Bandits Three (1973)

D. Marco De Freitas
Colour

Even ignoring the obvious, cannibalism was big in Italian cinema in the 1970s

Here, for example, is Italian cinema strapping on a big napkin and cannibalising itself. Where one genius visionary took ideas from American cinema, made them his own and created cinema gold and his own genre, here is another much less talented Italian director taking those ideas second hand from the genius and just making pretty much the same film – but cheaper and far less good. Yes, just as real spaghetti begets pasta shapes in tins in supermarkets, so spaghetti westerns begets the kind of low grade-horse operas that spaghetti westerns were supposed to blow away.*

Actually in the 1970s, thanks to Sergio Leone’s success, Italian westerns were two a lira. This one is different though. This one is actually an unofficial remake of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’.
By ‘unofficial remake’. I mean it uses exactly the same story, exactly the same beats and even some of the exact same shots.

Only this one has English actors (and one Anglo-Australian) as the leads, English actors who only make a half-hearted attempt at the accent and are clearly so under invested it’s amazing they don’t check their anachronistic wrist watches to see how long it’s going to be before each scene ends.
We have George Lazenby (The Good), Stewart Grainger (The Bad) and Kenneth Moore (The Ugly), all wandering around the Spanish countryside in search of buried treasure. Yes, that’s as weird a combination as it sounds on paper. If Clint Eastwood thought he was low down the list of actors for ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, Lord knows what this list looked like.

‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ itself seems to take place in a dreamlike version of America, ‘Three Bandits’ however barely pretends to be America at all. The accents don’t help, with Moore all but giving up on his after about two scenes to be a creepy public school boy (of the minor type) wandering incongruously around the dessert, Granger is supposed to be from Tennessee but clearly sees the whole thing as far below him, and Lazenby skips between Chelsea and Canberra while trying to be hard arsed and charismatic and failing completely. There are crosses and double crosses, buried treasure, stock footage of a bridge blowing up (which looks alarmingly like it is the very footage from ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ – which is just cheeky) and a final graveyard Mexican stand-off where the cheap, tinkling score tries to find some way in which it can soar.

It’s in no way a great film, but it’s perversely interesting to watch what happens when similar ingredients go into the mix and cinematic alchemy triumphantly fails to happen.


* I know I’ve moved from a cannibalism metaphor to a spaghetti shaped metaphor in the space of one paragraph. They’re both food based though so I think I can get away with it. Suffice to say that this warmed up and stodgy rubbish, and I know from bitter experience that both human flesh and spaghetti lose their flavour after being whacked in the microwave.

Mummy in Manhattan (1936)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W

It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.

Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.

Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!

This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.

When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.

It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?

At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.

Jungle Jim (1984)

D. Hackworth Hopes
Colour

Ah, Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimmer turned Tarzan, who once the most famous period of his career was over, picked up a jungle suit and a paunch and became Jungle Jim on both film and TV. “Who’s Jungle Jim?” I hear you cry. Well, Jungle Jim was another character created by the same guy who dreamt up Flash Gordon and was kind of a fully dressed western version of Tarzan, but one who operated in Asia rather than Africa. So he’s a sanitised take on the great white hunter, suitable for kids of all ages – even if Weissmuller looked a bit too portly and the jungle couldn’t be any more fake if Johnny was just stood in front of a plain background with the words ‘Trees Go Here’ scrawled on it.

The same year that director Hugh Hudson gave us a truly self-serious version of Tarzan in ‘Greystoke’, we had the other side of the coin with a remake of ‘Jungle Jim’. Here was Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, tackling another of Alex Raymond’s creations and proving once again that he was born at completely the wrong time. If ever there was a one dimensional actor who was good at striking heroic poses in the face of all kinds of monster nonsense, it was Sam Jones. But he needed to either exist in the time of B movie madness or the kind of schlock the Sci-fi channel turns out week after week now. The 1980s were really no good for him.

Having been knocked out and dumped in the jungle, Jim awakes in the mythical country of Muthapetox wearing an outfit that makes him look like Indiana Jones just after he’s been to the dry cleaners. Ever the adventurer, it isn’t long before he’s earned the wrath of white jungle priestess, Barbara Carrera (another performer who screams the 1980s and another performer who wasn’t given proper chance to put her bad acting skills to good use), and then rescued damsel in distress, Emma Samms, and her incredible shrinking skirt. Samms and Jones bicker and fight and flirt and fall in love as they trek their way out of the jungle and towards ‘civilisation’. But Jim realises that the legendary lost city of Nig-taca is not far away and determines to visit it.

So we’re in the land of made up places with obviously made up names, but unlike the same year’s Tarzan movie, that means it doesn’t take itself at all seriously. Interestingly the film ends with an alien spaceship rising out of the lost city where it’s been buried for thousands of years. That’s of course the same ending as ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ and yet in this far more preposterous film such an occurrence doesn’t seem to so utterly preposterous. The Indiana Jones film spent its length stretching our credibility (fridges that survive nukes; Shia Le Bouef channelling Tarzan, the entire Shia Le Boeuf performance in fact) until it reached the point of tearing that credibility completely asunder. ‘Jungle Jim’ though doesn’t require any credibility, in fact it demands you leave your credibility at the door at the start, and it’s all the better for it.

The Last of the Mohicans (1964)

D. Peter Potinstoff
Colour

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

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

And Elvis is fucking terrible in it!

