The Sexy Goth Girl in the Lake (2004)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour (although the sex scenes are in black & white, so we can pretend they’re art)

The first Sexy Goth Detective film was like an episode of ‘Columbo’, but the second one is like the weirdest episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ you’ll ever see. There’s the small town where everyone knows each other, the dramatic discovery of a body, a cavalcade of suspects, and one lone woman who is prying into everyone’s lives, rustling feathers and generally making sure she’s irritating as hell in her quest for the truth. But what differentiates this from Jessica Fletcher (or Jane Marple) is that this film screams modern.

And sexy.

Sexy and wild in a way that Jessica Fletcher never ever was.

 (Well, maybe in her younger days).

The corpse of a 22 year old goth girl is pulled from the lake in the charmingly named town of Girdle. She was an outsider so her death isn’t investigated as thoroughly as it might be by the chief of police, but she has a friend driving to town determined that justice must be done. Enter Liddy D’Eath as the sexy goth detective – there to turn heads and cause discomfort in every way she can.

It really is a tour de force for both her and Von De Mille’s dialogue. All those scenes we’ve seen so many times before: the tense interrogation in the booth of a cafeteria; the leaning on a post office counter to interrogate a witness who is cagy as hell; the car chase on the dark country lanes outside the town;  the screaming confrontation with the relative of the deceased who doesn’t think the detective is doing her right. All of that is here and all of it crackles. It of course helps that Liddy has gone full on goth for this, with every harsh line of make-up and elegantly torn piece of clothing screaming that she is part of an alternative culture.

Okay, this may sound tame as hell. “What happened to the edgy promise of the original sexy goth girls film?” you may ask. Well, to counter balance the softness we do have a small town femme fatale who Liddy falls hard for her and goes skinny dipping in the lake with before a long soft-focus sex scene. Those expecting  a movie to watch over their cocoa will no doubt choke on their marshmallows at this point. It sticks out as much as a full blown S&M scene would in the middle of Cabot Cove. I’ve always said De Mille would be happier making porn and now he has.

The other characters aren’t well drawn and the plot has not only run away from the director by the end, but gone and hidden, yet thanks to a classy performance by the heroine this is a much watch.

Jack Malibu (1988)

D. Corey Dickshield
Colour

Jack the Ripper haunts the public imagination like no other killer. He is all mist, frightened women and a mystery which never ends (DNA discoveries will prove easy to ignore, mark my words). He’s a supernatural figure, one who lives inside the London fog and attacks like a knife wielding ghost. Yeah, his name might turn out to be Aaron Kosminski or he might be the dissolute son of a high-born family – it doesn’t matter. The mystique and odd romance of this (let’s not forget) particularly brutal killer will continue for centuries to come.

That’s how you can take the idea out of London and put it in a whole other geographic locale, as we understand how the Ripper works. Similarly you can set the tale nearly a hundred years after the events, as again we all understand how the Ripper works. You can even throw rock ballads in and make it a musical. Ah no, that might just be pushing things a little too far.

Here’s a genuine oddity. A musical set amongst affluent beach front property on the California coast, starring two Celtic singers, and centred around the return of England’s most famous serial killer.

Yes, this is Jack Malibu.

Bonnie Tyler (for it is she) is a Welsh-American singing star who now lives in a big house on the Coast and is at the height of her career. But she’s also the descendent of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and the ghost of that killer is coming back to wrap up unfinished business. A fog (borrowed from the occasion from John Carpenter) rolls in from the Pacific and suddenly there’s a dead prostitute lying on the patio of Bonnie’s house. Called in to investigate is Scottish-America detective, Sheena Eastern (for it is she), who also has a connection to the original Ripper case. And as the fog rolls in again, the two women try to work out what the hell is going on – all the while singing their lungs out.

The songs are over-blow 80s numbers, full of synths and echoing drums, but bizarrely all have titles stolen from great standards: so that ‘Strangers in the Night’ is nowhere near what you’d imagine it to be; neither is ‘Foggy Day’; nor ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. All have terrible tunes with lyrics seemingly scribbled out by a collective of sub-literate, goth obsessed, teenage boys. ‘Excruciating’ is the best word, and the only soundtrack albums bought were surely used to torture terrorists.

The hair is big, the shoulder pads could balance scaffolding, the acting is ludicrously bad (with the accents making some lines unintelligible even to a fellow Brit – and a fellow Welshie at that), the plot is ridiculous and the ending is just too Scooby Doo for words. It’s worth watching though as a ludicrous camp spectacular and the saving grace that at least they realised that if Jack was going to be scary he couldn’t be made to bloody sing.

