D. Anthony de La Sewell
Colour
This one is going to be like a dog whistle to bad movie lovers.
Here we have Patsi Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony as a female pop group/super spies saving the world whilst also filming a music video and trying to get to Top of the Pops on time. Yes, I’ll say those names again Patsy Kensit, Elizabeth Hurley and Lysette Anthony, three beautiful but limited actresses who scream the 1980s to Britons of a certain age. As with all deference to George Orwell, this is the most 1984 movie ever made. There’s the cast, the music, the hair, the shoulder pads, the cultural references which were supposed to make it hip and with it, but must have actually made it look aged and past it by January the First, 1985. You see the group here are clearly supposed to be Bananarama. In fact I’d be totally stunned if this wasn’t written with Bananarama in mind. Not only is there the sassy all good trio, adored stars of the British music scene, but the fact that when they perform the singing is actually Bananarama’s – taking on songs from the bottom of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman slush pile (and when you hear them you’ll realise that these songs must have been pressed right to the floorboards they were so far down). Why Bananarama themselves weren’t cast is open to debate. One can only guess that it’s because they weren’t really actors. Although when you see the performances Hurley, Anthony and Kensit give, you’ll realise that can’t possibly be the reason.
The plot starts in Thailand (for the music video shoot) before returning to London (for the Top of the Pops appearance), but in-between the wearing swimsuits and leggings and miming, the girls find that the spy agency they work for has been compromised and a list of agents is now in the wrong hands. It’s up to our mighty trio (the group is actually called ‘Trio’, such is the lack of inspiration) to juggle their priorities and get them back. Gradually the prime suspect emerges as former agent and 1970s pop superstar, Magdalena de Faith – and Trio have to stop her before she carries out the final part of her dastardly plan.
(Interestingly this would all seem to be much the same plot as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, so I guess that is an unofficial remake of this. That’s a film I’ve never managed to watch all the way through, as it’s awful. This is awful too, but in a more fun and haphazard way; Charlie’s Angels is awful in the most corporate, soulless way possible.)
Joanna Lumley plays Magdalena de Faith and is fantastic as the haughty European has-been, and thus totally wasted in this movie. Kensit is bad, Anthony equally so, but both look Rada trained next to Hurley, who can barely walk convincingly, let alone deliver lines. The songs are awful, the plot is obvious (with zero sense of pacing) and even though the crew was clearly flown out to Thailand for exteriors, the interiors couldn’t be any more shot on a cheap sitcom set in Elstree if Mrs Slocambe marched into shot. In short this is a bit of a disaster, but I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Showing posts with label spy-movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spy-movie. Show all posts
Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Wednesday, 12 November 2014
Atom-Man!!!
D. Stanley Kirby
That really faded and dank colour I am constantly amused and depressed by in 1970s British films
So here we have the second of this week’s ‘man at the centre of a nuclear explosion isn’t blown into a million pieces as you’d expect, but instead absorbs the frightening powers of radiation and becomes something akin to a super man’ movies. The first was a tense, taut cold war thriller, hampered by the fact that the man on the run looked so blatantly suspicious it was like he had a big self-powered neon sign saying “Radioactive man here!” above his head.
So now we come to this, the more heroic and the more moronic version.
The first thing to notice is the date off release, 1978. That’s 19-fucking-78! What this is aiming for is the wild psychedelic James Bond spoof, of the kind that I’ve covered on this blog before. But all those films come from the late 1960s, when Bond-mania is at its height. There are very few of them after that, because James Bond movies started to aggressively spoof themselves – so that if you wanted ‘James Bond thriller’ and ‘spoof of James Bond thriller’ you only needed to buy the one ticket. 1978 is not the time of Bond spoofs
The second thing you immediately notice is who is playing our heroic lead, it’s Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver bloody Reed. I appreciate that after a career playing brooding and sinister outsiders, Oliver probably leapt at the chance of being an actual hero. He has the looks, he has a certain dash to him and he even appears to be sober. But there’s still something so menacing about him, a stillness that makes it seem like, even though he’s the hero, he’s considering randomly killing everyone else in the room.
Atom Man is a world hero who lives in London and has the secret identity of super spy, Gregory Smythe. Yes, the film really is having its greedy teenage geek’s birthday cake and stuffing its face full of it. But he faces a two pronged attack: the Russians have a ray that they hope will render Atom-Man powerless; AND there’s a secret agent who is going to seduce and make Gabriel Smythe switch sides. To be fair it’s more invested in the spy stuff as it actually doesn’t have the budget to do the super hero stuff, being set again and again in boring rooms and having Adam West-esque sound effects when Atom-Man throws a punch. It also has female nipples, which as far as cinema is concerned, were invented in 1969.
It’s interesting to watch this film next to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, which was released a few weeks earlier. One is top quality superhero antics which still resonates today, the other is a cheap British romp – which in its final run around in a nudist camp seems to just give up all pretence and admit to just being a cheap British romp. But in the anti-heroic performance of its hero, you can’t help thinking that there’s a far darker and weirder film completely untapped here. People speak of having a darker Batman, but no one thought of handing it to someone like Oliver Reed. Except that one day in the forgotten mists of cheap British movies, somebody actually did.
