Category: Films

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The incredible shrinking wardrobe

 

 

The past few weeks have been extremely busy for me as I’ve been moving house – not the easiest of things to do if, like me, you live in Singapore.  So, here’s something light and frivolous.

 

It’s said that you become more conservative as you grow older.  That’s because, people reason, of the material and financial possessions you acquire over the years – property, cars, shares – which make you increasingly suspicious of lefty governments inclined to levy high taxes on you and generally interfere with your accrued wealth.

 

Maybe that explains why I’ve singularly failed to shift rightwards in my politics as I’ve become wrinkly and decrepit.  These days I’m a cranky old left-wing git, whereas formerly I was a cranky young left-wing git.  It’s due to the fact that I haven’t amassed property, cars, shares, etc.  Actually, from the look of my finances, it’s likely I’ll be spending my dotage stacking supermarket shelves.

 

One thing that brought this lack of acquisitions home to me recently was my discovery that, after moving into a new apartment, I could comfortably fit my entire collection of clothing into half a wardrobe.  Well, half a wardrobe plus a shelf for storing a couple of folded trousers and one drawer in which I stash all my socks, underwear and accessories (basically a beanie hat, a sporran, and ‘anti-leech socks’ worn while trekking in the Asian mountains).  My incredible shrinking wardrobe now contains a few work-shirts, a work-jacket, a sweater that’s never used because I live in sultry Singapore, a kilt and a bunch of mostly old and mostly black T-shirts.  And that’s it.

 

Anyway, hanging those T-shirts in their new wardrobe in their new home inspired me to take a walk down Memory Lane…

 

Firstly, here’s one with your actual Godzilla on it.  That’s the city-stomping, take-no-shit-from-anyone Japanese Gojira, not the wimpy Hollywood version who appears in buddy movies with King Kong.  By the standards of my wardrobe, this item is an example of ultra-modernity, since my partner bought it for me last year.

 

 

Meanwhile, this was a Christmas present given to me by my partner’s mum.  She heard I was a fan of county Suffolk’s greatest symphonic-black-gothic metal band Cradle of Filth and kindly procured this T-shirt for me featuring Nigel Wingrove’s cover artwork from their 1996 album Dusk and Her Embrace.  It’s probably just as well, though, that her mum didn’t purchase for me the most famous T-shirt that Cradle of Filth have ever brought out.

 

 

She was also nice enough to buy me a T-shirt emblazoned with the iconic cover design for the 1984 compilation Bad Music for Bad People by that mighty psychobilly band The Cramps.  In this case, the artist responsible was Steve Blickenstaff and he perfectly captured the band’s trashy punk-horror aesthetic.

 

 

Meanwhile, here’s a T-shirt bearing the name of evergreen (or ever-black) goth band The Cure.  If I remember rightly, a friend bought this for me as a memento of the Marseille gig the band did during their 2008 European tour.  I was thinking of attending the gig myself but, because of the expense and effort involved in getting to Marseille, wimped out.  It’s now 2024 and I’ve still never seen Robert Smith and co. perform live, so I really wish I’d got off my bum and gone for it in 2008.  Especially as it sounded like an awesome gig – they managed to play a dozen songs during the encores alone.

 

 

Around the same period, sometime in 2008 or 2009, I picked up this T-shirt in the famous market in central Norwich.  Showing a ghoulishly-green deceased person and the tagline, ‘When there’s no more room in HELL, the dead will walk the EARTH’, it’s the poster from the seminal 1979 zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, directed by George A. Romero.  (The remake, which Zack Snyder directed in 2004, is great during its first half-hour but after that gets a bit ‘meh’.)

 

 

And this is the inevitable AC/DC T-shirt, which I bought a few months ago in our local branch of that hardcore, uncompromising, heavy-metal hangout, Mango.  I live in the tropics and it’s an indispensable part of my beachwear, along with a pair of black jeans and pair of Doc Martens.  Come to think of it, an AC/DC T-shirt, black jeans and Doc Martens also constitute my streetwear, sportswear, casualwear, workwear, partywear and eveningwear.

 

 

No wonder I received this ZZ Top T-shirt – again from my partner’s mum, who really does spoil me.  I’m clearly a Sharp Dressed Man.

 

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Cinematic heroines 2: Sheila Keith

 

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

 

Every year, March is designated ‘Women in Horror Month’.  This is when fans of horror fiction, cinema, television, comics, games, etc., are encouraged “to learn about and showcase the underrepresented work of women in the horror industries. Whether they are on the screen, behind the scenes, or contributing in their other various artistic ways, it is clear that women love, appreciate, and contribute to the horror genre.”

 

As an occasional writer of horror fiction, and just before the month ends, here’s my contribution.  I pay tribute to a lady who, during a unique run of movies, did much to give me nightmares – or indeed, frightmares – during my impressionable youth.

 

Scottish actress Sheila Keith had a remarkable dual career.  Though not a household name, she was certainly a familiar face – with a familiar, haughty, often-disapproving voice – to a couple of generations of British TV viewers.  This was because of her appearances as prim ladies of a certain age, frequently nuns, or aristocrats with double-barrelled names, in cosy situation comedies like The Liver Birds (1969-78), Some Mothers do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973-78), Rings on their Fingers (1978-80), Bless Me Father (1978-81), Agony (1979-81), The Other ‘Arf (1980-84), Never The Twain (1981-91), A Fine Romance (1981-84) and The Brittas Empire (1991-97).

 

On top of that, she put in time in ITV’s long-running but much-derided soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), where she played cook Betty Cornet, toiling in the Crossroads Motel kitchen for 31 episodes in 1967.  Poor Betty perished when workmen extending the motel’s premises accidently uncovered and set off a World War II bomb.

 

The second, less conventional strand of Keith’s resumé came from her involvement in a series of movies made by British director Pete Walker.  Having started off making sex-comedies like 1969’s School for Sex and 1970’s Cool It Carol!, Walker hit his stride making horror movies during the 1970s, with Keith as a regular collaborator.  A combination of exploitation cinema and social commentary, these were memorably grim – serving up (for the time) disturbingly graphic violence, attacking institutions like the judiciary and the Catholic church, and generally showing how depressingly grotty life was in 1970s Britain.  And Keith’s performances, as ladies doing unspeakable things whilst maintaining the veneer of snootiness that’d served her well in her TV sitcom work, made the films even more memorable.

 

The first Keith-Walker collaboration was 1974’s House of Whipcord (1974), wherein a young woman called Ann-Marie (Penny Irving) suffers some spectacularly bad luck.  Firstly, she discovers that a nude photograph of her has been put on public display.  Then the nice young man who befriends her (Robert Tayman, who’d recently played the villain in the 1971 Hammer horror flick Vampire Circus), and takes her to his country estate to escape the scandal, turns out to be a ‘honey-trap‘.  His parents are a demented anti-permissive-society campaigner called Margaret Wakehurst (Barbara Markham) and a reactionary, but now blind and senile judge called Justice Bailey (Patrick Barr).  They’ve turned the country house into a secret, illegal prison where women they deem to have ‘fallen’ are brutally punished.  And Ann-Marie, they’ve decided, has fallen.

 

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

 

The remainder of the film is basically a race against time, with Ann-Marie’s friends (Ray Brooks and Ann Michelle) trying to track her down and rescue her, before her repeated attempts to escape the prison incur the ultimate penalty – execution.  You might not want to bet your life savings on there being a happy ending.

 

Though not the lead villainess, Keith is memorable as Walker, one of Wakehurst and Bailey’s prison wardens.  Walker may not be doing the job just for the money and from a misguided sense of justice — seeing the young inmates flogged seems to turn her on.  Meanwhile, the other Walker, Pete, and his scriptwriter David McGillivray make it clear who their target is in a sarcastic opening-credits statement: “This film is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment…”  They may have had in mind the Nationwide Festival of Light, in vogue at the time, described by Wikipedia as a ‘grassroots movement formed by British Christians concerned about the rise of the permissive society and social changes in English society by the late 1960s’ and whose supporters included Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cliff Richard and the inevitable Mary Whitehouse.

 

A year later, Keith got a bigger role in House of Mortal Sin (1975), which this time took a swipe at organised religion and the Catholic church in particular.  This had a slightly starrier cast too.  Stephanie Beacham and Susan Penhaligon play Vanessa and Jenny, sisters who, through their friendship with a well-meaning young priest (Norman Eshley, later to find fame as snobby neighbour Jeffrey Fourmile in the 1976-79 TV sitcom George and Mildred), unwittingly enter the orbit of the deranged Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp).  Not only is Meldrum a stalker who’s soon targeting Jenny, but he’s a homicidal maniac who uses some appropriately ecclesiastical methods to murder people – bludgeoning them with incense-burners, feeding them poisonous communion wafers, throttling them with rosary beads.

 

Keith plays Meldrum’s housekeeper Miss Brabazon, who turns a blind eye – literally a blind eye, because she’s missing one – to the old monster’s crimes due to her love for him.  She has responsibility for looking after Meldrum’s extremely elderly and ailing mother, and particularly gruelling are the scenes where she abuses her charge, blaming her for making her son enter the priesthood and a lifetime of celibacy.  Again, don’t expect a happy ending.

 

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd / Columbia Pictures

 

However, it’s the film Keith made for Walker between the two Houses, Whipcord and Mortal Sin, that saw her at her terrifying best.  In Frightmare (1974), she plays Dorothy Yates, a character who spends the film shifting gears between being a confused, pathetic, middle-aged housewife and a demented brain-eating cannibal.  In the late 1950s Dorothy and her husband Edmund (Rupert Davies) were placed in an asylum after a string of murders – though innocent, such was Edmund’s love for Dorothy that he allowed himself to be incarcerated alongside her.  Dorothy’s last 1950s victim, incidentally, is played by Andrew Sachs, soon to become a star as Manuel, John Cleese’s Spanish waiter / punchbag in Fawlty Towers (1975-79).