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!”

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.

Sixpence a Cornet (1961)

D. Carol Reed
B&W


Like all right minded people, I love Alec Guinness to bloody pieces. Clearly he was one of the greatest actors Britain ever produced, with a body of cinematic work unmatched by any of his similarly titled peers. One can appreciate why he'd get so phenomenally stroppy with idiot ‘Star Wars’ fans, as – really – who wants such a glorious career boiled down to "Use the force, Luke"? But I can also see that there was something incredible diffident about Alec Guinness. There was, even through his brilliance, an unbreachable reserve. That’s part of the reason why one can’t imagine him successfully playing the lead in a love story (even though he did more than once play the lead in a love story), but it’s also the reason why he actually makes an incredibly good movie serial killer.
Alec Guinness was superb in most roles, but charming, polite but ultimately ruthless killer is clearly one that makes him lick his lips with real relish.

In this blacker than the blackest black British black comedy, we have him as Walter Witkins, an ice cream man who drives his cart from seaside town to seaside town and when he gets the opportunity bumps off young ladies he meets, His murders are ridiculously creepy in their politeness and deference. Walter is so solicitous to make sure that he isn't hurting his victims or causing them discomfort, sometimes even beyond the point he has his hands around their throat and is choking the sheer life out of them. (There’s something fantastically creepy about your killer telling you: “Don’t worry, this will all work out fine. I promise it will all be over in a moment.” as your windpipe is crushed and your eyes roll back in your head.) When we meet him he's had a successful summer with lots of ice creams sold and a fair number of young ladies murdered and the Old Bill – as far as we can tell – nowhere to be seen. Then in one particularly sunny and busy seaside resort he runs into Hayley Mills. She’s all sweetness and innocence, golden curls and childhood purity. But she is not only much older than she looks, she has the habit of knocking off lascivious middle-aged men.
The stage is set for a deliciously deadly duel.

Released the year after ‘Psycho’, this movie is the equivalent of Norman Bates meeting a Marian Crane who is travelling the highways with a dead body in her boot. What’s more, it contains a scene the equivalent of Norman Bates bursting into the shower to find it empty and then starting to wonder why that glass of milk he had earlier tasted so funny. In many ways then this is a more disturbing film than ‘Psycho’, as in the Hitchcock classic we know even on first viewing that Norman is going to be caught. Here we don't know who will come out on top, who will die, who will be captured, or whether the two of them will overcome their differences and set up a magnificent murderous home together. We just get the strange beauty of an old killer and a young killer staring at each other with deadly adoration before doing some genuinely creepy flirting over ice cream cones.

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.

Killer on Sunset Boulevard (1982)

D. Wayne Hopkin
Colour

Johnny Cash was a pious man. A Christian who put a lot of stake in his faith in God and recorded many gospel tracks – as well as, of all things, a Man in Black Christmas album. But there was also something sinister about Johnny Cash. You don’t bill yourself ‘The Man in Black’ if you want to be loved by everyone. Just as you don’t spend hours practicing a brooding sneer in front of the mirror as a teenager (we don’t think that look just arrived on his face, do we?) if you’re planning to make it as a happy-clappy, Christian entertainer. A faithful man Johnny Cash may have been, but he knew as sure as Alice Cooper knew, that darkness sells. That’s doubly true in films. You can go so far with being pious and Christian on a cinema screen, but you can do a hell of a lot more with sinister.

Even more than the other Monkees, Micky Dolenz clearly craved fame. If you think of the gurning comedy, or the mugging at camera while pretending to play the drums, then clearly this is a man desperate to be noticed. He stood out much more than Took or Nesmith, and made Davy Jones look like a blandly English ex-Coronation Street actor in comparison. There was in Dolenz, an all-round entertainer trying to get out, a counter- culture Sammy Davis Jr – but in reality all he really got to be was drummer in The Monkees.

Here Cash and Dolenz come together in ‘Killer on Sunset Boulevard’. Although, to be fair, it’s hardly a meeting brimming with the anticipation of a Newman/Redford, De Niro/Pacino or even Godzilla/ King Ghidorah.

It’s 1982 and neither of them is at the height of their careers (although Cash would later climb the summit again; Dolenz is no longer able to see it even with high powered binoculars). So it’s an odd combination in an odd film, but one which specifically plays to who they are. From the outside Johnny Cash and Micky Dolenz look odd casting, but on closer examination it’s difficult to think of anyone else playing these roles.

