D. Stanley Kirby
That really faded and dank colour I am constantly amused and depressed by in 1970s British films
So here we have the second of this week’s ‘man at the centre of a nuclear explosion isn’t blown into a million pieces as you’d expect, but instead absorbs the frightening powers of radiation and becomes something akin to a super man’ movies. The first was a tense, taut cold war thriller, hampered by the fact that the man on the run looked so blatantly suspicious it was like he had a big self-powered neon sign saying “Radioactive man here!” above his head.
So now we come to this, the more heroic and the more moronic version.
The first thing to notice is the date off release, 1978. That’s 19-fucking-78! What this is aiming for is the wild psychedelic James Bond spoof, of the kind that I’ve covered on this blog before. But all those films come from the late 1960s, when Bond-mania is at its height. There are very few of them after that, because James Bond movies started to aggressively spoof themselves – so that if you wanted ‘James Bond thriller’ and ‘spoof of James Bond thriller’ you only needed to buy the one ticket. 1978 is not the time of Bond spoofs
The second thing you immediately notice is who is playing our heroic lead, it’s Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver bloody Reed. I appreciate that after a career playing brooding and sinister outsiders, Oliver probably leapt at the chance of being an actual hero. He has the looks, he has a certain dash to him and he even appears to be sober. But there’s still something so menacing about him, a stillness that makes it seem like, even though he’s the hero, he’s considering randomly killing everyone else in the room.
Atom Man is a world hero who lives in London and has the secret identity of super spy, Gregory Smythe. Yes, the film really is having its greedy teenage geek’s birthday cake and stuffing its face full of it. But he faces a two pronged attack: the Russians have a ray that they hope will render Atom-Man powerless; AND there’s a secret agent who is going to seduce and make Gabriel Smythe switch sides. To be fair it’s more invested in the spy stuff as it actually doesn’t have the budget to do the super hero stuff, being set again and again in boring rooms and having Adam West-esque sound effects when Atom-Man throws a punch. It also has female nipples, which as far as cinema is concerned, were invented in 1969.
It’s interesting to watch this film next to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, which was released a few weeks earlier. One is top quality superhero antics which still resonates today, the other is a cheap British romp – which in its final run around in a nudist camp seems to just give up all pretence and admit to just being a cheap British romp. But in the anti-heroic performance of its hero, you can’t help thinking that there’s a far darker and weirder film completely untapped here. People speak of having a darker Batman, but no one thought of handing it to someone like Oliver Reed. Except that one day in the forgotten mists of cheap British movies, somebody actually did.
Showing posts with label Soho. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soho. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Sunday, 9 November 2014
No Face (1958)
D. Thomas Logan
B&W
What would it be like to be at the centre of a nuclear blast?
Well, obviously you wouldn’t survive long enough to dwell on it. That atom bomb would have splattered your particular atoms evenly over a square mile. But that moment, that sensation of the blast, when maybe the thought shoots through your mind that you’ve never been near anything so freaking powerful (right before the more understandable “fuck! I’m about to die!” screams through your mind) must be one of fearful awe. But what would happen if you actually did survive. If you were able to stand right inside that power and walk away; more than that, if you were actually able to absorb all that power and take it with you. What would it do to you? What would happen to your mind and body afterwards?
Our two films this week approach that Doctor Manhattan idea and take it in weirdly different directions.
Firstly paranoia and tension are on order in this gas-lit noir thriller, as down-on-his-luck-hack Leo McKern hears rumours that not only is a Russian atomic man at loose in London, but his controllers want him to detonate himself at the State Opening of Parliament. However his investigation not so much ruffles feathers as plucks them furiously, so the authorities come down on him hard (with ‘The Official Secrets Act” waved in manic Neville Chamberlain style more than once), and McKern finds himself both pursued and pursuer as the clock ticks down to the moment London goes boom.
