The Fox and Mrs Garter (1966)

D. Albert Ross
Colour

Let’s be honest, ‘The Sound of Music’ has caused more deaths than any other movie.

I know that might sound like a contentious theory at first, but bear with me. There’s something about those nuns singing such terrible sickly songs to those creepy, godawful kids that just makes the blood of hitherto right minded people boil. (The old joke is that ‘The Sound of Music’ is a frustrating story of how the Nazis failed to kill seven revolting children.) ‘Natural Born Killers’ and ‘Dexter’ may get the headlines, but I think if an enterprising criminologist was looking for instances where someone snapped – where some sane and peaceful part of a hitherto upstanding member of the community just broke – he or she would find that in the background was a viewing of Robert Wise’s ‘The Sound of Music’. I speak from personal experience: that shot of Dame Julie spinning around on the hill makes me want to go out and bludgeon kittens.

So it’s interesting that right after that movie was made, Julie Andrews herself seemed to respond with violence.

In this genteel, but bloody, comedy Dame Julie plays the eponymous Mrs Garter, a widow who lives in a delightfully opulent house in Bloomsbury and apart from wearing black every day seems to lead a charmed life. Seeking to seduce this charming bereaved lady is Peter Sellers, as Wilberforce Cartwright-Smyth, a dapper and fake white hunter and the bluebeard of the Victorian age. He intends to marry Mrs Garter and take possession of all her money. So begins an expert seduction, which Mrs Garter seems to find impossible to resist. However Mrs Garter has her own secret – she poisoned her last husband and the husband before that and the husband before that. So both parties have murder on their mind, but who will succeed first and will they fall in love beforehand?

Andrews does nothing here that would be considered particularly funny, but in her prim and proper, no fuss approach to murder, she’s absolutely perfect for this movie and the perfect foil for Sellers. (If she couldn’t sing, she might have found her niche as a counter culture version of Margaret Dumont.) Everything he does becomes funnier because it’s so grounded by her. Indeed she brings him back down from the high moments of excitement and loudness that he was prone to at this point in his career – a mugging desperation in the pursuit of laughs. This was the period of ‘Hoffman’, ‘The Ad Man’ and ‘There’s a Girl in My Soup’ all of which show a somewhat misogynistic star. This movie could have been distasteful in the same way, but Andrews’ charm and strength of her performance negates that. She makes even the most unbearably excited version of Peter Sellers bearable (and funnier).

Apparently the two actors couldn’t stand each other (and Andrews would soon marry another of Sellers’s nemeses [he was a man who had more than one], Blake Edwards), but maybe that helped as well – as much like Alec Guinness and Hayley Mills the other week, these two would be murderers retain a certain wariness to each other even in the wooing, and the whole drips with delicious malice.

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.

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.

The Fishman of Alcatraz (1965)

D. Harry Paddock
B&W


After the success of 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' (and maybe even the lesser success of 'The Jazzman of Alcatraz') lots of Hollywood producers felt the need to make a movie with the suffix 'of Alcaraz'. After all it was the most famous prison in the world, in the news because it had recently shut down and so rather than just making A.N. Other prison film, an ALCATRAZ film made sound of commercial sense of the kind that makes dollar signs flash in the eyes of Hollywood producers and thin lines of drool to run from the corners of their greedy fat mouths. Most of these films though had ridiculously little to actually do with Alcatraz (as we'll see in the next entry), this one does though - and clearly even managed to film some scenes on the island. Not great scenes admittedly, not even memorable scenes, but enough for the film to yell out “Hey bozos! We actually fucking went there!”

I'll be honest, when I first saw the title 'The Fishman of Alcatraz' I seriously misjudged the film’s content. My obviously distressingly adolescent mind, crammed full of images of Spiderman and Batman, just imagined that Alcatraz was a really stupid place to send the captured superhero, Fishman. This is after all a prison surrounded by water and so would be a terrible location in which to hold the mighty Fishman. (Clearly my mind is full of cut-price versions of Aquaman). If one was to have Fishman in custody a prison far in land would be miles better. On Alcatraz, Fishman’s escape is inevitable.

However my super hero fantasies proved to be as unfounded and inaccurate as mermaids, mermen and that whole Atlantis myth, as this film turned out to be about a man who just really liked fish.

Following all the beats of the Burt Lancaster movie, here a doggery Elisha Cook jr is a convict who really likes fish and through correspondence courses and careful examination of his surroundings, becomes an expert on them. Therefore Alcatraz becomes his salvation, as he has lots of time to examine fish and even discovers a new breed. Set in the 1930s, there are cameos from an overweight and sweating Al Capone and a Machine Gun Kelly who ends his sentences with “rat-tat-tat” just so we know who he is. Cook looks old, but is still convincing as a small crook who got in above his head, and the whole is in many ways quite a sweet film. However whereas birds have beautiful plumage and a distinct look on screen, fish either swim away or just flop about. And after 90 minutes watching a kindly old man pursue this Piscean interest, if you haven’t flopped limp to your seat yourself, you’ll almost certainly have swum hurriedly away.

