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?
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctor Who. Show all posts
Sunday, 31 August 2014
Sunday, 17 August 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, 20 July 2014
Mr Hargreaves (1959)
D. John Guillermin
B&W
If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.
In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.
This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.
Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.
(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)
Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.
At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.
B&W
If ‘Mr Hargreaves’ was green-lit today, it would be as “’Lucky Jim’ meets ‘The Manchurian Candidate’”. Whether that’d work as a pitch today I don’t know, it does rather assume that your average film executive is not only savvy enough to have come across Kingsley Amis, but also capable of dismissing warnings that he isn’t a big draw with the 18-25 demographic. I’m glad though that in 1959 Kingsley was a big enough name to get it into production. ‘Lucky Jim’ is clearly hard-wired into its DNA, right there to the smudges on its fingers. To be fair, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ was still a couple of years from reaching the box office (the book had been written however); but the fact that Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury were still waiting and playing solitaire doesn’t matter. Few places knew as much about cold war paranoia as Great Britain and it’s with sweaty, nervous and anxious palms that the Brits go to the well here.
In an unnamed provincial university a lecturer arrives, he is very polite and ingratiating, but there’s just something not right about him. Gradually fellow faculty members and students become suspicious and after some snooping evidence emerges suggesting that he is in fact a Soviet spy, there to assassinate the Prime Minister on an upcoming visit.
This is a cracklingly tense movie, all shot in the small poky rooms of a regional English town – but those box-like, cell-like spaces edited together to be edgy and claustrophobic. But what really makes this film great is the identity of the mysterious, suspicious professor, as we have here Peter Sellers at the height of his powers.
Still in his chubby phase and not quite as old as his character should be, Sellers excels at creating a great blankness. He later joked that he was all mask, that there had been a real him but he’d had it removed. This is the film which shows that aspect more than any other, presenting a character who is all façade, a moral nothingness hidden by good manners. Yes Mr Hargreaves is polite, yes he’s outwardly pleasant, yes he’s obsequious – but there’s always something absent behind his eyes. It’s a performance of great skill: creating a man who seems to be an inoffensive two dimensional human being, then slowly revealing a moral void underneath.
(Later on, when he was lost to broad comedies, did Sellers not look back and think how brilliant he once was and that he should try and make movies like this again?)
Richard Todd and Janette Scott (as fellow lecturer and student respectively) are the team which work together to expose him, and they’re both perfectly serviceable in their stock roles. But in the background we have Beryl Reid as a soused French professor who seems barely able to speak French; Bill Kerr as the sports mad, loutish, Aussie poetry professor; and William Hartnell looking old and smiling genially as the professor of a subject so ancient it’s been forgotten. It ensures that there’s some colour and comedy in the staffroom in what would otherwise be a very serious, taut and paranoid black & white film.
At the forefront though is Sellers, taking on the kind of role money, fame and madness would soon snatch him away from, and if you’ve ever seen ‘The Party’ or ‘After the Fox’ you’ll know what a damned, crying shame that was.
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
Scotland The Feared (2009)
D. Neil Marshall
Colour
It’s a tad surprising that Neil Marshall’s satire/horror/dystopian science fiction/gaudy spectacular of a film isn’t better known, I’d have put good money on it being referenced (by both sides) in the run up to the Scottish devolution vote. I’d have thought that with the future 'Dr Who' careers of two of its stars, Whovians like myself would be all over it. But no, it seems that after ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘The Descent’, Marshall’s films have struggled to get recognition. And that’s a shame as for all its flaws (and they are myriad), this is a film crammed full of ideas.
In the future, the Prime Minister of the independent Scotland (Peter Capaldi – not doing full Malcolm Tucker, but still in scary if not sweary mode) is agitated about Scotland’s influence on the world stage. Oil is running out and Scotland is facing becoming a poor country, “the bastard cousin” of a still dominant England. These strifes have already reached home, with gangs of disaffected youths – known as Haggises – roaming the land. However with the discovery of a nuclear weapon left over from Colonial times (as they’re referred in the film), Capaldi decides to start a war. It’s up to plucky young reporter James MacAvoy (bland) and his intern, Karen Gillan (inexperienced as an actress, but fetchingly lovely) to stop him.
The newly minted Twelfth Doctor and Amy Pond together on celluloid, you’d have thought the Science Fiction magazines would be panting over DVDs of this. Particularly, as I’ve already noted, the vote this year is going to make it truly topical. However the reason they won’t, is that having splattered all these elements together, ‘Scotland the Feared’ struggles to make any of them work.
