The Beatles: The Future (1976)

D. Winston O’Boogie/Apollo C. Vermouth
B&W, with flashes of bright and scary psychedelic colour


Here’s an absolutely bizarre and barely seen movie which is exactly the kind of film this blog is duty-bound to bring to wider attention. ‘The Beatles: The Future’ is a surreal faux documentary which looks at what would have happened if The Beatles hadn’t broken up. Constructed using fake talking head clips, fake footage of The Beatles and even really amateurish cartoons, this is a head-spinning montage which revels in love for the 1960s and disappointment in the 1970s. Clearly the filmmakers believed the 1960s was the ushering of a utopia which cruelly never actually happened, and that the 1970s (which when this began filming were only three years old) were struggling to cope with all that failed promise. The Beatles were of course the great symbol of the 1960s and perhaps another group of filmmakers would have used their continuing presence as the salve that the decade needed; another film would have suggested that if The Beatles were still around the 1970s would have been much brighter and better. But that’s not what this movie does. Yes, The Beatles were part of the more hopeful age of the 1960s, but if they’d stayed around for the following decade they’d have been tarnished along with everything else.


The Beatles – none of whom are really played by the same actors from one scene to the next, let alone right away from the movie (so working out who is who is can be a trifle hard) – are instead portrayed as doing all the ridiculous 1970s rock star stuff. This is a movie which comes to slaughter, rather than praise, its idols. The not so fab four preach a Marxian tune of shared belongings, but move to Monaco to stop paying taxes; they talk peace, whilst employing thuggish bodyguards; they festoon themselves in ridiculous kaftans and shawls, demanding attention even as they claim to be “just four ordinary lads from Liverpool” (the accents are atrocious btw); and when they do play a concert, it’s a pompous three hour event in front of the pyramids at sunset which proves disastrous, leading to a stampeded “where eight people and fourteen beautiful camels died tragically”. They also have other more Beatles-centric concerns, with Yoko and Linda very much to the fore so that the band end up releasing albums as ‘The Beatles Collective’; including a four disk number, the side Ringo is in charge of apparently benefiting from actually being some fun.


Actually for a musical film there’s little in the way of music. Obviously they couldn’t afford the rights to actual Beatles songs and your jobbing songsmith can’t just knock out a genuine Lennon/McCartney. So what we have here is ramshackle affair with little music and from scene to scene difficulty in telling which Beatle is which, but if you’re a Beatles fan and want to watch something which is occasionally witty and clever and pointed about the failures of heroes, then this is a bit of a slog but well worth tracking down.


My favourite scene? In 1973 when The Beatles are getting truly bad coverage, a press conference is called. John Lennon tears up poster-size covers of the NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone and others – all of whom have had the temerity to criticise the band – but for each one torn up The Beatles take off an item of clothing. It ends with four chubby and hairy Beatles impersonators in a line, wearing only Y-fronts and socks, doing the kind of stamping dance which one imagines inspired Madness. I don’t know what it all means, but in it’s clearly fucking mad way, it captures the whole shabby vagabond spirit of the film.

The Man from Budapest (1946)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W


Ah, it must have been great to have an actor like Peter Lorre hanging around the studio. He could make any bog-standard scene 500% better, while if you gave him something really good he’d turn it into black & white gold. I guess Steve Buscemi would be the modern equivalent. Both are weedy tough guys, both are always better than their material and both occasionally had the chance to be a leading man. In Buscemi’s case television has moved on far enough that he can find himself the star of a lavish drama, while Lorre got ‘The Man from Budapest’. This is a remarkable movie: here’s Peter Lorre in the Bogart role: the ethically dubious detective, with love scenes, smacking down the villains, and being brilliant in the most unsettling way.


Lorre is Lazlo Tec, a famous Hungarian detective (this is a world where policeman in Eastern Europe can build up reputations which stretch across continents – just go with it). On a trip to Manhattan, Lazlo literally has murder drop into his lap in the form of the young Angela Lansbury. Even on holiday Lazlo is too much of a professional to let criminals get away, so he helps nice but dim NY police detective, George Reeves, solve the crime. Along the way he spars with bad girl gone good but maybe going bad again, Lana Turner; roughs up gangster Edward G. Robinson (himself born in Romania, but here playing very American) before revealing the killer at a big fireworks event in a truly bizarre scene where all the dialogue is interspersed by pops and bangs and the other characters look to be peering around Lorre to watch the thrills.