There’s a lot to admire here. Leo McKern as a journalist is like an embryonic version of his character in the excellent ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’; London exists in a kind of perpetual 1950s smog that must have required a man with a massive smoke-machine and the sets from every Jack the Ripper movie ever made, and there are fine character actors at every corner. Indeed in such a dour black & white film, there’s a surfeit of background colour – including Jack Warner as a shady Dixon of Dock Green, Kenneth Williams as the campest cockney snout who ever lived and Diana Dors as a foreign agent whose accent places her somewhere on the border between Minsk and Margate.
The problem, and it is a large – H-bomb sized – problem, is the villain. Because of scars from the blast, he hangs around London with a cloth perpetually masking his face. It’s tight to his features and makes him look something like an alien bank robber. Apparently he is supposed to be inconspicuous like this. He checks into the various hotels and guest houses and nobody winks an eyelid – as if they constantly give occupancy to people who won’t show their faces. He dresses like a faceless gangster, wanders about after dark, a bobby actually sees him near a dead body – but still he remains a mystery man on the run.
It’s a tense film, in many ways a clever film, but it’s difficult to take a film seriously where the hard-to-find bad guy is obviously saying: “Look at me! Look at me!”
B&W
What would it be like to be at the centre of a nuclear blast?
Well, obviously you wouldn’t survive long enough to dwell on it. That atom bomb would have splattered your particular atoms evenly over a square mile. But that moment, that sensation of the blast, when maybe the thought shoots through your mind that you’ve never been near anything so freaking powerful (right before the more understandable “fuck! I’m about to die!” screams through your mind) must be one of fearful awe. But what would happen if you actually did survive. If you were able to stand right inside that power and walk away; more than that, if you were actually able to absorb all that power and take it with you. What would it do to you? What would happen to your mind and body afterwards?
Our two films this week approach that Doctor Manhattan idea and take it in weirdly different directions.
Firstly paranoia and tension are on order in this gas-lit noir thriller, as down-on-his-luck-hack Leo McKern hears rumours that not only is a Russian atomic man at loose in London, but his controllers want him to detonate himself at the State Opening of Parliament. However his investigation not so much ruffles feathers as plucks them furiously, so the authorities come down on him hard (with ‘The Official Secrets Act” waved in manic Neville Chamberlain style more than once), and McKern finds himself both pursued and pursuer as the clock ticks down to the moment London goes boom.
There’s a lot to admire here. Leo McKern as a journalist is like an embryonic version of his character in the excellent ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’; London exists in a kind of perpetual 1950s smog that must have required a man with a massive smoke-machine and the sets from every Jack the Ripper movie ever made, and there are fine character actors at every corner. Indeed in such a dour black & white film, there’s a surfeit of background colour – including Jack Warner as a shady Dixon of Dock Green, Kenneth Williams as the campest cockney snout who ever lived and Diana Dors as a foreign agent whose accent places her somewhere on the border between Minsk and Margate.
The problem, and it is a large – H-bomb sized – problem, is the villain. Because of scars from the blast, he hangs around London with a cloth perpetually masking his face. It’s tight to his features and makes him look something like an alien bank robber. Apparently he is supposed to be inconspicuous like this. He checks into the various hotels and guest houses and nobody winks an eyelid – as if they constantly give occupancy to people who won’t show their faces. He dresses like a faceless gangster, wanders about after dark, a bobby actually sees him near a dead body – but still he remains a mystery man on the run.
It’s a tense film, in many ways a clever film, but it’s difficult to take a film seriously where the hard-to-find bad guy is obviously saying: “Look at me! Look at me!”
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Runaway! (1970)
D. Michael Winner
Colour (but a really washed out colour, as if it woke up hung-over that morning)
Reading Robert Galbrath/J.K. Rowling's tale of a down on his luck private eye in Soho, reminded me with sudden incredible clarity (like I’d just eaten a madeleine) of this neglected Michael Caine private eye movie. And that memory gave me particular satisfaction when I realised that Caine's character is actually named - and I'm not making this up - Barry Potter. Not that I’m suggesting for one second that Rowling based either of her recurring characters on this film. Having read ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, Michael Caine certainly isn’t Comoran Strike. Admittedly I’ve only seen the Harry Potter films rather than read the books, but unless there’s something in the novels about the teen wizard having a porn collection and liking rough sex, he’s not a student of Hogwarts either.
