D. Pierre de Franc
Colour
Michael Caine recently stated that he chose his movies on two criteria: whether it was going to make him a lot of money, or whether it was likely to win him an Oscar. So who the fuck knows what the explanation is for him appearing in the 1979 drugged up, fantasy thriller? As no sane observer would ever look at this and think it had Oscar glory etched right through it. So maybe French cinema in the early 1980s was bizarrely well remunerated, or perhaps it just suited Caine for tax purposes to hang out in Paris for a few months. Then again maybe he just read the script and thought it’d be a great wheeze to play Oscar Wilde.
Yes, here is Michael Caine as Oscar Wilde. An Oscar Wilde after the disgrace, who is now living in Paris and drinking too much and doing too many drugs, but his mind is still sharp and he has a murder mystery to solve.
For you see, as well as being a playwright, poet, novelist, raconteur and the world acknowledged wittiest man alive, Oscar Wilde was apparently also the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. So, get your bon mots and deer stalker ready, as this is Oscar Wilde, dipso great detective.
To be fair Caine does acquit himself admirably as Wilde. Wilde was a big man and so Caine immediately looks the part, but adds a certain prissy delicacy of tone. His voice manages to stay neutral accent-wise and that’s great as it would have been a cockney calamity if some Smithfield Market had slipped in. Christopher Plummer has the thankless Watson role as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, assisting Wilde in his investigation, but being Christopher Plummer does a genius job with it; and Liza Minnelli does a good Liza Minnelli as the Moulin Rouge dancer who loves Wilde too tragically.
So the performances are good and the idea is certainly no worse than any other, so it’s frustrating how bad a film this is. Having a hero who is self-medicating is one thing, using it as an excuse to OD on addled weirdness is quite another. Animated angels appear to Welles and give him important clues before then seeming to perform fellatio on him off camera; our heroes hire a horse and cart, where the horse is driving and the man – naked with bridle jammed into his mouth – is pulling; while in a fake reveal the killer is revealed to be Wilde himself, which does let Michael Caine face off against Michael Caine – both of them absolutely astonished. Most surreally though, at the Moulin Rouge we get – for no apparent reason – to watch frock-coat wearing Bee-Gees performing a slowed down ‘Islands in the Stream’, while Pans People writhe in front of them. All of that makes it sound more fun than it actually is, as this an ill focused and frustrating film - to the point where having watched it I even now have no idea who the killer is.
So the question remains and it's probably a mystery the great Oscar Wilde himself couldn't solve, why did Sir Michael Caine make this movie?
Showing posts with label paranoia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paranoia. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Sunday, 30 November 2014
The Gentleman in the Pub (1947)
D. Arnold Pouter
B&W
That rarest of things: an English Boris Karlofff movie.
Boris Karloff just seems such an international figure. Even though his career was predominantly American, the name he took and that sinister screen persona made it seem like he was from some strange forgotten land. Bela Lugosi had a similar name, but he had an accent which gave away that he was from a fixed Eastern European locale. Karloff with his more mid-Atlantic tones was just impossible to place (and you certainly wouldn't have imagined he was from Catford in South East London. Somehow I can’t imagine Karloff on a Cockney fruit stall). No, Boris Karloff the star of scary movies hailed from some mysterious isle, maybe the same one as King Kong, and no doubt he hatched from an egg fully grown as the dapper, sinister and yet vulnerable gentleman we know.
Here he is back home, in that version of England which existed in a film studio’s polite and ordered mind, as a man who occupies the corner stool of a saloon bar and tells eerie tales. (In many ways like P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner, without the jokes, but with a surprising amount of horror and death.) Karloff relates these stories with a sinister smile on his face, his voice rumbling with menace, his hand forever stroking a scary, one-eyed black dog. Indeed what gives away that this pub isn't quite normal is the fact that everyone else in the pub just accepts Boris as one of them and don't run a mile from him – while in reality his presence would make any pint of warm ale feel uncomfortably chilled.