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

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

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

The 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.

Those who Enter the Skaneateles Hotel (1939)

D. George Waggner
B&W


Whereas other film trilogies ebb and flow, with some entries clearly not matching the quality of others, the original Skaneateles Hotel trilogy manages to hold a fantastically consistent line of quality all the way through. The first two entries are variations on a theme, showing what an innovative studio can do with a fantasy setting in a hotel, while this third does what fantasy does best and aims for epic. Picking up on one of the themes of the second film, the refugees from some unknown conflict, here we have the hotel in wartime. Except of course that the Skaneateles Hotel is too big to ever really be affected by some far off conflagration and so here we have a war between two distinct and implacable tribes taking place in the hotel itself. Now I’m well aware that a war between two different parties in a hotel sounds like a Marx Brothers movie that never was (and certainly would have been preferable to ‘Room Service’), but such is the scope and vast vistas already created within the Skaneateles Hotel that the whole thing seems utterly believable and incredibly tense.


Once again we’re greeted by the smiling and menacing form of Boris Karloff, but here there are four separate and very different guests – there’s English aristocrat, Basil Rathbone; the brilliant Peter Lorre in his stock role as mysterious European; reporter, Ginger Rogers (on loan from RKO and definitely not dancing); and loudmouth, Jack Carson. Although the four arrive at different times of day and night, they soon find themselves thrown together by the ever changing corridors of the Skaneateles Hotel. Wary at first, the four are forced to get over initial reservations, to learn to trust to each other, so they can survive in this world of rogue spies, murderers and distant gun battles.


This is the film where Karloff seems at his most vulnerable. Unlike in previous entries, the omnipotentcy deserts him when he’s suddenly dropped into the action with the others, and he flails as much as they do. It’s an unusual and distressing sight. Fans of these films have gotten used to his unflappability, his almost imperious façade, to have that taken away from him feels like the crushing of something. The five of them flee, hole up, make alliances and try to leave the hotel, as they know that outside its cavernous walls  – and this becomes increasingly hard to imagine as the film progresses – there is peace. At first glance much more of an isolationist tract than the last film, this is a film about how much more preferable peace is than war, and how you shouldn’t stick your nose into the conflicts of other peoples. Except is it? As the film progresses it seems more and more the case that Karloff is just misdirecting, that he knows exactly what he’s doing, knows precisely what is needed. As the film progresses it becomes clear that he is in no danger, that he is still directing matters, and that it is his war.  And at that point the message seems to be there are some conflicts in this world of ours, be they within the Skaneateles Hotel or without, that are impossible to avoid.
One of my favourite scenes of this whole series is at the end. After all the chaos, fear, bloodshed and danger, Karloff calmly returns to the front desk, wipes his hands and gets on with his day. Anything is possible in the Skaneateles Hotel.


The establishment would go dark for a little while now, but the doors would reopen….

Return to the Skaneateles Hotel (1938)

D. George Waggner
B&W


We’re back!


Much more than Frankenstein’s monster, the unnamed concierge/manager/overlord of the deeply mysterious Skaneateles Hotel is the role we should best remember Boris Karloff for. It has everything, not only allowing him a glowering physical presence – capable of turning from contempt to sweetness in a heartbeat – but also line after wonderful line of dialogue to be intoned in his glorious graveyard voice. It’s the voice of doom, but also soft as treacle and inviting despite its spookiness. Here we are welcomed with narration, wherein Karloff explains to us that while the world and the universe may change, nothing alters in the sanctuary of the Skaneateles Hotel. This we know is a joke, as we’ve already seen that the ambience, décor and the layout itself is constantly shifting at the Skaneateles Hotel.


In what we would now call a cold opening, the young David Niven is the first to check in, playing a caddish young Englishman with a string of broken hearts behind him. Outside his room he meets the kind of pneumatic, suggestive blonde that the Hays Code was surely supposed to have stamped out, she leads him like a siren back to her room, where the door slams ominously behind them. It might be that they’re having a night of pleasure together, but his scream suggests otherwise.


The meat of the story though is the arrival of another couple, this time the younger and far less charismatic pairing of Allan Jones and Melody Hazel. Obviously these are a duo we’re not going to care about anywhere near as much as Claude Rains and Marian Marsh, but that doesn’t matter – as the film knows its true star is the hotel itself and the ever brooding and ominous presence of Boris Karloff. Going for a stroll before dinner, our young lovebirds become horribly lost and disorientated, marching down seemingly the same corridor again and again. When they try a different turning, they’re first threatened by Bela Lugosi (playing second fiddle to Karloff once again and clearly hating every second of it), before having an elaborate con-trick played on them by Lon Chaney Jr, where they’re nearly separated and have to run for their lives. They end up in a strange and huge ballroom, one which rolls and lilts like a ship and is crammed full of refugees from some far off war (problems in Europe no doubt playing on the filmmakers’ minds). Joining with the refugees, the two have to hope that when Karloff does show up he’ll save them rather than damn them.


The worlds of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ obviously have whole continents to play with and explore. Vast vistas the likes of which we have never seen before. The true genius of the Skaneateles Hotel is that they manage to give us the same sense of scale and size all while filming in a studio and basing the action in one location. Our focus is the hotel, which is at turns a scary, mischievous, deadly, benign and benevolent pile of ever shifting and changing bricks. It, along with its most prominent employee, are the true stars. And what this first sequel proves is that it doesn’t matter if your nominal leads are Zeppo Marx’s replacement and a pretty flapper girl who never made another film, as long as Karloff and the hotel are in place, you can still make a fantastically scary, amazing and edge of the seat film.