This is a movie which combines ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ with ‘Desperate Hours’. Dolenz is a Hollywood star, an actor and musician extraordinaire, one of the most famous people on the planet according to the oddly fawning news broadcast we see (even the E network would consider it a little uncritical). His character is clearly leading the life Micky Dolenz himself has always dreamt of. There’s a gorgeous wife and two daughters, but more importantly the adulation of the world – who could ask for more? Except, Dolenz also has a deranged fan. This fan takes the form of Johnny Cash, who on this bright sunny day invades Dolenz’s home and holds him and his family hostage. What follows is a tense siege where Dolenz gets more and more desperate for his and his family’s safety in the face of his totally implacable opponent.

I’ll be honest, this is not a great film. Dolenz in no way has the acting chops to pull this off, and comes over more a whining child in a playground rather than a husband and father strung out to the very end of his tether. But Cash is extraordinary, so still and dangerous, with eyes that have years of fear and hurt deep within. Cash – unlike a certain Sun Records colleague – is never thought to have made that much impression of a film, but here we have an embryonic Hannibal Lector and the template for a million other screen psychos to follow.

Malcolm on Wheels (1968)

D. Henry Schloss
B&W

There’s something much less intimidating about British bikers than their American counterparts. You see in films the American biker gangs, tearing up the American highways on their hogs, before tearing up American towns and then if they get the chance tearing up American womanhood. It’s all deliberately, unapologetically and provocatively intimidating; and because that image is so persuasive the belief becomes widespread that all American bikers are that way. Yet when you’re driving about the byways and highways of Blighty and you see British bikers, you don’t feel intimidated by them in the slightest. Even when there’s a group of them together, you can’t help thinking that they’re basically nice, if slightly oil-stained young men. No doubt they probably live at home with their mothers, they work as a bank clerk Monday to Friday and their favourite dinner is beef casserole. British bikers, even British bikers who dub themselves Hell’s Angels, just don’t have anywhere near the same air of menace about them.

This black & white British film seems to back up those prejudices. For the first half an hour the central character of Malcolm fits in exactly with what we imagine a British motorcyclist to be. Played by David Hemmings, still young, thin and cherubic, he does indeed live at home with his Mum (Beryl Reid), has what looks at first glance and incredibly boring job in an architect’s office and he has great trouble talking to pretty girls – be they the nice lass down the street, or the kind of sneering leather-clad good-time girl he sees when sitting by himself at biker stops. He is bland and inoffensive, a boy/man who just likes riding his motorcycle and doesn’t want to be a fuss to anyone. He is exactly what we all imagine British bikers to be.

But that’s before he takes a Stanley knife and slashes open the throat of the leader of the local biker gang.

What follows is a serial killer/chase film, where Malcolm rides around the country with good girl who just wants some dark thrills, Jane Asher, pinion behind him. In many ways this is your stereotypical 1960s dangerous bikers’ story, with our protagonist killing those who get in their way and always just about evading the police. But even with all the deaths and the violence, it manages to avoid the dark glamour of American biker movies. One really can’t picture Dennis Hopper sat down eating marmite sandwiches out of kitchen foil and moaning about how he wishes his mum would use mustard instead; just as you can’t imagine Peter Fonda having deeply inadequate sex with his young pouting lover, who just calmly tells him that it’s okay, they can practice when they get home.

This is a film about motorcyclists on the open road, about youthful rebellion; so it’s a film that steals tropes from an incredibly recognisable part of American culture, yet still manages to produce something so weirdly and bathetically British.

The Playboy (1968)

D. Harry Reilly
Colour

One of Roger Moore’s first stabs at big screen stardom, sees him never stray far from his established persona as Roger Moore The Saint on the TV, which was of course the same persona he later made famous as Roger Moore James Bond.


Despite a long career, acting was never Roger Moore’s strong point and so you’d expect him to bring nothing else but his normal bag of tricks. Yet, even though Roger Moore is still so clearly playing Roger Moore, if you actually watch the film, you’ll see that incredibly he’s both wheeling out his normal debonair persona, but also subverting it at every level. Here his charm, suavity and effortless English cool aren’t the products of excellent breeding and inherent style, they’re just a façade which hides something far darker and more disturbing.

For in ‘The Playboy’, Roger Moore isn’t a gentleman thief or a gentleman spy, he’s a screwed up would-be gentleman and genuine mummy’s boy who likes nothing better than to little murder old ladies.