 

Released from the mental institution in the mid-1970s, the couple become a headache for Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), Edmund’s daughter from a previous marriage.  She has to supply her father and stepmum, who’ve holed up in a remote farmhouse, with parcels of sheep’s brains in an attempt to satisfy Dorothy’s cravings.  Also, she’s keen to keep her tearaway half-sister Debbie (Kim Butcher), Edmund and Dorothy’s daughter, away from her parents for obvious reasons.  Things don’t work out well.  Dorothy is soon demanding brains of the human variety, lures people into her parlour (full of chintzy ornaments and cups of tea) for Tarot card readings, kills them and eats them.  Meanwhile, there are disturbing signs that her cannibalistic urges may be running in the family.

 

Frightmare climaxes with some nasty stuff involving a Black-and-Decker drill, but nothing quite compares to the image of Dorothy that assails Jackie during a dream – her mad stepmother stalks up to her, white-faced and grinning, chewing brains from a red-soaked parcel, blood oozing down her chin.  In its less sensational, buttoned-up way, Frightmare is the English Home Counties’ answer to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was released the same year.

 

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd / Lone Star Pictures

 

Walker cast her in two later horror movies, 1978’s The Comeback and 1982’s House of the Long Shadows, but neither was to the standard of their earlier work.  The Comeback has an interesting idea – an elderly couple (one of whom is Keith) take gruesome revenge on a faded rock star whom they believe induced their daughter to commit suicide.  Confronting the rocker at the end, Keith admonishes him in a hate-filled voice for his decadence, his depravity and even his ‘foul contortions’ onstage.  This would have worked if the rock star had been played by someone properly decadent like Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop but, laughably, he’s played by Jack Jones, housewives’ favourite and singer of the Love Boat theme (1977).  Jones’s performance was likened by one critic to that of a ‘hibernating bear’.

 

Some of the other casting is distracting too.  Jones’s manager is played by David Doyle, who at the time was a regular in the popular American TV show Charlie’s Angels (1976-81) – wow, I thought the moment he appeared, it’s Bosley!  Meanwhile, in the role of Keith’s husband is Bill Owen, famous in Britain for playing the wellie-wearing, ferret-loving Compo in the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine, which ran from 1973 to 2010 and became the longest-running TV sitcom in the world.  Just to round out the weirdness of The Comeback’s cast, Jack Jones, Bosley and Compo are joined by Pamela Stephenson, soon to hit it big as a comedienne in the BBC’s satirical sketch-show Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-82).

 

You couldn’t nitpick about the cast of House of the Long Shadows, the last of Keith and Walker’s movies and, indeed, the last film Walker made.  For horror fans, it’s awesome – horror legends Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and (from an earlier period of macabre cinema) John Carradine.  Long Shadows tells the story of a hotshot young author (Desi Arnaz Jr) who makes a bet with his publisher (Richard Todd) that he can write a novel in 24 hours in a suitably-inspiring environment – a creepy, deserted mansion house in Wales.  However, Arnaz Jr soon discovers that the mansion isn’t deserted at all.  It’s still home to a decrepit lord (Carradine) and his sons (Price and Cushing) and daughter (Keith).  Complicating matters is Lee as a pompous businessman, turning up to declare his intention to buy the property, and then the revelation that there’s a madman on the loose, killing the house’s occupants one by one.

 

House of the Long Shadows is a disappointment, which is hardly a surprise considering the disparate elements involved in its making.  Price, Lee and Cushing had become stars in the 1950s and 1960s working for studios like Hammer Films and American International Pictures, making films that were colourful, gothic-horror costume-dramas – for example, instalments in the studios’ Dracula, Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe series.  Made later, in the 1970s, Walker’s brutal, contemporary-set horror films were obviously a reaction against these.  Similarly, his scriptwriter here, Michael Armstrong, had directed gory films like The Haunted House of Horror (1969) and Mark of the Devil (1970), which definitely weren’t of the gothic fairy-tale school either.  Armstrong’s script, though, was based on a very old novel and play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, both from 1913.  And the producers were none other than Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of that very 1980s-esque outfit, Cannon Films.  Thus, the stars, the director and scriptwriter, the source material and the producers belonged to wildly-different eras.  Long Shadows unsurprisingly doesn’t gel.

 

© Cannon Film Distributors

 

It doesn’t help that Armstrong’s script ends with a couple of twists that don’t so much amaze the audience with their cleverness as make them groan at their corniness.  But still, it’s a pleasure to see Price, Lee, Cushing and Carradine together, and Keith has fun playing an eccentric who fancies herself as a singer, even though she’s painfully tone-deaf.  Small wonder she’s eventually done in with a length of piano wire.

 

Thereafter, Keith’s film appearances were few, although she turned up in the 1986 John Cleese movie Clockwise.  She also kept busy into the 1990s with TV appearances.  Fittingly, her last role – three years before her death in 2004 – was in an episode of the 2001 spoof anthology show Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible, written by Graham Duff and Steve Coogan and designed as an affectionate piss-take of old British horror movies from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  Though handsomely staged, it wasn’t particularly good.  However, it was nice to see Keith appear in an episode called And Now the Fearing…, playing a gypsy woman who crosses swords with an architect (Alexander Armstrong) who wants to clear her encampment to make way for a new development.  Keith, predictably, draws on some old gypsy magic and has fun turning the tables on the smug, smarmy Armstrong.

 

The actresses who found fame in British horror movies tended to be of the young, sexy, ‘starlet’ variety – Ingrid Pitt, Caroline Munro, Linda Hayden and so on.  Sheila Keith was already in her fifties when she arrived on the scene and didn’t have youth or sexiness on her side.  Rather, splendidly playing a succession of harridans who were psychotic, sadistic, embittered and / or pitiful, she represented grey power.  With power tools.

 

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

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It’s Timmy time

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

 

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, sequel to his 2021 sci-fi blockbuster Dune and an adaptation of the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, has been on release for a few weeks now.  Though we’ve been busy recently moving apartment, my partner and I found time to watch it yesterday afternoon in our new neighbourhood’s cinema.

 

The film’s opening 20 minutes weren’t a happy experience for us.  Villeneuve immediately plunged us into the action, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their Fremen escorts Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) pinned down on the surface of the desert planet Arrakis by a squad of heavily-armed, black-clad goons from the villainous House of Harkonnen.  The tension mounted as the two parties, hunting each other, snuck across the planet’s scorched landscapes of sand and rock…  The soundtrack was unnervingly silent…  And from right behind us came an incessant cacophony of rustling paper, crackling wrappers, slurpy masticating and greedy chomping.  We were attending a 1.30 pm screening of Dune 2 and the couple sitting behind us had decided to guzzle a takeaway lunch while watching the film.  I wished a giant Arrakis sandworm would surface directly under their seats and guzzle them.

 

Finally, the couple managed to finish their meal, their unwelcome sound effects abated and we were able to focus fully on Villeneuve’s movie.  So, what did I think of it?  Before I give my verdict, here’s a warning.  In the entry ahead, there will be spoilers galore for Dune 2.

 

Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as its predecessor.  Mind you, I expected that three years ago as I walked out of Dune 1.  As I wrote at the time: “One thing I suspect makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy.  And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative.  I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping.  For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.”

 

To be fair to Villeneuve and his co-writer John Spaihts, the ending they come up with here is less happy than the one I remember in Herbert’s novel, which I read as a teenager.  But the plot, wherein Paul Atreides joins forces with the Fremen, Arrakis’s Bedouin-like natives, and they take on the scumbag Harkonnens, still feels emotionally less complex than that of the original film.

 

© New English Library

 

The first film saw Paul’s honourable, though imperialistic father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the House of Atreides, get tricked into taking stewardship of Arrakis.  There, the House is destroyed by the brutal and grudgeful Harkonnens, with the connivance of the galactic Emperor (the ever-whispery Christopher Walken) and the Bene Gesserit, a female sect with Jedi-like powers who’re secretly manipulating events.  Paul and Jessica are among the few survivors and the Fremen reluctantly take them under their wing.

 

I had some problems with Dune 2’s pacing.  Much of the film takes place in the Arrakis desert, where Paul and his mum are gradually initiated into the ways of the natives.  Some Fremen are particularly interested in Paul because he seems to fulfil a long-held prophecy about a messiah who’ll come from another world and not only lead them to freedom but make their sandy world green again.  While I respect Villeneuve’s efforts at ‘world-building’ here, I feel this section goes on too long.  He ladles on the Fremen’s rituals and lore, especially things involving hallucinogenic substances like the spice – the prized commodity, necessary for enabling space travel in the Dune universe, which makes Arrakis such a big political deal in the first place – and the Water of Life, a blue fluid extracted from baby sandworms, the planet’s main non-human lifeform.  Though as any Scotsman will tell you, the Water of Life is actually whisky.

 

Also, the scenes where Paul argues with the Messiah-believing faction of the Freeman (headed by Bardem) that he isn’t really the Messiah put me in mind of the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian.  While Chalamet tried to convince them that he wasn’t the Chosen One, I kept expecting to hear Terry Jones call out in his raspy old-lady voice: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

 

© HandMade Films / Python (Monty) Pictures

 

Conversely, towards the end, things feel rushed.  As Paul and the Fremen escalate their attacks on the Harkonnens, who’ve taken over Arrakis and are trying to supervise its spice production, and the planet slips out of control, the Emperor and his daughter (Florence Pugh) are compelled to make an intervention.  They head for Arrakis…  And after their spaceship lands at the Harkonnens’ base, Paul and the forces of the Fremen simply turn up, unobserved and unannounced.  Until then, we’ve been led to believe that they’re confined to the inhospitable, storm-ridden south of the planet, outside the Harkonnens’ control.  How they arrive so quickly and easily, with legions of troops, a cavalry of sandworms and an arsenal of missiles, in the Harkonnens’ backyard is a mystery.  It’s as if the planet of Arrakis has suddenly shrunk to being the size of the Isle of Wight.