The Jazzman of Alcatraz (1962)

D. Quentin Hofstetter
B&W

White corporate America’s ability to either sanitise or remake everything in its own image always astounds me. Here we get a double jackpot, with a bleached and cleaned up version not just of the hardest nastiest prison in the United States; but much more than that, the absolute whitest version of jazz music human eyes and ears have ever had the misfortune to endure.

The altogether much too clean-cut and distinctly unblemished Robert Vaughan plays an incarcerated jazz musician. It’s hinted that he’s the victim of a miscarriage of justice and I can believe that, as a more honest, decent, grown up boy-scout boring, sickeningly saintly character one couldn’t possibly meet. Whilst enjoying a stint in Alcatraz he starts to write a piece in his head based on the sounds of life, laughter and love drifting across the bay from San Francisco. This isn’t a bad idea for a story, in the right hands those sounds of freedom would surely be both an inspiration and an exquisite torture. However the not bad idea at the centre is decidedly hamstrung by the fact that this is a film which wants to do nothing to upset middle America. And things which might upset middle America clearly include both jazz and Alcatraz.

I actually went to Alcatraz recently and if ever a film fails to capture the grim bleakness of it, it's ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’. There are moments when the director and designer seem to trying to make it look grim, but not wanting to scare off the punters means it mostly comes across as homely. It’s like a hotel that you would never want to stay in again, but still actually a three star hotel. There's a nice autumnal light to the cellblock, helpful and articulate fellow prisoners and guards who are not only courteous but actually encouraging. In fact the version in the film seems a great place to pursue an artistic endeavour, as a writer myself I almost wanted to check in there.

More alarmingly though, Robert Vaughan is the nicest, sweetest, most upstanding – non-drinking, non-smoking (absolutely no drugs!) – jazz musician to ever grace the silver screen. Even his prison uniform looks freshly starched and laundered each morning. Given the actual history of jazz music, he is painfully white and so his casting feels amazingly anachronistic in what is a contemporary film. Remember that unfortunate scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty McFly inadvertently inspired Chuck Berry? Well imagine that cultural appropriation spread out to eighty three minutes of length and you have ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’.

Except not quite.

Vaughan broods about his quite nice cellblock playing jazzman (playing rather than being, it’s an important distinction), he stares moodily out while composing in his head, but what we get here is nowhere near ‘Johnny B Goode’. It's not really a surprise that after all the inspired looks and beauty struck words he uses to describe his opus, on unveiling it is so lacklustre and insipid that to describe it as elevator music would be far too kind.

Robin Hood and the Vampires (1962)

D. Henry Jagol
Gruesome and rich Colour, the way gothic should be

Putting Robin Hood in opposition to Dracula is actually a pretty good idea. After all vampires are the most aristocratic of all mythical monsters. Anybody can become a werewolf, but vampires have castles and huge tracts of land and servants and titles. They’re not the upwardly mobile screen monsters – that’s Frankenstein, who is self-making men wherever he goes; instead they’re the inherited wealth, excellent pedigree, Tatler-subscribing creatures of the undead. As such, who better to pit against them than a man who specialises in removing wealthy people from their wealth? A hero who has thrown away his own title and is now intent on making the aristocrats of this world more like the rest of us. Yes, true friend of the masses, Robin Hood, against serial exploiter of the blood of the proletariat, Count Dracula, makes loads of sense. Let’s bring on the ultimate class battle!

Unfortunately, this being a cheaply made AIP Hammer knock-off of the early Sixties, these kinds of issues are never raised. Indeed what the film is most interested in is shots of vampires with arrows bursting through their chests.

So we’re in the forest with Robin Hood (Stewart Granger, painfully aware that he’s slumming it) and his merry men. They’re having fun singing songs as they liberate the riches of the local aristocracy, but the nearby castle has a new tenant and he has plans for the region much darker than Robin Hood has ever imagined.

(Where all this is set is a bit up in the air. The word ‘Sherwood’ is never mentioned; neither is the word ‘Nottingham’. But presumably this is Robin Hood’s home-patch so this is Sherwood Forest and this is Nottingham and that’s a bizarrely gothic version of Nottingham Castle Dracula has just moved into. But then some of the locals know Dracula of old, which would suggest Transylvania. Whoever did the research for this movie really gave a slapdash effort.)