The Hotel at Skaneateles Avenue (1937)

D. George Waggner
B&W


J.R.R Tolkein thought that his books would never make a successful transition to film; similarly if George R.R. Martin had been born forty years earlier, the best either could ever have hoped for in their lifetimes were some English characters actors wandering around Yorkshire, some rubbery dragons and a shit-load of stuff happening off screen. The Skaneateles Avenue stories don’t have the same literary pedigree (being based on a couple of now obscurer than obscure tales in pulp magazines), but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are actual fantasy. Yes it’s fantasy that eschews dragons, swords fights and mysterious rings; but in its ever changing corridors, vast horizons of suddenly open rooms with seemingly infinite variations, the Skaneateles Avenue Hotel offers as much scope for wide vistas and endless stories as anything in Middle Earth or Westeros.


The great Boris Karloff is the key. Here he is cast as the concierge, as the manager, as the supposed solver of problems, as the face which pops up when you least expect it. He is at points the charming, omnipotent overlord of the Skaneateles Avenue Hotel and at others as equally helpless a victim of it as any of his guests. Sometimes he’s the puppeteer gleefully pulling the strings, others just another mannequin being twisted around in knots. But whatever else is happening it’s always his looming face and menacing voice that welcome us, telling us he hopes we have a lovely stay – which reassures us in no way shape or form.


Claude Rains and the now almost forgotten Marian Marsh (as if she genuinely did check into a mysterious hotel never to be seen again) are the husband and wife who arrive wet and desperate for a room on a horrific, stormy night. They are greeted by Karloff at his most obsequious and shown up to their room, but before long they’re lost in a maze of their own desires and fears, changing corridors, shifting floors and doors that seem to open to vast other worlds. Without a doubt the set design on this film, changing as it does from tight and intimate corridors, to crowded ballrooms which seem to stretch on as far as the eye can see, is astounding. Along the way they meet various other lost guests – including Basil Rathbone and Lon Chaney Jr – who may be trying to help or hinder, or perhaps a combination of the two. And every so often Karloff shows up, still seeming so solicitous to their needs but looking less and less trustworthy with every appearance.


Say what you will about Universal Films in the 1930s, but they knew how to slap some celluloid into a projector and say “now, THAT is a horror movie!” ‘The Hotel at Skaneateles Avenue’ represents a bending of the normal format, making it a film not just about thrills and chills, but about fantasy and other worlds. Although not as well known as its Transylvania and Castle Frankenstein stable mates, this trio remains a hugely influential and important series (Doctor Who’s ‘The God Complex’ is clearly a homage). What makes it so interesting and amazing to see with 2014 eyes is how successful these films are at putting this claustrophobic fantasy onto the big screen. Other worlds and vistas – like those created by Tolkein and Martin – would still be far beyond what was possible in 1930s cinema; but here we have fantasy, and fantasy which happens in a world that manages to be both fantastically big and humanly small, created successfully on a cinema screen in a way which will make any genre fan lick their lips with relish.

Nickleby (1963)

D. Randall MacDougall
Colour

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


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


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


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


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

Privates Lives (2001)

D. Otto von De Mille
Colour

Two years after the disaster that was the final Sexy Goth Girls movie, Liddy D’Eath and Otto Van De Mille reteamed for this spin on Noel Coward’s ‘Private Lives’. It’s difficult to see from the outside what kept D’Eath and Van De Mille together, why one of them didn’t explore what other opportunities there were. There are rumours of an affair between the two, but it seems to have finished before they started making films. So far, so Woody Allen/Diane Keaten, but Keaten did at least go off and make ‘The Godfather’, Liddy D’Eath just stayed true to Von De Mille. This is surprising as whereas he is an adequate director, there’s something quite special about her screen presence. Not just her physicality, which is waif like, with blonde hair and big eyes and tattoos which suggest a tarnished angel, but also a genuine charisma that only Van De Mille seemed to want to capture. And that’s odd, as once again in a collaboration between the two we see Liddy D’Eath using a defibelator on the struggling material she has been given, going so far as to give it frantic life to life in a struggle to give it any kind of pulse. It must have been disconcerting for her to work so hard and still only get phone-calls from her weirdly named ex-boyfriend.


Before long the two of them would embark on another series of films which would match the best of the Sexy Goth Girls movies, but first there is this interesting, curiosity of a mis-step. A comedy of modern sexual manners, a bedroom farce which doesn’t get near achieving the right balance between bedroom and farce. Having married impetuously, Liddy and her new wan-faced husband (played by the void like, Jackson Wilson) find themselves on honeymoon in a remote desert hotel. But she is shocked to discover that in the next bedroom is not only her ex hot and heavy boyfriend (the big and brooding, Douglas Conifer) but his new bride, who happens to be her college lesbian lover (Jenny Picard). The stage is set for passion, jokes, recriminations, misunderstandings, fetching leather lingerie, laughter, tears, innuendo, broken hearts and more exploring of sexual confusion than even Noel Coward would ever have dreamed possible.