 

Meanwhile, certain sub-plots from Herbert’s book don’t quite enrich the movie in the way they could have – or are cut altogether.  The return of Paul’s faithful warrior-mentor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) happens abruptly.  He just pops up all-of-a-sudden.  I’d have liked to know how he survived the massacre in the previous film, especially as we last saw him about to engage the Harkonnens in desperate battle.  Gurney brings with him an unexpected revelation about some ‘House Atomics’, nuclear missiles belonging to the Atreides that Duke Leto quietly stashed away on Arrakis.  These become a handy bargaining chip for Paul when he points them at the all-important spice fields and are a deus ex machina if ever there was one.  I can’t recall if these were in the book – if they were, I assume they were introduced less jarringly.

 

I do recall the book having an interesting twist whereby Gurney believes Jessica is the one who betrayed the Atreides to the Harkonnens.  But there’s zero interaction between the two of them in Dune 2.  Rebecca Ferguson, incidentally, deserves praise for her portrayal of Jessica, who grows into a sinister, if not chilling figure as she exerts more and more influence over the Fremen.  Gurney would be right to distrust her.

 

Elsewhere, I was perplexed by the absence of Thufir Harat (Stephen McKinley Henderson in Dune 1).  Thufir is a mentat, beings in the Dune universe who do the work of computers.  Employed by Paul’s late father, he has a reasonable supporting role in the first film and it’s noticeable that he’s not around in Dune 2.  In the novel, the Harkonnens enslave him after their bloody takeover, but then he secretly tries to undermine his new bosses whilst working in their headquarters.  In Dune 2, his presence might have solved the problem of how Paul moves his forces to the proximity of the Harkonnens and the Emperor without anyone noticing – Thufir could have deactivated the monitoring systems.  Anyway, the film leaves us to surmise that Thufir perished during the slaughter of the Atreides, though Villeneuve thanks McKinley Henderson in the credits, presumably for accepting the dropping of his character with good grace.

 

Ironically, in the first adaptation of Dune, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch, which tried to shoehorn the entire novel into two hours and 17 minutes of running time and was derided for leaving so much out, Thufir is shown surviving the Atreides’ massacre and becoming the Harkonnens’ slave.  In that version, he was played by Freddie Jones, father of Toby Jones, with big, spidery eyebrows.

 

All that said, I did enjoy Dune 2.  The film was generally impressive and there were moments where I went, “Wow!”  Following on from Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), it’s good to see Villeneuve again treat a science- fiction story with high seriousness.  And I like how, for all that the male characters hog the screen and flaunt their testosterone, it’s implied that the female characters, as portrayed by Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux, are the ones really running the show.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

 

Also great is Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnens.  The scenes set on their home planet truly capture their fascistic, creepy, sado-masochistic awfulness, resembling black-and-white footage of rallies in Nazi Germany but populated by the bald-headed Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise.  Even their fireworks look dark and perverted.  And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychopathic nephew of arch-villain Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s drafted in to quell the Fremen’s resistance and restore order on Arrakis, Austin Butler gives possibly the best performance in the film.  (In the old David Lynch movie, Feyd-Rautha was the character played by the reggae-loving Geordie, Sting.)

 

Though Butler just about manages to steal the show, it is one of those films that’s helped immeasurably by its ensemble cast.  That includes Timothée Chalamet who, as Paul, has the hardest acting task – he could have ended up a dull goody two shoes or, as he agonises over whether or not he should proclaim himself the Messiah, a whiny pain in the neck.  But Chalamet avoids both pitfalls.

 

Lastly, watching Dune 2, I realised it featured no fewer than three James Bond villains – Walken (Max Zorin in 1986’s A View to a Kill), Bardem (Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall) and Dave Bautista (Mr Hinx in 2016’s Spectre).  For good measure, you get a Bond lady too, Lea Seydoux who played Madeline Swann in Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die.  Yes, I know.  It’s sad that I notice these things.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

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Hey, hey, we’re the munchies

 

© Duckworth Books

 

Another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Zombie movies used to be my favourite sub-genre of horror cinema.  Okay, at first, it’s difficult to see the charms of a school of movies about reanimated corpses shambling around and trying to munch on the living.  But what I liked about zombies was that they could be a brilliant metaphor for any group that was large in number but, according to the powers-that-be, mindless: consumers, blue-collar workers, the homeless, etc.  This gave filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment and allowed zombie movies to have brains figuratively as well as literally.

 

Thus, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a parable about a United States rattled by racial tensions and the Vietnam War.  His 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead takes potshots at a consumerist America where shopping malls had become part of both the landscape and the social fabric.  Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a Britain where anger was an increasingly common social phenomenon, terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ having entered the popular vernacular.  Its sequel, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq.  And Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) takes the piss out of a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just stoned, drunk or hungover.

 

But I said I used to be fond of zombie movies, because in the last few years I feel there’s been too damned many of them, offering the same old apocalyptic visions and same old shambling tropes.  Zombies have become ubiquitous, not just in the cinema but in TV series, books, graphic novels and computer games.  With popular TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-present), derived from a graphic novel, and The Last of Us (2023), derived from a computer game, filling our screens with zombie carnage week after week after week, surely it’s impossible now to do anything fresh with the concept?

 

Despite my zombie-fatigue, however, I recently read Max Brooks’ bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  This is probably the number-two urtext in the zombie pantheon.  (Obviously, the number-one urtext is George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies, Night, Dawn and 1986’s Day of the Dead, which created the template: the flesh-eating, the infection being spread by bites, the need to shoot them in the head, the humans reacting to the crisis soon becoming more monstrous than the zombies themselves.)  Brooks updated the sub-genre for the 21st century and imagined a zombie plague happening on a global scale, with different countries responding in different ways.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rhododendrites

 

World War Z is a mock non-fictional tome modelled on Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984).  It’s purportedly a compilation of interviews by a United Nations expert who, sometime after a worldwide zombie crisis ended, worked on a UN Postwar Commission Report.  He collected oral testimonies from survivors but, ultimately, the commission’s chairperson decided not to include the testimonies in the report, reasoning: “It was all too intimate…  Too many opinions, too many feelings.  That’s not what this report is about.  We need clear facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor.”  So instead, the UN expert publishes the survivors’ stories in book-form.

 

One’s first impression of World War Z is that Brooks – who in real life is the son of venerable funnyman and comic filmmaker Mel Brooks – has not only set his sights high but done his homework.  The book believably presents the voices not just of ordinary people, but of politicians, scientists, doctors, soldiers, mercenaries, pilots, etc.  It nicely captures their particular sets of jargon, slang and cadences as they describe their  experiences of the conflict with the undead.  The political protocols, science, technology, medicine, weaponry and equipment referred to sound convincingly well-researched.  Brooks is also authoritative when his UN official interviews people from more specialist walks of life, such as deep-sea divers (these zombies can move underwater) and astronauts (there’s a section about the crew of the International Space Station who, after things kick off, find themselves in orbit for longer than planned and do all they can to help humanity below).

 

The jargon occasionally gets a bit dense.  For instance, a diver grumps: “Kids today… f*ckin’ A.  I sound like my pops, but it’s true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have this ZeVDek – Zero Visibility Detection Kit – with colour-imaging sonar and low-light optics…  We couldn’t see, we couldn’t hear – we couldn’t even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.”  But then, people in any profession use plenty of jargon when they talk with passion about their work.  And you have to be passionate about your work when it involves relentless waves of zombies coming at you.

 

From pixabay.com / © Syaibatul Hamadi

 

A few entries stray into stereotypes and caricature, though.  An account by one Kondo Tatsumi, a teenaged computer geek so addicted to hacking into systems and obtaining information that he stays at his bedroom computer long after his parents have vanished, and the zombies have started eating his neighbours, without any awareness of the peril he’s in, ladles on the stereotype of the Japanese otaku too thickly.  To rub it in, Kondo is described as being at the time ‘a skinny acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair.’

 

Another Japanese-set instalment is rather cheesy too.  It concerns an elderly blind man called ‘Sensei’ Tomonaga Ijiro.  Though old and blind, his sense of hearing and smell are acute and he’s also skilled at using a samurai sword – well, it’s really a sharp-bladed shovel that he used during his pre-World-War-Z days working as a gardener.  He manages to survive for years in the forested mountains of Hokkaido, slaying any zombie that ventures near him.  Here, Brooks is clearly riffing on the legendary blind swordman Zatoichi, a fixture of Japanese cinema and fiction.  But the story’s unlikeliness is out-of-place in a tome that generally aims for documentary realism.  Even if Sensei Tomonaga’s non-visual senses and swordsmanship enable him to fight off zombies for several years, I don’t see how an old blind bloke could stay alive in Hokkaido, in the open, for so long.  I’ve lived in Hokkaido and know how brutal its winters are.

 

Worst of all is the testimony of David Allen Forbes, a stereotypical Richard Curtis / Hugh Grant-style silly-ass Englishman whom Brooks’ dad could have featured in one of his films – Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), say, or Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).  An expert on castles, he begins by explaining how modern-day humans used the medieval structures as refuge against the zombie hordes.  Then he gets onto his own experiences of World War Z, which he spent holed up in Windsor Castle, just outside London.  There’s some utter guff where Forbes gets teary recalling Queen Elizabeth II.  She refused to join the rest of the Royal Family when they were evacuated to Ireland – yes, it shows how desperate things were that the Royal Family, for their safety, had to be sent to Ireland.  Instead, she stayed with the garrison in Windsor to ‘be an example to the rest of us, the strongest, and bravest, and absolute best of us.’  Of castles and Her Majesty, Forbes concludes: “One defended our bodies, the other, our souls.”  That bit turned my stomach more than the most graphic gore I’ve seen in a zombie movie.