Before long the night time woods are filled with blood-suckers and the merry men are fighting to save every soul they can. This is fairly low-rent fun, but it’s not without moments of quality. Boris Karloff is clearly far too old to be Dracula (though it’s nice he finally got to play the old fangmeister), but Jack Nicholson as Reinfeld is there for the heavy lifting and does it with all the creepiness and malice as you’d expect from Jack; while some of the fight scenes have their moments – particularly Friar Tuck first trying to exorcise a female vampire, then waving his cross at her, then pleading with her about the rightness of God, then giving up on the holy stuff and simply setting fire to her.

So a film that misses the social message which should have been obvious in this story, is geographically confused and only just scrapes up to the level its ambition aims for. But in its Robin Hood/Dracula idea – even in an unambitious, ill thought out version of that idea – you just know it’s a movie Quentin Tarantino thinks is decidedly cool.

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 Last of the Mohicans (1964)

D. Peter Potinstoff
Colour

Something I’ve rarely touched upon so far is how good an actor Elvis was. Okay, I can see you rolling your eyes and smirking, but let me finish. Clearly he wasn’t allowed to be a great actor, the material just wasn’t there for him to demonstrate that even if he’d had the talent. But often the material isn’t there for him to show himself to be a good actor either, and yet somehow Elvis mostly manages to turn in a good performance. And by good I don’t mean simply adequate, I mean he truly inhabits his character within the context of the world around him. That’s different from creating a fully rounded, living and breathing character – as most Elvis films would have been deeply unsettled by having a fully rounded, living and breathing character in their midst – but in the light and fluffy world that most Elvis movies inhabit, Elvis fills his role with aplomb. He never embarrasses himself, and even when he’s clearly bored by the music, his acting performance retains masses of grace and soul. Elvis was never allowed to be a great actor, but then he was rarely given the material to shine as a truly good actor, yet he nearly always showed himself to be inherently gifted and as a man who could have had a proper career in the cinema if he’d been given the chance.

That’s my really long winded prelude to saying that despite all of that, ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ stinks.

And Elvis is fucking terrible in it!

Even I’m not going to try and defend this one.

Actually casting Elvis as Hawkeye is a fantastic idea. After all Elvis was often reputed to have Native American heritage and he has the skin tone, the eyes and the cheekbones to pull it off. He also has a certain stillness about him on the screen, and stillness is a quality that American movies loved to use for braves and chiefs (seriously, why aren’t there any jittery and nervous Native Americans on the big screen?) In practice though Elvis has no idea what to do with the part and is deeply and obviously uncomfortable within it. I think as a young boy Elvis always wanted to be a cowboy rather than an Indian and it shows in every stilted movement. Many scenes go by with him standing arms crossed in his headdress, looking like one of those old statues – creating a lifeless immobility that is at times so convincing it surprises you when he speaks. His dialogue is no help at all though, it’s supposed to be wise aphorisms in pigeon-English but he actually comes across like a less convincing Yoda: “Speak English, proper, he cannot”. Okay, the character comes more alive in the stunt scenes, but that’s more to do with an enthusiastic stuntman than anything else.

‘Harum Scarum’ and this are the Elvis films that suffer most from being shot entirely within the confines of the studio, with a few leaves and unconvincing shrubs at Paramount unable to replicate the great American wilderness. And the supporting cast of Shelley Fabares (later seen again with Elvis in ‘Spinout’), and Deforest Kelly (looking stunned at the absurdity around him, and this is a man who managed to act like he believed in William Shatner’s toupee) don’t manage to lift things any higher. This is a strange misfiring film, where everything goes wrong and one can only be amazed that every copy of it wasn’t dramatically hurled off some waterfall in North Carolina.

The Sound of Wedding Bells (1960)

D. Nigel Ramsbotham
B&W


‘The Sound of Wedding Bells’ is runt of the litter of Cliff Richard movies, and given what that litter looks like you can imagine that it’s a very malformed and feeble runt indeed. It’s the only one of Cliff’s movies to not be a musical, the only one that aims at proper drama and a movie that manages to be both tediously stilted and decidedly weird at the same time. Okay, there are two songs, but one of them is over the end credits and the film seems there to show off Cliff’s acting skills, or at least how far he has to go until he becomes a proper actor


Here Cliff is as a young lad in Northern English town who works in the factory and still lives with his widowed mother. So far so ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, though don’t expect the brooding machismo of an Albert Finney (or for that matter, an Albert Steptoe). What’s truly interesting though is that Cliff’s character is named Harry Webber, which of course is only one syllable off his real name. So there’s almost a sense that Cliff is playing himself: the good and dutiful son who is dedicated to his career and his mother. He does seem happy with his lot at the start of the film, but soon a good-time girl arrives to throw off all the certainties of his world with just a casual glance over her beautiful shoulder.


