist who has hit hard times and now churns out scripts for what looks like an incredibly tacky and unfunny sitcom. (Basically it looks like a less funny, less classy, more sexist version of ‘Two and a Half Men’. It’s therefore ridiculously easy to see why the character feels such contempt for the source of his paycheques.) Bobby spends the whole film striving to get back to where he thinks he belongs, reminding himself and others around him of how big a deal he once was. This doesn’t have the effect of building him up in the way he hopes, though it just shows how far and horribly he has fallen. The title comes from the sentence he uses to justify himself; wheels out when he tumbles into the pits into self-pity; even wields as a boast as he introduces himself to new people. We follow him as he tries repeatedly to pull himself up before falling back again; whilst the whole time having to deal with his boss Andy Garcia and his on/off girlfriend Jennifer Tilly. (Yes, De Niro, Garcia and Tilly really do make a cast list which would have been a whole lot more exciting ten years earlier.) It’s a maudlin comedy, one about failure and the fear of failure and the trap of failure.


And of course it all applies to Bobby. Here is a man who used to do absolutely incredible, awe inspiring work, but who is now trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of soulless hackery. This is a story about Bobby’s own predicament, about what’s happened to him and his career. But the thing is, from his low energy and bored look in his eye, it’s not at all convincing that Bobby has figured this out. It seems almost as if this is just another job for Bobby, another paycheque, one which will be over in a couple of weeks and then he’ll head onto his next film. You watch it and want him to realise that he’s making autobiography, you want him to rise to the challenge, but it never comes off. Obviously the ‘great work to will work for food’ path is one taken by the film’s director, Peter Bogdanowitz, and I hope he at least figured out the irony of what he was doing. As the only thing Bobby appears interested in throughout this film, throughout this story which could be his life story, is whether the limo which takes him back and forth the studio is comfy enough.

The Story of Jean Carter (1957)

D. John W. Harries
Colour


Whenever one is trying to give a harrowing story a sense of gloss, a sign that the redemptive arc will swing into action at some point, the focus should be soft. A Hollywood actress may die of cancer on the big screen, but there’s no way the audience can actually be shown the ravages of the big C. A starlet may find herself on junk in this year’s weepie, but she’ll be a still sexy junkie. And your Oscar winner to be may succumb to consumption in the period epic, but she’ll still look lovely. That’s fine, it’s understandable. This is the dream factory after all, the selling of a fantasy, and fantasies should be pleasant.


It does mean though that as the years move on and films become (somewhat) more accepting of the realities of life, then those movies shot in soft focus in the fifties/sixties now look fluffy dreams of the imagination, like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ with a brain tumour.


Here we get Marilyn Monroe at the eponymous Jean Carter. Outwardly happy, with a doting husband (Richard Widmark) and a young son, Jean is having problems. A back ache from a childhood injury means she is popping too many pills; a supportive network of friends allows her to palm off her son so she can drink to hide her misery; she is compulsively stealing from local stores; and what’s more she is considering an affair with her handsome young neighbour, George Peppard. It’s hard being Jean Carter. Eventually the dam bursts and she has a wild breakdown, ending up in a sanatorium. There are tears and cries for forgiveness, but eventually her addictions are taken in hand, her would-be lover is revealed to be a cad and her husband forgives her, leading to a happy family hug.


So, what’s interesting about this film? What differentiates it from other sub-Douglas Sirk knock offs? Well, the direction is workmanlike and most of the actors are clearly thinking of nothing but their paycheques. Widmark phones in his performance from a whole other state or maybe even a different country, to be fair though, his entire character is pitched on the wide spectrum between ‘supportive’ and ‘reliable’, so it’s not like he has much to work with. Peppard fails to smoulder in a role which calls for youthful sexuality. Yes he has a certain cock-suredness, but he seems totally in love with himself. It’s very odd for a man to appear in love scenes with Marilyn Monroe and look like he’d rather engage in a bout of onanism with someone he really fancies.