That really faded and dank colour I am constantly amused and depressed by in 1970s British films
So here we have the second of this week’s ‘man at the centre of a nuclear explosion isn’t blown into a million pieces as you’d expect, but instead absorbs the frightening powers of radiation and becomes something akin to a super man’ movies. The first was a tense, taut cold war thriller, hampered by the fact that the man on the run looked so blatantly suspicious it was like he had a big self-powered neon sign saying “Radioactive man here!” above his head.
So now we come to this, the more heroic and the more moronic version.
The first thing to notice is the date off release, 1978. That’s 19-fucking-78! What this is aiming for is the wild psychedelic James Bond spoof, of the kind that I’ve covered on this blog before. But all those films come from the late 1960s, when Bond-mania is at its height. There are very few of them after that, because James Bond movies started to aggressively spoof themselves – so that if you wanted ‘James Bond thriller’ and ‘spoof of James Bond thriller’ you only needed to buy the one ticket. 1978 is not the time of Bond spoofs
The second thing you immediately notice is who is playing our heroic lead, it’s Oliver Reed. That’s Oliver bloody Reed. I appreciate that after a career playing brooding and sinister outsiders, Oliver probably leapt at the chance of being an actual hero. He has the looks, he has a certain dash to him and he even appears to be sober. But there’s still something so menacing about him, a stillness that makes it seem like, even though he’s the hero, he’s considering randomly killing everyone else in the room.
Atom Man is a world hero who lives in London and has the secret identity of super spy, Gregory Smythe. Yes, the film really is having its greedy teenage geek’s birthday cake and stuffing its face full of it. But he faces a two pronged attack: the Russians have a ray that they hope will render Atom-Man powerless; AND there’s a secret agent who is going to seduce and make Gabriel Smythe switch sides. To be fair it’s more invested in the spy stuff as it actually doesn’t have the budget to do the super hero stuff, being set again and again in boring rooms and having Adam West-esque sound effects when Atom-Man throws a punch. It also has female nipples, which as far as cinema is concerned, were invented in 1969.
It’s interesting to watch this film next to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, which was released a few weeks earlier. One is top quality superhero antics which still resonates today, the other is a cheap British romp – which in its final run around in a nudist camp seems to just give up all pretence and admit to just being a cheap British romp. But in the anti-heroic performance of its hero, you can’t help thinking that there’s a far darker and weirder film completely untapped here. People speak of having a darker Batman, but no one thought of handing it to someone like Oliver Reed. Except that one day in the forgotten mists of cheap British movies, somebody actually did.
Sunday, 9 November 2014
No Face (1958)
D. Thomas Logan
B&W
What would it be like to be at the centre of a nuclear blast?
Well, obviously you wouldn’t survive long enough to dwell on it. That atom bomb would have splattered your particular atoms evenly over a square mile. But that moment, that sensation of the blast, when maybe the thought shoots through your mind that you’ve never been near anything so freaking powerful (right before the more understandable “fuck! I’m about to die!” screams through your mind) must be one of fearful awe. But what would happen if you actually did survive. If you were able to stand right inside that power and walk away; more than that, if you were actually able to absorb all that power and take it with you. What would it do to you? What would happen to your mind and body afterwards?
Our two films this week approach that Doctor Manhattan idea and take it in weirdly different directions.
Firstly paranoia and tension are on order in this gas-lit noir thriller, as down-on-his-luck-hack Leo McKern hears rumours that not only is a Russian atomic man at loose in London, but his controllers want him to detonate himself at the State Opening of Parliament. However his investigation not so much ruffles feathers as plucks them furiously, so the authorities come down on him hard (with ‘The Official Secrets Act” waved in manic Neville Chamberlain style more than once), and McKern finds himself both pursued and pursuer as the clock ticks down to the moment London goes boom.
There’s a lot to admire here. Leo McKern as a journalist is like an embryonic version of his character in the excellent ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’; London exists in a kind of perpetual 1950s smog that must have required a man with a massive smoke-machine and the sets from every Jack the Ripper movie ever made, and there are fine character actors at every corner. Indeed in such a dour black & white film, there’s a surfeit of background colour – including Jack Warner as a shady Dixon of Dock Green, Kenneth Williams as the campest cockney snout who ever lived and Diana Dors as a foreign agent whose accent places her somewhere on the border between Minsk and Margate.
The problem, and it is a large – H-bomb sized – problem, is the villain. Because of scars from the blast, he hangs around London with a cloth perpetually masking his face. It’s tight to his features and makes him look something like an alien bank robber. Apparently he is supposed to be inconspicuous like this. He checks into the various hotels and guest houses and nobody winks an eyelid – as if they constantly give occupancy to people who won’t show their faces. He dresses like a faceless gangster, wanders about after dark, a bobby actually sees him near a dead body – but still he remains a mystery man on the run.
It’s a tense film, in many ways a clever film, but it’s difficult to take a film seriously where the hard-to-find bad guy is obviously saying: “Look at me! Look at me!”
B&W
What would it be like to be at the centre of a nuclear blast?
Well, obviously you wouldn’t survive long enough to dwell on it. That atom bomb would have splattered your particular atoms evenly over a square mile. But that moment, that sensation of the blast, when maybe the thought shoots through your mind that you’ve never been near anything so freaking powerful (right before the more understandable “fuck! I’m about to die!” screams through your mind) must be one of fearful awe. But what would happen if you actually did survive. If you were able to stand right inside that power and walk away; more than that, if you were actually able to absorb all that power and take it with you. What would it do to you? What would happen to your mind and body afterwards?
