Trio (1984)

D. Anthony de La Sewell
Colour

This one is going to be like a dog whistle to bad movie lovers.

Here we have Patsi Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony as a female pop group/super spies saving the world whilst also filming a music video and trying to get to Top of the Pops on time. Yes, I’ll say those names again Patsy Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony, three beautiful but limited actresses who scream the 1980s to Britons of a certain age. As with all deference to George Orwell, this is the most 1984 movie ever made. There’s the cast, the music, the hair, the shoulder pads, the cultural references which were supposed to make it hip and with it, but must have actually made it look aged and past it by January the First, 1985. You see the group here are clearly supposed to be Bananarama. In fact I’d be totally stunned if this wasn’t written with Bananarama in mind. Not only is there the sassy all good trio, adored stars of the British music scene, but the fact that when they perform the singing is actually Bananarama’s – taking on songs from the bottom of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman slush pile (and when you hear them you’ll realise that these songs must have been pressed right to the floorboards they were so far down). Why Bananarama themselves weren’t cast is open to debate. One can only guess that it’s because they weren’t really actors. Although when you see the performances Hurley, Anthony and Kensit give, you’ll realise that can’t possibly be the reason.

The plot starts in Thailand (for the music video shoot) before returning to London (for the Top of the Pops appearance), but in-between the wearing swimsuits and leggings and miming, the girls find that the spy agency they work for has been compromised and a list of agents is now in the wrong hands. It’s up to our mighty trio (the group is actually called ‘Trio’, such is the lack of inspiration) to juggle their priorities and get them back. Gradually the prime suspect emerges as former agent and 1970s pop superstar, Magdalena de Faith – and Trio have to stop her before she carries out the final part of her dastardly plan.


(Interestingly this would all seem to be much the same plot as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, so I guess that is an unofficial remake of this. That’s a film I’ve never managed to watch all the way through, as it’s awful. This is awful too, but in a more fun and haphazard way; Charlie’s Angels is awful in the most corporate, soulless way possible.)


Joanna Lumley plays Magdalena de Faith and is fantastic as the haughty European has-been, and thus totally wasted in this movie. Kensit is bad, Anthony equally so, but both look Rada trained next to Hurley, who can barely walk convincingly, let alone deliver lines. The songs are awful, the plot is obvious (with zero sense of pacing) and even though the crew was clearly flown out to Thailand for exteriors, the interiors couldn’t be any more shot on a cheap sitcom set in Elstree if Mrs Slocambe marched into shot. In short this is a bit of a disaster, but I’d thoroughly recommend it.

The Gentleman in the Pub (1947)

D. Arnold Pouter
B&W

That rarest of things: an English Boris Karlofff movie.

Boris Karloff just seems such an international figure. Even though his career was predominantly American, the name he took and that sinister screen persona made it seem like he was from some strange forgotten land. Bela Lugosi had a similar name, but he had an accent which gave away that he was from a fixed Eastern European locale. Karloff with his more mid-Atlantic tones was just impossible to place (and you certainly wouldn't have imagined he was from Catford in South East London. Somehow I can’t imagine Karloff on a Cockney fruit stall). No, Boris Karloff the star of scary movies hailed from some mysterious isle, maybe the same one as King Kong, and no doubt he hatched from an egg fully grown as the dapper, sinister and yet vulnerable gentleman we know.

Here he is back home, in that version of England which existed in a film studio’s polite and ordered mind, as a man who occupies the corner stool of a saloon bar and tells eerie tales. (In many ways like P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner, without the jokes, but with a surprising amount of horror and death.) Karloff relates these stories with a sinister smile on his face, his voice rumbling with menace, his hand forever stroking a scary, one-eyed black dog. Indeed what gives away that this pub isn't quite normal is the fact that everyone else in the pub just accepts Boris as one of them and don't run a mile from him – while in reality his presence would make any pint of warm ale feel uncomfortably chilled.