Let’s be clear, this isn’t porn. There are points when it looks like it’s just going to tip into porn, particularly when the women seem about to reignite their passion with a breathless, full-on session. The camera lingers and it feels as if the bass line is going to strike up and we should either be watching this in a darkened room alone, or in a cinema with lots of other shifty men. But it never quite tips over into porn, although nor does it really become anything else. The dialogue, as you’d expect from the man who made the ‘Sexy Goth Girls’ movies, is frequently very funny – but it’s hardly likely to reach the standards of Noel Coward. (I think that Coward would have enjoyed this film though, perhaps with martini in hand and a bemused, amused look on his face). However the dialogue never touches the emotions it needs to. And because in a set up like this the emotions need to be addressed, there are whole amateurish scenes with craply written dialogue just to get them out of the way. As such what we end up with is a drama which isn’t dramatic enough, a comedy which isn’t funny enough and a porno which isn’t pornographic enough. Liddy D’Eath doesn’t even look that gothic, for god’s sake. It’s an odd faltering stumble of a movie, although one massaged into some kind of decent shape by the charms of its leading lady, but better isn’t far away.

The Invisible Man (1955)

D. Ralph Smart
B&W


There’s a reason why the Claude Rains/James Whale version is the best known of 'The Invisible Man' movies. There’s the spooky tavern, the screaming maid,. Raines’s magnificently sinister voice, a scarf dancing around by itself. It just feels so much like what Wells’s versions of The Invisible Man should be. In the eighty years since it was made (Eighty?! My doesn’t time fly!) Kevin Bacon, Chevy Chase and David MaCallum have had a stab at it but with less visible success (pun intended). Perhaps the most out there and uncanonical of these versions though is when Kenneth Moore donned the white bandages. It’s called ‘The Invisible Man’ and says it’s based on the novel by H.G. Wells, but if you’d resurrected Wells in 1955 and bought him popcorn at a showing, he’d have stared at the screen racking his brains as to whether he ever dreamed of such a thing. As this Invisible Man is invisible, but going places Wells never imagined. But even though the film is now pretty much forgotten you can surely see roots from this to 'Doctor Who', 'The Avengers', Alan Moore and the more outré parts of the James Bond films.


Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Michael Griffin, invisible man and roguish British secret agent.


Yes, those of you who’ve read the book or seen Claude Rains, may be surprised that someone so clearly insane could pass the rigorous examinations set by MI6. Surely he would have failed on personality type in eight or nine different ways. Also, wouldn’t a man so clearly self-absorbed not care too much about the nation state in the battle against the Russians? It’s true that his behaviour is a bit extreme at times, and there are moments when his colleagues and controllers look at him (or look at the space around where they imagine he might be) aghast. But then I guess actually having an invisible man on your side makes the difficulties of employing an invisible man worthwhile.


(Part of the problem with making ‘The Invisible Man’ is attracting a top name actor to it, after all why would your self-righteous A-lister want to do a role where he is never actually seen? This version gets around this though by giving Moore a perfectly fitting mask of his own face.  Bacon and McCallum (and Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible) also use such masks. But the question has to be asked, where would one get such an item? Masks are there to hide behind, so what company sees the market in making a mask that looks exactly like the person who is wearing it? Is there really much business in that type of thing? Even more than the idea of invisible men, this seems weird to me.)


After an opening mission which goes wrong (Griffin impetuously steals the wrong briefcase), his controller Leo G. Carroll (rehearsing for both ‘North by Northwest’ and ‘The Man from Uncle’) sends this invisible man on a mission to tail glamorous Russian spy, Jane Russell. The divine Ms Russell is clearly slumming it in British movies, but using it as an opportunity to cultivate an absurd East German accent which just gets magnificently broader and broader as the film goes on. Initially he is clandestine in the way only an invisible man can be, but before long he is putting on his human mask and wining and dining this ultra-glamorous Russian agent until she comes across to the British and right side. It’s then that she reveals her big secret, that the Russians have placed three giant robots in London which they are going to use to destabilise the capital. The stage is set for the incredibly giddy sight of the invisible man taking on huge metal men in London town.


Okay, the effects really do start to fall apart when the large men in robot suits go on the rampage. And more than once the strings are visible when the invisible man starts moving stuff around. But, in the ideas of it, in the concept, in the science fiction of stuff happening in grimy London we have both ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘The Avengers’. In the glamorous female prey and derring-do of the spy who breaks the rules, we have James Bond. And in the invisible man doing things H.G. Wells never imagined we have ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (as well as Ralph Smart’s own equally forgotten 1950s TV show ‘The Invisible Man’ which this was a springboard for). It’s far from perfect, but this is a movie we should hail!

Argonauts of the Air (1937)

D. Jimmy Cowdell
B&W


It’s H.G. Wells week this week on The Alternative History of Cinema. There’s no specific reason for this, on this blog I just pick things on a whim and whimsy and go from there. And since in recent weeks, two H.G. Wells adaptations have occurred to me, I thought I’d create thematic unity by running them together. Yes, I really should have done it in September for his birthday or something like that, but sod it! All year around is a good time for Bromley’s finest literary son. First up we have a stilted, cut glass tale of British derring-do in outer space. Set in the wonderful year of 2014, but clearly much more the 1930s. The future, much like the present, is British and nothing is going to stop that. Get your Union Jack marked spaceships at the ready, put your stiff upper lip in place, and off we go.