On a stormy night a charisma void of an actor, Robert Wainwright, stops by this country pub for a gin and water and a relief from his long drive. Boris has already embarked on that evening’s tales and the young man is drawn into listening, and so begins a portmanteau of stories - one about a young man breaking his father's heart by running away and the comeuppance that falls upon him; one is an act of cowardice in the war which has terrible consequences, and one is a man who breaks his fiancée’s heart in a tale which leads to murder and destruction. The realisation slowly dawns on this young visitor to the pub that all of these are all sinister twists on events which have happened in his own life.
The confrontation between him and Karloff swiftly escalates beyond all reasonable disbelief, and the (SPOILER ALERT) revelation that its Karloff's dog who is the sinister force is too silly for words, but in the main this is a scary and tense film where Karloff comes gloriously home, purring at his most superbly sinister in an unmistakably British setting.
At the end the young man runs into the darkness and the pub goes back to how it was, presumably before a name change and a visit from those poor young lads in ‘An American Werewolf in London’.
B&W
That rarest of things: an English Boris Karlofff movie.
Boris Karloff just seems such an international figure. Even though his career was predominantly American, the name he took and that sinister screen persona made it seem like he was from some strange forgotten land. Bela Lugosi had a similar name, but he had an accent which gave away that he was from a fixed Eastern European locale. Karloff with his more mid-Atlantic tones was just impossible to place (and you certainly wouldn't have imagined he was from Catford in South East London. Somehow I can’t imagine Karloff on a Cockney fruit stall). No, Boris Karloff the star of scary movies hailed from some mysterious isle, maybe the same one as King Kong, and no doubt he hatched from an egg fully grown as the dapper, sinister and yet vulnerable gentleman we know.
Here he is back home, in that version of England which existed in a film studio’s polite and ordered mind, as a man who occupies the corner stool of a saloon bar and tells eerie tales. (In many ways like P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner, without the jokes, but with a surprising amount of horror and death.) Karloff relates these stories with a sinister smile on his face, his voice rumbling with menace, his hand forever stroking a scary, one-eyed black dog. Indeed what gives away that this pub isn't quite normal is the fact that everyone else in the pub just accepts Boris as one of them and don't run a mile from him – while in reality his presence would make any pint of warm ale feel uncomfortably chilled.
On a stormy night a charisma void of an actor, Robert Wainwright, stops by this country pub for a gin and water and a relief from his long drive. Boris has already embarked on that evening’s tales and the young man is drawn into listening, and so begins a portmanteau of stories - one about a young man breaking his father's heart by running away and the comeuppance that falls upon him; one is an act of cowardice in the war which has terrible consequences, and one is a man who breaks his fiancée’s heart in a tale which leads to murder and destruction. The realisation slowly dawns on this young visitor to the pub that all of these are all sinister twists on events which have happened in his own life.
The confrontation between him and Karloff swiftly escalates beyond all reasonable disbelief, and the (SPOILER ALERT) revelation that its Karloff's dog who is the sinister force is too silly for words, but in the main this is a scary and tense film where Karloff comes gloriously home, purring at his most superbly sinister in an unmistakably British setting.
At the end the young man runs into the darkness and the pub goes back to how it was, presumably before a name change and a visit from those poor young lads in ‘An American Werewolf in London’.
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, 2 November 2014
Bonfire Burns (2006)
D. Simon Olson
Colour
As I sit here and type with the bangs and whizzes of early fireworks rattling and screeching through my study window, I can’t help thinking that surely Ray Winstone could make a good enough crust out of just appearing in big budget Hollywood movies. I know this seems a strange thought to be randomly popping into my head, but please bear with me. In the last few years alone, East London’s favourite big grizzly bear has popped up again and again in lavish stateside productions. I can think of ‘Noah’, ‘Edge of Darkness’ and ‘The Departed’ off the top of my head, all of which boasted the prominent Winstone scowl. But no, it seems any opportunity he gets Winstone will slot into some British film made for tuppence ha’penny with a script that knows gritty violence sells. Which brings me onto today’s subject, this Ray Winstone starring, undeniably British, Bonfire Night-set murder mystery. My thoughts are making a kind of sense now, aren’t they?