‘The Mouse that Roared’ satire of the premise – where Scotland attacks England’s great ally, Portugal (it’s true that the one country in Europe England/Britain has never been to war with is Portugal) goes from ludicrously satirical idea to be taken intensely seriously by all the characters very quickly. But then maybe the idea of firing a nuclear warhead at millions of innocent Portuguese can’t be played for comedy for too long.
As for the horror, the Haggises are scarily tattooed and scarily Glaswegian, but are used far too frequently. By the end it seems like any scene which has become inert can easily be resolved by having a bunch of violent skinheads crash into the room. And there are only so many times watching a drooling skinhead wield a broken bottle of McEwans is actually entertaining.
And the dystopian future stuff? Well, that’s a mix of smog coloured sky, bright neons and impressive shadows. It isn’t as original as it could be, but you can see Marshall and his cinematographer straining against the budget to create something that is undeniable futuristic and Scottish.
Which is what I like about this film, how goddamn Scottish it is. For the most part this looks like a film made for an exclusively Scottish audience. To understand all the references it helps if you have good working knowledge of Scottish indie music, the suburbs of Edinburgh and The Jacobite Rebellion. There are characters who speak like particularly indecipherable extras from Rab C. Nesbit, with not a subtitle in sight. Okay, for a more general audience there are jokes about the first presidents of Scotland being Alec Salmond, Sean Connery and Alex Ferguson – but you won’t necessarily feel a welcome in the hills if you’re a Sassenach.
So why isn’t this a rallying film for the independence campaign? Undoubtedly because the ending makes it clear that the film doesn’t know where it lies. (Spoiler alert) ‘Scotland the Feared’ does honestly end with England sending it troops to quell the Scots and make everything safe again. After all the stuff about being proud Scots and how the country can stand up for itself, it is forcibly taken back into English hands before it can cause any more damage. It’s a genuinely odd conclusion that makes you wonder who this film is aimed at. Surely anyone who believes in the Union doesn’t want to sit through 90 minutes of strident neon flag waving for independence; while anyone who believes in devolution doesn’t want to watch a film where England bails them out.
It’s all very odd, and just proves once again that you can’t have your Dundee Cake and eat it.
Colour
It’s a tad surprising that Neil Marshall’s satire/horror/dystopian science fiction/gaudy spectacular of a film isn’t better known, I’d have put good money on it being referenced (by both sides) in the run up to the Scottish devolution vote. I’d have thought that with the future 'Dr Who' careers of two of its stars, Whovians like myself would be all over it. But no, it seems that after ‘Dog Soldiers’ and ‘The Descent’, Marshall’s films have struggled to get recognition. And that’s a shame as for all its flaws (and they are myriad), this is a film crammed full of ideas.
In the future, the Prime Minister of the independent Scotland (Peter Capaldi – not doing full Malcolm Tucker, but still in scary if not sweary mode) is agitated about Scotland’s influence on the world stage. Oil is running out and Scotland is facing becoming a poor country, “the bastard cousin” of a still dominant England. These strifes have already reached home, with gangs of disaffected youths – known as Haggises – roaming the land. However with the discovery of a nuclear weapon left over from Colonial times (as they’re referred in the film), Capaldi decides to start a war. It’s up to plucky young reporter James MacAvoy (bland) and his intern, Karen Gillan (inexperienced as an actress, but fetchingly lovely) to stop him.
The newly minted Twelfth Doctor and Amy Pond together on celluloid, you’d have thought the Science Fiction magazines would be panting over DVDs of this. Particularly, as I’ve already noted, the vote this year is going to make it truly topical. However the reason they won’t, is that having splattered all these elements together, ‘Scotland the Feared’ struggles to make any of them work.
‘The Mouse that Roared’ satire of the premise – where Scotland attacks England’s great ally, Portugal (it’s true that the one country in Europe England/Britain has never been to war with is Portugal) goes from ludicrously satirical idea to be taken intensely seriously by all the characters very quickly. But then maybe the idea of firing a nuclear warhead at millions of innocent Portuguese can’t be played for comedy for too long.
As for the horror, the Haggises are scarily tattooed and scarily Glaswegian, but are used far too frequently. By the end it seems like any scene which has become inert can easily be resolved by having a bunch of violent skinheads crash into the room. And there are only so many times watching a drooling skinhead wield a broken bottle of McEwans is actually entertaining.
And the dystopian future stuff? Well, that’s a mix of smog coloured sky, bright neons and impressive shadows. It isn’t as original as it could be, but you can see Marshall and his cinematographer straining against the budget to create something that is undeniable futuristic and Scottish.