On a stormy night a charisma void of an actor, Robert Wainwright, stops by this country pub for a gin and water and a relief from his long drive. Boris has already embarked on that evening’s tales and the young man is drawn into listening, and so begins a portmanteau of stories - one about a young man breaking his father's heart by running away and the comeuppance that falls upon him; one is an act of cowardice in the war which has terrible consequences, and one is a man who breaks his fiancée’s heart in a tale which leads to murder and destruction. The realisation slowly dawns on this young visitor to the pub that all of these are all sinister twists on events which have happened in his own life.

The confrontation between him and Karloff swiftly escalates beyond all reasonable disbelief, and the (SPOILER ALERT) revelation that its Karloff's dog who is the sinister force is too silly for words, but in the main this is a scary and tense film where Karloff comes gloriously home, purring at his most superbly sinister in an unmistakably British setting.

At the end the young man runs into the darkness and the pub goes back to how it was, presumably before a name change and a visit from those poor young lads in ‘An American Werewolf in London’.

Atom-Man!!!

D. Stanley Kirby
That really faded and dank colour I am constantly amused and depressed by in 1970s British films

So here we have the second of this week’s ‘man at the centre of a nuclear explosion isn’t blown into a million pieces as you’d expect, but instead absorbs the frightening powers of radiation and becomes something akin to a super man’ movies. The first was a tense, taut cold war thriller, hampered by the fact that the man on the run looked so blatantly suspicious it was like he had a big self-powered neon sign saying “Radioactive man here!” above his head.

So now we come to this, the more heroic and the more moronic version.

The first thing to notice is the date off release, 1978. That’s 19-fucking-78! What this is aiming for is the wild psychedelic James Bond spoof, of the kind that I’ve covered on this blog before. But all those films come from the late 1960s, when Bond-mania is at its height. There are very few of them after that, because James Bond movies started to aggressively spoof themselves – so that if you wanted ‘James Bond thriller’ and ‘spoof of James Bond thriller’ you only needed to buy the one ticket. 1978 is not the time of Bond spoofs

The second thing you immediately notice is who is playing our heroic lead, it’s Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver bloody Reed. I appreciate that after a career playing brooding and sinister outsiders, Oliver probably leapt at the chance of being an actual hero. He has the looks, he has a certain dash to him and he even appears to be sober. But there’s still something so menacing about him, a stillness that makes it seem like, even though he’s the hero, he’s considering randomly killing everyone else in the room.

Atom Man is a world hero who lives in London and has the secret identity of super spy, Gregory Smythe. Yes, the film really is having its greedy teenage geek’s birthday cake and stuffing its face full of it. But he faces a two pronged attack: the Russians have a ray that they hope will render Atom-Man powerless; AND there’s a secret agent who is going to seduce and make Gabriel Smythe switch sides. To be fair it’s more invested in the spy stuff as it actually doesn’t have the budget to do the super hero stuff, being set again and again in boring rooms and having Adam West-esque sound effects when Atom-Man throws a punch. It also has female nipples, which as far as cinema is concerned, were invented in 1969.

It’s interesting to watch this film next to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, which was released a few weeks earlier. One is top quality superhero antics which still resonates today, the other is a cheap British romp – which in its final run around in a nudist camp seems to just give up all pretence and admit to just being a cheap British romp. But in the anti-heroic performance of its hero, you can’t help thinking that there’s a far darker and weirder film completely untapped here. People speak of having a darker Batman, but no one thought of handing it to someone like Oliver Reed. Except that one day in the forgotten mists of cheap British movies, somebody actually did.

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 Man (1982)

D. Tommy Bond
Colour

Looking like one of those old health and safety cartoons that for some reason has been blown up into an actual movie (although with animation so unsophisticated it actually makes those creaky old ‘Bananaman’ cartoons seem like cutting edge Anime) we have a movie superhero who totally fails to ignite. The mighty Bernard Cribbins voices the not quite so mighty Bonfire Man, who dresses in a cape and tights (in an outfit so like Superman’s, the lawyers at DC must have been twitching in their crypts), but who has the strange but apparently mighty power of bonfires. It’s important to distinguish that from the power of fire which would of course make him The Human Torch, as although he has these incredible and amazing talents, he’s only able to use these incredible and amazing talents every November the 5th.