Our two films this week approach that Doctor Manhattan idea and take it in weirdly different directions.
Firstly paranoia and tension are on order in this gas-lit noir thriller, as down-on-his-luck-hack Leo McKern hears rumours that not only is a Russian atomic man at loose in London, but his controllers want him to detonate himself at the State Opening of Parliament. However his investigation not so much ruffles feathers as plucks them furiously, so the authorities come down on him hard (with ‘The Official Secrets Act” waved in manic Neville Chamberlain style more than once), and McKern finds himself both pursued and pursuer as the clock ticks down to the moment London goes boom.
There’s a lot to admire here. Leo McKern as a journalist is like an embryonic version of his character in the excellent ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’; London exists in a kind of perpetual 1950s smog that must have required a man with a massive smoke-machine and the sets from every Jack the Ripper movie ever made, and there are fine character actors at every corner. Indeed in such a dour black & white film, there’s a surfeit of background colour – including Jack Warner as a shady Dixon of Dock Green, Kenneth Williams as the campest cockney snout who ever lived and Diana Dors as a foreign agent whose accent places her somewhere on the border between Minsk and Margate.
The problem, and it is a large – H-bomb sized – problem, is the villain. Because of scars from the blast, he hangs around London with a cloth perpetually masking his face. It’s tight to his features and makes him look something like an alien bank robber. Apparently he is supposed to be inconspicuous like this. He checks into the various hotels and guest houses and nobody winks an eyelid – as if they constantly give occupancy to people who won’t show their faces. He dresses like a faceless gangster, wanders about after dark, a bobby actually sees him near a dead body – but still he remains a mystery man on the run.
It’s a tense film, in many ways a clever film, but it’s difficult to take a film seriously where the hard-to-find bad guy is obviously saying: “Look at me! Look at me!”
Wednesday, 16 July 2014
The Guest in Room 313 (1968)
D. Giles Malay
B&W
Here’s a genuine curio of a movie which intrigues me every time I see it. ‘The Guest in Room 313’ is a shadowy and obtuse film, one that aims for a narrow focus but also tries to be many things at once, and as a consequence so much remains wonderfully elusive within it. I don’t think there’s another movie quite like it.
The set up is thus: Laurence Harvey, putting that uniquely frigid style of his to good use (this is his best film outside of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a burnt-out spy holed up in the room 313 of a Las Vegas hotel. (Hence the title, I guess.) Clearly something went awry on his last mission as Harvey has terror dreams even when awake; obviously he knows a lot of stuff he doesn’t want to know and it’s burning through his brain. But more than that, more than just being an ex-spy with a drink problem and mental health issues who has cut himself off from society, Harvey also believes that he’s a werewolf. And that belief takes hold even before young women start being murdered in Las Vegas at full moon.
This is a movie which drips with nervous sweat, which reeks of desperate paranoia. You almost suspect that the director and screenwriter and most of the crew made it while wearing little tinfoil hats to stop the government reading their minds. Harvey sits in the hotel room, he drinks whisky, he broods, he has panicked dreams that don’t seem to make any sense within the context of the film – but are undeniably compulsive and fit in totally with the feel of the film. Janet Leigh (another throwback to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a hotel employee in a smart suit who officiously tries to deal with his needs, flirting with him and mothering him, and generally being far more attentive than any normal hotel employee. (Think of that description and then think of the usual impersonal personal service of hotel staff, your suspicions are immediately raised, aren’t they?) Jack Nicholson is another visitor, a fellow agent or perhaps Harvey’s handler, who speaks in bizarre, drawling riddles and makes each of his three scenes decidedly edgy in the way only Jack can. Then there’s Charlotte Rampling, sweet and affecting as a call girl Harvey calls in daylight and who might, just like everyone else, know a lot more than she seems. These are performances which seem to come full of secrets, and around the immobile centre of Harvey – who somehow lets his stiff stillness radiate insanity – they create a movie where you obviously can’t even trust the walls.
The atmosphere of paranoia builds and builds, and never lets up. The ending might be to some people a damp squib, but I find it gloriously and remorselessly unsettling. Yes, little is resolved, most is still left up in the air, but this is a film which wants you to walk away thinking that they really are out to get you.
B&W
Here’s a genuine curio of a movie which intrigues me every time I see it. ‘The Guest in Room 313’ is a shadowy and obtuse film, one that aims for a narrow focus but also tries to be many things at once, and as a consequence so much remains wonderfully elusive within it. I don’t think there’s another movie quite like it.
The set up is thus: Laurence Harvey, putting that uniquely frigid style of his to good use (this is his best film outside of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a burnt-out spy holed up in the room 313 of a Las Vegas hotel. (Hence the title, I guess.) Clearly something went awry on his last mission as Harvey has terror dreams even when awake; obviously he knows a lot of stuff he doesn’t want to know and it’s burning through his brain. But more than that, more than just being an ex-spy with a drink problem and mental health issues who has cut himself off from society, Harvey also believes that he’s a werewolf. And that belief takes hold even before young women start being murdered in Las Vegas at full moon.