Which is what I like about this film, how goddamn Scottish it is. For the most part this looks like a film made for an exclusively Scottish audience. To understand all the references it helps if you have good working knowledge of Scottish indie music, the suburbs of Edinburgh and The Jacobite Rebellion. There are characters who speak like particularly indecipherable extras from Rab C. Nesbit, with not a subtitle in sight. Okay, for a more general audience there are jokes about the first presidents of Scotland being Alec Salmond, Sean Connery and Alex Ferguson – but you won’t necessarily feel a welcome in the hills if you’re a Sassenach.
So why isn’t this a rallying film for the independence campaign? Undoubtedly because the ending makes it clear that the film doesn’t know where it lies. (Spoiler alert) ‘Scotland the Feared’ does honestly end with England sending it troops to quell the Scots and make everything safe again. After all the stuff about being proud Scots and how the country can stand up for itself, it is forcibly taken back into English hands before it can cause any more damage. It’s a genuinely odd conclusion that makes you wonder who this film is aimed at. Surely anyone who believes in the Union doesn’t want to sit through 90 minutes of strident neon flag waving for independence; while anyone who believes in devolution doesn’t want to watch a film where England bails them out.
It’s all very odd, and just proves once again that you can’t have your Dundee Cake and eat it.
Wednesday, 22 January 2014
The Final Man on the Run (1959)
D. Frank Howard
B&W
I truly love creaky old British Science Fiction. It’s not just that being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan means that dodgy monsters in grainy black and white comes somewhat with the territory, it’s that alien invasion always feels a lot more poky and provincial in England. In America there are wide open spaces, the world that is being invaded seems so wonderful and worth taking. It’s not like that in Britain. Maybe if – like ‘The Children of The Damned’ – these aliens are choosing to invade the Home Counties you can perhaps see where they’re coming from, but grim and grimy London? Seriously, alien invaders, what’s wrong with your planet that you’d want to come somewhere that still uses powdered egg?
The oddly titled ‘The Final Man on the Run’ is cheap and British and essentially a rip off of ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – only with the twist that instead of a quiet and prosperous America town being stolen, it is the seedy environs and backstreets of Soho. This makes it a very interesting set-up, as the aliens are replacing people who are already scary anyway. These aren’t schoolteachers and policemen who are being replicated, but spivs, small time crooks and all round scum. The only one who realises what’s happening is a down on his luck boxer, with a dodgy record himself, but no one will listen to him as nobody really cares for these people anyway – and so the contagion spreads.
This film, despite its cheapness and the rip off of the premise, should be better remembered – not least as one of the early starring roles for Sean Connery. (There’s also a pre Doctor Who William Hartnell as a tobacconist who is one of the first to be taken. It’s a great moment when Connery peers into his face and sees not a single ounce of emotion). And Connery does well as the boxer in totally over his head. There’s a path to his performance, a joy in seeing the character question more and more before frustration truly overwhelms him. Although unlike Kevin McCarthy in the American version, Connery can never make himself look totally helpless. Even in the bleak conclusion, one gets the impression that this Glaswegian Terry Malloy, will still find a way to save the world.
It’s a tense ride which understands just how scary shadows are, although it feels too rushed at 72 minutes. Much like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, which can be interpreted as either anti-communist or anti-witch-hunts, I suppose there are two possible readings here also. Either the film is saying that the salt of the Earth (no matter how coarse a grain) are the most crucial people of all and once we lose them we lose everything; or else this is a bunch of middle class film makers sneering from their pipes and slippers and thinking that the working classes are so common and brutish they are all pretty much aliens anyway, aren’t they?
So perhaps pour yourself a sherry and let the alien takeover begin!
B&W
I truly love creaky old British Science Fiction. It’s not just that being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan means that dodgy monsters in grainy black and white comes somewhat with the territory, it’s that alien invasion always feels a lot more poky and provincial in England. In America there are wide open spaces, the world that is being invaded seems so wonderful and worth taking. It’s not like that in Britain. Maybe if – like ‘The Children of The Damned’ – these aliens are choosing to invade the Home Counties you can perhaps see where they’re coming from, but grim and grimy London? Seriously, alien invaders, what’s wrong with your planet that you’d want to come somewhere that still uses powdered egg?
The oddly titled ‘The Final Man on the Run’ is cheap and British and essentially a rip off of ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ – only with the twist that instead of a quiet and prosperous America town being stolen, it is the seedy environs and backstreets of Soho. This makes it a very interesting set-up, as the aliens are replacing people who are already scary anyway. These aren’t schoolteachers and policemen who are being replicated, but spivs, small time crooks and all round scum. The only one who realises what’s happening is a down on his luck boxer, with a dodgy record himself, but no one will listen to him as nobody really cares for these people anyway – and so the contagion spreads.