Why? You might ask. It’s a fair question and the film does try to answer but does so with such magical, mystical, science fiction mumbo jumbo that the answer might as well be blah blah blah.

Anyway just accept that we have a superhero who can only use his talents one day a year. Now mostly he uses these talents to start large bonfires. He stands on a podium in front of a screaming and braying crowd, and with a click of his fingers and a whoosh of his hands, he ignites the giant neighbourhood bonfire. As such he is a minor British celebrity, feted every time Guy Fawkes Night comes around. But he’s also a man who at the dawn of each November the 6th takes off his outfit and returns to his life as Arthur Stewart, the local fish and chip shop owner. His powers vanish, his muscles and chiselled jaw sink away, and he’s back to serving up saveloy and battered sausage.
But with Bonfire Night coming up this year, a criminal gang is planning to use the noise of the fireworks to rob the local bank. This year it seems that Bonfire Man may have to step out of his shell and use his powers for real and proper good.

Okay, one can see how blowing a bank vault on bonfire night would cause less attention than blowing it on, say, Easter Sunday. The plan makes sense from that point of view. But if in the town there is a superhero named Bonfire Man, who only has super powers one day a year, then maybe that day is not the best one on which to embark on a nefarious scheme. Wait until Chinese New Year, for god’s sake!

It’s a kids film so one shouldn’t be overly hard on the simplicity of its logic, but it’s a kids film with such low ambitions, it’s frankly quite depressing. One could make a really interesting film about what it would mean to have such ephemeral powers, about what it’s like to be a lonely man who is treated as a god for one day a year. Sadly this isn’t that film.

It’s worth watching though as the thing which really works in this movie is Cribbins voice work, which is truly brilliant – managing to distinguish Arthur Stewart from Bonfire Man, but keeping them recognisably the same person; as well as finding emotions and depth in lines that even the scriptwriter clearly thought were just throwaway crap. Everyone in the UK is genetically programmed to love Bernard Cribbins and this is yet another reason why.

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.

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?

Daleks in New York (1972)

D. Henry Q. Fleming
Colour


Four years after their amicable split, which saw The Doctor fail to fight the daleks on TV for four years and the daleks get their own movie which at points seemed to last four years, we have their reunion. Despite Terry Nation’s best efforts the daleks hadn’t been successful by themselves. Most sensible observers saw that coming, as after all murderous pepper pots who bicker amongst themselves in grating metallic voices aren’t actually inherently cool. So we’re back to where we began, with him licensing his monsters for the TV show again and as a quid pro quo, that strange Victorian human inventor with a doctorate and the unlikely surname of ‘Who’ returning to the films.


Yes, here is Peter Cushing in his velvet coat, looking much the same but now sporting exciting 1970s side-burns.


There has been a change though, as whereas the first dalek story was a horror film for kids, with human beings on a strange planet in terrible danger, here we get – well, a mess. The tone of this film is so schizophrenic that it’s unclear whether the director, writer, crew or cast gave any thought at all to what this movie was aiming for. It’s both brooding urban menace and broad comedy, almost as if two films were actually shot and then haphazardly edited together by some cracked old drunk. The scary and ruthless army of daleks of the last (underperforming) film are replaced by battered daleks who’ve only just managed to drag themselves by their suckers out of their crashed spaceship. But having six daleks rather than six hundred works, as inspiration strikes and we have the great image of killer daleks lurking like muggers down dark New York alleyways. (Although clearly this production never went to New York as the film is either shot on sets or on that rare London street which could conceivably pretend to be New York.) Unfortunately, in-between the scary exterminations, we also have a couple of fun and playful daleks. And the silly daleks make their more ruthless brethren look by association just a bit, well, silly.