This is a movie which drips with nervous sweat, which reeks of desperate paranoia. You almost suspect that the director and screenwriter and most of the crew made it while wearing little tinfoil hats to stop the government reading their minds. Harvey sits in the hotel room, he drinks whisky, he broods, he has panicked dreams that don’t seem to make any sense within the context of the film – but are undeniably compulsive and fit in totally with the feel of the film. Janet Leigh (another throwback to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’) is a hotel employee in a smart suit who officiously tries to deal with his needs, flirting with him and mothering him, and generally being far more attentive than any normal hotel employee. (Think of that description and then think of the usual impersonal personal service of hotel staff, your suspicions are immediately raised, aren’t they?) Jack Nicholson is another visitor, a fellow agent or perhaps Harvey’s handler, who speaks in bizarre, drawling riddles and makes each of his three scenes decidedly edgy in the way only Jack can. Then there’s Charlotte Rampling, sweet and affecting as a call girl Harvey calls in daylight and who might, just like everyone else, know a lot more than she seems. These are performances which seem to come full of secrets, and around the immobile centre of Harvey – who somehow lets his stiff stillness radiate insanity – they create a movie where you obviously can’t even trust the walls.
The atmosphere of paranoia builds and builds, and never lets up. The ending might be to some people a damp squib, but I find it gloriously and remorselessly unsettling. Yes, little is resolved, most is still left up in the air, but this is a film which wants you to walk away thinking that they really are out to get you.
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Dropper Harris and the Menace from Beyond (1939)
D. Ted Green
B&W
The third Dropper Harris film clearly realises it’s the last in the series. That’s not to say it’s lazy, everybody involved is clearly giving a hundred percent even when they know the material they’ve been given is utterly ludicrous. Cary Grant in particular looks like he’s relishing the absolutely ridiculous dialogue and lunatic scenario, knowing that this isn’t something he’d find himself doing for Howard Hawks or George Cukor. This has the feel of everybody letting their hair down, of an entire production team chilling out and just throwing stuff to the wall to see what would stick. Cary Grant later wrote (and indeed directed a film) about his experiments with LSD, and this feels like he’s slipped some to the crew to give the whole production that blissed out, psychedelic, “logic is there to be broken, man” type of atmosphere. As here we have a plot involving Dropper Harris, London citizen and number one agent for the British secret service, taking a trip into space. Yes, this is Dropper Harris goes to the moon.
If you were expecting some common-sense plot to explain this development, then I’m sorry you’re out of luck. There are reasons given for why all this happens, explanations offered for all that takes place, but they don’t stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Indeed this is the second version of this paragraph I’ve written, in the first I tried to explain the plot, but after much head scratching and confusion I just gave up. Again the makers aren’t being slap-dash, this is a film that knows its money shot is Dropper Harris (Cary Grant) and Binky (Tommy Harrison) bouncing around in Flash Gordon outfits on the moon with big silly grins on their faces. That’s what’s on the poster, that’s what the public wanted to see and – goddamnit! – that’s what we got.
Yes, there’s some nonsense about the Russians having opened a moon-base and sending rays back to Earth, but it’s purely window dressing. This is about Dropper, Binky and new team member/love interest Catarina (Dorothy Lamour) going to the moon. That’s where the fun lies and everybody is set to have the time of their lives. Grant in particular has a big, very un-Cary Grant-like goofy grin, as he prances around in Buster Crabbe’s cast-offs spouting alternatively meaningless mumbo-jumbo or over the top atrocious dialogue. He’s still brilliant in this film. Indeed the genius of Cary Grant’s acting is that even when he knows what he’s doing is totally ridiculous, even when part of him is obviously making fun of each scene even as he acts in it, he still takes the audience with him. He never capsizes the film, never ruins it by playing it like panto – somehow he manages to be both serious and in on the joke at the same time, and the result is some of the most joyful silliness you will ever see.
There was nowhere else for Dropper Harris to go after this (except, perhaps, Mars), but we should be thankful these movies exist. A gleeful series of mad, lunatic 1930s adventure films, which always felt out of this world even before they actually went there.
B&W
The third Dropper Harris film clearly realises it’s the last in the series. That’s not to say it’s lazy, everybody involved is clearly giving a hundred percent even when they know the material they’ve been given is utterly ludicrous. Cary Grant in particular looks like he’s relishing the absolutely ridiculous dialogue and lunatic scenario, knowing that this isn’t something he’d find himself doing for Howard Hawks or George Cukor. This has the feel of everybody letting their hair down, of an entire production team chilling out and just throwing stuff to the wall to see what would stick. Cary Grant later wrote (and indeed directed a film) about his experiments with LSD, and this feels like he’s slipped some to the crew to give the whole production that blissed out, psychedelic, “logic is there to be broken, man” type of atmosphere. As here we have a plot involving Dropper Harris, London citizen and number one agent for the British secret service, taking a trip into space. Yes, this is Dropper Harris goes to the moon.
If you were expecting some common-sense plot to explain this development, then I’m sorry you’re out of luck. There are reasons given for why all this happens, explanations offered for all that takes place, but they don’t stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Indeed this is the second version of this paragraph I’ve written, in the first I tried to explain the plot, but after much head scratching and confusion I just gave up. Again the makers aren’t being slap-dash, this is a film that knows its money shot is Dropper Harris (Cary Grant) and Binky (Tommy Harrison) bouncing around in Flash Gordon outfits on the moon with big silly grins on their faces. That’s what’s on the poster, that’s what the public wanted to see and – goddamnit! – that’s what we got.