No, the reason to check out this film the next time it appears on Channel 4 on a wet Wednesday afternoon is the leading lady, as Marilyn Monroe is surprisingly good as the drunken, pill-popping, kleptomaniac, depressive, would-be adulterer. Okay, she is never allowed to look particularly bad, or particularly drunk, or particularly smashed out of her gord on pills – but her eyes do capture the sadness of her character. There’s an element that she is still Marilyn Monroe, but to use a hackneyed phrase, it’s a Marilyn Monroe we haven’t seen before – wearing stolen garments which will be returned to the stores by the end.

The Invisible Man (1955)

D. Ralph Smart
B&W


There’s a reason why the Claude Rains/James Whale version is the best known of 'The Invisible Man' movies. There’s the spooky tavern, the screaming maid,. Raines’s magnificently sinister voice, a scarf dancing around by itself. It just feels so much like what Wells’s versions of The Invisible Man should be. In the eighty years since it was made (Eighty?! My doesn’t time fly!) Kevin Bacon, Chevy Chase and David MaCallum have had a stab at it but with less visible success (pun intended). Perhaps the most out there and uncanonical of these versions though is when Kenneth Moore donned the white bandages. It’s called ‘The Invisible Man’ and says it’s based on the novel by H.G. Wells, but if you’d resurrected Wells in 1955 and bought him popcorn at a showing, he’d have stared at the screen racking his brains as to whether he ever dreamed of such a thing. As this Invisible Man is invisible, but going places Wells never imagined. But even though the film is now pretty much forgotten you can surely see roots from this to 'Doctor Who', 'The Avengers', Alan Moore and the more outré parts of the James Bond films.


Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Michael Griffin, invisible man and roguish British secret agent.


Yes, those of you who’ve read the book or seen Claude Rains, may be surprised that someone so clearly insane could pass the rigorous examinations set by MI6. Surely he would have failed on personality type in eight or nine different ways. Also, wouldn’t a man so clearly self-absorbed not care too much about the nation state in the battle against the Russians? It’s true that his behaviour is a bit extreme at times, and there are moments when his colleagues and controllers look at him (or look at the space around where they imagine he might be) aghast. But then I guess actually having an invisible man on your side makes the difficulties of employing an invisible man worthwhile.


(Part of the problem with making ‘The Invisible Man’ is attracting a top name actor to it, after all why would your self-righteous A-lister want to do a role where he is never actually seen? This version gets around this though by giving Moore a perfectly fitting mask of his own face.  Bacon and McCallum (and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible) also use such masks. But the question has to be asked, where would one get such an item? Masks are there to hide behind, so what company sees the market in making a mask that looks exactly like the person who is wearing it? Is there really much business in that type of thing? Even more than the idea of invisible men, this seems weird to me.)


After an opening mission which goes wrong (Griffin impetuously steals the wrong briefcase), his controller Leo G. Carroll (rehearsing for both ‘North by Northwest’ and ‘The Man from Uncle’) sends this invisible man on a mission to tail glamorous Russian spy, Jane Russell. The divine Ms Russell is clearly slumming it in British movies, but using it as an opportunity to cultivate an absurd East German accent which just gets magnificently broader and broader as the film goes on. Initially he is clandestine in the way only an invisible man can be, but before long he is putting on his human mask and wining and dining this ultra-glamorous Russian agent until she comes across to the British and right side. It’s then that she reveals her big secret, that the Russians have placed three giant robots in London which they are going to use to destabilise the capital. The stage is set for the incredibly giddy sight of the invisible man taking on huge metal men in London town.