This is a tale about a down on his luck London private eye, but Comoran Strike has nothing on Barry Potter for rough living. Yes, both sleep in their offices and squander their money on booze and fags, but Strike doesn't steal a tenner from the elderly lady upstairs for electric metre money. Nor does he effectively mug a homeless man when said homeless man is cheeky. Nor, indeed, does he steal a chip from a nun in a chip-shop before suggesting flirtatiously that he remove her from the habit. There is an aggressive unpleasantness and seediness to this character - the anti-anti-anti-Philip Marlowe. It's almost as if the filmmakers looked at Caine as Harry Palmer and decided that he was still just too upwardly mobile for their tastes, it was time to bring him down several dirty and greasy pegs. And Caine relishes the part, clearly on paper this is an unpleasant man, but our favourite cockney knight uses all his charm to make sure he still deserves to be the hero.
Philip Marlowe is undoubtedly a (much more noble) background presence, as the plot isn’t far off Raymond Chandler's ‘The Little Sister’ (which had been filmed far more glamorously in Hollywood a few years earlier). A prim librarian type seeks out Potter's help to find her missing sibling, who’s disappeared into the Soho netherworld of strip clubs and pornographers. Before long Potter finds himself up to his neck in sleaze (not necessarily a problem, Potter admits to liking “a bit of naughty”), and murder (more of a problem, particularly when he finds himself the prime suspect). It's up to Potter to stay one step ahead of the police as he tries to solve the crime.
The audience stayed away en mass, which is why the British tough guy Michael Caine picture people remember from the early 1970s is ‘Get Carter’ and that’s fair enough as it’s much stronger and looks far better. However good performances abound: from Ray Milland as a disgraced former copper with an accent so very, very Welsh (so much so I couldn’t work out whether he was putting it on or that was indeed his real accent), surprise guest-star Frankie Avalon, hamming it up as a would be gangster even when he looks a little lost in seedy London, and most astonishing of all Cilla Black – of all people – as a hard as nails prostitute. If those punters who stood excited at her side in the ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise’ years had watched this, they’d probably have come armed.
(Casting Director-wise, the movie credits one Phyllis Dunfield, who clearly had a very left-field mind that’s hard not to admire.)
The Rowling/Galbrath book is better, as despite a not bad cast and a suitably muddy storyline, this is a film which – even with Sir Michael’s efforts – is so seedy and depressive it leaves you wanting to have a good scrub down afterwards.
Colour (but a really washed out colour, as if it woke up hung-over that morning)
Reading Robert Galbrath/J.K. Rowling's tale of a down on his luck private eye in Soho, reminded me with sudden incredible clarity (like I’d just eaten a madeleine) of this neglected Michael Caine private eye movie. And that memory gave me particular satisfaction when I realised that Caine's character is actually named - and I'm not making this up - Barry Potter. Not that I’m suggesting for one second that Rowling based either of her recurring characters on this film. Having read ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, Michael Caine certainly isn’t Comoran Strike. Admittedly I’ve only seen the Harry Potter films rather than read the books, but unless there’s something in the novels about the teen wizard having a porn collection and liking rough sex, he’s not a student of Hogwarts either.
This is a tale about a down on his luck London private eye, but Comoran Strike has nothing on Barry Potter for rough living. Yes, both sleep in their offices and squander their money on booze and fags, but Strike doesn't steal a tenner from the elderly lady upstairs for electric metre money. Nor does he effectively mug a homeless man when said homeless man is cheeky. Nor, indeed, does he steal a chip from a nun in a chip-shop before suggesting flirtatiously that he remove her from the habit. There is an aggressive unpleasantness and seediness to this character - the anti-anti-anti-Philip Marlowe. It's almost as if the filmmakers looked at Caine as Harry Palmer and decided that he was still just too upwardly mobile for their tastes, it was time to bring him down several dirty and greasy pegs. And Caine relishes the part, clearly on paper this is an unpleasant man, but our favourite cockney knight uses all his charm to make sure he still deserves to be the hero.