A burnt out detective inspector is called to investigate two murders at the start of Bonfire Night. As the darkness falls and the bonfires start up, the cop finds himself alone in a suburban wilderness, without back-up or a walkie-talkie, battling a serial killer who is like a tabby with a rodent. Around him are dead eyed Bonfire Night revellers, many dressed in scary masks and costumes, who offer him no help, aid or solace whatsoever.
Without a shadow of a doubt it’s cinematic. Normal film whodunnits involve a lot of sitting in rooms with people talking. Yes these scenes of people sat in rooms talking can be shot with great tension and skill, they can even be interspersed with car chases, but the modus operandi remains the same. Here however the whodunit takes place in the nightmare bleakness of suburbia, with most of the scenes illuminated by the flickering orange glow of nearby bonfires, thus giving them a savage dream-like quality. In the background there is the savage whizz and explosions of rockets and Catherine wheels, the dark sky suddenly illuminated by screaming lines of fire. It’s no surprise then that Winstone’s character is soon looking so woozy and disorientated, as the whole does look like some dreadful acid trip.
There’s a strange melding of Halloween and Bonfire Night here. Even though the film is truly and obviously British, there does seem to be misinformation about what Bonfire Night is actually like. I’ve not really partaken in awhile, but when I think of Bonfire Nights as a kid I remember huddling in the backgarden watching the fireworks my dad purchased from the newsagent, holding sparklers and eating cheesy jacket potatoes. We never dressed up in monster movie outfits, we never wore scary masks and aiding lunatic serial killers was scarcely ever on our agenda.
But then I guess the international markets wouldn’t know what Bonfire Night was, Halloween is international, they’re near each other – so why not add two to two and come up with the kind of scary Bonfire Night nobody in their right mind would ever want to take part in?
The chase at the end involving a London bus is a tad ridiculous as nobody ever tries to outrun anything on a London bus, but this is, despite the darkness and dialogue muffled by pops and fizzles, a roaring London thriller which – much like bonfire night itself – is not as good as you want it to be.
Colour
As I sit here and type with the bangs and whizzes of early fireworks rattling and screeching through my study window, I can’t help thinking that surely Ray Winstone could make a good enough crust out of just appearing in big budget Hollywood movies. I know this seems a strange thought to be randomly popping into my head, but please bear with me. In the last few years alone, East London’s favourite big grizzly bear has popped up again and again in lavish stateside productions. I can think of ‘Noah’, ‘Edge of Darkness’ and ‘The Departed’ off the top of my head, all of which boasted the prominent Winstone scowl. But no, it seems any opportunity he gets Winstone will slot into some British film made for tuppence ha’penny with a script that knows gritty violence sells. Which brings me onto today’s subject, this Ray Winstone starring, undeniably British, Bonfire Night-set murder mystery. My thoughts are making a kind of sense now, aren’t they?
A burnt out detective inspector is called to investigate two murders at the start of Bonfire Night. As the darkness falls and the bonfires start up, the cop finds himself alone in a suburban wilderness, without back-up or a walkie-talkie, battling a serial killer who is like a tabby with a rodent. Around him are dead eyed Bonfire Night revellers, many dressed in scary masks and costumes, who offer him no help, aid or solace whatsoever.
Without a shadow of a doubt it’s cinematic. Normal film whodunnits involve a lot of sitting in rooms with people talking. Yes these scenes of people sat in rooms talking can be shot with great tension and skill, they can even be interspersed with car chases, but the modus operandi remains the same. Here however the whodunit takes place in the nightmare bleakness of suburbia, with most of the scenes illuminated by the flickering orange glow of nearby bonfires, thus giving them a savage dream-like quality. In the background there is the savage whizz and explosions of rockets and Catherine wheels, the dark sky suddenly illuminated by screaming lines of fire. It’s no surprise then that Winstone’s character is soon looking so woozy and disorientated, as the whole does look like some dreadful acid trip.
There’s a strange melding of Halloween and Bonfire Night here. Even though the film is truly and obviously British, there does seem to be misinformation about what Bonfire Night is actually like. I’ve not really partaken in awhile, but when I think of Bonfire Nights as a kid I remember huddling in the backgarden watching the fireworks my dad purchased from the newsagent, holding sparklers and eating cheesy jacket potatoes. We never dressed up in monster movie outfits, we never wore scary masks and aiding lunatic serial killers was scarcely ever on our agenda.