Okay, the effects really do start to fall apart when the large men in robot suits go on the rampage. And more than once the strings are visible when the invisible man starts moving stuff around. But, in the ideas of it, in the concept, in the science fiction of stuff happening in grimy London we have both ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘The Avengers’. In the glamorous female prey and derring-do of the spy who breaks the rules, we have James Bond. And in the invisible man doing things H.G. Wells never imagined we have ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (as well as Ralph Smart’s own equally forgotten 1950s TV show ‘The Invisible Man’ which this was a springboard for). It’s far from perfect, but this is a movie we should hail!

Argonauts of the Air (1937)

D. Jimmy Cowdell
B&W


It’s H.G. Wells week this week on The Alternative History of Cinema. There’s no specific reason for this, on this blog I just pick things on a whim and whimsy and go from there. And since in recent weeks, two H.G. Wells adaptations have occurred to me, I thought I’d create thematic unity by running them together. Yes, I really should have done it in September for his birthday or something like that, but sod it! All year around is a good time for Bromley’s finest literary son. First up we have a stilted, cut glass tale of British derring-do in outer space. Set in the wonderful year of 2014, but clearly much more the 1930s. The future, much like the present, is British and nothing is going to stop that. Get your Union Jack marked spaceships at the ready, put your stiff upper lip in place, and off we go.


Based on the very short Wells story of the same name, this is the almost Monty Python set-up of spaceflight from the suburbs. Just outside the two up, two down of the new suburban developments, there are rockets lined up ready to fly to the furthest reaches of space. There dashing young men queue up to be spacemen and take the glory of Britain to the further possible horizon, while dowdier men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats man Mission Control – just like Mr Benn’s most out of this world adventure. We hear tales of a moon-base, a Martian colony (where in a throwaway line it seems we are teaching the Martians about civilised government), of how the Saturn fleet is now mighty. But a threat is coming from closer to home that could seriously harm this brilliant endeavour.


For the most part this is derring-do of a Bulldog Drummond style. Lewis Coleman is Captain Jack Cook, a legendary figure in the space corps – the kind of man with a pencil thin moustache, slicked back hair, a rakish grin and a glint in the eye bright enough to weaken the knee of any poor susceptible member of the female species. He’s the type of Englishman who is every woman’s dream (although that dream probably involves pounding her lover’s buttocks once a week with a cane to really get him off. Yes, he’s that type of Englishman!) Clearly the film makers have seen Flash Gordon as there are the plastic rocket ships, onesie space uniforms, strange new planets. But at the forefront, hands on hips, staring handsomely into the distance, looking both heroic and rather repressed, is our very English hero.


But there’s a problem, the large staff back at space-fleet command has been infiltrated. It hasn’t been infiltrated by a Martian, or a Venusian or a moon person – no the big threat comes from closer to home, it comes from the anarchists. Arthur Simkins, as rat-faced an actor as ever lived, is Karl Mannix, an anarchist who is determined to destroy the space-fleet. He doesn’t dream of a glorious space Empire, he dreams of bringing England to its knees. After a few acts of sabotage a general meeting is called and after a bumpy opening, Captain Jack carries the day and gets the workforce on its side. It’s then that Mannix, and his sinister foreign cohorts, decide to step the plan up and kill Captain Jack, slaughter the glorious symbol of the British Space Empire itself. But the will of the people is stronger. Joined together – every member of the space corps, from Captain Jack Cook down to a lowly cleaner named Marjorie (who stares at Captain Jack with a mix of motherly pride and lustful wantonness) is able to root out and get rid of the these subversive infiltrators. Space flight is for all and the all join together to make sure that the malcontent few do not destroy the great dream of mankind.


It’s a beautiful image, one that precedes ‘Star Trek’ by thirty years, and chimes well with Wells’ own political views. But it also makes for an oddly confusing movie. The anarchists are clearly portrayed as left wing themselves. There they are with their pamphlets, their copies of Marx, their exaggerated (as it turns out) claims about poor working conditions. And so they don’t seem to be that different from the grouping which eventually crushes them. Yes, socialism without Marx is an ideal Wells is on record as desiring, and this is a film where the Marx is forcibly removed from socialism. Yet there is little on the screen to truly explain what that means and we’re left with a story where some left wing patriots get rid of some really left wing malcontents so that the bowler hatted fellows of Wimbledon, Surbiton and Worcester Park can continue their work in Britain’s glorious imperial space-race.