It’s 1968 in swinging London and Roger Moore cruises the streets in a second hand jaguar looking to meet ladies of a certain age he can woo and charm. Like a much hornier Max Bialystock, Moore is adept at making these women feel special; romancing them, wining & dining them, looking so happy to be on their arm. But the moment the dear old thing’s will is changed to reflect her new found infatuation, she’s ushered to bed by her handsome young suitor and takes a long sleep from which she’ll never awake. Irene Handl is suitably charmed, Joan Hickson is equally charmed, even visiting American former cabaret artiste Shelley Winters finds it impossible to resist. All fall asleep so full of love and passion that they never wake up to realise their mistake. It isn’t long though before the trail of corpses arouses suspicion and Detective Alex McGowan (playing essentially the same character he later did in Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’, but without the stilted marital bickering), starts to track his man.

Released the same year as ‘Alfie’, in many ways this serves as a darker version of that film: both being about Londoners with a taste for the ladies (including Shelley Winters, for whom 1968 was clearly a randy year around London). Yet even though the murders give it a far darker edge than ‘Alfie’, it still feels like a far older and more conservative film.

From a 1968 perspective (actually from a 2014 perspective too), Michael Caine is better cast as a modern man than his near contemporary Roger Moore. Roger Moore reeks of public school, the good tailor, the brogues. He doesn’t feel like a 1960s man, more a throwback to the 1950s, who’s only cool and young in the way Frank Sinatra was still trying to be cool and young. If ‘The Playboy’ had been released ten years earlier, its blithe mixture of that charm and murder would have made this a disturbing and genuinely memorable British film. As it was, it feels like a strange anachronism wrapped in an un-hip suit and stinking of Brylcreem.

Although watching his performance, clearly Roger Moore had more murder in his soul than he was ever encouraged to show as James Bond – and the fact he never got to use it is a dying shame. By the end of his tenure, Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny was very much the right age group for this film’s version of Roger Moore. So it’s genuinely disappointing that she just disappeared from the screen, rather than being gently ushered to sleep by an OO7 gone very, very rogue.

Now, wouldn’t THAT have been a hell of an ending to ‘A View to a Kill’?

Night-Train to Budapest (1968)

D. Terrence Fisher
Colour

I like that there’s the odd film out there where Christopher Lee actually gets to play the hero. One is the Hammer semi-classic ‘The Devil Rides Out’, where for once he finds himself on the right side of satanic events; while this – from the very same year – is a much more 1960s steampunk effort. Here the now Sir Christopher Lee is Sir Michael Wooton, an Edwardian gentleman and adventurer. He’s a derring-do hero of the old school (no doubt the kind of very English place that never admitted oiks and bred distrust of greasy foreigners). He sports the natural grace and charm of a true aristocrat, all exuded through his exquisitely tailored suit and form-fitting topcoat. He’s undoubtedly the handsomest, best-dressed man in the room, but one who has more than a little danger about him.

We open swarmed with paperboys, all yelling stories of Sir Michael’s latest exploits. Clearly he’s a star of the Edwardian age and has hired Sherlock Holmes’s publicist to boot. An adoring crowd follows him to the train station and he waves to them and thanks them for all their cockney compliments (it’s good actually that this gang of extras got work, as they’d been roaming feral since the film of ‘My Fair Lady’). He then boards the train for what for anyone else would be a pleasant journey into Europe. But given what we know of his track record, this particular journey is not likely to be peaceful – and that no doubt suits him fine.

As I said I like Christopher Lee as a hero, he seems a lovely man in reality and so it’s great that he gets to have the odd heroic moment. But if I’m honest he makes a really odd hero. When he’s supposed to be bad, Sir Chris knows how to sink his teeth into the role (pun intended); but being good doesn’t suit him as well and his discomfort leads him to becoming stiff and patrician. It means we have a hero it’s often difficult to warm to, no matter how brave or noble he proves himself to be. Here that’s thrown into stark contrast by his train-raiding nemesis, played by Orson Welles at his most avuncular. There’s the bad guy roaring with laughter over drink and food, while the reserved hero stares on with a slightly supercilious air. In addition Orson’s scheme is pleasingly bizarre, involving as it does arming the train with “a photon coal engine” and some wrought iron warheads then turning it into a bomb. (The actual plan is too big to be anything other than hazy, but there also seem to be skis and livestock involved.) Such is the mad audacious brilliance it all, combined with Welles’ sparkle and charm, that the audience is really left wondering who exactly to root for.

But more than that, on top of this fascinating good/bad dichotomy of a concoction we find, perched fetchingly, a fascinator: as Sir Chris’s sidekick, the man helping him beat this overweight, over-loud, overly-charming bad guy, is a pre-Doctor Who Roger Delgado. The saturnine looks are there, as well the dark and menacingly hypnotic eyes; although here – along with Sir Chris – he’s supposed to be one of the good guys.