This sweetheart is Jeanette Scott, a sexy blonde who wants to go to the bright lights of London. In her skin-tight white trousers and pink angora jumper she looks every inch the 1950’s American pin-up girl, and plays the role with appropriate American brassiness. Unfortunately that truly unsettles a film where she’s supposed to be all hot and wild for a far more frigid Cliff. Imagine the twenty-five year old Angelina Jolie trying to get it on with Sir John Gielgud and you have a good idea of their scenes together. But the script says there has to be sparks between them: so they meet, kiss, seem to fall in love (although interestingly those words are never used) and before they know it they’re engaged. As their relationship progresses it becomes clear that Cliff is going to have to decide whether to marry this fast woman follow her to a fast lifestyle in London. That would mean leaving his life, and most importantly his mother behind.


What’s interesting, for the accepted narrative that it was The Beatles who came along in 1962/1963 to blow Cliff away, is how neutered he was even a year before. Already his image is safe and dutiful and as far from a rock’n’roll child as it would be possible to be. The ending sees him separate from the gorgeous, yet wild fiancée, leaving her to head off to London by herself (where she’ll certainly meet a much more exciting man), while Cliff stays behind with his dear old mother. Yes there’s the possibility of romance with safe and conservative librarian, Una Stubbbs, but this is a film about a boy who loves his mother above all else. For a movie starring a rock’n’roller at the height of his fame that’s a decidedly odd note to end up on – and yet given how Cliff’s career and life has progressed – a really appropriate one.

Two Bouquets, Two Husbands , Only One Bride (1965)

D. Donald Howard
Colour


I got married yesterday!


There’s a fairly loud statement with which to begin a blog-post, but it’s true. I am now a married man.


The thing is though, that I’m writing this piece far in advance as I need a buffer to keep this blog chugging merrily along while I head off on honeymoon, so as I type this I’m not actually married at all. I’m writing in the past tense about things which haven’t actually happened yet. But all will be fine and by the time you read this I will be married and nursing my post-bash hangover with my gorgeous, young bride.


Anyway, this seems a perfect opportunity to look at some of the interesting wedding movies out there.


Why don’t we try this one on for size?


Kenneth Williams and Sid James both finding themselves married to Jayne Mansfield?


A preposterous idea, you say?


It happened on the big screen, my friend.


Kenneth Williams and Sid James were never a comedy double act, in fact they didn’t even really like each other that much (although that actually makes them sound a lot like most comedy double acts). But I can see how the American producers of this British production may have got the impression that they were a comedy double act. They offer a nice line in contrasts: James wiry, tough and wrinkled, against Williams’ smooth, slight figure; James’ crudeness against Williams’ fastidious prissiness; James’ dirty, salt of the earth cackle, against Williams head thrown back, nostrils flared, superior howl of laughter. This movie was an attempt to throw a budget behind them and make them a proper double act, and to really give it zing, faded glamour-puss Jayne Mansfield – the woman who practically coined the word ‘pneumatic’*  – was flown over from The States. Her name is obviously the big drawer on the poster, but it truly wasn’t really that big a deal, by this point she was well into the ‘will do anything for money’ phase of her career.


Mansfield is an American gold-digger who simultaneously marries Williams’ spoilt and effete aristocrat, and James’ scrap metal dealer made good. It’s then high farce of the doors slamming, compromising situations, rushed excuses and arms well and truly flailing kind, as she tries to keep them from finding out about each other. When they get suspicious that she’s just in this for their money, all it takes is the innocent wide eyes to Williams, and a sultry pose to James and they’re wrapped back around her little finger again. (I’m sure you can picture it: Williams gurning with excitement and amazement at his bride; James giving his biggest lascivious grin). The real problems come though when she realises she’s fallen in love with both of them.


This could have been a great bawdy 60s farce, but really it’s just not that funny. It relies on the chemistry of the leads to paper over the fact that there aren’t that many good lines, and then doesn’t put the leads together often enough to make it work. Anyone who has seen a later Carry On film will know how good James and Williams are at scraping thin samples of life off even the most stale and putrid material, so it’s galling that most of what we would loosely describe at the best lines go to Mansfield. Really, you don’t want Jayne Mansfield to be your main comic force, her talents rise and fall much more in decoration.


Maybe Williams/James could have become international stars in the Martin/Lewis mould, but it seems odd to think of them in Bel-Air, sipping cocktails and winning honorary Oscars. Theirs is a lot more pleasant, down at heal glamour. This film went nowhere (earning less and being substantially poorer in quality than the same year’s ‘Carry on Cowboy’). They may have been disappointed, but I’m glad things went this way, as they were always a better fit for a nice pair of slippers and a pint of stout at the BBC and Thames TV.