Philip Marlowe is undoubtedly a (much more noble) background presence, as the plot isn’t far off Raymond Chandler's ‘The Little Sister’ (which had been filmed far more glamorously in Hollywood a few years earlier). A prim librarian type seeks out Potter's help to find her missing sibling, who’s disappeared into the Soho netherworld of strip clubs and pornographers. Before long Potter finds himself up to his neck in sleaze (not necessarily a problem, Potter admits to liking “a bit of naughty”), and murder (more of a problem, particularly when he finds himself the prime suspect). It's up to Potter to stay one step ahead of the police as he tries to solve the crime.
The audience stayed away en mass, which is why the British tough guy Michael Caine picture people remember from the early 1970s is ‘Get Carter’ and that’s fair enough as it’s much stronger and looks far better. However good performances abound: from Ray Milland as a disgraced former copper with an accent so very, very Welsh (so much so I couldn’t work out whether he was putting it on or that was indeed his real accent), surprise guest-star Frankie Avalon, hamming it up as a would be gangster even when he looks a little lost in seedy London, and most astonishing of all Cilla Black – of all people – as a hard as nails prostitute. If those punters who stood excited at her side in the ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise’ years had watched this, they’d probably have come armed.
(Casting Director-wise, the movie credits one Phyllis Dunfield, who clearly had a very left-field mind that’s hard not to admire.)
The Rowling/Galbrath book is better, as despite a not bad cast and a suitably muddy storyline, this is a film which – even with Sir Michael’s efforts – is so seedy and depressive it leaves you wanting to have a good scrub down afterwards.
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
The Final Man on the Run (1959)
D. Frank Howard
B&W
I truly love creaky old British Science Fiction. It’s not just that being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan means that dodgy monsters in grainy black and white comes somewhat with the territory, it’s that alien invasion always feels a lot more poky and provincial in England. In America there are wide open spaces, the world that is being invaded seems so wonderful and worth taking. It’s not like that in Britain. Maybe if – like ‘The Children of The Damned’ – these aliens are choosing to invade the Home Counties you can perhaps see where they’re coming from, but grim and grimy London? Seriously, alien invaders, what’s wrong with your planet that you’d want to come somewhere that still uses powdered egg?
The oddly titled ‘The Final Man on the Run’ is cheap and British and essentially a rip off of ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – only with the twist that instead of a quiet and prosperous America town being stolen, it is the seedy environs and backstreets of Soho. This makes it a very interesting set-up, as the aliens are replacing people who are already scary anyway. These aren’t schoolteachers and policemen who are being replicated, but spivs, small time crooks and all round scum. The only one who realises what’s happening is a down on his luck boxer, with a dodgy record himself, but no one will listen to him as nobody really cares for these people anyway – and so the contagion spreads.
This film, despite its cheapness and the rip off of the premise, should be better remembered – not least as one of the early starring roles for Sean Connery. (There’s also a pre Doctor Who William Hartnell as a tobacconist who is one of the first to be taken. It’s a great moment when Connery peers into his face and sees not a single ounce of emotion). And Connery does well as the boxer in totally over his head. There’s a path to his performance, a joy in seeing the character question more and more before frustration truly overwhelms him. Although unlike Kevin McCarthy in the American version, Connery can never make himself look totally helpless. Even in the bleak conclusion, one gets the impression that this Glaswegian Terry Malloy, will still find a way to save the world.
It’s a tense ride which understands just how scary shadows are, although it feels too rushed at 72 minutes. Much like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, which can be interpreted as either anti-communist or anti-witch-hunts, I suppose there are two possible readings here also. Either the film is saying that the salt of the Earth (no matter how coarse a grain) are the most crucial people of all and once we lose them we lose everything; or else this is a bunch of middle class film makers sneering from their pipes and slippers and thinking that the working classes are so common and brutish they are all pretty much aliens anyway, aren’t they?