Yes, there’s some nonsense about the Russians having opened a moon-base and sending rays back to Earth, but it’s purely window dressing. This is about Dropper, Binky and new team member/love interest Catarina (Dorothy Lamour) going to the moon. That’s where the fun lies and everybody is set to have the time of their lives. Grant in particular has a big, very un-Cary Grant-like goofy grin, as he prances around in Buster Crabbe’s cast-offs spouting alternatively meaningless mumbo-jumbo or over the top atrocious dialogue. He’s still brilliant in this film. Indeed the genius of Cary Grant’s acting is that even when he knows what he’s doing is totally ridiculous, even when part of him is obviously making fun of each scene even as he acts in it, he still takes the audience with him. He never capsizes the film, never ruins it by playing it like panto – somehow he manages to be both serious and in on the joke at the same time, and the result is some of the most joyful silliness you will ever see.
There was nowhere else for Dropper Harris to go after this (except, perhaps, Mars), but we should be thankful these movies exist. A gleeful series of mad, lunatic 1930s adventure films, which always felt out of this world even before they actually went there.
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular (1966)
D. Ken Annakin
Colour
I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.
This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.
(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)
Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.
I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.
Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.
Colour
I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.
This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.
(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)
Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.
I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.
Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.
Sunday, 4 May 2014
Agent Marie Lautrec (1964)
D. André Hunebelle
Colour
I’ve read in other guides that this is a French James Bond imitation/spoof, but surely it has as much to do with OSS 117 as it does with 007. We might not want to admit it in our smug Anglo-Saxon way, but Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath actually precedes James Bond in both books and films – so maybe we should salute the French for their own originality in this regard. Although given the popularity of the two franchises, let’s make it a small salute. I can see though why the James Bond element is concentrated on more than anything else; as in this zany, Technicolor, bright, loud, flashy and explosive film, we have not only the over the top quality of 1960s Bond spoofs, but also how untethered from reality and ridiculous James Bond would himself become.
Brigitte Bardot, here the sex symbol to end all sex symbols, is our title character: the stunning, super, secret-agent Marie Lautrec. We know how brilliant she is as everybody in the (unnamed) French secret service keeps telling us. However from watching the film, it seems that her main talent is wearing lots of ridiculously tight and skimpy outfits. There she is doing some espionage work while dressed as a French maid (or maybe in the context of this film, just a maid), a Catholic school girl, in a ridiculously low-cut top and tight shorts as a cow-girl, and even for a brief scene as the kind of dominatrix who would give Emma Peel a run for her money. Beyond taking the odd covert picture or listening in to other people’s conversations, there’s little in the way of espionage involved. But hey, ‘Diamonds are Forever’ or ‘Moonraker’ weren’t likely to be shown as MI6 training films either.
The plot is similarly full of Bond spoof ludicrousness, involving as it does flies with cameras on their backs, de-thawed hibernating Nazis who just can’t get their feet warm, robotic dragons piloted by midgets and an attempt to crash the moon into North America. It’s all stupendously and utterly bonkers. This is a movie which would look at the concept of a mad, bald super villain living in a hollowed out volcano and decide it wanted to steer away from such social realism. But then ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’ doesn’t want you to concentrate on the plot, it exists for loud colours, cackling villains and Brigitte Bardot pouting and playing with her hair while dressed in very little.
But elsewhere in the movie we have the odd contrast of the lovely French chanteuse, Francoise Hardy, as a colleague of Bardot’s and a possible double agent. In the restraint of her performance, in how demure her outfits are in comparison with the star, we have a glimpse of a whole other film.
Whereas Bardot is predicting Bond at its most unrestrained, Hardy seems to want to play a part in a particularly dour John Le Carre adaptation. Her more reigned in performance slows the film down and the scenes between her and Bardot are absolutely beautiful. Yes, its style clashing with brassiness, but it’s also that rare moment when the film allows itself to breathe, giving us something actually tense and interesting. Predictably these scenes also have a distinct lesbian edge, which at the time I thought it might just be the French being the French, although as we’ll see in the next film – it was a trait 1960s female-led adventure films seemed really eager to explore.
Colour
I’ve read in other guides that this is a French James Bond imitation/spoof, but surely it has as much to do with OSS 117 as it does with 007. We might not want to admit it in our smug Anglo-Saxon way, but Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath actually precedes James Bond in both books and films – so maybe we should salute the French for their own originality in this regard. Although given the popularity of the two franchises, let’s make it a small salute. I can see though why the James Bond element is concentrated on more than anything else; as in this zany, Technicolor, bright, loud, flashy and explosive film, we have not only the over the top quality of 1960s Bond spoofs, but also how untethered from reality and ridiculous James Bond would himself become.
Brigitte Bardot, here the sex symbol to end all sex symbols, is our title character: the stunning, super, secret-agent Marie Lautrec. We know how brilliant she is as everybody in the (unnamed) French secret service keeps telling us. However from watching the film, it seems that her main talent is wearing lots of ridiculously tight and skimpy outfits. There she is doing some espionage work while dressed as a French maid (or maybe in the context of this film, just a maid), a Catholic school girl, in a ridiculously low-cut top and tight shorts as a cow-girl, and even for a brief scene as the kind of dominatrix who would give Emma Peel a run for her money. Beyond taking the odd covert picture or listening in to other people’s conversations, there’s little in the way of espionage involved. But hey, ‘Diamonds are Forever’ or ‘Moonraker’ weren’t likely to be shown as MI6 training films either.