Cushing and his granddaughters arrive in New York (I’ve lost track at this point of the granddaughters’ names and the actresses playing them; for a character who seems so sexless, this Doctor Who’s progeny really do seem to go at it). What follows is a cat and mouse game with these rogue and dangerous creatures of Skaro, but at the same time the audience is supposed to find a couple of them sweet and endearing in their incompetent pootling around the Big Apple. So we have the daleks killing a mother who is pushing a pram, but we also have them trying to recruit a bubble-gum machine to their cause. We have them melting locks as they pursue the doctor, but then being befuddled by an escalator. It makes for a really mind-bending film and that’s before we get to Binky7.2.


My friends, if you ever wanted to see where George Lucas got inspiration for Jar-Jar Binks, then look no further than Binky7.2, the friendly dalek. This is a dalek who appreciates poetry, who tries to sing in his grating metallic voice and spends the film learning about humour and how to crack wise. This is the dalek the doesn’t buy into the others’ killing and world domination plans and the one who (SPOILER ALERT) ends up saving Doctor Who’s life and joining the Tardis as a companion by the end. Certainly a friendly travelling dalek goes a bit against expectations and makes a nice twist, but let’s be fair, it doesn’t bode well for more serious films ahead.

Over the Threshold (2004)

D. Mike Culumbus
Colour


Nicole Kidman should not be allowed to do comedy.


It’s a fact that should be as clear as the flipping moon by now.


Obviously she’s an extremely good dramatic actress and clearly a very attractive woman (there are blind man in lost tribes of the Amazon who fancy Nicole), but to cast her in a comedy is always huge and regrettable mistake. It’s as if she doesn’t understand the concept of jokes or laughter or punchlines, even prat-falls are beyond her – there’s just something too delicate and restrained about Nicole for her to ever fall over in a funny way. Evidently she thinks she can do it, but that’s because she has watched other people be funny and imagines she can copy them. But there isn’t an amusing, witty or humorous sinew in her whole body, so she just ends up working her way through comic scripts in dead-eyed incomprehension – and that is not good for the health of any comedy project. (For another red headed actress similarly affected, see Moore, Julianne). By all means cast her in drama, let her do big emotional, tragic, scenes with swelling scores that make Oscar voters sit up and salivate like juicy prunes, but just keep her away from comedy. There are some people who can get laughs and there are some who really, really can’t. She is the latter.


Here’s an example, with Nicole playing against Hugh Grant in a culture clash comedy that was actually released in 2004 but feels like it’s been sat on a shelf since about 1958. Giving an early sketch of her white trash role from ‘The Paperboy’, but this time broader and less subtle, NIcole is a Kentucky waffle waitress who is wooed and married by visiting English aristocrat Grant. After the wedding she’s whisked back to England where fish out of water comedy ensues. It’s not a particularly original scenario for a film, is it? And believe me the script does it no favours by being half-baked, underwritten and about an eighth as funny as a 1980’s ITV sitcom.


So we have comedy yokels, sniffy aristocratic relatives, cheerful barmen, flirty antique dealers, a brassy would-be mistress for Grant, and – as counter-balance – a sleazy aristo interested in the delectable Nicole. The jokes are asthmatic and seemingly riddled with hay-fever in the English sunshine, so Grant does what he always does in these situations and starts to flail wildly in an attempt to make things funny just through a kind of polite mania. It results in him playing every scene slightly too loud in an attempt to bring life to them, but really he just sucks all the fun away in his desperation. Yet because Nicole just doesn’t understand comedy and doesn’t understand that this won’t work, she starts to imitate him, as if believing that since Grant does know about comedy this must be the way to do it. And so we have both of them horribly over the top, both of them waving their arms and bulging their eyes, until the two of them are caught in a despairing and terrible death spiral of unfunniness.


It’s terrible to watch, and on a blog where I’m supposed to be recommending obscure films I have to say that you should avoid this one like a virulent plague-zone. I just bring it forth as Exhibit A in why Nicole most absolutely, totally and certainly shouldn’t do comedy.