So perhaps pour yourself a sherry and let the alien takeover begin!
B&W
I truly love creaky old British Science Fiction. It’s not just that being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan means that dodgy monsters in grainy black and white comes somewhat with the territory, it’s that alien invasion always feels a lot more poky and provincial in England. In America there are wide open spaces, the world that is being invaded seems so wonderful and worth taking. It’s not like that in Britain. Maybe if – like ‘The Children of The Damned’ – these aliens are choosing to invade the Home Counties you can perhaps see where they’re coming from, but grim and grimy London? Seriously, alien invaders, what’s wrong with your planet that you’d want to come somewhere that still uses powdered egg?
The oddly titled ‘The Final Man on the Run’ is cheap and British and essentially a rip off of ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – only with the twist that instead of a quiet and prosperous America town being stolen, it is the seedy environs and backstreets of Soho. This makes it a very interesting set-up, as the aliens are replacing people who are already scary anyway. These aren’t schoolteachers and policemen who are being replicated, but spivs, small time crooks and all round scum. The only one who realises what’s happening is a down on his luck boxer, with a dodgy record himself, but no one will listen to him as nobody really cares for these people anyway – and so the contagion spreads.
This film, despite its cheapness and the rip off of the premise, should be better remembered – not least as one of the early starring roles for Sean Connery. (There’s also a pre Doctor Who William Hartnell as a tobacconist who is one of the first to be taken. It’s a great moment when Connery peers into his face and sees not a single ounce of emotion). And Connery does well as the boxer in totally over his head. There’s a path to his performance, a joy in seeing the character question more and more before frustration truly overwhelms him. Although unlike Kevin McCarthy in the American version, Connery can never make himself look totally helpless. Even in the bleak conclusion, one gets the impression that this Glaswegian Terry Malloy, will still find a way to save the world.
It’s a tense ride which understands just how scary shadows are, although it feels too rushed at 72 minutes. Much like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, which can be interpreted as either anti-communist or anti-witch-hunts, I suppose there are two possible readings here also. Either the film is saying that the salt of the Earth (no matter how coarse a grain) are the most crucial people of all and once we lose them we lose everything; or else this is a bunch of middle class film makers sneering from their pipes and slippers and thinking that the working classes are so common and brutish they are all pretty much aliens anyway, aren’t they?
So perhaps pour yourself a sherry and let the alien takeover begin!
Sunday, 19 January 2014
Blue Moon Over Soho (1977)
D. Jack Gold
Colour
I always want to like this film more. The three times now that I’ve seen it, I’ve always wished I could find a way to take this film more to my heart. After all, what’s not to like? We have David Hemmings (already distinctly portly after his sixties prime) running a pornography empire in Soho, and after he tries to help a young girl, finding himself being investigated by uptight cop, Albert Finney. Elsewhere we have Patrick MacNee (John Steed of all people) as a strip-show obsessed English gentleman, and Helen Mirren as a tabloid journalist who has more than a little interest in the seedier side of life. I look at that mixture, and say what’s not to love? Surely this should be one of my favourite films. Why then isn’t it?
The flaw can be described in two words “Robin Askwith”.
Not that Mr Askwith actually appears in this film – he’d be well and truly out of place in this esteemed cast – but ‘Blue Moon Over Soho’, for its all lofty and hard-hitting pretensions, bends a little too far towards the Robin Askwith school of British cinema. Askwith, for those of you lucky enough not to know (I almost feel like I’m robbing you of some of your innocence here) was the star of a series of sex comedies in the 1970s, all with the prefix “Confessions”. So we had ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’, ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’, ‘Confessions of a Neurosurgeon with a Focus on Peripheral Nerves’ (okay, one of those titles I may have made up). The films are a low grade spicy stew of Jack the Lads, bum & tits, a nice bit of crumpet and phwooaaarrr!!! If you’ve never seen a ‘Confessions’ film, but have seen a latter day ‘Carry On’ film then you’ll know pretty much what I’m talking about.