The Horsemen of Now (1974)

D. John Crosby
Colour


Here’s a deeply weird British film which cries out for a big budget Hollywood remake. Surely this is just sitting there waiting for, say, Tom Cruise as the good guy and maybe Christophe Waltz as the bad. If you throw in modern computer generated effects, a big budget and stunts that are clearly more than just toy trucks, then you probably have the makings of a fantastic franchise. As the film we have at the moment, the budget is nowhere near capable of taking on the frankly huge and bonkers ideas, and something epic needs surely to be done with it. However, having said all that, one of the things I really like about this film is the very British smallness of it. The fact that the entire world is clearly represented by a few streets in West London. The recognisability of the cast, being the usual British mix of jobbing stage actors and Carry On veterans. And most particularly the fact the good guy’s headquarters Is a greasy spoon café. This is a film of a dysfunctional future and I love that this particular dystopia has the whiff of greasy bacon sarnies.


Actually sod it. The yanks can stay away from this, I’m happy with the deeply weird and very British ‘The Horsemen of Now’ being exactly the way it is.


Richard Burton, looking weary and sounding gruff and seeming every inch the son of a coalminer from Pontrhydyfen, is Sammy – one of the leaders of this new world and a truck driver. Yes, you’ve read that right. In the future, after whatever happens takes place the truck drivers are the Kings. (Whatever this dreadful event actually is remains incredibly vague. Obviously it is cataclysmic, with the sky forever tinged pink and dust visible in the air, and trucks racing unimpinged by speed limits around Shepherd’s Bush.) These truckers get into the cabs, unwrap their Yorkies (probably, nothing is said to the contrary) and patrol the streets like the knights of olde. But they have an enemy. Travelling in their own London taxis, piloted by an army of undead cab drivers, we have The Sorcerers. That’s right, Sorcerers. In the future there is magic, it has been rediscovered and harnessed by these sorcerers, who intend to turn themselves into gods and enslave everybody left. It’s the power of the Earth against the mechanical brilliance of man in this skewed version of alchemy. At the head of the sorcerers is Patrick McGoohan, and the entire film is a wait for him and Burton to face off in what will clearly be an epic confrontation.


It’s an interesting dynamic, Burton’s hair is bleached a terrible honey blonde which makes him look like a particularly seedy member of the SS, while McGoohan is raggedly handsome and shot in heroic poses throughout. What’s more, traditionally in films, those harnessing the elemental powers of the Earth would be seen as the good guys, with the bad being those in control of the big, dusty, metal machines. And yet here it is the other way around. Brilliantly it is toil and sweat and being skilled with your hands that is seen as the good and useful thing, while magic is something airy and fairy and likely to be taught at Oxbridge. Yes, it’s the rise of the salt of the Earth, taking up their articulated vehicles and getting ready to punch the soft-hand layabouts in the face.


For some tastes this no doubt will be a bit talky. The budget isn’t high, so there’s a lot of Burton sat around a transport caff (chatting with, amongst others, fellow trucker Kenneth Conner, and proprietor Joan Sims) about what the hell those damned sorcerers are up to now. We do get a few scenes where black cabs pull up and their passengers do terrible things to a lone trucker, but clearly – from what Burton says – they are just the tip of a very strange and peculiar iceberg. Similarly McGoohan hangs out with his cohorts, in what looks to be some wood panelled magic seat of learning, and tells them what he’s going to do to Burton and then to the world when the day comes. (McGoohan was of course first choice for James Bond and turned it down, but here he is showing that his real skill would have been as the campest, most over the top Bond villain of all time!) It may seem a long wait but it ensures that tension is high at the end, when a convoy of trucks goes into battle against a fleet of black-cabs piloted by zombies and carrying a group of sinister magicians. As the vehicles roar, the manhole covers actually lift and the pavements are alternatively smashed up and bent by the warring parties, any wait seems fantastically worthwhile as it’s astounding how bonkersly brilliant it all is.