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 Chrysalids (1971)

D. Michael Anders
Colour

‘The Chrysalids’ is a fantastic novel which I’ve travelled too far in life without reading and, now I have, I whole-heartily recommend it. As such I really wanted to enjoy this obscure and barely released film adaptation. John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ are much more wired into the psyche of the British public, I think, because of the film versions (the latter, of course, as ‘The Village of the Damned’). I wanted this film then to right a wrong, so that even if it wasn’t as well known it may one day get a cinema re-release, or a big DVD push, and the reputation of both it and the book would rise. Unfortunately, even though it doesn’t shy away from ambition, there are performances here so ropey they could be used in rigging, dialogue so mouldy it’s like it’s been delivered from a petri dish, the kind of continuity errors that would get most film-editors beaten, whipped and then sacked, and a plot which even a casual observer would stare at and wonder where all those bloody great holes came from.

Set in a harsh puritan society of a post-apocalyptic world, we follow decidedly mature teens Ian Ogilvie and Jane Seymour, who like nuclear Romeo and Juliet fall in love despite the enmity of their families. When the pair’s passion is discovered, the arguments which ensure result in the two of them revealing hitherto hidden telekinetic powers that mark them both out as devil’s spawn in their world. Their only chance for survival is to flee into the badlands outside the civilised world, but such is the fear they’ve provoked, they are pursued relentlessly by the mad preacher who runs the town.

I can handle Seymour and Ogilvie not really looking like teenagers at all. I can handle that the moment they escape, they ditch their buttoned up puritan garbs for some battered and revealing swimwear, as clearly they’re now rebelling. I can handle that the telepathy in the book has become the far more visually pleasing telekinesis in the film. I can ever handle that both Seymour and Ogilvie’s performances are bland, particularly when compared with the ridiculously and enthusiastically evil turn Roy Dotrice gives as the town preacher – and Seymour’s dad.

But what I really can’t get a grip on is the way telekinesis is only used when the plot needs it. At points the film just forgets that its lead characters can move things with their mind – which we can all agree, would be a useful ability to have in a scrape – and just finds some other way to get them out of trouble. Similarly the unexploded nuclear bomb they find at the end feels like deus ex grande machina. The book’s different ending also has a similar charge against it, but here we have two people, hundreds of years after a nuclear war that’s ill-defined in their history, instantly clocking what this weapon is and figuring out how to use it to their advantage. It’s like watching a caveman have a flash of inspiration on how to programme a digital watch.

There are some scary moments en route, particularly for Seymour who is very much screaming peril monkey of the movie, but this is a film which rides its way through the pretty English countryside with only a faint grasp on its own plot, and so never captures Wyndham and fails even on its own terms.

Mr Hargreaves (1959)

D. John Guillermin
B&W


If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.

In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.

This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.

Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.

(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)

Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.

At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.

Marie Antoinette (1985)

D. David Spartan
Colour


Having started the week with Paul Muni inventing fire, we now come to another strange supposedly historical movie where actual history is totally unimportant. Those of you who’ve read deeply into the life of Marie Antoinette, or know something of the French revolution, avert your eyes now. As what we have is not strictly a portrayal of life in the court of Versailles, one that looks at the ins and outs of the bloody events of the 1790s, but instead Toyah Wilcox as ‘Marie Antoinette – Demon Bloodsucker’.


In the days of ‘Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter’, this probably makes a lot more sense. Back in the 1980s, though, it must have been a shock to see a pop star as a French queen stalking through the streets of Paris to suck the necks of children. What makes it more surprising is that there’s zero context for this. We start with what looks to be a standard historical biopic (well as standard an historical biopic as you can get with Toyah Wilcox as the lead), all stately homes, bodices and BBC accents; but before long we’re nicking ideas from old Universal and Hammer movies and she’s out on the grimy Parisian backstreets as the arch nocturnal huntress. Other musical luminaries – Adam Ant, Richard O’Brien, Lulu – appear with their tongues firmly placed firmly in their cheeks to either aid her or try to stop her, as this Austrian-French Queen (she was actually Austrian, but Toyah insists on playing her with a wandering accent that’s just this side of Inspector Clouseau) goes all Countess Bathory while wearing tight, heaving corsets. Then the French revolution comes along; the masses, tired of being oppressed and no doubt livid at having their blood sucked, rise up. It initially seems that the chaos will aid this vampire Queen but her fall isn’t far away.