But then I guess the international markets wouldn’t know what Bonfire Night was, Halloween is international, they’re near each other – so why not add two to two and come up with the kind of scary Bonfire Night nobody in their right mind would ever want to take part in?
The chase at the end involving a London bus is a tad ridiculous as nobody ever tries to outrun anything on a London bus, but this is, despite the darkness and dialogue muffled by pops and fizzles, a roaring London thriller which – much like bonfire night itself – is not as good as you want it to be.
Sunday, 26 October 2014
G-Man! (1953)
D. Richard McCarthy
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W
Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.
Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.
Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.
Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.
Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W
Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.
Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.
Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.
Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.
Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
The Spaceman of Alcatraz (1968)
D. Franc Violon
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
Wednesday, 27 August 2014
We Cease to Grow! (1972)
D. Damien Nostro
B&W
Much like the Doctor Who serial ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and the forthcoming ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’, this obscure grainy 1970s film features a mad environmentalist who decides that the best way to solve the population problem is to wipe out most of mankind. Obviously Paul R. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ has, and continues to have, some effect – although possibly not the one the good doctor was expecting. Let’s look at this closely, what kind of absolute nutter thinks that the best way to save the human population is to wipe out 99.9% of it? Okay, let’s say that there are people like that out there, misanthrope extremis, how would they persuade anyone else to go along with their scheme? Surely anyone propositioned to help implement this plan of mass slaughter, would back slowly away with a distinctly scared and freaked out look in their eyes. In both ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’ it’s the elite who are saved (although in the 1970s that meant intellectuals; in 2014 it apparently means celebrities), while in ‘We Cease to Grow!’ it’s less clear – but even then, surely members of any elite know people who aren’t in the elite? Surely they’re not so blasé in their lifestyle they’re happy to watch everyone else die just so they can hang out and procreate with people like themselves. Perhaps I’m being horribly naive, but I’d like to think that when some billionaire megalomaniac does come along and suggests this scheme, that most people (although certainly not all, I admit that) will say that they don’t want to be a party to the genocide of most of humanity, thank you very much.
Orson Welles plays the lead role – although even then he probably knocked out his part in about four days – as a wheelchair bound mad genius who has unleashed a terrible chemical bug into the world. Now locked down in his bunker, and resembling a bigger and scarier Raymond Burr, he ruminates on his reasons and rationale whilst chaos takes hold outside. Welles’s voice as he intones is like the rumble of the apocalypse, so it’s appropriate he’s there literally narrating the end of the world. Statistics purr out of this wounded lion, as he tells of how much food the world has left, the spread of diseases and the rise of the oceans. Outside we see the chaos starting, rioting on the streets; as well as more individual vignettes, where sad and desperate people come to the end of their sad and desperate lives. It’s not a film to make you feel good about yourself; in fact it’s difficult to work out what kind of mood the film makers want you to leave the cinema in, because as far as I can see Welles is supposed to be right here. Yes he has carried out this drastic act, but he is a sage, a seer, he is salvation. So who knows what the audience was supposed to do with it? Maybe the film makers just wanted enough people to see it so that if some megalomaniac did suggest killing most of humanity, somebody would actually say yes.
B&W
Much like the Doctor Who serial ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and the forthcoming ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’, this obscure grainy 1970s film features a mad environmentalist who decides that the best way to solve the population problem is to wipe out most of mankind. Obviously Paul R. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ has, and continues to have, some effect – although possibly not the one the good doctor was expecting. Let’s look at this closely, what kind of absolute nutter thinks that the best way to save the human population is to wipe out 99.9% of it? Okay, let’s say that there are people like that out there, misanthrope extremis, how would they persuade anyone else to go along with their scheme? Surely anyone propositioned to help implement this plan of mass slaughter, would back slowly away with a distinctly scared and freaked out look in their eyes. In both ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’ it’s the elite who are saved (although in the 1970s that meant intellectuals; in 2014 it apparently means celebrities), while in ‘We Cease to Grow!’ it’s less clear – but even then, surely members of any elite know people who aren’t in the elite? Surely they’re not so blasé in their lifestyle they’re happy to watch everyone else die just so they can hang out and procreate with people like themselves. Perhaps I’m being horribly naive, but I’d like to think that when some billionaire megalomaniac does come along and suggests this scheme, that most people (although certainly not all, I admit that) will say that they don’t want to be a party to the genocide of most of humanity, thank you very much.