Based on the very short Wells story of the same name, this is the almost Monty Python set-up of spaceflight from the suburbs. Just outside the two up, two down of the new suburban developments, there are rockets lined up ready to fly to the furthest reaches of space. There dashing young men queue up to be spacemen and take the glory of Britain to the further possible horizon, while dowdier men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats man Mission Control – just like Mr Benn’s most out of this world adventure. We hear tales of a moon-base, a Martian colony (where in a throwaway line it seems we are teaching the Martians about civilised government), of how the Saturn fleet is now mighty. But a threat is coming from closer to home that could seriously harm this brilliant endeavour.


For the most part this is derring-do of a Bulldog Drummond style. Lewis Coleman is Captain Jack Cook, a legendary figure in the space corps – the kind of man with a pencil thin moustache, slicked back hair, a rakish grin and a glint in the eye bright enough to weaken the knee of any poor susceptible member of the female species. He’s the type of Englishman who is every woman’s dream (although that dream probably involves pounding her lover’s buttocks once a week with a cane to really get him off. Yes, he’s that type of Englishman!) Clearly the film makers have seen Flash Gordon as there are the plastic rocket ships, onesie space uniforms, strange new planets. But at the forefront, hands on hips, staring handsomely into the distance, looking both heroic and rather repressed, is our very English hero.


But there’s a problem, the large staff back at space-fleet command has been infiltrated. It hasn’t been infiltrated by a Martian, or a Venusian or a moon person – no the big threat comes from closer to home, it comes from the anarchists. Arthur Simkins, as rat-faced an actor as ever lived, is Karl Mannix, an anarchist who is determined to destroy the space-fleet. He doesn’t dream of a glorious space Empire, he dreams of bringing England to its knees. After a few acts of sabotage a general meeting is called and after a bumpy opening, Captain Jack carries the day and gets the workforce on its side. It’s then that Mannix, and his sinister foreign cohorts, decide to step the plan up and kill Captain Jack, slaughter the glorious symbol of the British Space Empire itself. But the will of the people is stronger. Joined together – every member of the space corps, from Captain Jack Cook down to a lowly cleaner named Marjorie (who stares at Captain Jack with a mix of motherly pride and lustful wantonness) is able to root out and get rid of the these subversive infiltrators. Space flight is for all and the all join together to make sure that the malcontent few do not destroy the great dream of mankind.


It’s a beautiful image, one that precedes ‘Star Trek’ by thirty years, and chimes well with Wells’ own political views. But it also makes for an oddly confusing movie. The anarchists are clearly portrayed as left wing themselves. There they are with their pamphlets, their copies of Marx, their exaggerated (as it turns out) claims about poor working conditions. And so they don’t seem to be that different from the grouping which eventually crushes them. Yes, socialism without Marx is an ideal Wells is on record as desiring, and this is a film where the Marx is forcibly removed from socialism. Yet there is little on the screen to truly explain what that means and we’re left with a story where some left wing patriots get rid of some really left wing malcontents so that the bowler hatted fellows of Wimbledon, Surbiton and Worcester Park can continue their work in Britain’s glorious imperial space-race.

The Great Gatsby (1962)

D. Randal MacDougall
Colour


I don’t care what anyone says, Elvis Presley as Jay Gatsby works!


This is a movie which gets a lot of stick, even from Elvis fans. Yes that’s right, even those ultra-defensive individuals who’ll fervently make the case that EVERY SINGLE FUCKING THING the man did was brilliant to every semiquaver, will slag off this film. Complaints I’ve read include that the period detail looks unconvincing, that the supporting case is painfully uncharismatic and that the songs are crap. That last one is particularly odd, as the songs really aren’t that bad, if you slog your way through Elvis soundtrack album after Elvis soundtrack album (I don’t recommend this as a leisure activity by the way) you will find dozens of worse examples. Other complaints are that the script doesn’t really capture the book, that it’s poorly paced and that – really – ‘The Great Gatsby’ shouldn’t come with a quasi-happy ending.


And I’ll be honest, a lot of that is true. The period trappings are a little staid with any detail coming from stock footage and fake backdrops. Obviously the more contemporary setting of ‘Wuthering Heights’ was better, but the 1920s – if we’re honest – is not so far away from Elvis’s milieu as to be ridiculous. Michael Landon as Nick Carroway and Linda Evans as Daisy Buchanan are both bland as hell, clearly miscast and losing all their television charisma on the big screen. As for the songs, yes there are some turgid examples, but then there are a couple of catchy ones – the Leiber & Stoller ‘Money, Money, Money’ (clearly no relation to the Abba track) is a particular foot stamper. And really, we’re going to criticise an Elvis adaptation of a classic novel because it doesn’t show sufficient fidelity? It’s an Elvis adaptation of a classic novel - Different Rules Apply!


It seems to me though that all these criticisms miss the point of the enterprise, as this entire film – more than ‘Loving You’, more than any of the concert movies – is a film all about Elvis. This is a movie, this a character, that Elvis Presley just owns! Think about it: the tale of a self-made man who comes from nothing to live the life of opulence; the story of a man who dared to dream big and had all those dreams come true; a man who achieved so much from so little and so must have felt a stranger in his own skin. This could be the Elvis Presley story. Elvis is Jay Gatsby in a way that he is never any other part. In a way that completely negates later interpretations by Robert Redford or Leonardo DiCaprio. On screen this is him at his best, pure and undistilled. This is a magnetic performance of sheer dynamism, a brilliant showing which truly captures the highs and lows of not only the story, but Elvis’s whole career.