The plot is similarly full of Bond spoof ludicrousness, involving as it does flies with cameras on their backs, de-thawed hibernating Nazis who just can’t get their feet warm, robotic dragons piloted by midgets and an attempt to crash the moon into North America. It’s all stupendously and utterly bonkers. This is a movie which would look at the concept of a mad, bald super villain living in a hollowed out volcano and decide it wanted to steer away from such social realism. But then ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’ doesn’t want you to concentrate on the plot, it exists for loud colours, cackling villains and Brigitte Bardot pouting and playing with her hair while dressed in very little.
But elsewhere in the movie we have the odd contrast of the lovely French chanteuse, Francoise Hardy, as a colleague of Bardot’s and a possible double agent. In the restraint of her performance, in how demure her outfits are in comparison with the star, we have a glimpse of a whole other film.
Whereas Bardot is predicting Bond at its most unrestrained, Hardy seems to want to play a part in a particularly dour John Le Carre adaptation. Her more reigned in performance slows the film down and the scenes between her and Bardot are absolutely beautiful. Yes, its style clashing with brassiness, but it’s also that rare moment when the film allows itself to breathe, giving us something actually tense and interesting. Predictably these scenes also have a distinct lesbian edge, which at the time I thought it might just be the French being the French, although as we’ll see in the next film – it was a trait 1960s female-led adventure films seemed really eager to explore.
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
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 outrĂ© 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!
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 outrĂ© 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!
Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Dropper Harris and the Opera of Doom (1938)
D. Ted Green
B&W
A year after the first Dropper Harris movie, Cary Grant was back. This is interesting in itself, as sequels were far from the norm back then and certainly not the done thing for major stars. They were the preserve of men with the surnames Weissmuller and Crabbe, Olympic swimmers who’d turned to – what could loosely be described as – acting, rather than serious cinema players. Yet the ‘Dropper Harris’ movies, although clearly made with a higher budget and better actors, are trading in the same language as your Tarzans and Flash Gordons. They are popcorn, adventure films, there to provide mindless entertainment, but of a higher quality and with bigger thrills. Which means that decades before George Lucas and Steven Spielberg took those old adventure films and turned them into ‘Indiana Jones’, Cary Grant was – as always – already leading the way.
Here we are back in a London of the mind, a London that bears as much resemblance to the 1930s or the 1890s as it does to now. There are horse drawn carts and Dropper Harris’s housekeeper seems to be wed to an old fashioned mangle. But there are also speeding black Ford automobiles and gangsters, some of whom would not be out of place in Chicago. Harris catches what he refers to “the London tube”, but it’s one of those sleek trains you imagine carrying you from Grand Central to Union Station. It even has a bar for god’s sake! Most jarring of all though is Harris’s portable communication device, which he keeps in his pocket and looks and treats just like a mobile phone (albeit it’s something like a Nokia from the turn of the century, rather than an iPhone. This film isn’t that forward looking!) This is a mix of the present, the past and a million possible futures. This is Dropper Harris’s world and we’re supposed to goggle at it.
Along with his trusty sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison), Harris finds himself again investigating a music based case. This time they are backstage at the opera where two warring parties of gangsters are prone to machine-gunning each other at the crescendos of arias. One is your standard group of hard-faced, monosyllabic muscle, the others are Charles Laughton’s antiquarian gangsters. Hoodlums, known as The Charing Cross Road Gang who – and I’m not making this up – love nothing better than first editions and are running a protection racket involving all the libraries in London. Elsewhere we have the delicious Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale soprano, and Claude Rains as an ineffective policeman. The plot, once it gets there, never really leaves backstage of The Royal Opera House – and so we have something like ‘Night at the Opera’ meets ‘Scarface’ meets ‘The 39 Steps’ but even more complex than such a bizarre mash-up would suggest. Mystery piles on top of mystery until it all falls over into a conclusion which is brilliant, but doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. That doesn’t matter though, as by the end, all we want to know is what is Leslie Howard’s conductor really up to?
It’s incredibly fun and fast paced (seriously, the way Grant rat-tat-tats the dialogue here makes it seem like he was doing ‘His Girl Friday’ while on mogadon). If you tried to think about how all the strands actually tie together your brain would explode, but this is one of the most invigorating films the 1930s ever produced.
B&W
A year after the first Dropper Harris movie, Cary Grant was back. This is interesting in itself, as sequels were far from the norm back then and certainly not the done thing for major stars. They were the preserve of men with the surnames Weissmuller and Crabbe, Olympic swimmers who’d turned to – what could loosely be described as – acting, rather than serious cinema players. Yet the ‘Dropper Harris’ movies, although clearly made with a higher budget and better actors, are trading in the same language as your Tarzans and Flash Gordons. They are popcorn, adventure films, there to provide mindless entertainment, but of a higher quality and with bigger thrills. Which means that decades before George Lucas and Steven Spielberg took those old adventure films and turned them into ‘Indiana Jones’, Cary Grant was – as always – already leading the way.
Here we are back in a London of the mind, a London that bears as much resemblance to the 1930s or the 1890s as it does to now. There are horse drawn carts and Dropper Harris’s housekeeper seems to be wed to an old fashioned mangle. But there are also speeding black Ford automobiles and gangsters, some of whom would not be out of place in Chicago. Harris catches what he refers to “the London tube”, but it’s one of those sleek trains you imagine carrying you from Grand Central to Union Station. It even has a bar for god’s sake! Most jarring of all though is Harris’s portable communication device, which he keeps in his pocket and looks and treats just like a mobile phone (albeit it’s something like a Nokia from the turn of the century, rather than an iPhone. This film isn’t that forward looking!) This is a mix of the present, the past and a million possible futures. This is Dropper Harris’s world and we’re supposed to goggle at it.