Orson Welles plays the lead role – although even then he probably knocked out his part in about four days – as a wheelchair bound mad genius who has unleashed a terrible chemical bug into the world. Now locked down in his bunker, and resembling a bigger and scarier Raymond Burr, he ruminates on his reasons and rationale whilst chaos takes hold outside. Welles’s voice as he intones is like the rumble of the apocalypse, so it’s appropriate he’s there literally narrating the end of the world. Statistics purr out of this wounded lion, as he tells of how much food the world has left, the spread of diseases and the rise of the oceans. Outside we see the chaos starting, rioting on the streets; as well as more individual vignettes, where sad and desperate people come to the end of their sad and desperate lives. It’s not a film to make you feel good about yourself; in fact it’s difficult to work out what kind of mood the film makers want you to leave the cinema in, because as far as I can see Welles is supposed to be right here. Yes he has carried out this drastic act, but he is a sage, a seer, he is salvation. So who knows what the audience was supposed to do with it? Maybe the film makers just wanted enough people to see it so that if some megalomaniac did suggest killing most of humanity, somebody would actually say yes.
Sunday, 20 July 2014
Mr Hargreaves (1959)
D. John Guillermin
B&W
If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.
In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.
This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.
Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.
(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)
Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.
At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.
B&W
If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.
In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.
This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.
Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.
(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)
Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.
At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.
Wednesday, 16 July 2014
The Guest in Room 313 (1968)
D. Giles Malay
B&W
Here’s a genuine curio of a movie which intrigues me every time I see it. ‘The Guest in Room 313’ is a shadowy and obtuse film, one that aims for a narrow focus but also tries to be many things at once, and as a consequence so much remains wonderfully elusive within it. I don’t think there’s another movie quite like it.
The set up is thus: Laurence Harvey, putting that uniquely frigid style of his to good use (this is his best film outside of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a burnt-out spy holed up in the room 313 of a Las Vegas hotel. (Hence the title, I guess.) Clearly something went awry on his last mission as Harvey has terror dreams even when awake; obviously he knows a lot of stuff he doesn’t want to know and it’s burning through his brain. But more than that, more than just being an ex-spy with a drink problem and mental health issues who has cut himself off from society, Harvey also believes that he’s a werewolf. And that belief takes hold even before young women start being murdered in Las Vegas at full moon.
This is a movie which drips with nervous sweat, which reeks of desperate paranoia. You almost suspect that the director and screenwriter and most of the crew made it while wearing little tinfoil hats to stop the government reading their minds. Harvey sits in the hotel room, he drinks whisky, he broods, he has panicked dreams that don’t seem to make any sense within the context of the film – but are undeniably compulsive and fit in totally with the feel of the film. Janet Leigh (another throwback to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a hotel employee in a smart suit who officiously tries to deal with his needs, flirting with him and mothering him, and generally being far more attentive than any normal hotel employee. (Think of that description and then think of the usual impersonal personal service of hotel staff, your suspicions are immediately raised, aren’t they?) Jack Nicholson is another visitor, a fellow agent or perhaps Harvey’s handler, who speaks in bizarre, drawling riddles and makes each of his three scenes decidedly edgy in the way only Jack can. Then there’s Charlotte Rampling, sweet and affecting as a call girl Harvey calls in daylight and who might, just like everyone else, know a lot more than she seems. These are performances which seem to come full of secrets, and around the immobile centre of Harvey – who somehow lets his stiff stillness radiate insanity – they create a movie where you obviously can’t even trust the walls.
The atmosphere of paranoia builds and builds, and never lets up. The ending might be to some people a damp squib, but I find it gloriously and remorselessly unsettling. Yes, little is resolved, most is still left up in the air, but this is a film which wants you to walk away thinking that they really are out to get you.