 

Still, the good parts of World War Z more than outweigh the duff ones.  Most effective for me is a section where an American woman, Jesika Hendricks, recalls her experiences as a girl early in the crisis.  Following government advice to move north – by then it’d been noticed that zombies freeze up in cold weather – her urban, white-collar family load up a van and head for Canada.  They join some fellow refugees who’ve set up camp beside a lake.  Initially, everything is cheery, with communal bonhomie, singing around the campfire, and the nearby forest and lake-waters providing fuel and food.  Then, as the trees get cut down, and the fish get dynamited to non-existence, and the days grow shorter and colder, the mood sours.  “The camp became a mess, nobody picking up their trash anymore.  A couple of times I stepped in human shit.  Nobody was even bothering to bury it.”  By mid-winter, things have become truly nasty.  It’s a grim and believable account of what frightened and unprepared people can end up doing in an emergency.  And the zombies aren’t even around.  They figure in the punchline, though: “It took a lot of time, but eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, and the snow finally began to melt.. spring was finally here, and so were the living dead.”

 

Meanwhile, Brooks devises a neat explanation for the zombies’ origins and how they spread everywhere.  The zombie-creating virus first appeared in China – possibly somehow spawned in the areas flooded by the Three Gorges dam project – and went on to infect the country’s supply of organs that’d been forcibly-harvested in its prisons.  Some of these organs were exported around the world and they released the virus into the bodies of their recipients.  Incidentally, in real life, China announced in 2014 that it would no longer use prisoners as forced organ-donors.

 

© Skydance Productions / Paramount Pictures

 

This premise didn’t make it into the big-budget, but disappointing movie version that Hollywood made of World War Z in 2013.  No doubt the studio, Paramount Pictures, was mindful of the growing importance of Chinese audiences for international movie profits and didn’t want to include anything that might annoy the Chinese government.

 

Finally, I noticed how the book makes references, mostly indirectly, to personages like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth II.  This gives it an oddly historical feel now.  Its story evidently began in the mid-noughties and concluded sometime in the 2010s.  And while Brooks pours scorn on inept and corrupt politicians, and other assholes in positions of power and influence (like a crooked pharma tycoon who lulls the West into a false sense of security with an ‘anti-rabies’ vaccination), he obviously believes the era still has enough people with the leadership skills, knowhow and courage to win the day for humanity.

 

But the mind boggles at the thought of such a scenario occurring in 2023.  For years now, we’ve been subjected to the callousness, venality and stupidity of leaders like Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Netanyahu, Johnson and, of course, Trump.  Also, we’ve seen how so many of them botched the handling of the Covid-19 epidemic.  If a zombie apocalypse started under the watch of the far-right-wing populist authoritarians who currently run too many countries in the world, they’d probably use it as an excuse to invade neighbouring countries, burn the Amazon, bash the Muslims, avoid corruption charges, hold raucous parties, inject themselves with bleach or, indeed, abandon the ‘blue states’ to the zombies.

 

And on the fake-news front, millions of ‘zombie sceptics’ would agree with Alex Jones, who’d dismiss news footage of zombie carnage as the work of ‘crisis actors’.  Millions of supposed ‘freethinkers’ would applaud the tweets of Right Said Fred and Neil Oliver, who’d dismiss the thing as a hoax engineered by a shadowy global cabal wanting to foist a ‘world government’ on us all.  Actually, I could imagine Oliver defying zombie-emergency lockdown by announcing on GB News: “If your freedom means I might get bitten by a zombie then so be it.  If my freedom means you might get bitten by a zombie, then so be it.”

 

Max Brooks’ 2006 World War Z chronicles a horror-show, but in hindsight, there’s ultimately something positive and uplifting about it.  A 2023 World War Z would be a horror-show full-stop.

 

From invaluable.com / © Motik One

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A Russell-ing in the dark

 

© Penguin Classics

 

Another post for Halloween…

 

Even if the American horror, science-fiction and mystery writer Ray Russell hadn’t done any writing, it’s likely he still would have had an impact on one of his preferred genres.

 

In the 1950s, after serving in the wartime US Air Force, studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and working for the United States Treasury, he  became fiction editor for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.  Playboy was an odd combination of smutty pictures of hot ladies and seriously well-written stories and articles.  The magazine’s detractors have dismissed this as a cynical ploy on Hefner’s part, propagating the idea that you could simultaneously be an unsavoury male lech and a connoisseur of the literary and intellectual.  Hence, by perusing the latest fiction by Philip Roth or an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, its readers didn’t have to feel bad about jerking off to a picture of the Playmate of the Month a few pages earlier.

 

Whatever.  During the 1950s, Russell must have kept many horror and fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, afloat by regularly buying their short works and printing them in Playboy‘s glossy – if sometimes ejaculation-splattered – pages.  By the late 1950s and early 1960s, those guys had moved onto television and were writing scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller (1960-62).  (In Robert Bloch’s case, his 1959 novel Psycho also became something of a hit when it was adapted for the cinema screen by a chap called Alfred Hitchcock).  These shows imprinted themselves on the DNA of the kids watching them, who occasionally grew up to be popular filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, or popular novelists, like Stephen King.

 

In effect, indirectly, Russell helped cultivate an unsettling, mid-20th-century American gothic.  This was one in which the world suddenly and inexplicably turned dark and weird for the citizens of post-war, suburban America – for office-bound men in grey-flannel suits, dutiful housewives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses, wholesome kids playing behind white picket fences.  And it’s one whose influence is still felt today.

 

But it’s Ray Russell the writer, rather than the editor, whom I want to discuss here.  I’ve just read a collection of his short stories, first published in 1985 and now reprinted as a ‘Penguin Classic’, entitled Haunted Castles.  Yes, I bet nobody working for Penguin Books back in 1985 imagined their prestigious publishing company would one day consider a book called Haunted Castles a ‘classic’.  Its seven stories show Russell’s love for a different type of gothic fiction – the full-blooded, 19th-century variety exemplified by such books as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

 

Russell’s tales here take place in a world of wild, sparsely-populated mountains and forests, fearsome thunder-and-lightning storms, nightmarish coach-rides and remote settlements inhabited by superstitious villagers.  And, as the collection’s title suggests, castles.  Each one is a “vast edifice of stone” exuding “an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay.”  In fact, four of these stories feature castles and they’re all equipped with torture chambers: “There stood the infernal rack, and branding irons and thumbscrews, and that grim table called in French peine forte et dure, whereon helpless wretches were constrain’d to lie under intolerable iron weights until the breath of life was press’d from them.”

 

Occupying the first two-thirds of the book are three novellas that are frequently regarded as a trilogy, though they don’t have anything in common apart from their gothic settings and trimmings and the fact that they have single-word, polysyllabic titles beginning with ‘s’: Sardonicus, Sagittarius and Sanguinarius.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

Kicking off the proceedings is Sardonicus, Russell’s best-remembered story.  It’s told in the first-person by a 19th-century London physician called Sir Robert Cargrave, who specialises in treating muscular disorders.  The title character summons him to – surprise! – his castle in ‘a remote and mountainous region of Bohemia’.  Sardonicus suffered a nasty mishap in his youth.  Following his father’s funeral, he discovered that prior to his death the old man had purchased a winning lottery ticket.  Inconveniently, the ticket was pocketed in his burial clothes.  The avaricious Sardonicus dug up his father to retrieve it, and claim the attendant fortune, but paid a hideous price. Seeing a terrifying death’s-head grin on his parent’s decaying face, he was so traumatised that his facial muscles froze and fixed his mouth in an identical, grotesque rictus. Now resembling a 19th-century version of the Joker in Batman, he tasks Cargrave with finding a cure for his affliction.

 

Channelling Dracula with its setting and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) with its disfigured central character, Sardonicus benefits from both an irresistible set-up and Russell’s knowingly-florid prose-style.  Also, he manages to sustain the reader’s sympathy for Sardonicus despite it becoming clear early on that he’s an evil shit who probably got what he deserved.  Sardonicus’s unfortunate wife is someone Cargrave once loved from afar, and the smiley-faced cad soon makes clear to the physician that unspeakable things will be done to her if he fails in his mission.

 

Meanwhile, Sagittarius and Sanginarius channel other macabre literary and historical characters.  With Sagittarius, it’s the dual personage described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though the setting isn’t Victorian London but decadent fin-de-siecle Paris – well, Paris in 1909, to be exact.  Russell has a lot of fun evoking the city’s simultaneously sophisticated and sleazy theatrical world at the time, though when the Jekyll-and-Hyde trope surfaces, it’s not difficult to guess how the story will end.

 

Sanguinarius focuses on Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16th / 17th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered girls and women, believing it was a beauty treatment that’d hold the ravages of old age at bay.  Interestingly, Russell’s take on the legend depicts Bathory as, initially at least, an innocent victim.  The goodness gets gradually squeezed out of her, and she becomes corrupted, by an evil entourage around her.  Russell also downplays the idea that she bathed in blood to stay young.  Rather, the slaughter is mostly fuelled by sheer badness, by the thrill of being ‘steep’d… in reeking devilish rites, and vilest pleasures… sharing both dark lust and blame.”

 

Of the other stories, Comet Wine is the most substantial.  Set in a community of composers and musicians in 19th-century St Petersburg, this one draws on the Faust legend and reflects the love Russell – a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music – had for classical music.  The remaining three pieces, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta and The Cage, are comparatively brief affairs and are best described as gothic fairy stories.  But each comes with a nasty barb in its tail.