Apparently Elvis was disappointed not to get an Oscar nomination, I can truly see why.


Those naysayers are wrong as even though there are plenty of flaws, those flaws all melt away in the face of Elvis’s performance. Yes, in isolation it’s hard to imagine Linda Evans inspiring anybody’s eternal passion, but Elvis manages to convince that this is the case; just as he makes it believable that he’d take Michael Landon as a friend (and not just someone to pelt with wet toilet roll whenever he saw him); or that Jay Gatsby could and should come out somewhere on top. Okay, the ending is contentious and I would find it ridiculously dubious in any other adaptation, but here the near happy ending is one all Elvis fans should root for. As this isn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, this is Elvis Presley’s. And who wouldn’t want to see a happier ending to ‘The Great Presley’?

Le Long Au Revoir (1978)

D. Claude Chabrol
Colour


In cinema terms, the French are much cooler than the British, aren’t they? If you look at how grand and romantic Paris appears on the cinema screen, and then contrast it with how dingy and provincial London looks, you have to – and it pains me to admit this - say that France wins. It’s by far the most cinematic country with a much grander film tradition and many more great films. Of course as a citizen of these isles I will not admit French superiority in any other matter (our cheeses are much better than theirs, goddamnit!), to do so would see my British passport revoked and my bruised and battered body dumped off The White Cliffs of Dover. But when it comes to cinema, I feel I am on safer ground – they have the lead on us. Damn them!


A case in point, in the same year Robert Mitchum was playing an aged Philip Marlowe on the dank streets of London, Stéphane Audran was essaying a more original and yet still recognisable version of Marlowe on the lush and golden streets of Paris.


But whereas one was directed by the dread hand of Michael Winner, the other was being helmed by the French Hitchcock himself – the great and equally balding, Claude Chabrol.


Audran is Michelle, a socialite who it’s hinted has some kind of scandalous past. Outside a nightclub one evening (where she has pushed away the attentions of a particularly hirsute date – like that bloke from ‘The Joy of Sex’ made flesh), she encounters Veronique, an old acquaintance. The two of them share a cab home and say goodbye with a Parisian kiss on the cheek and a lingering embrace. Maybe the encounter would never have meant anything, but the following morning Veronique arrives at Michelle’s apartment and asks to be driven to Charles de Gaulle airport. Michelle senses that something is wrong, but does it anyway. It turns out that Veronique’s boyfriend is lying dead in their house, and having aided the main suspect’s escape, Michelle is questioned as an accessory. Once the police free her though, this one time party girl becomes Philip Marlowe in a tailored skirt and kitten heels, and starts to investigate. She gets to know Veronique’s neighbours, Henri Robery and his wife Sevine, and develops a flirtatious relationship with both – but also starts to get nearer to what really happened that fateful night.


‘The Long Goodbye’ is the only Chandler novel in which Marlowe manages to get his end away, for all the crackling dialogue and wanton women in the other books, he always somehow resists. It therefore seems appropriate that it was turned into the sexist and most sizzling Marlowe adaptation of them all. (I like the Robert Altman version as well, but without question Stéphane Audran is sexier than Elliot Gould.) There’s just something so French about it all – the careless flirtations and the passion of the affairs – which just suits this material so well. Paris in this film is a city where cross and double cross seem a matter of course, just like infidelity and wild homicidal passion – that’s the way of the world. The mystery therefore plays out against a background where there are a dozen similar mysteries taking place every day.


And Stéphane Audran makes a superb, if unorthodox, version of Marlowe. The gender swap may be controversial, but it works – having a sexy and somewhat mature woman ask these questions just adds a whole other frisson to the piece. And despite her wild past and how sexy she looks with her eyebrow raised, there is still a moral certainty to her that Chandler would have been proud of. A moral authority and an inner steel, and those are the essential ingredients every big screen Philip Marlowe needs.

Wuthering Heights (1961)

D. Don Siegel
B&W


This is called learning from your mistakes. This is called poring over the smouldering wreckage of what went before, having the humility to admit that that particular journey was started with the brake wires cut and a rubber toy in place of the steering wheel, and then correcting those massive errors going forward. This is called not crashing the same car into the same wall all over again; or more appropriately this is called not just churning out any old crap for a cheap buck. This is the way things should have been.


Yes, Elvis in ‘Wuthering Heights’ is fantastic!


As an Elvis obsessed little boy who became an Elvis obsessed man, I take great pleasure in bringing these neglected gems of his much maligned film-work forward. And it gives me particular joy to polish up, buff until its gloriously shiny and then present this gem – with a wide soup-bowl shaped grin on my face – for your perusal. The last time Elvis tackled a classic, you might remember, it was ‘Hamlet’ and the results can be politely described as not good. There was Elvis in a doublet and hose, trying to master iambic pentameter with that Memphis drawl and singing whole soliloquies whilst ridiculous ghostly bongo players kept rhythm over his shoulder.


There is nothing so ludicrous on display here, this one is playing to Elvis’s strengths. I have no idea whether there was ever a plan to set this in Victorian Yorkshire, with Elvis giving us his best “Ecky thump, it be right perishing out moor”; but if there was, then it was thankfully scrapped. (Seeing Elvis trying to speak like Sean Bean is no more appetising than imagining Sean Bean quiffed up and trying to play Elvis.) Instead the action of this film is set in Wuthering Heights, a suburb of Nashville.