B&W
Here’s a genuine curio of a movie which intrigues me every time I see it. ‘The Guest in Room 313’ is a shadowy and obtuse film, one that aims for a narrow focus but also tries to be many things at once, and as a consequence so much remains wonderfully elusive within it. I don’t think there’s another movie quite like it.
The set up is thus: Laurence Harvey, putting that uniquely frigid style of his to good use (this is his best film outside of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a burnt-out spy holed up in the room 313 of a Las Vegas hotel. (Hence the title, I guess.) Clearly something went awry on his last mission as Harvey has terror dreams even when awake; obviously he knows a lot of stuff he doesn’t want to know and it’s burning through his brain. But more than that, more than just being an ex-spy with a drink problem and mental health issues who has cut himself off from society, Harvey also believes that he’s a werewolf. And that belief takes hold even before young women start being murdered in Las Vegas at full moon.
This is a movie which drips with nervous sweat, which reeks of desperate paranoia. You almost suspect that the director and screenwriter and most of the crew made it while wearing little tinfoil hats to stop the government reading their minds. Harvey sits in the hotel room, he drinks whisky, he broods, he has panicked dreams that don’t seem to make any sense within the context of the film – but are undeniably compulsive and fit in totally with the feel of the film. Janet Leigh (another throwback to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a hotel employee in a smart suit who officiously tries to deal with his needs, flirting with him and mothering him, and generally being far more attentive than any normal hotel employee. (Think of that description and then think of the usual impersonal personal service of hotel staff, your suspicions are immediately raised, aren’t they?) Jack Nicholson is another visitor, a fellow agent or perhaps Harvey’s handler, who speaks in bizarre, drawling riddles and makes each of his three scenes decidedly edgy in the way only Jack can. Then there’s Charlotte Rampling, sweet and affecting as a call girl Harvey calls in daylight and who might, just like everyone else, know a lot more than she seems. These are performances which seem to come full of secrets, and around the immobile centre of Harvey – who somehow lets his stiff stillness radiate insanity – they create a movie where you obviously can’t even trust the walls.
The atmosphere of paranoia builds and builds, and never lets up. The ending might be to some people a damp squib, but I find it gloriously and remorselessly unsettling. Yes, little is resolved, most is still left up in the air, but this is a film which wants you to walk away thinking that they really are out to get you.
Sunday, 23 February 2014
The Bang-Bang Men (1972)
D. John Flynn
Colour
This is actually the movie Gene Wilder made directly after ‘Willy Wonka’ and in many ways it seems like the same performance. Once again he is quixotic, changeable and prone to bursts of rage, so much so it’s impossible to believe a word he says. Okay, that magical look has gone from his eyes. When he stares off into the distance in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ it’s like he’s contemplating not just shooting some fat kid up a tube, but torturing him a little first. But clearly, even before Gene Wilder’s portrayal of Willy Wonka became a cultural touchstone, Gene Wilder was doing his own riff on Willy Wonka – although a far more dangerous version. You see Gene Wilder’s character in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ doesn’t have the heart of gold Willy Wonka has, instead he’s a hired killer who’d think nothing of blowing up a pleasant and picturesque (almost Germanic) little town if it would get him what he wants. There are some things that The Candyman can’t do, but The Bang-Bang Man certainly can.
Taking this Willy Wonka-esque performance and putting it in a far edgier film does make for a strange dissonance, and that’s before we’re introduced to Wilder’s co-star – the redoubtable Charlton Heston. It’s amazing to see them together. Of course their careers overlapped (Heston actually made his last big screen appearance after Wilder) but to say that a pixyish Gene Wilder and a stolid Charlton Heston is a clash of styles is like suggesting that strawberry jam and marmite really shouldn’t find themselves together in the same sandwich. By the 1970s Heston was a face of the glorious past now become the vision of the frightening future. America had grown up with him in all those historical/biblical epics, but now he was ‘The Omega Man’, now he was visiting ‘The Planet of the Apes’, now he was investigating ‘Solyent Green’. Everything was going swiftly to hell and Charlton Heston was our weather vane, showing us just how bad things were going to be. In ‘The Bang-Bang Man’ he is even saying that the present isn’t so brilliant – playing a CIA agent forced to hire Wilder’s psychotic assassin to clear up a mess after an agency wetjob goes wrong. But the plot is almost irrelevant, there just to facilitate granite faced with mercury; Heston’s manly snarl against Wilder trying a little too hard to be funny (and he does try a little too hard, which has the effect of making his character even more deranged and frightening). This is jittery and nervous young America facing off against its wonderful and macho history.