This film, despite its cheapness and the rip off of the premise, should be better remembered – not least as one of the early starring roles for Sean Connery. (There’s also a pre Doctor Who William Hartnell as a tobacconist who is one of the first to be taken. It’s a great moment when Connery peers into his face and sees not a single ounce of emotion). And Connery does well as the boxer in totally over his head. There’s a path to his performance, a joy in seeing the character question more and more before frustration truly overwhelms him. Although unlike Kevin McCarthy in the American version, Connery can never make himself look totally helpless. Even in the bleak conclusion, one gets the impression that this Glaswegian Terry Malloy, will still find a way to save the world.
It’s a tense ride which understands just how scary shadows are, although it feels too rushed at 72 minutes. Much like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, which can be interpreted as either anti-communist or anti-witch-hunts, I suppose there are two possible readings here also. Either the film is saying that the salt of the Earth (no matter how coarse a grain) are the most crucial people of all and once we lose them we lose everything; or else this is a bunch of middle class film makers sneering from their pipes and slippers and thinking that the working classes are so common and brutish they are all pretty much aliens anyway, aren’t they?
So perhaps pour yourself a sherry and let the alien takeover begin!
Wednesday, 1 January 2014
The Evil of the Daleks (1969)
D. Gordon Flemyn
Colour
This is the point where ‘Doctor Who’, the TV Programme and the adventures of the cinema character, Doctor Who, who does nothing but battle daleks on the big screen, really do diverge. What was a symbiotic relationship breaks apart and isn’t put back together until late in the next decade. Let’s be fair the signs have been there for some time. On television, The Doctor is now a scruffy man with a Beatle haircut who has the knack for pretending he’s incompetent even before Peter Falk started squinting his way through ‘Columbo’. While on the big screen, Doctor Who (his actual name, making him son of Mr and Mrs Who and the brother no doubt to twin siblings, Elvis Who and Priscilla Who) is still a slightly stand-offish Victorian fogey. One is Patrick Troughton, the other is William Hartnell-eque. Neither of them, to be fair, is the original Doctor.
Of all the Dalek films, this might actually be my favourite – it’s Sherlock Holmes, it’s Hammer Horror, it’s steampunk before steampunk and it’s just so damn weird. We open with Doctor Who arriving in Victorian England with a deerstalker on his head and his granddaughter’s former boyfriend in tow. This is a break with tradition as granddaughter number one, Susan, and A.N.Other granddaughter were hitherto always present for these trips. Instead now it’s Roy Castle, back again from the first film. Where he’s shown up from is never really explained, he’s just there – tagging along with Doctor Who on his trips through space and time. And in a way that might be a problem for the film, we can accept the character has the unlikely surname Who and travels in hither and thither throughout the universe and all of history – but really, he’d go back and pick up the wet lettuce Roy Castle again? Pleeaaasseee. The two of them are investigating how come 1960s style gadgets are showing up in Victorian London. Look, there’s a record player, there’s a tin opener, there’s a Vespa, there’s a Beatles doll and – more alarmingly – isn’t that man threatening them holding a machine gun? Clearly something is amiss. The two of them track these objects down to Professor Waterford, who has built his own time machine – although one far inferior to Doctor Who’s Tardis. It seems that he is some kind of time meddler, but swiftly his true purpose becomes apparent – he is merely a cog in a plan designed to lure Doctor Who into investigating. And behind that plan is, of course, the daleks.
From that point things just get far madder. There are for some gobbledegook reason, daleks with the ‘human factor’ who Doctor Who, although initially wary, ends up befriending and finally playing with: leading to a montage of shots of Doctor Who dancing an old fashioned jig with some rhythmic pepperpots and Roy Castle playing snakes and ladders against another (although how a dalek rolls the dice or moves the counter is anyone’s guess). Then there’s a trip to the dalek home planet Skaro – for the first time since the original film, and the place has had one full on multi-coloured redesign. It’s 1969 and daleks are clearly as in awe of the psychadelic as everyone else. There the human factor daleks take on pure daleks in one of the most exciting and visually striking battles these films have ever seen. Never elsewhere was Gordon Flemyn as good a director, it’s a gripping lightshow and explosion spectacular. (Truly, science fiction was not this exciting again until George Lucas woke up one morning and said “Hey! I know, a samurai western in space!”) And at the end of it – SPOILER ALERT – Doctor Who’s plans are defeated, he’s stranded without his Tardis (even worse, he’s stranded without his Tardis but with Roy Castle) in one of the most pessimistic endings ever whacked onto a children’s film. The bad guys win, the heroes lose and now the whole universe seems imperilled.