* It was either her or Aldous Huxley, I always get those two mixed up.

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.

The Dracula Twins (1965)

D. Norman Taurog
Colour


I remember as a small child being fascinated by the Hammer Horror film ‘Twins of Evil’. I hadn’t actually seen the movie, but it had been adapted as a comic strip in a horror annual I owned. For those who don’t know it, it’s a gothic set tale of twin raven-haired beauties who become vampires and attack their community. I didn’t realise as a small child that the twins were Mary Collinson and Madeleine Collinson, the first identical twins to appear in a Playboy centre-fold. Nor did I realise until I actually saw the film quite how much nudity there was (although a lot of the violence was included in this comic version for kids). Certainly I didn’t realise how bad the actual film was. The acting is poor, the sets are cheap, the script abysmal and not even the great Peter Cushing can save it.
All in all a bit of a disappointment then, but as an adult I heard about a film called ‘The Dracula Twins’ and for a moment my heart skipped a beat as I thought that maybe – just maybe – I’d found the great twin-centric vampire film I’d been hunting for most of my life.


Made six years before ‘Twins of Evil’, this movie sees another seemingly cut-off community where two young twin sisters, at their most attractively ripe, are turned suddenly into vampires and terrorise those around them. There’s probably even more gore in this than there is ‘Twins of Evil’, certainly lot of that bright red stuff that used to pass for blood in 1960s movies. But oddly, rather than an oppressive European atmosphere, this actually tries for a lighter tone; including comedy, jokes and even a musical number. You see the whole thing is set in Malibu and plays like one of those old Annette/Frankie beach movies, but one where – amidst the Pina Coladas – gruesome, painful death is never far away. That’s a little jarring in itself, but what made my excited heart sink further was the realisation of who is playing the twins.


Yes, it’s Raquel Welch.


Yes, she’s playing both of them.


That really was a blow to the stomach, as Ms Welch is frequently unconvincing in films where she’s called upon to play just one person, let alone two. And somehow, a film about vampires at the beach, didn’t seem like it would be one that would tap into hitherto unseen thespian skills. She plays Margo and Chantel, two gorgeous (although suspiciously mature) teenagers who look great in bikinis. One wears a blue bikini and one wears a red; while one has her hair over her left shoulder and the other favours the right. This isn’t Jeremy Irons in ‘Dead Ringers’ though, even the most perceptive viewer will have difficulty telling the two Raquels apart. After being attacked one night, they became predators in the beach community, both heading out after dark to kill their prey.


This truly is a mess of a movie, too gory to be funny and not funny enough on its own terms anyway. Welch’s favourite pose is to stare with her eyes wide and her lips slightly apart, but that isn’t enough to look truly seductive or truly sexy, and certainly not enough to differentiate one character let alone two.


Another disappointment then, but at least people like me who are hunting down bloodsucking twins films, can cross it off the list.

The World Cup and Saucer (1967)

D. Spike Milliga (and apparently an uncredited Richard Lester)
B&W


No doubt this would have been more successful and better known if it had been released actually during the World Cup in 1966, but since it was made on the fly during the tournament itself by two friends primarily concerned with amusing themselves, then commercial prospects weren’t high on anyone’s agenda. Working with no script and seemingly no idea what to do at the start of each day, the two friends ad-lib their way through the entire 64 minute running length of the film, making silly jokes, putting on ridiculous accents and appearing in ludicrously hit and miss (mainly miss) sketches. It all sounds incredibly tedious, doesn’t it? The kind of movie that would now appear on Youtube, the braying laughter of the cameraman accompanying every moment that’s supposed to be remotely funny. It sounds like the kind of thing most people would rather poke their eyes out with sharpened sticks rather than watch; but then given the old friends in question are Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, even self-indulgence is not going totally devoid of comedy.


Some of it is, to be fair, almost inspired. The ongoing travails of World Cup Willy – the lion which served as a mascot for the whole tournament – who at various points finds himself stuck outside a palace with his tail caught in the door, attacked by poodles and propositioned by an overly-amorous gay lion, did make me laugh. The highlight though is the insert of a long piece of stock footage of a bus caught in traffic with Sellers dubbed over bus driver trying to explain to the Argentinian team that they are not lost, all the time it being clear they are very, very lost. (“This is the Norwich district of London.”) I also enjoyed Spike Milligan’s Swedish man who clearly is only using the World Cup as an excuse to eat in every restaurant in London. Fifteen years later that character would be called Mr Creosote.