It’s a brilliant conceit. Here we have the cute as several dozen buttons Tuesday Weld as Cathy (the same year in which she met Elvis in the far less inspiring, and indeed wild, ‘Wild in The Country’), an aspiring and truly headstrong country and western singer who has got herself engaged to a Pat Boone-esque crooner, Edward Litton (played with appropriate lack of charisma by someone called Dave Fellows – quite, me neither), but who’s that smouldering his way back into town? Why it’s Elvis as Heathcliff , the boy she grew up with and the great romance of her life.


Even for a modern day version of the story, it’s one which deserves the description ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘adapted from’ Emily Bronte’s novel. Indeed it can be more accurately described as a musical remake of the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version – as both films leave out the second and more interesting part of the book. But in the end fidelity doesn’t matter, as this is brilliant. Siegel (helming Elvis for the second rime) shoots for and gets a beautiful, noir soaked black & white; Elvis’s role requires little more than to just show up and be broody and soulful, and he does more of that with one look than most actors can manage in a career; and Weld is suitably intense and passionate, as well as utterly convincing as a lifelong object of desire. While if Fellows is as uninteresting as a sheep farmer in 1800’s Yorkshire, well he’s supposed to be.


Okay, if the film was perfect the songs would be a lot better – such numbers as ‘The Boy Heathcliff (Back in Town)’, ‘Don’t Run Away, Cathy’ and ‘It Ain’t the Wind That’s Wuthering;’ are never going to show up  on any Elvis ‘best of’, no matter how many volumes it stretches to. But then this is the rare thing, a musical where the music isn’t that important. No, ‘Wuthering Heights’ isn’t about the songs, it’s about sheer sex appeal, it’s about pouting and rebellious youth, it’s about giving up everything for passion, it’s about personifying cool – and in that regard it succeeds on every measure.

The Stainless Steel Rat (1970)

D. Gerry Anderson
Colour


In many ways it should have been the perfect coming together. The first ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ book is great fiction for kids, it moves along at a fine clip, doesn’t aim for too much depth and isn’t concerned about painting the planets it visits in anything other than the broadest strokes. World building and complex plots are not what ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ is about, what it’s about is colourful adventure. Therefore Gerry Anderson must have seemed the ideal choice to film the adaptation. He had after all spent most of the 1960s making uncomplex and undemanding adventure series. If anything he created more depth for the worlds he encountered and so should have been great at filling in the blanks. His metier – as it was seen at this point by the general public and the industry itself – was puppets. And if anything was created to be filmed in Supermarionation, it was ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’.


This feature length pilot for a proposed series should have been a success then. Unfortunately, by 1970, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Gerry Anderson really fucking hated puppets.


It’s odd that the man most associated with Supermarionation, who coined the word even, was the man who became the biggest critic of it. Anderson wanted to work with real actors, he wanted to make films (he was involved in the development of ‘Moonraker’) and felt that puppets were a cul de sac. Unfortunately, as his later ‘UFO’, ‘The Protectors’, ‘Space 1999’ career proved, he wasn’t good at working with live actors. Indeed he had an odd habit of making actual actors give performances reminiscent of puppets. That was all in the future though, at this time he was still the man with the puppets, but the fact he was so desperate not to be the man with the puppets explains why ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ fails so badly.


‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz is a rogue, a crook in a world where crime has largely been abolished. He is a high-tech, futuristic gentleman thief, like a Raffles with a ray-gun. We open as he successfully carries out a heist, before moving confidently onto his next crime. Unfortunately the next crime brings him into contact with Inskipp, a thief even more legendary than himself, but one who is now working as an investigator for the state. (Inskipp is a glorious puppet by the way, so squat and rotund and sweaty. It looks as if he’s been left in front of the radiator for a couple of days). He recruits Slippery Jim, much against his will, but soon our stainless steel rat gets the righteous scent of the hunt in his nostrils. He finds himself in pursuit of Angelina, the great femme fatale of the galaxy.


Firstly, the things this adaptation does right. The puppets are excellent, a far improvement on what Anderson had been working with at the start of the decade. One wouldn’t go as far as to say lifelike, as they’re still puppets after all, but these puppets are clearly at the more expressive end of puppet performers. The story is well paced, with the script placing exciting set-piece after exciting set-piece. And it corrects the biggest problem of the book, which is that the relationship between Jim and Angelina is so ill defined. Here Anderson aims for chemistry between his puppets, giving them witty dialogue that makes them sizzle like Bogart and Bacall with strings. Indeed it appears at points as if Anderson doesn’t want to restrain himself to just kisses. No doubt when he watched the sex scene in ‘Team America: World Police’ he saw realised a load of images which had flooded through his mind when making this film.


But where it doesn’t work is that Anderson is clearly straining with all his might against the form he did so much to develop. He clearly fucking hates puppets, and that has bad consequences for this film. Even when it’s puppets in brave new worlds, he still directs it in the most pedestrian way, with none of the verve of his earlier work. As such the exciting set pieces following exciting set pieces are not really that exciting at all.