And this is the real break from the TV show. In the television version of this story it’s The Doctor and Jamie who win and the daleks who are defeated. These arch villains of 1960’s British Science Fiction were saying goodbye to the programme that spawned them. Their creator, Terry Nation, was taking his ball away and making sure that the daleks only appeared in films (and hopefully their own TV show, but that never really came off). As such the daleks left the TV version of ‘Doctor Who’, albeit – as things turned out – only for the time being. However in films it’s Doctor Who himself who is leaving and he is left stranded and lost at the end. I like Peter Cushing as an actor, although don’t think that his work in these films is his best. However that expression of sadness and disappointment on his face as he realises how utterly defeated he has been (realises he has been left alone with Roy Castle and his snakes and ladders board – and maybe, and this is a dreadful thought, his fucking trumpet too!) is worth the price of seeing all five films. But even that is blown away and topped by the final shot: a camera moving slowly and menacingly ever closer and closer to the eye-stalk of the Dalek Supreme, as it tells us that the mighty daleks are coming for all of us. Rarely has a piece of talking metal ever been made to look so chilling.
‘The Evil of the Daleks’ looks great, if there’s one thing Elstree could do (as proven by Hammer and here by Amicus) it was Victoriana gothic, the inclusion of modern technology (even of a 1960s kind) in a Victorian setting is surely what steampunk is about, and in the human factor daleks we have another pushing at the envelope of what daleks can do – but one that leads to some spectacular dalek on dalek violence.
It will be a long time before those exterminating pepperpots are anywhere near this good on the big screen again.
Colour
This is the point where ‘Doctor Who’, the TV Programme and the adventures of the cinema character, Doctor Who, who does nothing but battle daleks on the big screen, really do diverge. What was a symbiotic relationship breaks apart and isn’t put back together until late in the next decade. Let’s be fair the signs have been there for some time. On television, The Doctor is now a scruffy man with a Beatle haircut who has the knack for pretending he’s incompetent even before Peter Falk started squinting his way through ‘Columbo’. While on the big screen, Doctor Who (his actual name, making him son of Mr and Mrs Who and the brother no doubt to twin siblings, Elvis Who and Priscilla Who) is still a slightly stand-offish Victorian fogey. One is Patrick Troughton, the other is William Hartnell-eque. Neither of them, to be fair, is the original Doctor.
Of all the Dalek films, this might actually be my favourite – it’s Sherlock Holmes, it’s Hammer Horror, it’s steampunk before steampunk and it’s just so damn weird. We open with Doctor Who arriving in Victorian England with a deerstalker on his head and his granddaughter’s former boyfriend in tow. This is a break with tradition as granddaughter number one, Susan, and A.N.Other granddaughter were hitherto always present for these trips. Instead now it’s Roy Castle, back again from the first film. Where he’s shown up from is never really explained, he’s just there – tagging along with Doctor Who on his trips through space and time. And in a way that might be a problem for the film, we can accept the character has the unlikely surname Who and travels in hither and thither throughout the universe and all of history – but really, he’d go back and pick up the wet lettuce Roy Castle again? Pleeaaasseee. The two of them are investigating how come 1960s style gadgets are showing up in Victorian London. Look, there’s a record player, there’s a tin opener, there’s a Vespa, there’s a Beatles doll and – more alarmingly – isn’t that man threatening them holding a machine gun? Clearly something is amiss. The two of them track these objects down to Professor Waterford, who has built his own time machine – although one far inferior to Doctor Who’s Tardis. It seems that he is some kind of time meddler, but swiftly his true purpose becomes apparent – he is merely a cog in a plan designed to lure Doctor Who into investigating. And behind that plan is, of course, the daleks.
From that point things just get far madder. There are for some gobbledegook reason, daleks with the ‘human factor’ who Doctor Who, although initially wary, ends up befriending and finally playing with: leading to a montage of shots of Doctor Who dancing an old fashioned jig with some rhythmic pepperpots and Roy Castle playing snakes and ladders against another (although how a dalek rolls the dice or moves the counter is anyone’s guess). Then there’s a trip to the dalek home planet Skaro – for the first time since the original film, and the place has had one full on multi-coloured redesign. It’s 1969 and daleks are clearly as in awe of the psychadelic as everyone else. There the human factor daleks take on pure daleks in one of the most exciting and visually striking battles these films have ever seen. Never elsewhere was Gordon Flemyn as good a director, it’s a gripping lightshow and explosion spectacular. (Truly, science fiction was not this exciting again until George Lucas woke up one morning and said “Hey! I know, a samurai western in space!”) And at the end of it – SPOILER ALERT – Doctor Who’s plans are defeated, he’s stranded without his Tardis (even worse, he’s stranded without his Tardis but with Roy Castle) in one of the most pessimistic endings ever whacked onto a children’s film. The bad guys win, the heroes lose and now the whole universe seems imperilled.