Actually I’ve changed my mind again. You can do this is you like, Tom. The original won’t disappear and I’d like to see the whole thing done on a proper big budget. Just please, Tom, try and keep as much of the brilliant weirdness as the studio will let you.

A Bucket of Bolognese (1974)

D. Franco di Palma
Colour


We’re through the looking glass here, people. And it’s a looking glass which is cracked and dripping bright red with thick viscous blood, or – actually – is that pasta sauce? As today we’re looking at the bizarrely titled and utterly bizarre ‘A Bucket of Bolognese’, and I’m torn as to whether this is an attempt to make the weirdest Spaghetti Western of all time, or an attempt to spoof the whole genre, or simply a filmmaker taking his dream journal and making a very long and very silly movie from it.


The setting is a lost desert town which wears the name ‘Nowheresville’ on an old battered sign. It’s a small, ramshackle place, the kind you’ve seen in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Unmistakably it’s the type of town where the locals have earned deep lines on their faces, where the wind and wisdom of years has given them an interesting turn of phrase, yet where they speak English in a way which doesn’t quite match the movement of their mouths. Living in Nowhereville is stock character after stock character: there’s a corrupt sheriff; a sage and philosophical saloon owner; an earnest and good hearted whippersnapper; and a particularly lusty and buxom madam. Into town one day rides a stranger – Robert Vaughan, of all people – handsome, debonair and deadly. He clearly has the killer instinct to match his sharp get up. And he’s just in time, as the town is about to be besieged by an insane undertaker who has decided to build up his business by massacring the town folk.


(That last point is particularly interesting. Yes, for an undertaker, massacring a whole town would make him much busier in the short term – but who on Earth is going to pay him? There’s no financial gain in this. And what would the word of mouth about this undertaker be? Yes, it would undoubtedly give you more holes to dig, but this is not a sensible business building scheme.)


I’ve always admired the dream-like quality of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, the way, for example, a whole army can vanish from a destroyed bridge while Eastwood and Wallach sleep. Here that dream quality is turned up to some loud and proud, bright and brash, feverish hallucination. The undertaker is portrayed as a cackling lunatic of the kind The Grimm Brothers would have dismissed as a tad too broad. Around the town he sets up these coffin traps, where out of nowhere a full sized coffin springs up and starts spraying machine-gun fire. In town things are no better, with the lusty madam always in a state of undress and putting herself in the most ridiculous situations. You don’t expect to see a busty, sexy woman in a slip run right across the middle of a gunfight in slow motion for no real reason (well, apart from the obvious ones). Elsewhere the earnest youth is shot, but still acts as a gopher for Vaughan for the unfeasibly long amount of time it takes him to die – a good half of the movie’s length, I reckon. So what we have here is a really weird mixture and that’s before we get to the backroom of the saloon, where an incongruous party of dwarfs does nothing but play poker and eat a giant suckling pig – worrying little about the possible oncoming slaughter.


At the centre of it all, doing amazingly stoic and sterling work as the gunslinger, is Robert Vaughan. I like Robert Vaughan, I like how he uses his traditional Hollywood looks and charisma and gives them a sinister edge. It works amazingly well here, in a film where no one is sure what the gunfighter’s next move will be, that dubious morality is beautifully judged. But even more than that, by keeping a straight face and remaining calm no matter what piece of madness unfurls in front of him, he provides a centre which makes whatever the hell is happening in this movie appear almost normal.


How funny this is, I couldn’t tell you, nor whether it’s supposed to be funny. I can’t even tell you how good it is, but I know that once seen, it’s not forgotten.