So we have Dracula and The Master teaming up to thwart Charles Foster Kane on a speeding train, what kind of freak wouldn’t want to watch this movie?

The Sexy Goth Detective (2003)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour


Liddy D’eath could undoubtedly scrub off that dark make-up, take out those intimidating piercings and sling on some loose fitting pastels, then leave all this sexy goth girl stuff behind forever. But really that would make her just another pretty girl in an entertainment industry full of pretty girls – all of whom are looking for that one break. So there’s no point her doing that, she has her niche and it’s a good niche, even if it isn’t that big a niche. And to help her exploit it she always seems to have Otto Van De Mille on hand, like some kind of faithful, salivating lap-dog with a viewfinder.

Rarely has such an enduring cinematic relationship been created by two such uneven talents. At his best Van De Mille looks like he’s directing adverts, he has a way of capturing the sharp, memorable, but ultimately meaningless image. At his worst though, he’s basically a porn director, voyeuristic with an alarming lack of subtlety. (Although, to be fair, the same criticisms could be made of Michael Bay, but at least he knows how to blow shit up). Whereas Liddy D’Eath can be a brilliant and transcendent and often darkly erotic actress, Van De Mille films her in such a way that at his best makes the actress look striking and incredible and you want whatever she’s selling; but at his worst it’s like she’s just going to hump whoever else happens to be in the room with her.

Fortunately Van De Mille’s skills with dialogue haven’t yet deserted him. And it’s double, roll-over fortunate that this time they seem to have been married to an actual grasp of plot (as if he’d spent the last two years sat at home reading a book entitled ‘How to Plot Your Way out of a Paper Bag’), making this movie their best since the first sexy goth girls film.

How best to describe what we have here? Well, think of ‘Columbo’, with the killer all smug as he commits the perfect crime and then high-handedly underestimates the shabby, trench-coated detective. Now think of a ‘Columbo’ with the same kind of recognisable guest villain (Eric Roberts, if you’re interested), but instead of a shabby cop investigating him, it’s a “goth, lesbian bitch with bad PMT.” And there you have ‘Sexy Goth Detective’.

Clearly Von De Mille is going for the mainstream, a lot of this film couldn’t be any more pitched at easy Sunday night viewing if John Nettles showed up as a put upon senior detective. But in his leading lady, he has a presence – which no matter how much he wants to sanitise it – remains spectacularly dark, weird and off-kilter. D’Eath dominates this film and even though she’s the heroine, she makes every scene she is in much more tense and scary than it ever need be. It’s a disturbing and fascinating performance which truly upsets Van De Mille’s stabs for some kind of respectability and creates a disturbing and fascinating movie.

Kiss Me Dangerous (1972)

D. Henry Levin
Colour
 

So here’s a question: why isn’t a series of film starring the one and only Tom Jones as an ultra-cool private detective in The City of Angels an almighty camp-fest? Those Matt Helm films made in the 1960s are far camper. Batman the TV series was off the scale campness compared to this, and that didn’t even have the added value of a singer smugly strutting his way through the lead part. Here we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales – but really just playing Tom Jones as a private detective – tackling crime in downtown Los Angeles, punching bad guys, showing off nifty gadgets, and even in this film sporting a brand new catchphrase (“Not bad for a lad from Ponty”) and yet it isn’t total over the top camp of the campest fashion.


Why, oh why, is this?


Partly I think the answer is because it’s made in the 1970s. Matt Helm, ‘The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular’ and all those other Bond knock-offs were shot in the bright shades of the 1960s, which was very much the in-palate back then; while these films have more 1970s hues which don’t lend themselves to sheer campness. (Try and imagine a camp comedy that looks like ‘The Conversation’. Not easy is it.) But more than that, we have as the star the ultimate macho-man; the muscled, hairy Welsh love god. A lad from Ponty made very good. Yes, Tom itself keeps it from being camp. In fact, if you were to tell this good boyo from the valleys – now apparently a private detective in LA – that he was camp, he’d probably punch you in the nose.
 

In much the same vein as ‘Vengeance Man’, Tom tours around LA, sorts out bad guys, foils an evil plot and gets it on with lots of nubile young nymphettes who are waiting like moist peaches for him to pluck. When Italian nuclear physicist, Claudia Cardinale, (not the most likely of nuclear physicists, I agree, but still doing a much better job than Denise Richards in ‘The World is not Enough’) is kidnapped on an LA stopover it’s up to Tom to spring into action and save the day before the knowledge inside her head is harnessed to create a new super weapon. His best source of information is bored party girl, Pamela Tiffin (still best known for dancing in a bikini in ‘Harper’), who Tom has the predictable frosty relationship with right until he seduces her. Along the way there are fistfights, gunfight, car-chases, more than one helicopter explosion and smooch after smooch after smooch. Until at the end when the gorgeous Claudia (in what is really a cameo) is so grateful for being rescued she makes her way to Tom’s bed. Of course she does.
 