Unfortunately we also get the other side of the Sellers/Milligan dynamic, which is what we would call ‘ethnic humour’. The presence of so many people of different nationalities, of different skin colours, just lets these two white boys crack out the make-up and funny accents. Some of it isn’t bad, I suppose: Milligan’s Mexican footballer and Seller’s Spanish footballer meeting up and just being totally unable to understand each other, for instance. But then elsewhere we have Nazi West Germans and overly lazy Portuguese in skits that don’t start well and don’t get better the longer they go on. Most distressingly though is Milligan’s Pakistani meeting Sellers’ Indian both under the impression that this is a cricket tournament, and the comic misunderstandings that occur as they try to find the game with the bats. Milligan grew up in India and denied that any of this was meant in a racist fashion, but even if we take that at face value it’s incredibly regressive, more than a little unfortunate and a sign that sometimes even comic geniuses have feet of clay.

The Female Boss (1964)

D. Valentine Woolf
B&W


Here's a moody black & white melodrama that was no doubt on Matthew Weiner's radar when he created ‘Mad Men’ (although since he oddly claims that he hadn't read Richard Yates's superb ‘Revolutionary Road’ – which looks, feels and smells like a full drawn out blueprint [bathrooms, windows and all fixtures included] for ‘Mad Men’ – then perhaps it actually, and slightly incredibly, wasn't). It’s set in New York in the early 1960s, centring on a high-flying business executive in a power suit, played with charismatic authority by a born star performer. This is a character who drinks and smokes far too much across the course of the day, there’s office intrigue and drama, and even the possibility of romance with a younger member of staff. Except, the twist here is that this executive is played by the divine Ms Joan Crawford.


Clearly latching on to Ms Crawford’s role at Pepsi Cola (she had married an executive and did a hell of a lot of work for the second of America’s fizzy drinks companies, and at his death wound up on the board); we have on the back of her marketability in ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane’, Ms Crawford in corporate America. There she is in a dark tailored suit staring down subordinates (and particularly insubordinates) when she finds herself Acting President, steering the company through a crisis after the beloved old President dies. The industry she works in is left deliberately vague, but even if it’s not advertising she does get to stride around like a proto feminist Don Draper exuding ruthless arrogance or delicate feminine charm, depending on the encounter. As Don is far luckier than her, because she also has to face blatant sexism in the workplace: snide voices plot against her, believing her to be just as a token women who has risen too far, or refer to her as “the secretary”, or say that her power has come through some undescribed (but no doubt salacious) incident.


Unfortunately beyond 'a woman in the boardroom, that’s a crazy, new idea!' the film doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. She’s Acting President for most of the film, but the main thrust of the story is her trying to find the right candidate to be full time President and at the end she does and it’s a man (albeit a very liberal, modern sort of man). So the film isn’t ready yet to accept a woman as full-time head of the boardroom. But more than that it strives to show how hard this corporate life is, but it also strives to show that it's especially hard on a woman, which kind of undermines its supposed ‘sexes are equal’ ethos. Still the pressure of proving herself means we get lots of great scenes of Joan in angry meetings, steely-eyed confrontations, and then – afterwards – her jaw wobbling when she's back in her own office supping a much needed tumbler of whisky. Jon Hamm’s Don Draper may be many things, but he rarely lets his jaw wobble – and certainly not as divinely as Joan’s does here.


With an aesthetic borrowed straight from ‘The Apartment’ (so much so you expect a cameo from Jack Lemmon, talking to his wife on the phone and still calling her “Miss Kubelik”) this is without a doubt a well-intentioned film, but one which hasn't really thought through its convictions enough to have courage in them.

The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular (1966)

D. Ken Annakin
Colour


I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.


This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.


(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)


Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.


I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.


Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.

Agent Marie Lautrec (1964)

D. André Hunebelle
Colour


I’ve read in other guides that this is a French James Bond imitation/spoof, but surely it has as much to do with OSS 117 as it does with 007. We might not want to admit it in our smug Anglo-Saxon way, but Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath actually precedes James Bond in both books and films – so maybe we should salute the French for their own originality in this regard. Although given the popularity of the two franchises, let’s make it a small salute. I can see though why the James Bond element is concentrated on more than anything else; as in this zany, Technicolor, bright, loud, flashy and explosive film, we have not only the over the top quality of 1960s Bond spoofs, but also how untethered from reality and ridiculous James Bond would himself become.


Brigitte Bardot, here the sex symbol to end all sex symbols, is our title character: the stunning, super, secret-agent Marie Lautrec. We know how brilliant she is as everybody in the (unnamed) French secret service keeps telling us. However from watching the film, it seems that her main talent is wearing lots of ridiculously tight and skimpy outfits. There she is doing some espionage work while dressed as a French maid (or maybe in the context of this film, just a maid), a Catholic school girl, in a ridiculously low-cut top and tight shorts as a cow-girl, and even for a brief scene as the kind of dominatrix who would give Emma Peel a run for her money. Beyond taking the odd covert picture or listening in to other people’s conversations, there’s little in the way of espionage involved. But hey, ‘Diamonds are Forever’ or ‘Moonraker’ weren’t likely to be shown as MI6 training films either.