But by that point in the film we’ve got used to the bizarre, as all the way through we’ve had Lorre’s truly shifty and untrustworthy performance. The kind of performance no one usually gives as a hero, but which makes this film truly interesting. No doubt this was written for a Robert Montgomery or a Dana Andrews. That would have been a straightforward film, a run of the mill film, a boring film – this one though is fascinating.


There’s something so wrong about having Lorre as a hero. Every line he utters sounds like a lie, every assertion a misdirection, every accusation a fabrication to hide his own sins. There’s that snivelling voice, that weedy demeanour, those big wet eyes not designed for your straightforward detective. When he smiles at a suspect, one imagines he does so because he knows he’ll be murdering the suspect’s parents later. But what makes it truly great is that the script all the way through treats him as if he is of the highest repute, admired and loved by all, even though that doesn’t really work on the screen. Lana Turner’s character – for instance – falls for him hard, but Lana Turner the actress can’t quite pull off the burning desire for Peter Lorre she needs and so the love scenes feel like he’s paying her to be there.


All of this adds up to a really weird film which almost brings a big old unreliable narrator to the cinema. We’re told Lorre is a hero and he seems to behave decently and to solve the crime at the end. But what if he isn’t and he doesn’t? After all, Lansbury drops into his lap just after he’s been away from his seat to find a waiter. What if, rather than finding the waiter he was killing her for some unknown reason? Then when the police arrive he lays out his credentials (and he may be the real Lazlo Tec, or he might not – who would really know?) and leads the dim NY City police detective on a merry dance. He charges over NY blaming others for his crime, committing more in the cover up (or just for the hell of it), before finally landing on some dumb sap to take the heat for it all. Then at the end he heads back to Hungary with his new paid for floozy escort.


Pick your own version of what the hell is going on, but acknowledge that this is wonderfully subversive film which makes you doff your cap once again to the genius of Peter Lorre.

Mrs Davenport (1949)

D. Curtis Bernhardt
B&W


A great big melodramatic musical of the kind nobody makes anymore, or made that often even in the 1940s. A musical which isn’t about dancing in front of exotic sights, or sexy and exciting show folks singing warmly to each other; but instead ordinary people in a big house facing crises in their relationships. Even small stories can be made big if you give them the right attention, and this is a small story made epic and spectacular. It centres on a bored housewife, Olivia De Havilland, who is fed up of her travelling businessman husband, George Sanders, and so flirting with waif-like hunk up the street, Farley Granger. When Granger breaks his leg she seizes her chance for perhaps something more and moves him in with her to recuperate. But, maybe sensing something wrong, Sanders decides to take a sabbatical from work to return to the house full time and become a doting husband. The scene is set for high passion, jealousy, arguments, tears, swoons and finally revelation after revelation of crippling childhood secrets. It’s the stuff of high musical drama, of emotive songs in an over-wrought style. Except if you put ‘Mrs Davenport’ on with a view to tapping your feet along to some soaring tunes, then I should apologise now, as this isn’t actually a musical at all.


Why am I being mischievous? Why am I lying? Well, because if ever a film looks like it’s crying out to be a musical it’s ‘Mrs Davenport’. So many times throughout the film an emotional crescendo is reached, the score starts to swell, and one thinks this is it: we’re going to have a big heartfelt number. But frustratingly it never actually happens. Yet still the film, in its ever so earnest melodramatic pomp, keeps leading us to believe that a musical is going to break out. The last time I watched this movie, a friend of mine and I played a drinking game wherein you had to swig at every point you thought a song was going to happen. We both ended up so, so pissed. At first I thought it was the self-serious score leading the audience to feel like this, but actually the whole thing is staged as if it really is a musical. At the end of every argument, revelation, tearful reconciliation, the camera lingers that little bit too long on our leads’ faces with the result that you expect something else to happen. When it then cuts away to the next talky scene, it’s like something has been chopped out. As if some bitter projectionist who can’t hold a tune has made this film his own personal plaything.