Along with his trusty sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison), Harris finds himself again investigating a music based case. This time they are backstage at the opera where two warring parties of gangsters are prone to machine-gunning each other at the crescendos of arias. One is your standard group of hard-faced, monosyllabic muscle, the others are Charles Laughton’s antiquarian gangsters. Hoodlums, known as The Charing Cross Road Gang who – and I’m not making this up – love nothing better than first editions and are running a protection racket involving all the libraries in London. Elsewhere we have the delicious Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale soprano, and Claude Rains as an ineffective policeman. The plot, once it gets there, never really leaves backstage of The Royal Opera House – and so we have something like ‘Night at the Opera’ meets ‘Scarface’ meets ‘The 39 Steps’ but even more complex than such a bizarre mash-up would suggest. Mystery piles on top of mystery until it all falls over into a conclusion which is brilliant, but doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. That doesn’t matter though, as by the end, all we want to know is what is Leslie Howard’s conductor really up to?
It’s incredibly fun and fast paced (seriously, the way Grant rat-tat-tats the dialogue here makes it seem like he was doing ‘His Girl Friday’ while on mogadon). If you tried to think about how all the strands actually tie together your brain would explode, but this is one of the most invigorating films the 1930s ever produced.
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Dropper Harris and the Speeding Bullet (1937)
D. Ted Green
B&W
It’s no doubt Cary Grant’s later association with Alfred Hitchcock which ensures that the Dropper Harris films are now forgotten relics of a more dashing age. And that’s a shame, as they’re a bit creaky and stiff (but then a lot of films in 1937 are a bit creaky and stiff) but these are sharp and suspenseful movies, which are a lot more fun and free-wheeling than most American thrillers of the age. Yes, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Yes, the version of England it pedals couldn’t be any more obviously California unless the Hollywood sign appeared and all the houses of parliament started to sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, but I have a massive soft spot for this film and its sequels. Whatever their flaws, they’re a lot of fun. And Cary Grant is a great choice for the square jawed hero, as even when he’s playing it straight he can’t help but seem to subvert the whole concept.
We’re in London, the home of pea-soupers and cheerful cockneys and the occasional horse drawn hansom carriage (the last detail is particularly baffling, as otherwise this is set in what is then the present day). Grant is Hugh ‘Dropper’ Harris, the finest investigator in the British service. His job title is as vague as ‘consulting detective’ and it’s never clear throughout the series whether he’s a policeman or a spy, but it doesn’t really matter. He is Richard Hannay with a license, or Bulldog Drummond in spats. What he calls himself doesn’t matter, his job is to have adventures, and along with his sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison) he’s about to find that the case of the speeding bullet is one of the most dangerous he’s ever had.
The conductor of the London Philharmonic is gunned down mid performance (shades of the original ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’), but it seems that the bullet struck before the shot was fired. How is that possible and – more importantly – who did it? Dropper Harris is on the case. Of course this is just a creaky hat-stand on which to hang the whole thrilling adventure, and you may wonder if it’s actually sturdy enough or whether it will collapse with a thud and the swishing of tailored jackets – but, rest assured, it may wobble from time to time but there’s enough ballast to provide 84 minutes of top quality black & white hi-jinks.
So off we go: there’s Sylvia Sydney as the most fatale of femme fatales, smoking through a cigarette holder as if brandishing a weapon; there’s Madeline Carroll as the good girl possibly gone bad, clutching both pigtails and a revolver; there’s Spencer Tracey as the businessman who may be behind it all; and Humphrey Bogart as his menacing henchman. (Grant, Tracey and Bogart all in one film together, and still it’s only remembered by geeks like me. Go figure!) Most of them don’t even bother to tackle the accent, which combined with Grants transatlantic tones make this London one of the most international cities in the world.
It’s a film with some of the best scenes anywhere in cinema. Here’s Spencer Tracey trying to intimidate Cary Grant over cocktails – a triumph of cracking dialogue and clinking glasses and lots of good natured smiling. It’s two friends together, laughing and telling jokes, with one friend making it clear he’d like to murder the other. Elsewhere we have Bogart trying to do a bit of menacing while he and Grant try out pogo-sticks in a Bloomsbury toy shop. Just watching those two icons of cinema bouncing up and down while exchanging breathless dialogue is one of the most joyful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Clearly they felt that joy, as the camera is constantly cutting to obviously let them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, And finally there’s Sylvia Sydney cornering Grant in front of the monkey cage in private zoo in Kensington Palace, launching into a long and wide-eyed speech about how she likes thick and long lasting cigars, the kind only the right kind of handsome Englishman possesses. It’s a triumph of innuendo, double entendre, a shared bag of peanuts and a chimpanzee who mugs as if in a silent comedy, clearly wanting star-billing in his own right.
(On a side note, is there really a private zoo in Kensington Palace? I think The Tax Payer’s Alliance should investigate.)