And this is the real break from the TV show. In the television version of this story it’s The Doctor and Jamie who win and the daleks who are defeated. These arch villains of 1960’s British Science Fiction were saying goodbye to the programme that spawned them. Their creator, Terry Nation, was taking his ball away and making sure that the daleks only appeared in films (and hopefully their own TV show, but that never really came off). As such the daleks left the TV version of ‘Doctor Who’, albeit – as things turned out – only for the time being. However in films it’s Doctor Who himself who is leaving and he is left stranded and lost at the end. I like Peter Cushing as an actor, although don’t think that his work in these films is his best. However that expression of sadness and disappointment on his face as he realises how utterly defeated he has been (realises he has been left alone with Roy Castle and his snakes and ladders board – and maybe, and this is a dreadful thought, his fucking trumpet too!) is worth the price of seeing all five films. But even that is blown away and topped by the final shot: a camera moving slowly and menacingly ever closer and closer to the eye-stalk of the Dalek Supreme, as it tells us that the mighty daleks are coming for all of us. Rarely has a piece of talking metal ever been made to look so chilling.
‘The Evil of the Daleks’ looks great, if there’s one thing Elstree could do (as proven by Hammer and here by Amicus) it was Victoriana gothic, the inclusion of modern technology (even of a 1960s kind) in a Victorian setting is surely what steampunk is about, and in the human factor daleks we have another pushing at the envelope of what daleks can do – but one that leads to some spectacular dalek on dalek violence.
It will be a long time before those exterminating pepperpots are anywhere near this good on the big screen again.
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
The Power of the Daleks (1968)
D. Gordon Flemyn
Colour
On TV, in the continuing adventures of the alien known as The Doctor, this was the first story of the Patrick Troughton era. A chance to show that even though the leading man had changed, his most hated enemies were still there and that they recognised him. Of course the films are the adventures of Doctor Who, son of Mr and Mrs Who, and grandfather to Susan Who and various other girls with the unlikely surname, Who. He hasn’t altered his face, he hasn’t altered his demeanour, he’s exactly the man he was and given they spent most of the last film hunting him down, it isn’t such a big deal here when the Daleks do recognise him. Except it takes them a little time for them to acknowledge who he is, or indeed who they are.
Here’s the plot. Doctor Who and his two granddaughters Susan (played by the maturing Roberta Tovey and Felicity (played by the impossibly cute Felicity Kendell) arrive on Earth Colony 7. (The planet had no more original name than that). There, to their horror, they find the Daleks. But these Daleks aren’t like the ones we’ve previously seen, no, they’re working as servants and regarded by the humans who greet them as subservient and friendly robots who exist to bring drinks and snacks. All is bliss on Earth Colony 7 and Doctor Who is looked at as mad for claiming that these robots are emotionless killers or “fiends in shiny metallic cloaking” as he at one point memorably calls them. (If I was trying to scare people, and I have done that in my time, I’m not sure that that’s the choice of words I’d go for). Meanwhile the Dalek leader (he’s bigger and shiner than the others) sees Doctor Who’s presence and accelerates their underlying plan.
What follows is one of the most schizophrenic films you’re ever likely to witness. On one hand we have various Daleks sliding out of darkness to kill guards and other people who get in their way. These scenes are shot with full shadowy terror (Flemyng excels himself), an almost black and white creepiness which really emphasises these Daleks as metallic seraphs of death. But elsewhere there’s Michael Bentine as Professor Yakabult, who demonstrates experiments with the aid of his assistant, Doris the Dalek. These scenes are inserted into the film as broadcasts on Earth Colony 7’s TV station, illustrating just how friendly these Daleks are. Bentine and the other characters in the film never interact, instead he goggles at the Dalek with wide eyes, he dances a waltz with it, the two of them sing “Earthling’s Eyes are Gleaming” in horrible tunelessness. It’s clearly designed for the kids, it’s clearly designed as light entertainment. The idea from a plot point of view is to show how inured everybody on Earth Colony 7 has become to the Daleks, how unthreatening they are, but my word it’s excruciating. One can only breathe a sigh of relief when the plot catches up with the horrible twosome and Doris exterminates him.