 

Reading these stories, there’s a sense of Russell having his cake and eating it.  He describes horrible, bloody, perverted goings-on in stylised prose and with obvious relish, but at the same time doesn’t go into detail and rub our noses in the gore.  Elizabeth Bathory merely laments, for example, about “the manner by which these hapless prisoners were put to death: not with the swift, blunt mercy that is dealt even to dumb cattle, but by prolong’d and calculated tortures, which I have not stomach to set down here, so degraded and inhuman were they.”  A fine line is trod between the erudite and the sordid – a line that, come to think of it, Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

 

© Santa Clara Productions / American International Pictures

 

Incidentally, Russell also wrote for the movies but, sadly, no one properly managed to capture his flamboyant gothic visions onscreen.  He scripted a film version of Sardonicus in 1961, with the title slightly adjusted to Mr Sardonicus.  The film terrified me when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of ten.  However, as it was directed by William Castle, a filmmaker more fondly remembered for the outrageous gimmicks with which he publicised his movies – plastic skeletons flying above cinema audiences’ heads in The House on Haunted Hill (1959), special ‘Illusion-o’ viewing glasses to allow audiences to see the ghosts of the title in 13 Ghosts (1960), a 45-second ‘fright-break’ near the end of Homicidal (1961) so that cinema-goers who couldn’t handle the horror could flee the auditorium (and get a refund on the way out) – rather than for the quality of the movies themselves, I imagine it wouldn’t stand up well today.

 

Around the same time, Russell penned scripts for two directors who’d recently made their names pioneering a newer, bolder, more vivid form of gothic-horror cinema – Terence Fisher, who’d helmed Hammer Films’ revivals of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Roger Corman, who’d launched a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for American International Pictures.  The results, alas, represented neither director at their best.  Russell wrote The Horror of It All (1964) for Fisher while he was moonlighting from Hammer and working for the low-budget Lippert Films.  A horror-comedy about an oddball family getting murdered one-by-one in a dilapidated mansion, it was evidently designed to cash in on a remake, released the year before, of the 1932 classic The Old Dark House.  (Confusingly, 1963’s Old Dark House remake had been produced by Hammer and directed by William Castle.)  Again, I found The Horror of It All scary enough, and funny enough, when I saw it as a ten-year-old, but I hate to think what it would seem like now, 48 years on.

 

Russell scripted an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for Roger Corman, 1962’s The Premature Burial.  It has its moments but lacks the flair of Corman’s best Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) or Masque of the Red Death (1964).  This is partly due to it not having the energising presence of Corman’s usual Poe-movie star, Vincent Price.  And it’s hamstrung by a lame ending.

 

I prefer a non-gothic film Russell wrote for Corman, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).  This is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the visual spectrum that’s perceptible to humans.  Nothing good comes of this, of course.  Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distant edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk.  How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions.  They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals.  The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude.  Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.

 

Ray Russell died in 1999, before there’d been a truly impressive cinematic version of his work.  Actually, there still hasn’t.  But returning to Haunted Castles…  I notice that the forward to my edition of it has been written by none other than the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, who specialises in making horror and fantasy films.

 

So…  How about it Guillermo?

 

From penguinrandomhouse.com / © Charles Martin Bush

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Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

 

© Penguin Books

 

As Halloween is approaching, here’s a reposting of something I once wrote about the novella that inspired one of the greatest horror movies of all time – Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 tale Don’t Look Now, turned into the Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name two years later.  And there’s mention of some other disquieting stories by her too.

 

I have a tiny sliver of a connection with Daphne du Maurier, the popular 20th century English writer responsible for novels like Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938) and short stories like The Birds (1952) and Don’t Look Now (1971).  When I was at college in the 1980s, I knew her great-nephew very slightly.  Actually, I was better acquainted with her great-nephew’s flatmate and a few times, because of him, I visited their apartment.  Its walls were slathered with pictures of George Michael and Andrew Ridgely from the then-massive pop duo Wham, cut out of popular teen magazines of the time like Smash Hits and No 1.  I assume the young du Maurier and his flatmate had stuck up these pictures in an attempt to appear ironic.  Unfortunately, it meant that thereafter when I saw his great-aunt’s name on the cover of a book, I couldn’t help but hear, by way of association, the irritatingly bouncy strains of such Wham pop-dance numbers as Club Tropicana (1983) or Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (1984).

 

For a long time the only thing by Daphne du Maurier I’d read was The Birds (1952), a story that because of its remote Cornish setting feels even more claustrophobic and desperate than the North America-set film version directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963.  However, a while back, I got a chance to familiarise myself with more of her fiction when my partner gave me a copy of du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories as a present.

 

A novella about a grieving English couple who’re taking a break in Venice when they’re approached by two strange women – one of whom claims to be a medium – and told that their dead daughter’s spirit is trying to warn them against danger, Don’t Look Now has been filmed too.  Nicolas Roeg directed a movie version in 1973 and it’s now regarded as a classic, both as a horror film and as an example of Roeg’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, which combined fragmented and elliptical narratives, haunting and recurrent images and scenes of violent and sexual intensity to unforgettable effect.  Having seen the film several times over the years, I was keen to read the piece of fiction that’d inspired it.

 

My first impression when I started reading Don’t Look Now was that film and story felt like they belonged to different eras.  The couple, John and Laura, seem more modern, liberated and chic in the film, though that may be because they were played by 1970s icons Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie.  On the page, John and Laura have an old-fashioned English starchiness and they try to get over their loss with stiff upper lips and a strained Keep Calm and Carry On cheerfulness.  Also, the literary John and Laura are in Venice as tourists, so they seem less confident and more vulnerable.  Their cinematic equivalents are there for work reasons – John is helping to restore a Venetian church – and thus know their way around better.

 

Then there’s the presentation of the story.  Du Maurier’s novella is a briefer and more economical account of the events I was familiar with from the film.  As it stands, it could easily have been made into a 45-minute TV play.  (The film clocks in at 110 minutes.)  It begins in Venice with John and Laura encountering the medium.  The death of their daughter, by meningitis, is mentioned retrospectively.  And the suggestion that the dead girl’s spirit is urging them to leave the city before something terrible happens feels like a simple device to kick-start the main story – wherein John doesn’t leave Venice, through a series of mishaps, misunderstandings and further supernatural shenanigans; and then, when he tries to intervene in what he thinks is the mistreatment of a child, something terrible does happen.

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

 

The movie opens with a harrowing sequence showing the death of John and Laura’s daughter – not by meningitis but by drowning in a pond in the English countryside.  Roeg and his scriptwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant create a sense of a cosmic, all-encompassing evil at work.  Even as the girl dies, everything that’s still to happen in Venice seems to be prefigured.  We see John studying pictures of the Venetian church where he’ll be working and discovering a mysterious figure wearing a red coat in one of the slides.  When he spills water onto the figure, its redness spreads across the slide like a bloodstain.  John’s daughter is also wearing a red coat when she drowns and, later, so too is the child-figure John sees scarpering alongside the night-time Venetian waterways.

 

Indeed, in the film, John clearly makes a connection between the two characters thanks to the coat.  Is the red-clad figure by the canals the ghost of his daughter?  But this association doesn’t appear in the original novella.

 

Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now is efficiently gripping.  But I think Nicolas Roeg’s brooding cinematic version, spinning a web of portents, visions and uncanny coincidences in which John’s doom seems pre-ordained from the start, is better – a work of art.  That’s despite the fact that, by changing the girl’s death from meningitis to drowning, the film can be accused of illogicality.  As the website British Horror Films observes pithily: “If tragedy has struck and drowned your daughter, why go to a place with an excess of water?”

 

Actually, with Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, I preferred a couple of those ‘other stories’ to the title one.  And interestingly, nearly all of them share a similar theme, in that they deal with English people going abroad and coming unstuck as they leave their cultural comfort zones.

 

Not After Midnight is about an amateur artist taking a holiday in Crete to do some landscape painting.  In a manner reminiscent of the hero of John Fowles’s novel The Magus (1965), he encounters a strange man and becomes embroiled in some equally-strange activities touching upon ancient Greek myths.  However, while Fowles’s novel is an airy and exuberant affair where a Prospero-like figure orchestrates spectacular and elaborate ‘masques’, Not After Midnight is altogether grungier.  The man putting the events in motion is a drunken, debauched brute and, accordingly, the myths invoked concern “Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who, unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, reared Dionysus, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion.”  Du Maurier doesn’t say explicitly what bacchanalian depravities her hero finally succumbs to; but as he’s a teacher at a posh English boys’ school, we can guess.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

 

In A Border Line Case, a young woman who works as a theatre actress tries to honour the dying wish of her father.  She goes in search of her father’s long-lost best friend, to tell him that her father had wanted to “shake the old boy by the hand once more and wish him luck.”  She finds the missing friend in the Republic of Ireland, living as a recluse on an island, mysteriously lording it over a cohort of local men, and engaged in activities that are probably illegal and possibly weird.  Unlike the hapless protagonists in the other stories, the heroine here is a resourceful type.  She uses her skills as an actress to improvise, hide her identity and talk her way out of tight spots.  However, when at one point she suspects she’s stumbled across a secret society of homosexuals (“They were all homos…  It was the end.  She couldn’t bear it…”), you feel surprised that a theatre actress should be so wary and intolerant of gay men.  Still, A Border Line Case is well-paced and balanced nicely between an adventure story and a mystery one.  It builds up impressively to a nasty, if slightly predictable ending.