The bad guy’s representative on Earth is played by Barry Nelson (himself a one-time James Bond), but what’s really interesting is who he seems to work for. We see this Mr Big in Las Vegas, in a distinctive rhinestone jumpsuit and barking orders in an unmistakable drawl. There’s big rings, the glimpsed side of an enormous pair of sunglasses and a medallion with the legend ‘TBC’. We never see his face and that’s led to some writers believing it isn’t really him – but no, this is Elvis, in his very last acting role, playing the supervillain against Tom Jones’s superhero.
 

So the ultimate boy’s adventure, getting it on with Claudia Cardinale, amongst many other gorgeous ladies, and to top it all, having Elvis fucking Presley in a guest appearance – not bad for a lad from Ponty indeed.

An American Gangster in Pall-Mall (1985)

D. Ted Kotcheff
Colour



Every so often Ernest Borgnine left his genial, bear-like presence behind and went back to being the tough guy of his younger days. (Have you seen ‘Bad Day at Black-Rock’? You really must.) He did old and grizzled in ‘The Wild Bunch’ and he did it before he died in ‘Red’. And here he does it in this bizarre 1980s British movie, as an American gangster, dressed in a pin stripe suit, fedora and with a toothpick constantly between his incisors – like a walking, out of time, homage to John Dillinger. His niece is dead in Mayfair, but Borgnine hasn’t come to London to avenge her, all he’s interested in are the jewels she was carrying. That’s what’s really got his attention. As next of kin the jewels are his, he reasons, and he is going to stomp around the West End – kicking ass and pancaking noses – until he gets them.


Like Robert Stark’s ‘Parker’, Borgnine’s unnamed character is an unfeeling machine. He doesn’t care who gets in his way or who he hurts, all he thinks about is the jewels. Now there are in the Parker series, entries where our lead character is a fish out of water, but he’s still in a locale that is very much America and he learns how to adapt quickly. Here though we have that same unstoppable and untouchable hard guy, but also a quirky ‘ain’t Brits strange’ London travelogue. It makes for an odd movie, with Borgnine’s toughness contrasting with comical cab drivers, unarmed policeman with whistles who can only run helplessly after any perpetrator and gangs of punk rockers lurking around most corners. (Seriously the similarly titled ‘An American Werewolf in London also has menacing punk rockers. Surely any punk rocker in London in 1985 would have felt like they belonged on the ‘Antique’s Roadshow’.) Most baffling is Prunella Scales as an incredibly posh, English divorcee Borgnine meets on the plane and who shows up to flirt with him every so often. Scales plays it with a certain comic charm, but in the face of which this hard as nails version of Borgnine looks actually panicked.


The film is at its best when its lead character is punching people. First off its his niece’s foppish boyfriend, who is forced to abandon his grieving of drinking and enjoying prostitutes to have his face bashed in until he starts spilling the secret life about the dead girl; then it’s onto her drug dealer, who makes the horrible mistake of calling Borgnine “an old fart” and receives a cricket bat repeatedly to his own personal cricket balls; then the drug supplier, who has to be dropped out of a window and through the windscreen of his pride and joy Jag before he’ll cooperate, and on and on. The look on Borgnine’s face says he’s having the time of his life, that all this violence is so much fun. Of course for the film the danger is that all that face-slapping, head-butting and knee-kicking might become a bit unremitting, which is no doubt why it has Scales show up every so often – although the scenes have such a jarringly different tone, they’re amongst the most disturbing here.







So far, so late night Channel 5. But what really elevates it, what takes it above so many other violent films of the 80s, is the final scenes – when Borgnine reaches the top of this criminal empire. And who does he finds there? None other than Lord bloody Olivier. That’s right darling Larry Is lying back on a chez lounge, looking so elderly and weak, but clearly relishing every line of villainous dialogue. And here these two older Oscar winning actors (the 1948 and 1955 vintages, if you’re interested) size each other up, pad around each other, recognise each other’s distinct styles and then play an elaborate game of acting one-upmanship.  They’re really tense and delicious scenes that ensures the film builds to a tense and beautifully written ending it in no way deserves.

To Hunt A Victim (1992)

D. George Armitage
Colour


I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.


Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.


All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.