It sounds exactly what it is, a very Manhattan film – not Bloomsbury or Chelsea or Waterloo or Mansion House or any of the other names the film’s characters drop in without having a clue what they’re talking about. But that doesn’t matter. This is set in London like Terry Gilliam’s film is set in Brazil, it’s a glamorous state of mind, a fantasy world of beautiful woman, guns, danger and an impossibly dashing leading man.
As its Grant who truly makes this film great. In the wrong hands it could have been po-faced, but Grant is so convincing as this super secret agent even as he has fun with the material. It’s what makes him the finest cinema leading man there ever was. Cary Grant always manages to be convincing in every role he does, even when he’s being Cary Grant. Here he winks at the audience to let them know that it’s all a joke, even as he carries us along with the excitement and danger. He know this isn’t a serious film, he know that the rope isn’t going to burn and that the safe is not going to drop on Dropper Harris’s handsome skull, but he takes us through and lets us both take it seriously and laugh at it and have an absolute whale of a time as we do.
B&W
It’s no doubt Cary Grant’s later association with Alfred Hitchcock which ensures that the Dropper Harris films are now forgotten relics of a more dashing age. And that’s a shame, as they’re a bit creaky and stiff (but then a lot of films in 1937 are a bit creaky and stiff) but these are sharp and suspenseful movies, which are a lot more fun and free-wheeling than most American thrillers of the age. Yes, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Yes, the version of England it pedals couldn’t be any more obviously California unless the Hollywood sign appeared and all the houses of parliament started to sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, but I have a massive soft spot for this film and its sequels. Whatever their flaws, they’re a lot of fun. And Cary Grant is a great choice for the square jawed hero, as even when he’s playing it straight he can’t help but seem to subvert the whole concept.
We’re in London, the home of pea-soupers and cheerful cockneys and the occasional horse drawn hansom carriage (the last detail is particularly baffling, as otherwise this is set in what is then the present day). Grant is Hugh ‘Dropper’ Harris, the finest investigator in the British service. His job title is as vague as ‘consulting detective’ and it’s never clear throughout the series whether he’s a policeman or a spy, but it doesn’t really matter. He is Richard Hannay with a license, or Bulldog Drummond in spats. What he calls himself doesn’t matter, his job is to have adventures, and along with his sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison) he’s about to find that the case of the speeding bullet is one of the most dangerous he’s ever had.
The conductor of the London Philharmonic is gunned down mid performance (shades of the original ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’), but it seems that the bullet struck before the shot was fired. How is that possible and – more importantly – who did it? Dropper Harris is on the case. Of course this is just a creaky hat-stand on which to hang the whole thrilling adventure, and you may wonder if it’s actually sturdy enough or whether it will collapse with a thud and the swishing of tailored jackets – but, rest assured, it may wobble from time to time but there’s enough ballast to provide 84 minutes of top quality black & white hi-jinks.
So off we go: there’s Sylvia Sydney as the most fatale of femme fatales, smoking through a cigarette holder as if brandishing a weapon; there’s Madeline Carroll as the good girl possibly gone bad, clutching both pigtails and a revolver; there’s Spencer Tracey as the businessman who may be behind it all; and Humphrey Bogart as his menacing henchman. (Grant, Tracey and Bogart all in one film together, and still it’s only remembered by geeks like me. Go figure!) Most of them don’t even bother to tackle the accent, which combined with Grants transatlantic tones make this London one of the most international cities in the world.
It’s a film with some of the best scenes anywhere in cinema. Here’s Spencer Tracey trying to intimidate Cary Grant over cocktails – a triumph of cracking dialogue and clinking glasses and lots of good natured smiling. It’s two friends together, laughing and telling jokes, with one friend making it clear he’d like to murder the other. Elsewhere we have Bogart trying to do a bit of menacing while he and Grant try out pogo-sticks in a Bloomsbury toy shop. Just watching those two icons of cinema bouncing up and down while exchanging breathless dialogue is one of the most joyful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Clearly they felt that joy, as the camera is constantly cutting to obviously let them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, And finally there’s Sylvia Sydney cornering Grant in front of the monkey cage in private zoo in Kensington Palace, launching into a long and wide-eyed speech about how she likes thick and long lasting cigars, the kind only the right kind of handsome Englishman possesses. It’s a triumph of innuendo, double entendre, a shared bag of peanuts and a chimpanzee who mugs as if in a silent comedy, clearly wanting star-billing in his own right.
(On a side note, is there really a private zoo in Kensington Palace? I think The Tax Payer’s Alliance should investigate.)
It sounds exactly what it is, a very Manhattan film – not Bloomsbury or Chelsea or Waterloo or Mansion House or any of the other names the film’s characters drop in without having a clue what they’re talking about. But that doesn’t matter. This is set in London like Terry Gilliam’s film is set in Brazil, it’s a glamorous state of mind, a fantasy world of beautiful woman, guns, danger and an impossibly dashing leading man.
As its Grant who truly makes this film great. In the wrong hands it could have been po-faced, but Grant is so convincing as this super secret agent even as he has fun with the material. It’s what makes him the finest cinema leading man there ever was. Cary Grant always manages to be convincing in every role he does, even when he’s being Cary Grant. Here he winks at the audience to let them know that it’s all a joke, even as he carries us along with the excitement and danger. He know this isn’t a serious film, he know that the rope isn’t going to burn and that the safe is not going to drop on Dropper Harris’s handsome skull, but he takes us through and lets us both take it seriously and laugh at it and have an absolute whale of a time as we do.
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