 

The book’s most humorous story is The Way of the Cross, about a group of disparate English tourists making their way to and then around Jerusalem.  The characters and plot seem slightly contrived at times.  It’s unlikely that a progressive left-wing lady who’s worried about the plight of the Palestinians should be married to a hard-nosed right-wing businessman.  Also, a climax where two characters are stricken by unconnected illnesses and a third one suffers a serious accident stretches credibility.  Nonetheless it’s an enjoyably satirical account of English folk abroad.

 

The final story, The Breakthrough, is the exception to the rule.  Its engineer hero doesn’t leave England for another country, although he is posted to the desolate flatlands and beaches of East Anglia.  There, an ambitious experiment is underway in a scientific / military laboratory, ostensibly involving computers, but really about capturing a psychic energy that surrounds people when they’re alive and escapes when they die.  The Breakthrough’s blending of the scientific and the supernatural calls to mind the famously frightening TV play The Stone Tape (1973), written by Nigel Kneale.  Bravely, du Maurier opts for a non-sensational ending that prioritises character over action or horror.  Admittedly, some readers might find that ending a bit of a let-down.

 

Overall, I greatly enjoyed reading Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, because of the author’s precise and no-nonsense prose, her ability to pack a lot of incident into her narratives without letting them get too convoluted, and her determination at all times to tell a rattling good yarn.

 

Indeed, on the strength of this, I’m now starting to think of Daphne du Maurier as being in the mould of Stephen King – and not so much in connection with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely.  Yes, better the author of The Running Man (1982) than the authors of I’m your Man (1986).

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

 

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 2)

 

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

 

William Friedkin’s most influential movie arrived two years after The French Connection.  This was his horror masterpiece about a demonically-possessed child, The Exorcist (1973), which achieved two things the mainstream  film industry had previously thought impossible.  Firstly, it showed that horror movies could do big box-office business (something reinforced by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws two years later).  Secondly, it proved that horror movies could be as hard-hitting and adult in tone as anything coming from the New Hollywood Generation, who shook up American filmmaking in the 1970s and included Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader and John Milius.  Mind you, the idea of serious horror movies had diminished again by the 1980s.  That was when many horror filmmakers decided it was more fun to tell stories about horny teenagers being murdered in inventive ways by homicidal maniacs in hockey masks.

 

The Exorcist was released in cinemas around the time I first saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s on TV.  My family was living in Northern Ireland then and I remember a young guy called Lawrence Timlin, who worked for my dad, telling me about how he’d seen The Exorcist twice.  The first time was during his wanderings in London and the second time was after he’d returned home to Northern Ireland.  The version he’d seen in a Northern Irish cinema, he said indignantly, had had many things cut out of it, no doubt from fear of what Northen Ireland’s sizeable communities of religious nutcases (both Catholic and Protestant) would say if they were left in.  Mind you, that didn’t stop those nutcases picketing cinemas when the film opened in the province anyway.

 

A decade later, when I finally saw The Exorcist, it wasn’t in ideal circumstances.  I was at college and staying in a hall of residence.  The hall’s residents’ committee organised a showing of it one Sunday afternoon.  As a result, I saw it in a common room with about 40 other people, all of us squinting at a TV set, on which it was playing from a VCR.  Definitely not a big-screen experience.  Still, I was lucky that I saw it at all.  For, in a decision that highlights yet again the cultural idiocy of Maggie-Thatcher-era Britain, video sales of The Exorcist were banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1988.  They were afraid of the effect it might have on ‘young people’ who saw it at home: “At the cinema it had been relatively easy to ensure that young people would be excluded, but video was another matter.”  Home video sales of The Exorcist remained illegal in the UK until 1999.  At least in 1998 I managed to catch it in a cinema, on a big screen at last, during a special release marking its 25th anniversary.

 

I have misgivings about The Exorcist’s philosophy.  I find facile its depiction of evil as an opportunistic, external force – when the idea that evil is something internal, that potentially resides inside every human being and can be activated by the right combination of circumstances (especially weakness of character), is more disturbing.  Even more facile is the idea that the Catholic Church is the line of defence holding evil at bay.  That seems laughable today, given that in the half-century since 1973 it’s become clear that the church’s cassocked ranks have harboured far more threats to young people than video sales of The Exorcist could ever have posed.

 

But those are issues I’d blame on the movie’s script and source novel by William Peter Blatty.  Its performances and Friedkin’s direction can’t be faulted.  He handles the famous set-pieces – rotating heads, projectile vomiting, the manifestation of the demon Pazuzu to Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in Iraq – with aplomb.  And von Sydow’s arrival at the residence of Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and possessed daughter Reagan (Linda Blair), when he stands silhouetted in mist, his outline delineated by a glowing streetlamp mixed with a shaft of light from an upstairs bedroom-window, is absolutely magical – perhaps the most seminal image of the horror genre.  The insertion of music from Mike Oldfield’s classic prog-rock album Tubular Bells (1973) during an early scene works brilliantly too.  And I say that as someone who normally hates progressive rock.

 

© Hoya Productions / Warner Bros. Pictures

 

Seven years later, Friedkin generated more controversy with his 1980 thriller Cruising.  This has Al Pacino playing a New York cop who goes undercover in the city’s gay S&M scene, in order to track down a serial killer who’s murdering gay men.  I didn’t see Cruising until the 1990s and I watched it at the insistence of an ex-girlfriend who was enthralled by the film.  Maybe she got turned on by seeing Al Pacino in a tableau of gay sex and S&M.  The film was condemned by New York’s gay community, who felt that by focusing on the city’s ‘leather bars’ it was linking all gay culture with violent sex.  In the film’s defence, Pacino claimed that it concentrated only on one sub-culture and could no more be accused of slandering the whole gay community than a film that dealt with the Mafia could be accused of slandering the whole Italian-American community.  Maybe so, but in 1980 mainstream America was a lot more aware of and at ease with its Italian-American component than it was with its gay component.  It might be able to distinguish between the specific and general in the former community, but could it do so in the latter?

 

Whatever – despite the issues about what it portrayed and how it portrayed it, I think Cruising is a pretty good thriller.  Though I obviously didn’t get the kick out of it that my ex-girlfriend did.

 

It was also in the 1990s that I saw a Friedkin movie that made me wonder if, creatively, he’d fired his last bolt.  This was the 1990 horror movie The Guardian, which has Jenny Seagrove playing an angelic English nanny who’s actually a dryad.  She abducts the children entrusted to her care and sacrifices them to the gnarly old tree that she’s an extension of.  Seagrove had form playing mythological creatures, having turned up in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) as a mermaid who bewitches Peter Capaldi.

 

Horror movies about trees are generally not good – see From Hell It Came (1957), The Woman Eater (1958), Maneater of Hydra (1967) or the anthology movie Tales That Witness Madness (1973), which has an episode where Joan Collins is spurned by her husband because he’s become obsessed with a weirdly human-female-shaped tree trunk he’s found out in the woods.  (No jokes please about the tree trunk being a better actress.)  The Guardian unfortunately doesn’t buck the trend.  About the nicest comment about it was made by Time Out magazine, which chortlingly described it as: “A severely flawed but not unamusing venture from a director who should know better.”  The film was co-scripted by the estimable Welsh writer Stephen Volk.  It was Volk, apparently, who got Friedkin hooked on the tree angle – the film’s source novel, Dan Greenburg’s The Nanny (1987), has no such material in it.  However, once Volk had shown Friedkin the 1904 short story The Ash-Tree by M.R. James, the director was adamant.  His movie had to have a killer tree!

 

© Universal Pictures

 

But happily, Friedkin enjoyed a renaissance in the early 21st century.  This was largely thanks to an association with the playwright Tracy Letts.  First came the claustrophobic and entomophobic Bug (2006), based on Letts’ 1996 play of the same name and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon.  Many people reacted to Bug by hailing it as an accomplished horror movie, which caused Friedkin to grumpily complain that it was no such thing.  For him it was ‘a black comedy love story.’  Well, I consider Bug to be both a pretty smart horror movie and an unsettling character study, with its two lead actors playing the messed-up protagonists with wonderful intensity.

 

Then in 2011 we got Killer Joe, an adaptation of Letts’ 1993 play, again of the same name.  This is about a family of Texan trailer trash hiring the titular hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to rub out their estranged wife / mother so they can get their hands on her life insurance policy.  A flamboyantly unhinged character, Joe agrees to the job, but only if he gets custody of the family’s youngest daughter, the simple-minded Dottie (Juno Temple), as a down-payment for it.  An unhealthy relationship soon develops between Dottie and the forty-something Joe.  “How are you gonna kill my mama?” she asks him at one point. “That’s not appropriate dinner conversation, Dottie,” he chides her.

 

From there, things become even darker and there’s a simultaneously horrific and hilarious finale that involves the family’s devious stepmother (Gina Gershon) being forced to do some unspeakable stuff with a chicken drumstick.  Killer Joe is an excellent slice of ‘Southern Gothic’ and benefits hugely from a barnstorming central performance by McConaughy.  When he warns, “If you insult me again, I will cut off your face and wear it over my own – do you understand?”, you believe him.

 

There are still Friedkin movies I haven’t seen but would like to.  I hear that 1985’s To Live and Die in L.A. with William Petersen and Willem Dafoe is very good, and I’d also like to catch up with his 1968 film version of Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party with Robert Shaw, Dandy Nichols and Patrick Magee.  The latter film was produced by Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, whose company Amicus Productions was better known for making horror films.  I doubt if it’s a coincidence that images from Rosenberg and Subotsky’s first-ever horror venture, 1960’s City of the Dead, appear on a television screen during a scene in Killer Joe.

 

So… William Friedkin was a filmmaker who brought us harrowing tales of serial killers, deranged hitmen and psychotic cops.  He raced cars against elevated trains and coaxed explosives-laden trucks across flimsy rope bridges.  He consorted with monstrous woodland entities, with the devil, and with Norman Wisdom.  He even managed to make progressive rock sound cool – twice.  Truly a man of many achievements.