 

Stamped Overdue (1994)

D. Robert Harmon
Colour


Just as Steven Seagal once furthered his action hero career by posing as a chef, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a cop at a kindergarten, here Jean Claude Van Damme takes on a seemingly normal sounding job and brings added explosions and gunfire to it. For the small town library in the New England hamlet of Shakespeare has itself a new librarian, but this is no fusty middle aged spinster, it’s the mussels from the Brussels himself. He is Jacques Duvall, bibliophile, qualified librarian and French Foreign Legion commando. (I’m not exactly sure if commando is a rank one can attain in the Foreign Legion, or why this man – who is otherwise portrayed as French – was allowed to join the French Foreign Legion in the first place. But, please, this film really doesn’t invite too many questions.)  Coincidentally, a legendary and incredibly valuable diamond is being displayed at the museum attached to this library, and villainous James Woods and his gang of criminals are set to steal it. The stage is set for car chases, automatic gun fire and explosions in this sleepy, leafy little New England town. As the one thing this gang hasn’t counted on is the librarian.


Few films have such commitment to being mindless, adrenalin soaked fun as ‘Stamped Overdue’. It’s almost as if the writers (six of whom, incredibly, are credited), worked out a whole list of elements which JUST HAD to be in their action movie/library combo. Will the hero have a gunfight in the middle of the library, gunfire shooting books from the shelves so that they explode in charred sheets of paper? Of course he will. When the hero runs out of bullets, will he use a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to beat a foe into submission before making a tired semi-literary quip? Without a doubt. Will the hero be able to save himself by pulling the bookshelves on top of him and letting the books absorb the gunfire? Yes, because resourceful is his middle name (and books seemingly only disintegrate under gunfire when he needs them to). Will the bad guy make some sneering remark about those who like books being wimps? Absolutely. And will the young librarian assistant, so tightly wound and frigid in her bun, finally relent to the hero’s charms to undo her hair and reveal what a gorgeous face and hot bod she has? Please, this isn’t just an action movie, it is poetry!


Of course this is all magnificently stupid stuff. You truly have to admire the filmmakers’ commitment to being so absolutely, fantastically, moronically stupid. They set out to make a big, dumb film and succeeded in making a film so lacking in IQ that even that year (the year of ‘The Specialist’ and Van Damme’s own ‘Streetfighter’), it was the idiot child sat in the corner trying to suck its own thumb but somehow failing. But my problem with this big, brash film where the hero is a bibliophile librarian and the villain professes to hate reading, is that a lot of books do suffer. As a bookish man myself, it distresses me to see all those broken spines and flying leaves. By the end, when half the library is on fire, all this destruction just seems like a hell of a shame and one which doesn’t merit the big heroic flourish in the music. As for all the lead character’s stated love of books, the message of this film seems to be: books are good, but martial arts and blowing things up are way cooler – especially when the things you’re blowing up burn as easily as books. And surely that’s not the message a film set in a library should send.

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 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.

Shadows of the Aliens (1984)

D. Phillippe Noir
Colour


It’s sad that this French science fiction film didn’t garner a bigger audience, as it’s a visually innovative, sharply political, gripping thriller. Whether one would describe it as enjoyable is a question we’ll throw into the air with little heed to its safety, as there are car crashes which are less bleak. But how often do you get to pick up a croissant and a glass of red wine and sit down to a science fiction movie which has something to say and is saying it in a French accent?


Our setting, as the opening caption tells us is the future, although very little is done to indicate the future. The cars, the buildings, the haircuts all scream the 1980s, so that is where we are. (Clearly Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’ is an influence.) Our setting then is the present, but not quite the present. Jean Poiret, pulling on his policeman’s overcoat, is a government sanctioned hunter. He stalks the streets of Paris hunting down aliens, who are then rounded up and taken to who knows where. Of course this being science fiction, these aliens are humanoids from outer space (recognised by their two sets of eyelids and no toes) rather than immigrants. But for the social message of the film, these are one and the same. The aliens are not wanted by France, they have never been invited in and now they have to leave.


The first half of the film then is chasing these aliens (they are never given a name) around Paris, trying to catch them but sometimes being forced to terminate them with maximum force. In the first half hour alone we have a creature thrown off a tall building into the path of a juggernaut; and one dropped into a vat of handily placed acid (of the kind which only ever exist in the movies). Poiret seems to be the type of investigator Napoleon would like, as whenever an act of violence needs to be committed, a luckily placed fire-axe or lift-shaft is nearby.


Some movies would have been content with this cat and mouse, this human and humanoid alien, some movies would have left their ambition there. But ‘Shadows of the Aliens’ decides to push things much further.