What’s more, no matter how expressive the puppet, they’re clearly not enough for him anymore. When it comes to one of his characters giving a real serious emotion, then the vague features of a real person are superimposed onto their faces (superimposition on top of supermarionation). No doubt it was supposed to add depth, but it comes across looking weird, spooky even. Here we have a man who is working with puppets and wants to work with actors and so decides to do both, but doing so adds zero of the qualities you generally get from live actors and just ends up making his puppets look even more fake and stranger than before.


Such is his contempt for the materials he’s working with, that the viewer begins to imagine that he might truly shatter the illusion by running onto screen before the final shot and snipping all the strings while cackling manically into the camera. No doubt he was delighted that this wasn’t picked up as series. Even though ‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz was a more nuanced and interesting character than Anderson had had before (maybe even the most nuanced and interesting character Anderson ever had) he was still – in this form – a fucking puppet. Underwhelming live action would follow for Anderson now, as for diGriz his wait for a proper film goes on – but I can’t help thinking that his puppet self is staking somewhere out right now.

Roseanna (1974)

D. Jack Smight
Colour

It’s downright odd that one would take a bleak Scandinavian crime thriller, full of gloomy and moody Swedes, and transport it to sunny and bright Los Angeles.

 

It’s utterly peculiar that having taken this dark and existential story, one would then cast a talented light comic actor like George Segal in the lead.

 

No matter how witty the banter, one would normally be really quite suspicious that the audience will find it distasteful to see male cops wisecracking over a violent sex crime.

 

And  it’s frankly and maddeningly bizarre that amidst the bright Los Angeles sunshine (with all the lingering shots of beautiful blondes in bikinis that implies), the charmingly smiling leading man and all the jokes, one would not only keep the brutality of the crime but try to hold onto some of the book’s existential angst as well.

 

All of the above makes the adaptation of ‘Roseanna’ a distinctly head spinning experience.

 

Sometimes films are schizophrenic, sometimes films have two distinct personalities struggling to get out. It’s not just that a film struggles to find a tone, it’s that it’s so totally tonally deaf, so unable to engage with its own subject matter, that it becomes a warped piece of cinema that nobody is possibly going to get to handle on. I don’t want to mock the mentally ill, I don’t want to joke about the poor souls who were hauled around in cages a hundred years ago by shysters who charged the public a penny a gander, but this is a freak film, a genuinely split personality, mad and unstable movie.

 

And as you know by now, this website exists to put its arms around genuinely split personality, mad and unstable movies.

 

In 1964 the Swedish crime writing team, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, introduced their character Martin Beck In ‘Rosanna’. It’s a compulsive police procedural, but a very dark and Swedish book which lays the miserabilism on hard. It adopts a questioning and disorientated stand against the world, to the point where there’s a police officer actually named Kafka. The story concentrates on the sexually-motivated murder of a young tourist in Sweden and the way the case gets under the skin of the team investigating it, obsessing them and torturing them with the thought that the man who did this is still out there. In short, it isn’t a crammed barrel full of chuckles. Whether when Sjöwall and Wahlöö wrote this book they thought there was a film in it, I don’t know. But if they did, they probably thought it would be made by Ingmar Bergman on one of his less cheery days.

 

However, fast forward ten years and Hollywood decides to take a bash at it.

 

At the time this wouldn’t have necessarily seemed such a bad idea. A year earlier, Walter Matthau had scored a success with his version of Martin Beck in ‘The Laughing Policeman’. That was also set in California (San Francisco rather than LA), but managed to maintain the grim procedural qualities of the book. Presumably Mr Matthau was unavailable for this second go around, so instead another actor known for comedy roles was hired – George Segal. Now this might also have been a good thing, it could have expanded his range away from comedy to something with more depth. And as long as the plot wasn’t messed around with (which substantially it isn’t) and the horror wasn’t muted (which it is, but only slightly) then this may have been a gripping and scary thriller.

 

Instead we get this bloody mess, a diluted thriller which just wants to be loved and ends up being the awkward guy at a party – there to make friends, but just a bit too creepy to succeed. I like George Segal, I think he’s an engaging presence, but obsessive and moody brooding is not his thing. The film does give him a few moments of staring at the Pacific with a furrow on his brow, but it is only a moment – then the grin snaps into place and we’re back to wisecracking. And that’s the problem, the film doesn’t trust itself to do the serious material and so tries to make it more palatable with jokes. But because it doesn’t actually tone down the serious material, the end result is either a harsh film which inexplicable keeps racing off to do some clowning, or a comedy with a far too dark and brutal heart.

 

Amongst Segal’s colleagues are an hilarious bunch of LA police officers, forever telling jokes and joshing with each other – but more than anything they show the warped and flawed sheer wrongness of this film. Watching men stand over the naked body of a girl while joking about what their girlfriend likes to do with ketchup is just too weird. Words cannot express how odd it is to watch and how uncomfortable the audience feels as a consequence. The film becomes even worse than the awkward guy at the party, now instead the awkward guy at the funeral, trying to lighten the mood with some ill advised blue comedy.

 

The whole thing – the sunshine, George Segal, the jokes – just twist what should be an unrelenting thriller completely out of shape . The brutality of the plot is kept, but this film doesn’t have the palate to do brutality, it can only do bright and primary colours. As such it fails at every conceivable level. But then if ‘Dirty Harry’ had featured a scene in which Harry Callaghan – just after having been to the mortuary –  put on a Groucho mask, picked up a ukulele and mugged frantically while singing a medley of show tunes to a simpering, leggy, lab technician, that would have been something  a fail as well.