In the background of this bright and shiny pop video, which for some reason has been stretched to feature length and inexplicably had all the songs left out, is – of course – the evil of Margaret Thatcher. At one point Toyah even tells her lady in waiting, who is concerned about the Queen’s nightly expeditions that “this lady is not for turning”. (It’s a pity that Thatcher didn’t say “There’s no such thing as society” until later, as the filmmakers would have salivated right down their chins at a line like that.) Obviously this is a project its makers felt passionate about, but in their passion and over-whelming hatred for the British Prime-Minister, what they’ve lost is any sense of subtlety. It’s a film which doesn’t just want to dislike Thatcher, it wants to state loud and proud that she actually feasts on the blood of the poor and the blood of their children. This is a literal demonization and that makes it – even if you’re broadly sympathetic to where the film is coming from – easy to not take seriously. Often within the echo chamber of the left or right, people just lose all sense of the wider world and convince themselves that all that exists is their passion and beliefs. Toyah Wilcox as Marie Antoinette sounds very, very silly and – even with a shouted political agenda – it is very, very silly.

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 New Cross Eleven (1946)

D. Randall Smyth
Dusty B&W


In British cinema there have always been films which look back at the Second World War with something approaching fondness. Ah, the memories – all those kids playing on the bomb sites, the camaraderie, the sheltering in the tubes, the interminable sing alongs. As long as one ignores the doodlebugs, husbands and fathers fighting overseas, the victims of the blitz, then clearly it was a bloody great time. This is one of those movies with a halcyon glow, made just as the war was ending and so managing to combine a war time story with a pleasure and relief of a job well done.
It’s an optimistic film, a film about promise from the rubble of the past, a film about youth. That’s what I particularly like about it, the fact that the cast is so goddamn young. The principals are all fifteen and younger, and they look it. This is the British youth of 1945: gawky, all elbows and knees and terrible, terrible teeth. If anything is going to reinforce our American cousin’s impression of our dental work, it would be this movie and its pre NHS gnashers. (It’s a shame that barely any of the cast stayed in acting, as Hammer Horror could have used their faces ten years later.) On one hand it’s a sweet film and an innocent film, but it’s also a film about still lingering threats and that adds a jab of cold steel to the centre of it.


‘The New Cross Eleven’ is a boy’s brigade football team, who might look rag-tag but are apparently the best side in their division. The scenes on the football pitch are lovely, even with the bomb sites in the background – they have a charming fluidity that feels fresh and real. It’s as if they’ve just filmed these lads actually playing and captured all the exuberance and fearlessness of youth. It’s particularly stunning – with this soulless, corporate football spectacular going on at the other side of the world – just how divorced what we have today is from this film. The looseness of the football, the length of the shorts, the sense of mischievous community, even the Knobbly knees – all this has gone now. These are not pampered and preening popinjays. They would take one look at Ronaldo and decide he needs to be made less pretty; although spud-faced nipper Wayne Rooney has very much the right appearance. What we have here are good, down to Earth lads. They may be a little scampish at times, but they’re definitely warm and happy presences. Probably I could have just watched them play football in their bombed-out South London suburb for the entire film, but before long the plot kicks in when they start to suspect that the new referee in their league may be a German spy.
Our boys start to investigate.


There’s probably more broad humour in the investigation than I would ideally have liked (certainly most of the toilet jokes fail to flush satisfactorily), but the charm remains and the story takes some fun twists and turns. No doubt the executives behind the much maligned Children’s Film Foundation saw this and thought they saw the future: fun and undemanding films about children solving mysteries and being heroes. However unlike a lot of that body’s output, this film actually works. This isn’t spoon in the mouth drama school kids pretending to be working class, but the real thing; and this isn’t a shaggy dog story where the stakes are only high when looked at from a very middle class nursery in Hampstead, but something that matters. This is a kids’ film but it isn’t a soft film. Indeed anyone who has ever been to New Cross would know that I’d be impossible to make a soft film there. Even at the end of the war, a war that people were already starting to be fond of, there are dangers still apparent and this film isn’t shy of them.

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.