We are in the shadows here, with covert operations, counter covert operation and operations which are probably confused about whether they covert or not. There are assassinations, car chases and angry confrontations. There’s Susan George as a possibly rogue British agent, seemingly enjoying a highly unlikely sado-masochistic relationship with – of all people – Roy Kinnear (Veronica Salt’s father in ‘Willy Wonka’). There’s Angie Dickenson as the chanteuse with a secret and Joseph Cotton as the senator who probably commits three corrupt acts before breakfast. You get the picture. It’s moody and atmospheric, has no faith in any of the structures and players of government, and every single frame just drips with paranoia.
And it really says something for the paranoia of 1970s America cinema that even Gene Wilder and Charlton Heston could be affected by it.
Colour
This is actually the movie Gene Wilder made directly after ‘Willy Wonka’ and in many ways it seems like the same performance. Once again he is quixotic, changeable and prone to bursts of rage, so much so it’s impossible to believe a word he says. Okay, that magical look has gone from his eyes. When he stares off into the distance in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ it’s like he’s contemplating not just shooting some fat kid up a tube, but torturing him a little first. But clearly, even before Gene Wilder’s portrayal of Willy Wonka became a cultural touchstone, Gene Wilder was doing his own riff on Willy Wonka – although a far more dangerous version. You see Gene Wilder’s character in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ doesn’t have the heart of gold Willy Wonka has, instead he’s a hired killer who’d think nothing of blowing up a pleasant and picturesque (almost Germanic) little town if it would get him what he wants. There are some things that The Candyman can’t do, but The Bang-Bang Man certainly can.
Taking this Willy Wonka-esque performance and putting it in a far edgier film does make for a strange dissonance, and that’s before we’re introduced to Wilder’s co-star – the redoubtable Charlton Heston. It’s amazing to see them together. Of course their careers overlapped (Heston actually made his last big screen appearance after Wilder) but to say that a pixyish Gene Wilder and a stolid Charlton Heston is a clash of styles is like suggesting that strawberry jam and marmite really shouldn’t find themselves together in the same sandwich. By the 1970s Heston was a face of the glorious past now become the vision of the frightening future. America had grown up with him in all those historical/biblical epics, but now he was ‘The Omega Man’, now he was visiting ‘The Planet of the Apes’, now he was investigating ‘Solyent Green’. Everything was going swiftly to hell and Charlton Heston was our weather vane, showing us just how bad things were going to be. In ‘The Bang-Bang Man’ he is even saying that the present isn’t so brilliant – playing a CIA agent forced to hire Wilder’s psychotic assassin to clear up a mess after an agency wetjob goes wrong. But the plot is almost irrelevant, there just to facilitate granite faced with mercury; Heston’s manly snarl against Wilder trying a little too hard to be funny (and he does try a little too hard, which has the effect of making his character even more deranged and frightening). This is jittery and nervous young America facing off against its wonderful and macho history.
We are in the shadows here, with covert operations, counter covert operation and operations which are probably confused about whether they covert or not. There are assassinations, car chases and angry confrontations. There’s Susan George as a possibly rogue British agent, seemingly enjoying a highly unlikely sado-masochistic relationship with – of all people – Roy Kinnear (Veronica Salt’s father in ‘Willy Wonka’). There’s Angie Dickenson as the chanteuse with a secret and Joseph Cotton as the senator who probably commits three corrupt acts before breakfast. You get the picture. It’s moody and atmospheric, has no faith in any of the structures and players of government, and every single frame just drips with paranoia.
And it really says something for the paranoia of 1970s America cinema that even Gene Wilder and Charlton Heston could be affected by it.
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