Colour
When we arrange to meet up with a Dalek, what exactly are we
getting? Is it an armoured case specifically designed to shelter the mutated
remains of a race from the planet Skaro, or is it a killer robot which can be
presumably programmed to do other things but kill? And whichever one it is, are
we supposed to be scared of them, or are we supposed to find them quite funny
too? Although not framed that way by plot or dialogue, ‘The Power of the Daleks’
is a film which struggles to answer both of those questions. It’s a film which
has a back and fore with itself, at points thinking that Daleks are truly
scary, at others smiling with indulgence at the exploits of these colourful pepper
pot scamps. It’s a movie where a family being brutally cut down can sit side by
side with Michael Bentine messing about with some test-tubes and nonsense words.
It’s a Doctor Who adventure which really should be family entertainment, but
would also quite like you to see its dark side – like a drunk elderly uncle at
a Christmas party, threatening to show the six year olds his war wounds.
On TV, in the continuing adventures of the alien known as The Doctor, this was the first story of the Patrick Troughton era. A chance to show that even though the leading man had changed, his most hated enemies were still there and that they recognised him. Of course the films are the adventures of Doctor Who, son of Mr and Mrs Who, and grandfather to Susan Who and various other girls with the unlikely surname, Who. He hasn’t altered his face, he hasn’t altered his demeanour, he’s exactly the man he was and given they spent most of the last film hunting him down, it isn’t such a big deal here when the Daleks do recognise him. Except it takes them a little time for them to acknowledge who he is, or indeed who they are.
Here’s the plot. Doctor Who and his two granddaughters Susan (played by the maturing Roberta Tovey and Felicity (played by the impossibly cute Felicity Kendell) arrive on Earth Colony 7. (The planet had no more original name than that). There, to their horror, they find the Daleks. But these Daleks aren’t like the ones we’ve previously seen, no, they’re working as servants and regarded by the humans who greet them as subservient and friendly robots who exist to bring drinks and snacks. All is bliss on Earth Colony 7 and Doctor Who is looked at as mad for claiming that these robots are emotionless killers or “fiends in shiny metallic cloaking” as he at one point memorably calls them. (If I was trying to scare people, and I have done that in my time, I’m not sure that that’s the choice of words I’d go for). Meanwhile the Dalek leader (he’s bigger and shiner than the others) sees Doctor Who’s presence and accelerates their underlying plan.
What follows is one of the most schizophrenic films you’re ever likely to witness. On one hand we have various Daleks sliding out of darkness to kill guards and other people who get in their way. These scenes are shot with full shadowy terror (Flemyng excels himself), an almost black and white creepiness which really emphasises these Daleks as metallic seraphs of death. But elsewhere there’s Michael Bentine as Professor Yakabult, who demonstrates experiments with the aid of his assistant, Doris the Dalek. These scenes are inserted into the film as broadcasts on Earth Colony 7’s TV station, illustrating just how friendly these Daleks are. Bentine and the other characters in the film never interact, instead he goggles at the Dalek with wide eyes, he dances a waltz with it, the two of them sing “Earthling’s Eyes are Gleaming” in horrible tunelessness. It’s clearly designed for the kids, it’s clearly designed as light entertainment. The idea from a plot point of view is to show how inured everybody on Earth Colony 7 has become to the Daleks, how unthreatening they are, but my word it’s excruciating. One can only breathe a sigh of relief when the plot catches up with the horrible twosome and Doris exterminates him.
The plot gets faster and faster and more exciting and
exciting, and this is actually – once it settles down and answers its own
question – one of the best, scariest and most adrenalin filled entries in the
series. The base under siege set-up (even though it’s under siege from the
inside) and the running down corridors does make it resemble The Doctor’s
exploits on TV, and yet there’s something about this which is its own film. Yes,
there are Daleks and they are the true money spinners, but at the centre is the
human man and the film is determined in its point that – without any alien help
whatsoever – man will always win out against the monsters, no matter how
ridiculous they first appear.
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
Daleks - The Chase through Time (1967)
D. Gordon Flemyng
Colour (of the bright and shiny 60s variety)
Colour (of the bright and shiny 60s variety)
Thanks to complex rights issues,
apart from the first two of Peter Cushing’s Doctor Who vs Daleks films (big
favourites on Sunday afternoon with both BBC2 and Channel 4), the rest are lost
in a complex legal process whose paperwork would probably fill up the Tardis.
At the moment, Jerry Lewis's 'The Day the Clown Cried' appears more likely to
be spat out screaming into the world. That’s a shame as these films form a nice
counterpoint to the series, initially following the same lines before heading
off in wild and weird directions.