Pont-y-Clun (2004)

D. Lee Edwards
Grainy and gritty colour, tinged by relentless Welsh rain


A teenager is hiding out in the woods. We open with him sat high in a tree, close to the bark, his eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. Before long a couple pass by underneath, a young man and younger woman. The man is leading her by hand and doing all the talking. His voice is light and fruity, it is posh, it is English. Seriously, it is English beyond the point of parody, the kind of English voice Bertie Wooster would deem a bit ‘plummy’. The teenager crouches close to the branches as they go past. It’s not long before the couple stop and the man lays her back, he is still talking, still impressing her with his accent and his breeding. He talks and talks, even when he is taking her clothes off. She only says one word and that is “Diolch”, Welsh for ‘Thank you’. Clearly it’s a signal, as the teenager leaps from the tree and expertly slits the man’s throat. The girl smiles at him the whole time, moving swiftly from coquettish to really turned on.


And so begins ‘Pont-Y-Clun’ a Welsh horror/thriller/love story: the tale of two murderous young lovers, ‘Badlands’ with an asbo and acting lessons from ‘Pobol-Y-Cwm’. Gwilliam is a young lad with a bad reputation, one who has been driven out of his local town (unnamed in the film, but presumably the small South Wales town of Pont-y-Clun – home to a pub called ‘The Isambard Kingdom Brunel’, which is the only thing I know about it). However even though he is despised and loathed by the townsfolk, so much so that even his parents spit to the ground when they refer to him, he is loved by one person. Nubile and lovely young Delyth Parry, who helps him make ends meet, by luring young English tourists into the nearby woods so that Gwilliam can kill them, steal their clothes, take their money and – gulp – it’s hinted, eat them. Eventually the pile of bones of dead Englishmen gets so high that even the Welsh police have to investigate.


(Interestingly, Gwilliam, with his shock of red-hair and NHS glasses, looks like a grown up Norman Price from Welsh TV’s ‘Fireman Sam’. Given how naughty Norman Price is in ‘Fireman Sam’, maybe this film serves as a warning from the future. Unless Norman is taken in hand, his hometown of Ponty-Pandy will also find itself piled high with the corpses of dead computer generated Englishmen.)


There’s a very amusing moment, when local Detective Inspector Owen Teale (appearing on this blog for the second time this week) sighs and says that six dead Englishmen is just too many. It gives the impression that three or four dead Englishmen would be well within acceptable levels, but really Gwilliam is being greedy by going for half a dozen. I like this film, it’s taut and well made, and really understands the trick that suggested violence is the most horrific – but the anti-English flavour of it means that it was never going to travel easily over the border. Gwilliam even makes it clear he would never kill real people, ie. the Welsh; while Delyth ponders how weird it would be to have actual sex with an Englishman. (The film also isn’t helped by the fact that – in the version I saw – some of the Welsh language scenes aren’t subtitled, making it seem like some strange private joke against English speakers). So even though I like this movie, it sums up one of the main things I dislike about Welsh culture: namely, the incredibly chippy need to punch upwards. It’s an attitude that exists in TV, films, local news and even just talking to people on the street or in the pub, that identification as the poor, trodden down underdog who has to hit out at the big bully, even though that particular big bully has long since stopped paying attention. A little bit of nationalistic banter is fine, but Welsh nationalism – certainly as far as the English are concerned – has a real aggrieved nastiness to it that never seems particularly justified. Let’s be fair, the good people of Llantrisant, Llanelli and Llandaff may hate the English; but the good people of Leeds, Leicester and Luton are more likely to be baffled by it than share the animosity.

By the time the police enter the woods we are in Rambo territory, with do and die for the two young lovers, desperate to hang onto each other even as their murderous world falls apart. This is a film like its central character, it’s rude, overly aggressive and suffers from alarming xenophobia, but like redheaded Gwilliam it’s not totally impossible for someone to love – or at least, appreciate – it.