The plot is similarly full of Bond spoof ludicrousness, involving as it does flies with cameras on their backs, de-thawed hibernating Nazis who just can’t get their feet warm, robotic dragons piloted by midgets and an attempt to crash the moon into North America. It’s all stupendously and utterly bonkers. This is a movie which would look at the concept of a mad, bald super villain living in a hollowed out volcano and decide it wanted to steer away from such social realism. But then ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’ doesn’t want you to concentrate on the plot, it exists for loud colours, cackling villains and Brigitte Bardot pouting and playing with her hair while dressed in very little.
But elsewhere in the movie we have the odd contrast of the lovely French chanteuse, Francoise Hardy, as a colleague of Bardot’s and a possible double agent. In the restraint of her performance, in how demure her outfits are in comparison with the star, we have a glimpse of a whole other film.


Whereas Bardot is predicting Bond at its most unrestrained, Hardy seems to want to play a part in a particularly dour John Le Carre adaptation. Her more reigned in performance slows the film down and the scenes between her and Bardot are absolutely beautiful. Yes, its style clashing with brassiness, but it’s also that rare moment when the film allows itself to breathe, giving us something actually tense and interesting. Predictably these scenes also have a distinct lesbian edge, which at the time I thought it might just be the French being the French, although as we’ll see in the next film – it was a trait 1960s female-led adventure films seemed really eager to explore.

Nickleby (1963)

D. Randall MacDougall
Colour

So, once again I find myself defending an Elvis adaptation of a classic which gets more than its share of stick. Complaints I’ve read include that it’s all done without leaving the studio, that all the songs are boringly old fashioned and that it’s ridiculously hard to follow. And individually it’s difficult to make an argument against any of those points. They’re pretty much all on the nose, flaws that have to be acknowledged before any defence of ‘Nickleby’ can be made. But just picking out those individual faults ignores that a lot of this film actually works, and that casting Elvis Presley as sensitive, earnest, idealistic school teacher Nicholas Nickleby isn’t the irredeemably dumb idea many would expect.


For starters, handing Dickens’ long and sprawling novel to a fillet-happy butcher was a brilliant stroke. I said that casting Elvis as a sensitive, earnest, idealistic school teacher isn’t as stupid as one might expect, but actually the whole school teacher thing is only really alluded to. There is no Dotheboys and no Wackford Squeers. Some may see this as a bowdlerisation of the worse kind – but I think it’s bloody genius. It means that the focus is Nicholas’s time with the Crummles and their theatrical troupe – and if there’s ever a place where Elvis is going to feel at home, it’s near the bright lights of the stage, occasionally getting up to belt out numbers.


Okay, the songs aren’t great, but even so it’s never going to be dull to watch the King of Rock’n’Roll take on ‘Goodbye, Dolly Gray’, ‘I’m Henry the Eighth, I am’ and ‘The Man who Broke the Bank of Monte Carlo’. The choice of predominantly English music-hall songs is an interesting one, as the setting is Victorian New York, not Victorian London, which at least it removes the need for Elvis to attempt any kind of accent. If there’s one thing we’ve observed from these Elvis adaptations of classic novels, it’s that the boy really doesn’t like accents.


Elsewhere we have Nicholas’s virtuous and beautiful cousin Kate, for whom Nicholas holds a torch; there’s his villainous uncle Ralph (Harry Morgan, who later showed up in a more friendly role in ‘Frankie & Johnny’); and his slow witted sidekick, Smike. And that’s the real problem with this film, even with the Smithfield-esque butchering there is still so much plot and context needed to make the story works and no place to put it beyond clunking dialogue and clumsy asides. (“Ah, Mr Nickleby. I saw your Uncle Ralph the other day in his counting-house and a less pleasant cove I have scarcely glimpsed” is an actual piece of dialogue.) As the film progresses it becomes truly hard to work out why X hates Y, or what the history is between A and B, or why F is behaving in quite that way to G (and who the fuck is G anyway?) Indeed in an adaptation this confused and liberal, knowing the book becomes a positive disadvantage – as plot, character and relations are all gleefully subverted for ease, simplicity and sometimes just plain perversity. For example, we have Nicholas’s rather queasy love for his own sheltered cousin, Kate. Although given that that character is his sister in the book, it was possible for the film makers to embark on an altogether more troubling exploration of incest.