 

© Voltage Pictures / LD Entertainment

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The power of Friedkin compels you! (Part 1)

 

From wikipedia.org / © Guillem Medina

 

I was very young when a film made by William Friedkin, the great American director who died earlier this month, first unsettled me.  I was about eight or nine years old when I learnt that the BBC was going to show his 1968 movie The Night They Raided Minsky’s one evening.  The TV listings in the newspaper assured me this was a comedy film, starring the zany performer Norman Wisdom, who could best be described as Britain’s answer to the USA’s Jerry Lewis.  When I was eight or nine, I absolutely loved Norman Wisdom.  I adored the knockabout slapstick he specialised in and the gormless man-child persona he affected for his roles.  You couldn’t dissuade me from my belief that such efforts as The Bulldog Breed (1960), in which Norman joins the Royal Navy and ends up being launched into outer space in an experimental rocket, or The Early Bird (1965), in which Norman plays a humble milkman who takes on and outwits a ruthless dairy corporation that’s trying to muscle in on his milk-delivery patch, were the best movies ever.

 

Thus, I was rather perturbed when I sat down to watch The Night They Raided Minsky’s and discovered it wasn’t a typical Norman Wisdom vehicle.  Rather than a knockabout comedy, it was a nostalgic, bitter-sweet film about knockabout comedy, as it was enacted in American burlesque theatres in the 1920s.  It was also, I realised to my horror, a bit risqué.  It told the story of a naïve Amish girl (Britt Ekland) who runs away to the big city, tries to fulfil her dream of making a career onstage, and ultimately but accidentally invents the striptease routine. Every time the film featured a boob gag, I’d nervously look over my shoulder in case my parents had entered the room.

 

Needless to say, since then, my opinion of Norman Wisdom’s oeuvre has been revised, downwards.  I’ve also managed to see The Night They Raided Minsky’s again, at an age when I no longer found it baffling and was able to appreciate its tone and subject matter.  It’s not great, but it’s likeable and benefits from a marvellous cast: Ekland, Elliott Gould, Jason Robards, Forest Tucker, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliott, Joseph Wiseman and Bert Lahr, who’d played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939).  In the film’s final images, Lahr is shown ruefully treading the boards of the now-deserted theatre, after the titular police raid, with the implication that as far as burlesque is concerned, this is the end of an era.  (It was also the end, alas, for Lahr, who died of cancer during production.)  And, credit where it’s due, Wisdom is pretty good in the movie too.

 

© Tandem Productions / United Artists

 

The Night They Raided Minsky’s was film number three on William Friedkin’s CV and was a credible third film for a director in his early thirties.  Mind you, based on it, you’d hardly predict the stunning commercial and critical success that awaited him in the next decade.

 

Half-a-dozen years later, I was also unsettled by the second Friedkin movie I saw, 1977’s Sorcerer, shown on TV while I was a typical teenager, i.e., I saw myself as hardened, cynical and incapable of being fazed by anything.  Sorcerer made an impression because it did faze me.

 

A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), it tells the story of four dregs of humanity – a Mexican hitman (Francisco Rabal), a Palestinian terrorist (Hamidou Benmessaoud), a French businessman fleeing fraud charges (Bruno Cremer) and an Irish-American crook who has the Mafia after him (Roy Scheider) – hired to drive two ramshackle trucks carrying two loads of volatile explosives across a natural assault course of overgrown jungle paths, rocky mountain-trails and decrepit rope bridges.  The explosives, ancient sticks of dynamite so decayed they’ve started to leak their prime ingredient, nitroglycerin, are needed to extinguish a fire that’s consuming an oil well in a remote part of South America.

 

I was rattled by Sorcerer because I wasn’t prepared for how brutal, cynical and hard-as-nails it was.  From its unflinching images of accident victims – bloodied ones after the getaway car Schneider and his gang are using crashes in New Jersey, charred ones after the initial explosion at the oil well – to the squalor of the village from which the four men set out on their ultra-dangerous mission – mud, shacks, chickens, feral dogs, feral policemen, Big-Brother-type political posters bearing the features of the local military dictator, barefoot kids whose only function is to mindlessly chase after the jeeps that occasionally rumble through the place, sordid bars where the only thing missing is the author Malcolm Lowry sitting on a barstool, getting sozzled on tequila – to everything that nature flings against them during their nightmarish odyssey – torrential rain, sweltering heat, choking vegetation, raging torrents, treacherous quicksand and toppled trees – Sorcerer knocked me for six.  And ladled over that is the film’s relentless nihilism, which makes it plain there’s going to be no happy endings for anyone.  Teenaged kid, Sorcerer seemed to tell me, you still have some growing up to do!

 

© Universal Pictures / Paramount Pictures

 

The film’s master set-piece, of course, is the sequence where the quartet have to get their trucks across a falling-apart rope bridge, above a swollen river, during a mini-hurricane – which at one point sends a fallen tree scudding along the water and crashing into them.  Appropriately, this provides the vertiginous image that appears on Sorcerer’s poster.  The film’s stunt coordinator was the Bud Ekins, who’d doubled for Steve McQueen during the climactic motorbike chase in The Great Escape (1963), though I’ve read that the cast did many of the stunts themselves.  There’s also a pulsing, needling soundtrack by German prog-rock band Tangerine Dream, which Friedkin wisely refrains from overusing.

 

On its release, Sorcerer was a financial disaster – coming out at the same time as a wee film called Star Wars (1977) probably didn’t help – and received a critical drubbing.  Leading the charge was Britain’s notoriously prissy, reactionary whinging-film-critic-in-chief Leslie Halliwell, who lamented, “Why anyone should have wanted to spend twenty million dollars on a remake of The Wages of Fear, do it badly and give it a misleading title is anybody’s guess.  The result is dire.”  Happily, Sorcerer had now been re-evaluated and is recognised as one of the very best American action-thrillers of the 1970s.

 

Roy Scheider turned up again in the next William Friedkin movie I encountered, 1971’s The French Connection, the one that put him on the map and won him a Best Director Oscar.  Lauded for its grittiness, as exemplified by Gene Hackman (who bagged an Oscar too) in the lead role of rumpled and rowdy detective Eddie ‘Popeye’ Doyle, The French Connection manages to have its cake and eat it – for while it oozes with authentic, documentary-style 1970s New York grime and sleaze, it also serves up some classic, if hardly realistic, action set-pieces.  Most notable of these is the legendary chase between a car and an elevated train, which Friedkin filmed without proper permission.  The sequence also necessitated the head of the New York Transit Authority being bribed so that one of their trains could be ‘borrowed’.  Indeed, it sounds like Friedkin indulged in the same sort of ‘guerilla filmmaking’ that nine years later Lucio Fulci did when he shot the New York parts of his horror opus Zombie Flesh Eaters (1980) – he’d have his crew turn up in city locations, start filming and then run like hell when the police appeared.  (There. I’ve just mentioned William Friedkin in the same sentence as Lucio Fulci.  The famously cantankerous Friedkin would hate me for that.)

 

Incidentally, classic though The French Connection is, I think its sequel, John Frankenheimer’s imaginatively titled French Connection II (1975), is equally good.  This sees Doyle pursue Alain Charnier, the smooth French drug-mastermind of the original film (who was played by Fernando Rey, actually a Spaniard), back to Marseille.  This leads to culture clashes galore.  Predictably and hilariously, Doyle shows zero diplomacy while dealing with the locals, including the exasperated Marseille police force.  He’s surely the most boorish American to ever descend upon France – well, until 2018, when Donald Trump rocked up there for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War One.

 

© Philip D’Antoni Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Stay tuned for the second instalment of this entry, when I talk about my experiences of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Cruising (1980) and Killer Joe (2011)! 

 

Cue Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells…

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People who stunted my development

 

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

 

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers.  A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23).  He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations…  Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars.  It’s going to happen.”

 

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie.  This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff.  The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

 

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

 

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house.  For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to.  I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage.  I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road.  Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

 

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).  This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert.  To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

 

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films.  Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire.  If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards.  And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes.  It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work.  (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

 

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

 

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

 

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns.  However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work.  Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him.  As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

 

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself.  This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck.  Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur.  And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

 

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman.  It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland.  (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.)  That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff.  He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

 

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS.  Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three).  He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

 

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago).  These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.”  I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003.  Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

 

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976).  For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church.  In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

 

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).  For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

 

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman.  He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years.  He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish.  He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights.  I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts.  Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

 

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career.  (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

 

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

 

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.  Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it.  But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself.  She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer.  Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto.  Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

 

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double.  His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

 

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible.  He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992).  Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

 

© Titan Books

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Cinematic heroes 4: Brian Glover

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Brian Glover’s Wikipedia entry begins with a quote from the great man that served both as a mission statement and as a career summary: “You play to your strengths in this game.  My strength is as a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.”  For a quarter-century, Glover played characters that were shiny of pate, pugnacious of visage and flat of vowels in many a British movie, TV show and stage play, and in the process made himself one of the most recognisable character actors in the country.

 

Born in Sheffield and brought up in Barnsley, the young Glover initially followed in his father’s footsteps.  His dad had been a professional wrestler and, while attending the University of Sheffield, Glover topped up his student grant by wrestling too.  He fought bouts under the moniker of ‘Leon Aris, the man from Paris’ and was good enough to appear on television, featuring in the Saturday-teatime wrestling slots shown on the ITV programme World of Sport that, a half-century ago, turned such burly, grappling bruisers as Kendo Nagasaki, Giant Haystacks, Mick McManus, Jim Brakes and Big Daddy into household names.  He continued to wrestle long after he’d graduated and settled into a respectable day job, which was teaching English and French at Barnsley Grammar School.