De Havilland, as always, is lovely and radiant and wonderful (I will never hear a word said against Olivia De Havilland); Sanders knows how to deliver snide remarks and present a wounded yet carefree façade like no other actor; while Granger looks the part of sensitive young soul, even if – as always – he looks ridiculously gauche on camera. But for a simple human drama, set in a ramshackle old house, it’s incredibly bombastic and in love with its own seriousness and importance in a way it doesn’t need to be. I don’t know if Tennessee Williams ever saw ‘Mrs Davenport’, but even he’d have thought that the characters just need to shut the fuck up and get over themselves. However if Warner Bros had taken the time to throw in something an audience could sing, well perhaps Mrs Davenport would have lived longer in the cultural memory as the great, spectacular, camp classic it is crying out to be.

The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular (1966)

D. Ken Annakin
Colour


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


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


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


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


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


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

Agent Marie Lautrec (1964)

D. André Hunebelle
Colour


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


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


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


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

Nickleby (1963)

D. Randall MacDougall
Colour

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


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


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


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


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

The Dalek War (1970)

D. Philip Strafer
Colour

This is what Terry Nation was striving for. From the first murmurings of dalekmania, his piggy eyes rang with pound signs and he was desperate to take his creations out into the world by themselves. Sod ‘Doctor Who’! He didn’t have the rights to ‘Doctor Who’ and so didn’t care about it. Indeed, arguably, the daleks were much bigger than the programme which beget them. They were the ones who made it the much watch show. What’s more, there had been five films at this point with the word ‘Dalek’ in the title and all of them had made money. There was clearly a market there for exterminators extreme and this movie was going to capitalise on it.


So whereas on TV The Doctor temporarily bid adieu to the daleks, in film the daleks waved a full goodbye to The Doctor. (That’s not as bizarre an image as it sounds: if a dalek holds its sucker at the right angle and weaves a little, it can do a pretty good wave.) So here we have a film which isn’t about The Doctor meeting and defeating the daleks, it’s about the daleks being the daleks and the audience revelling in their awesome metal coolness. This is the daleks being the best creatures in existence, shiny pepper-pots who will eventually control the universe.


Of course you couldn’t just have a film about daleks (even for Terry Nation a searing drama with a dalek only cast would have been a push) so there has to be some human characters as well. This comes in the form of a bunch of space soldiers – led by a young Gareth Hunt, with a shifty second in command played by Hywel Bennett – who crash land on Skaro, the daleks’s home planet. From being a hard-arsed incursion force, they suddenly find themselves having to survive long enough for the rescue ship to reach them. ‘The Dalek War’ is aiming to be a taut and claustrophobic movie, with lots of shiny corridors made dark by failing lights and humans being picked off one by one by the impressively relentless daleks.


To modern eyes the film it most resembles is ‘Aliens’, both are about military operations against an unremitting foe who can’t be beaten. Except in many ways it’s not at all like ‘Aliens’, as instead of being scary it finds new ways to be ridiculously cheesy at every turn. Imagine there were whole scenes in ‘Aliens’ given over to various xenomorphs chatting to each other about what strategy they were going to take. Imagine that the xenomorphs spoke in shrill, grating voices and actually had passionate arguments about what to do next. James Cameron’s vision suddenly becomes a lot less menacing, doesn’t it? But that is actually what we have here, sequences where daleks have ridiculous dalek conversations that just make them look far more comical than scary. But then part of the problem is that we’re clearly supposed to see the daleks as scary monsters, but also really like them as well. For all we’re supposed to care about the humans’ plight, there is part of the film that just desperately wants the daleks to win. And that gives it a real problem in tone, as with the charisma free Gareth Hunt, snivelling Hywel Bennett and nothing but anonymous meat bags surrounding them, it just feels like we shouldn’t want these idiots to escape even when two of them manage it. Instead we’re supposed to root for the daleks: to be scared of these pepper-pots, as well as finding them immensely cool, even when the film goes way out of its way to make them utterly bloody stupid.
It’s a confused movie which raises lots of conflicted emotions. It’s also the first dalek film not to make money, a crucial element would be back next time though.