The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities (1994)

D. Marco Webber
Colour

So it’s five minutes past St David’s Day and so we really should take the opportunity to peek at a couple of Welsh movies, visit the land of my birth, the land of my fathers. It’s time to pin on a daffodil and type furiously whilst singing ‘Sospan Fach’ at an irritatingly high volume. Actually compared to the other corners of the British Isles, Welsh cinema exists in the kind of shallow pool that your average algae would move out of seeking somewhere more spacious. Whereas Scotland has some undoubted classics (‘Local Hero’, ‘Trainspotting’), Northern Ireland a whole series of films inspired by the troubles (most recently the hugely impressive ‘Good Vibrations’) and Ireland was given a grand cinema tradition by John Ford which it either embraces or pushes violently against – the Welsh shuffle nervously at the edges, occasionally lobbing something forward before scuttling back to hide behind the settee again.

 

Which makes the ambition of ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’ all the more impressive. If you can imagine a magic-realist Mike Leigh movie, with a fantastically bright palate, dream sequences full of brilliantly crummy special effects, the occasional Welsh folk song, Catherine Zeta-Jones pouting in a tiny outfit, while Ruth Madoc sports a beard – then you have something approximating ‘The Carmarthen Circus of Curiosities’. This is a magical and ambitious movie, but also a provincially small Welsh film that thinks nothing of having whole scenes where characters just pass the time of day in almost incomprehensible Wenglish. It’s a day in a life of this extra special circus, which never travels anywhere, but has the world come to it. It’s the trials and tribulations of its performers, where nothing really happens beyond everyday moments of drama. It’s an odd film, which like laverbread is far from everybody’s tastes, but some people genuinely love.

 

We have Jonathan Pryce as the ringmaster, pattering away in a gorgeous singsong accent, and using force of personality to dominate the ring and the world around it. If you ever needed someone to lead a group of stilt-walkers into war, Pryce would be your man. There’s Owen Teale as the circus strongman who can lift any weight placed in front of him (including, as we see in montage, a double decker bus, a rather startled looking rhinoceros and a picnic table full of pensioners who don’t let such an occurrence interrupt their tea). The object of both their desires is Catherine Zeta-Jones. Words are not adequate to describe how ravishing la Zeta-Jones looks in this movie, dressed as she is mostly in a tiny black bikini, underneath a glittering almost sheer wisp of material – both of which seem to fluctuate in size and shape from scene to scene. To be honest it’s a ridiculously poorly written role which doesn’t require much more than pouting and smiling, and could no doubt have been played by a slightly more expressive than normal shop mannequin. It’s an odd use then for this future Oscar winner’s talents, although in the post ‘Darling Buds of May’ lull she was probably just happy to get the work. (Allegedly though, this is the first film in which Michael Douglas ever glimpsed her). Elsewhere we have Michael Sheen as the skinny stable boy, a very young Ruth Jones as his comically curvy squeeze and Antony Hopkins deigning to cameo for about for about twenty seven seconds as local gentry who is entranced by it all. While narrating the whole thing we have Ruth Madoc, in the only role I’ve ever seen her in outside of ‘Hi-De-Hi’, wearing the kind of luxurious and voluminous beard you could easily hide geese in.

 

If anything represented The Tafia in action, it’s this film. I think it’s marvellous, a real psychedelic treat. This is a motion picture I love dearly, but undeniably it’s an example of the Welsh film industry taking careful aim and shooting itself in the foot. As let’s be fair, it’s difficult to see where a large audience for such a film would come from. Yes it looks great, yes it is in parts brilliant – but soap opera mixed with Angela Carter, performed by a cast determined to exaggerate their Welsh accents to ludicrous effect, is not the kind of movie that will get them queuing around the block at the multiplex. I’m sure even at Cineworlds in Rhyl, Aberystwyth and – yes – Carmarthen, seats would have been very easy to come by.