 

One of Glover’s school colleagues was Barry Hines, who’d authored the novel A Kestrel for a Knave.  In 1968, this was filmed as Kes by the incomparable Ken Loach. Loach needed someone to play the puffed-up, preposterous and loutish Mr Sugden, the PE teacher at the school attended by Kes’s put-upon, juvenile hero, Billy Casper (Dai Bradley).  Hines suggested Glover.  For his audition, and to test Glover’s believability as a teacher, Loach staged a playground brawl and got Glover to break it up.  This obviously wasn’t difficult for him, being a teacher already and a wrestler.

 

Glover’s turn as Sugden, who organises a football match with his pupils, insists on captaining one of the teams, and then cheats, dives and brutally fouls the kids while spouting his own match commenatary – likening himself to “the fair-haired, slightly-balding Bobby Charlton” – provides a bleak film with its one shaft of comic sunshine.  Come to think of it, Loach’s 1998 movie My Name is Joe has some funny footballing sequences too, and when he finally got round to directing a proper comedy, it was 2009’s Waiting for Eric with French soccer legend Eric Cantona.  The beautiful game is clearly the one thing guaranteed to make the famously grim, anti-establishment Loach lighten up.

 

© Woodfall Film Productions / United Artists

 

Glover spent another two years teaching before his next acting assignment, which was a role in the Terence Rattigan play Bequest to the Nation.  Thereafter, he swiftly became ubiquitous.  On television he appeared in Coronation Street (1972), The Regiment (1973), Dixon of Dock Green, The Sweeny, Quiller (all 1975), Secret Army (1977), Minder (1980), Last of the Summer Wine and Doctor Who (both 1985).  In that last show he makes a memorable exit when he’s blasted away by some Cybermen.  He also gives notable performances in two 1970s shows written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who at the time scripted virtually the only British TV sitcoms set outside London and southeast England.  In a famous 1973 episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads he plays the devious Flint, who makes a bet with Geordie heroes Bob and Terry that they can’t get through the day in Newcastle-upon-Tyne without hearing the result of an important football match.  A year later, Glover joined the cast of Clement and La Frenais’ revered prison sitcom Porridge, playing the hapless, slow-witted convict Cyril Hislop, whose key line is: “I read a book once.  Green, it was.”

 

When not playing bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshire chancers and convicts, Glover could leaven his northern tones with a twinkly avuncularity, which made him popular among advertisers.  Thus, when his face wasn’t popping up on TV shows, his voice was popping up on commercials between TV shows.  He voiced the TV advertisements for Allinson’s bread – “Bread with nowt taken out” – and for Tetley teabags.  In the Tetley ads, he played the leader of the Tetley Tea-folk, an animated tribe of diminutive, white-coated, cloth-capped characters tasked with the exacting job of giving each teabag its ‘2000 perforations’.

 

© Wellborn / United Artists

 

Meanwhile, during the 1970s, Glover became a regular in British movies. These included Lindsay Anderson’s oddball 1973 epic O Lucky Man! and its follow-up, 1982’s Britannia Hospital (about which I intend to write on this blog very soon); Michael Crichton’s 1979 period adventure The First Great Train Robbery; and Terry Gilliam’s 1978 medieval comedy Jabberwocky, in which he plays the foreman of an ironworks that’s reduced to chaos when Michael Palin blunders into it.  In Douglas Hickox’s 1975 London-set thriller Brannigan, he’s a minor villain who gets roughed up by John Wayne, playing a tough American cop on an assignment to the British capital – Wayne creates mayhem as he behaves like a Wild West sheriff dealing with an unruly frontier town.  “Now,” he warns Glover, “would you like to try for England’s free dental care or answer my question?”

 

In 1981, John Landis made his much-loved horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, the opening scenes of which, set in a northern pub called the Slaughtered Lamb, called for a bald-headed, rough-looking Yorkshireman.  Obviously, there was only one man for the job.  Landis duly cast Glover and the resulting scene, wherein he entertains the Lamb’s patrons with his ‘Remember the Alamo!’ joke, is, along with Kes, his finest cinematic moment – both films show what a fine comic actor he was.  Unfortunately, the pub’s jovial mood is then ruined when David Naughton and Griffin Dunn inquire about the strange five-pointed star painted on the wall.  And as they’re ejected from the premises, Glover utters the film’s most quoted piece of dialogue: “Beware the moon, lads!”

 

© PolyGram Pictures / Gruber-Peters Company / Universal Pictures

 

Three years later, Glover turned up in another classic werewolf movie, playing a villager in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Angela Carter’s gothic short story, The Company of Wolves.  At one point, he’s involved in a brawl with the previous subject of this Cinematic Heroes series of posts, David Warner; and at another, he comes out with a very Yorkshire-esque line: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

 

Glover faced another monster, a slimy one rather than a hairy one, in 1992’s Alien 3, wherein he plays the warden in charge of a prison-colony on the stormy planet Fiorina 161.  Sigourney Weaver crash-lands there, unwittingly bringing with her a cargo of egg-laying alien face-huggers.  Directed by a young David Fincher, Alien 3 is a much-maligned film.  It can’t help but seem anti-climactic after the previous film in the Alien series, James Cameron’s barnstorming Aliens (1986), and the fact that it begins by killing off most of the characters left alive at the end of Aliens didn’t endear it to fans.  It’s got some wonderfully grungy set design, though, and there is something heroic about the film’s un-Hollywood-like, and commercially-suicidal, pessimism.  Even Weaver herself gets it at the end.

 

One of Alien 3’s biggest problems is that, due to incompetent scripting and editing, most of its interesting characters – Glover, Charles Dance, Paul McGann – vanish from the story halfway through.  Incidentally, for British audiences, Glover perhaps brought a little too much baggage to his role.  When I saw Alien 3 in an Essex cinema, a scene where Weaver confronts Glover in his office, while he – voice of the Tetley Tea-folk – absent-mindedly dunks a teabag in a cup of boiling water, provoked guffaws.

 

© Brandywine Productions / 20th Century Fox

 

Glover must have got on well with Sigourney Weaver, for he subsequently turned up in 1997’s Snow White: a Tale of Terror, in which Weaver played the evil queen.  Another late role was in the endearingly off-the-wall 1993 comedy Leon the Pig Farmer, in which a young Jewish Londoner, played by Mark Frankel, gets the unsettling news that he was the result of an artificial-insemination mix-up and his father is actually a Yorkshire pig farmer – inevitably a bald-headed, rough-looking one played by Glover.  What makes Leon, which also starred Fawlty Towers’ Connie Booth and former Bond girl Maryam D’Abo, slightly melancholic to watch now is the knowledge that lead-actor Frankel died in a motorcycle accident a few years later.

 

Glover’s stage CV was as busy as his film and TV ones.  He appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of As You Like It (playing, appropriately, Charles the Wrestler) and Romeo and Juliet, while other theatre work included Don Quixote, The Iceman Cometh, The Long Voyage Home, The Mysteries and Saint Joan.  Lindsay Anderson, a stage director as well as a film one, cast him in productions of the David Storey plays The Changing Room and Life Class and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw.  Such was Glover’s fame by the time he appeared in a West End version of The Canterbury Tales that it was advertised with a slightly amended version of one of his catch-phrases: “Chaucer with nowt taken out.”

 

Glover was a literary figure as well.  He was a prolific playwright and writer, was responsible for over 20 plays and short films, and penned a column in a Yorkshire newspaper.  Asked to contribute a script to a 1976 TV drama anthology called Plays for Britain, which also featured writing by Stephen Poliakoff and Roger McGough, Glover found himself short of inspiration.  He ended up paying a visit to a police station and inquiring if they’d experienced anything unusual lately that he might be able to use as an idea.  While he was at the station, a woman trooped in to the front desk to report indignantly that someone had pinched her front door.  Suddenly, Glover knew what his story would be about.

 

Meanwhile, I remember seeing him on a TV arts programme, discussing – with Anthony Burgess, no less – Paul Theroux’s acerbic 1983 travel book about the British coastline, The Kingdom by the Sea.  Glover, who during his wrestling days had toured many of the towns Theroux wrote about, took particular exception to a comment Theroux made about Aberdeen: “…the average Aberdonian is someone who would gladly pick a halfpenny out of a dunghill with his teeth.”

 

© UK Film Council / Entertainment Film Distributors

 

Alas, in September 1996, Brian Glover met his own Alamo.  He underwent an operation for a brain tumour, although a fortnight later he was back at work, making one of his final films, Up ‘n’ Under.  Fittingly, this was about the north-of-England sport of rugby league and was made by the playwright John Godber, whose debut play Bouncers has become a much-revived classic.  Glover was among the first people to go and see Bouncers when it premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977 and was quick to offer Godber encouragement.  Despite the surgery, the tumour eventually killed him in July 1997.

 

Thanks to his gruff-but-lovable persona, unmistakable voice, and talent for stealing any scene he was in, Glover lives on in the memory of people like me, who grew up watching a lot of television and movies in 1970s and 1980s Britain.  Those folk include actor Jason Isaacs, who admits to using him as inspiration for his star turn as the Soviet war-hero and Red Army commander-in-chief Georgy Zhukov in Armando Iannucci’s historical satire The Death of Stalin (2017).  While he played Zhukov as a blunt, abrasive and – crucially – Yorkshire-accented bad-ass, Isaacs said, “I had a picture of Brian Glover in my head.  Magnificent actor.”

 

Meanwhile, Glover is buried in Brompton Cemetery in London, where a simple gravestone describes him as a ‘Wrestler… Actor… Writer’.  Not just a Yorkshireman, then, but a true Renaissance man.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Edwardx