So the problem with ‘Blue Moon Over Soho’ is that it says it wants to hit hard but what it really wants to do is titillate. This tale of one man’s crumbling porn empire and the righteous cop out to get him, becomes an excuse for bouncing boobs and bums, of suspender clad thighs and attractive birds who just want it and want it now. There is no pubic hair, there is nothing that could be classed as penetration, but there is a school boy smuttiness that never lets up. The tone is established in the opening shot of a busty schoolgirl – who, if we’re honest here, must be at least thirty – slowly removing her gymslip. Of course this being Britain in the 1970s, there is a lot more cellulite and round bottoms than one would get if this film was made in California, but it’s still aiming to arouse rather than anger.
Of course the performances are great. If I had to watch an actor’s face as he gazes impassive at the exploitation of a young girl, then David Hemmings would be in my top ten. And he does some of his best work as a man who has his dormant conscience well and truly pricked. Finney is great as the driven and slightly mad copper, Macnee is deeply, but touchingly, weird as the dapper old pervert and Mirren does as much as she can in an underwritten role (and is, of course, given a topless scene). But one gets the impression that the film around them isn’t the one they signed up for, and the film that made it to the screen cries out for the reassuring presence of Robin Askwith.
‘Confessions of a Righteously Genteel Porn Baron’.
Colour
I always want to like this film more. The three times now that I’ve seen it, I’ve always wished I could find a way to take this film more to my heart. After all, what’s not to like? We have David Hemmings (already distinctly portly after his sixties prime) running a pornography empire in Soho, and after he tries to help a young girl, finding himself being investigated by uptight cop, Albert Finney. Elsewhere we have Patrick MacNee (John Steed of all people) as a strip-show obsessed English gentleman, and Helen Mirren as a tabloid journalist who has more than a little interest in the seedier side of life. I look at that mixture, and say what’s not to love? Surely this should be one of my favourite films. Why then isn’t it?
The flaw can be described in two words “Robin Askwith”.
Not that Mr Askwith actually appears in this film – he’d be well and truly out of place in this esteemed cast – but ‘Blue Moon Over Soho’, for its all lofty and hard-hitting pretensions, bends a little too far towards the Robin Askwith school of British cinema. Askwith, for those of you lucky enough not to know (I almost feel like I’m robbing you of some of your innocence here) was the star of a series of sex comedies in the 1970s, all with the prefix “Confessions”. So we had ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’, ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’, ‘Confessions of a Neurosurgeon with a Focus on Peripheral Nerves’ (okay, one of those titles I may have made up). The films are a low grade spicy stew of Jack the Lads, bum & tits, a nice bit of crumpet and phwooaaarrr!!! If you’ve never seen a ‘Confessions’ film, but have seen a latter day ‘Carry On’ film then you’ll know pretty much what I’m talking about.
So the problem with ‘Blue Moon Over Soho’ is that it says it wants to hit hard but what it really wants to do is titillate. This tale of one man’s crumbling porn empire and the righteous cop out to get him, becomes an excuse for bouncing boobs and bums, of suspender clad thighs and attractive birds who just want it and want it now. There is no pubic hair, there is nothing that could be classed as penetration, but there is a school boy smuttiness that never lets up. The tone is established in the opening shot of a busty schoolgirl – who, if we’re honest here, must be at least thirty – slowly removing her gymslip. Of course this being Britain in the 1970s, there is a lot more cellulite and round bottoms than one would get if this film was made in California, but it’s still aiming to arouse rather than anger.
Of course the performances are great. If I had to watch an actor’s face as he gazes impassive at the exploitation of a young girl, then David Hemmings would be in my top ten. And he does some of his best work as a man who has his dormant conscience well and truly pricked. Finney is great as the driven and slightly mad copper, Macnee is deeply, but touchingly, weird as the dapper old pervert and Mirren does as much as she can in an underwritten role (and is, of course, given a topless scene). But one gets the impression that the film around them isn’t the one they signed up for, and the film that made it to the screen cries out for the reassuring presence of Robin Askwith.
‘Confessions of a Righteously Genteel Porn Baron’.
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