So, yes it’s flawed and yes Elvis is not playing Nicholas Nickleby – in looks, temperament or the fact he keeps belting out tunes – in any way that Dickens would recognise. And yes it’s hard to follow just what the hell is going on. But that’s to ignore that for most of the film Elvis is having a great time. This is the best Elvis ‘putting on a show’ movie ever made, and to hark on about its problems is just to close your eyes and ears to how damned entertaining it is.

Adrienne and the Astronaut (1967)

D. Jean-Pierre Matisse
Colour


It’s odd that the French film ‘Le Cosmonaute Rend Visite à Adrienne’ was given the English title ‘Adele and the Astronaut’, as the future we are shown seems to be one where the Americans are completely wiped out. An astronaut is obviously a term for an American voyager to space, and yet the spaceman we meet is Terence Stamp and very British. (Very cockney in fact, so cockney that one briefly wonders whether the future will be a nightmare vision of jellied eels and rolling out the barrel). He isn’t remotely American. Indeed Americans aren’t mentioned at any point in the film and so the impression we get is that there are no Americans in the future. So this film, made at the height of the space race, two years before the moon landings, seems to go out of its way to suggest that in outer space there will be no room for the Yanks.


How are we to read this? To theorise that years from now all Americans will have been wiped out is probably a step too far. This is a film which posits a totally idyllic future in store for us, one where all citizens are happy, where their minds are totally open to new experiences, where love and contentment are universal rights. As such it would be odd if such a future was built on the total genocide of the whole American nation. It would be more than a tad icky to think of a future so beautiful built on such brutality to Uncle Sam. But the French film makers do seem to be saying – at the height of Vietnam, with riots right across The States – that true brotherly love can only take place without the Americans there. So if that’s the case, what happened to them?  If we discount genocide, then what else is there? Maybe they flew in away in their spaceships and have headed to Mars, where they now have all the wars their blood thirsty souls could possibly desire. Or perhaps they have transcended to whatever giant shakes, chilli cheese dogs, large fries on the side place in the sky Americans call nirvana.


Whatever. The French are making this film and they have decided NO Americans. And that it makes it interesting. After having seen and read so much American science fiction, it is intriguing, as well as somewhat jarring, to see a version of the future from which Americans have been totally excluded.


Catherine Deneuve is a futurist living in swinging London. By any measure she has made quite a good life from this nebulous profession of predicting the future, kitting herself out with a good pad and the fanciest designer clothes. But there’s one thing missing from her life and that’s a lover. That all changes one sunny morning however, when a man arrives from the heavens (actually there’s a blinding light in her bathroom and he steps out of that. So rather than the heavens it’s a toilet, but the principle is the same). He is spaceman, Terrence Stamp. A  creature from the future, part of the British stellar expedition force (which isn’t as mad as it sounds, the British were trying to make strides towards space in the late sixties), who has volunteered to be part of the new time travel programme. The technology is still in early days though and so Terrence has found himself transported back to the 1960s and Catherine. The reason for this is that she’s apparently is his true love - even though she was born a couple of hundred years before him, which suggests Cupid has one weird sense of humour.


Terrence takes Catherine to visit his time, so she can compare it to her visions. What we’re given is a very sixties version of the future, where the phones are still the clunky same (and people actually still use phone-boxes for calls, and not just urination), the skirts are much shorter and mop-top bands are very much in fashion. The Beatles though are passé, which must have looked an odd conclusion to reach in 1967. There are also zeppelins, and that’s actually one of the things Catherine predicted correctly. (Seriously, what is it with futurologists and zeppelins? Why do they believe that the future will be filled with them? It’s seventy years now since the zeppelin was last a serious mode of transport, face it: zeppelins aren’t making a comeback). This future is a very 1960s ideal of brotherly love and peace, and it’s all so wonderful and everybody is so happy, and it’s truly and remarkably dull. The future is bright and its lovely, but nothing actually bloody happens. Eventually to add a bit of drama, it’s realised that the gorgeous young lovers can’t sustain their relationship over the timelines and must separate. It’s sad as Terrence Stamp and Catherine Deneuve may be the best looking couple in cinema history, and through their peaceful and non-threatening and non-adventurous adventures, we’ve grown to kind of like them. For those who are still awake, it’s a little bit sad when they part. But at least when Catherine returns to her timeline, she knows that the future is safe and beautiful. And who knows? When she gets married and has kids and grandchildren and so on, maybe Terrence will turn out to be a descendent of hers. (Come on, I was bored. The film wasn’t offering me any spice, so I had to create my own).


It’s a pleasant film, an optimistic film, but it is the kind of film to make your eyelids beg for mercy. Say what you will about the yanks, at least they know to add a bit of action to these things.