‘Daleks – The Chase through Time’ is, like the first two films,
based on episodes of the TV show. Indeed Terry Nation seems to have written
these episodes with the express intention of turning them into a Peter Cushing
film. There’s The Empire State Building! There’s The Marie Celeste! There’s
Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster! And making their film debut, there’s Dave
Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich! Everything is bigger and far more fantastic
than the BBC could realistically conjure up, sadly though Amicus Pictures isn’t
up to the spectacle either.
Even in glorious Technicolor, Doctor Who (never forget that
that is, in these films, his actual title and surname – he is the well studied son
of parents with the unlikely name of Mr and Mrs Who) and his companions are
clearly not at The Empire State Building. The studio can use as many stock
shots of NYC as they like, but they can’t disguise a mock up. Similarly that
Marie Celeste they land on is not in the middle of the ocean. In fact the background
couldn’t be any more obviously cardboard unless Kenneth Connor fell through it.
As for the Universal/Hammer monsters (part of a horror theme
park our heroes visit), didn’t Amicus Pictures develop a good reputation for
horror? Shouldn’t they know how to do this stuff? So why is Graham Stark’s
Dracula so camp and pouty? (Was Liberace really the inspiration?) And why is
David Prowse’s Frankenstein’s Monster so powder puff? Why is the Monster
pictured at one point having a break, sitting down in a comfy chair and
drinking a couple of tea? It’s all very strange; an attempt at comedy which
didn’t work on TV and is played much, much, much broader on film – but doesn’t
work there either.
The
highlight of this potpourri of destinations is undoubtedly is Dave Dee, Dozy,
Beaky, Mick and Tith. Doctor Who and his companions find themselves in the
band’s house and chill out listening to the futuristically titled ‘Zabadak’ – a
song which manages to sound both adventurous and strangely banal. Here the
comedy works in a rather sweet fashion, with a lone Dalek scout pushed around
and mocked by the band as they play. I’m always impressed that the Dalek, with
its pepperpot shape, manages to slalom and bounce around the dance floor in
time to the beat. Underneath that metal shell he has a nice sense of rhythm.
What’s
truly interesting about that sequence, however, is that the producers allegedly
bent over backwards in an attempt to get The Beatles to be the musical cameo. A
photo does exist online of John Lennon larking around with a dalek, so clearly
it must have seemed a possibility. One can only imagine though what magic the
Fab Four and the Scary Scaro-ians would have produced if they’d reached their
third big screen outing together. The mind boggles at the psychedelic,
transcendent explosion of far-out spectacle which would have been unfolded if
these uber-colourful Daleks had met The Beatles in their resplendent Sgt Pepper
garb.
Okay, the plot: having thwarted two of their plans, the
Daleks decide to remove Doctor Who with the use of their own time machine.
Realising the danger he’s in, Doctor Who runs through time in an attempt to
escape them – along with his grand-daughters, Susan and Louise (Roberta Torvey and Jill
Curzon, returning from the last film) and stowaway teacher, Graham (Kenneth
Connor, moon faced and lovely through most of the running time, but too comic
relief to be a love interest to the noticeably younger Curzon).
There are a couple of flaws here. Firstly, why don’t the
Daleks just arrive at the location five minutes before Doctor Who and eliminate
him that way? (But then that flaw in logic is a problem in the TV show as
well). Secondly, Doctor Who on screen isn’t the mythical creation The Doctor is
on television; in fact he’s just a man. As such the film gives the impression
that this advanced race of super aliens has harnessed all their energy,
intelligence and will-power to eliminate one bloke. An incredibly bright bloke,
yes, but still one bloke. It seems a truly lop-sided battle, not made less so
when Doctor Who actually wins. Perhaps, given this film’s success in America,
one is tempted to imagine that Hanna-Barbara used it as the inspiration for
‘Stop the Pigeon’.
What’s episodic on TV remains episodic on the cinema screen.
When plotting cinema domination, Nation clearly thought more in terms of
spectacle than plot. But what’s truly interesting is that on the television The
Doctor is now Patrick Troughton, but on film it’s still Peter Cushing. And
rather than being part of some alien race who can change their faces, it’s made
clear more than once that Cushing is human. Even when using the same stories,
the lines of deviation between TV and film are hardening.
Still the Daleks are bright and shiny, as is The Tardis.
Peter Cushing remains a great presence to hang a film around and is really
creating his own version of the character. There are some scary and gooey scenes
which predate some gooier scenes and scarier films in the offing; but equally in
the sequence of the mutant Dalek who is less bright than the rest, we have a little
sign of other things to come...
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