Halfway through a giant spaceship arrives on Earth, or more precisely in Paris. (The film is French, therefore Paris is the centre of the world and quite probably the universe). These are the Vervoids, a powerful alien race which hates the original aliens as much as the French do. Initially we only see the Vervoid leader, a giant and sweaty ball of rippling flesh, unable to express the simplest emotion without its entire body rippling. Realised with the aid of a puppet, this is an alien leader who is striking and menacing and bears an unmistakable resemblance to the older Orson Welles. The Vervoids are hailed as saviours. (The fact that these first aliens are never named may cause problems in this review, but not in the film. We simply have The Humans, The Vervoids and – lastly – the aliens). With the French government’s approval – in the form of uber-efficient administrator, Gerard Depardieu – they take over Paris and work together to rid these aliens on a more industrial scale. Suddenly we have gone from problems of immigration to the Vichy government and everything has turned terrifying and strange.


There is no US/British allied force to the rescue this time (this isn’t ‘Adrienne and the Astronaut’ though, such creatures as Americans do still exist). We’re told that worried phone calls have been made by the President and Prime Minister, although the tone of Depardieu’s voice makes it seem like they’re easy to ignore. Instead the Vervoids and the humans are allowed in win. Indeed at the conclusion, with most of the original aliens dead, it’s clear how much the Vervoids and humans now look like each other. They are one and the same.


Post Star Wars there were a lot of science fiction films which didn’t really want to say anything, they just wanted to entertain with their brilliant light shows. This one though is desperate to say things, it wants to shout them from the rooftops, and is happy to bring in juggernauts, acid vats and rubbery Orson Welles just to get some attention. Maybe the end result is too dark to grab a huge audience, but this is undeniably a tense and thought provoking film.


And, really, where else are you going to see a giant rippling Orson Welles dominate Gerard Depardieu?

The Scandalous Mrs Brooks (1947)

D. Robert Wise
Black & White


One of the joys of having studied English literature is that it gives you the skills to do perverse readings of texts. I remember in my student library there was a book which proved that ‘Alice In Wonderland’ was a rewriting of The Koran. The author had gone through Lewis Carroll’s classic line by line to prove categorically – and beyond doubt - that Alice’s adventures were a rewriting of that sacred text. Now obviously ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is not a reworking of ‘The Koran’, but you have to admire the gumption of the author for attempting it. Textually he had managed to make a convincing case, even though that case was palpable nonsense. It’s a great example of what mischievous things English students can pull off if they set their minds to it.


So what can I do with 1940s noir melodrama ‘The Scandalous Mrs Brooks’? A tale of the conniving and wily Rebecca Brooks and the trouble she gets herself into. Obviously this film is nothing to do with Rebekah Brooks – currently facing trial at the Old Bailey for what went on in Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire – but let’s just say, for fun and larks, that buried away there may be hints in this film as to her case.


For starters, the central character is played by Rita Hayworth, so even though we’re looking at black and white, we know that there’s a flame haired lioness at the centre. There’s the fact that a key part of the plot is driven by a conversation that Rebecca eavesdrops over an open telephone line. At her side is an ever supporting second husband (Paul Henreid, playing the role with his normal phenomenal lack of charisma) who when he realises the perfidy of his wife, does all he can to alter the evidence. And then there’s the ruthless investigator, Claude Rains, who Rebecca first tries to charm and then to bully and then stonewall completely. Okay, its set in the 1940s, in a large mansion and the main push factor is the inheritance of your actual gold mine, but there are good reasons why no UK TV channel has shown this in the last few months. Seeing a Rebecca Brooks wriggle and connive and scheme to get herself out of serious trouble, may make jurors stare a little more anxiously at the Rebekah Brooks they have in the dock.


But what could probably be the most damning moment (certainly for any cinephiles in the jury) is when the camera pans onto a photo of Rebecca’s late husband,, Mr Brooks. There he is, played in still image by Orson Welles. That’s right, she finds herself in this movie closely associated with the most famous/notorious media mogul in cinema – Charles Foster Kane himself. Okay, Orson Welles never spoke with an Australian accent, but it isn't too much of a mental leap from bullying and untouchable Kane to bullying and untouchable Murdoch. The way Orson is wrinkling his forehead even makes him look a little like Rupert (although a vastly more handsome version). So there you have it, lies and deception, eavesdropping and obfuscation, and – to top it all - close connections with legendary media moguls. There really are very good reasons why no TV channel has shown this film in the last few months.


Of course any woman would find herself flattered by a comparison to Rita Hayworth, but Rebekah should probably do her best to avoid this film for now. The ending ain’t pretty!

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’.