Category: Films

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The Ken and Ollie show

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

A few days ago, Murray Melvin – the much-loved British theatrical actor, director and archivist, and a performer too on TV and in film – died at the age of 90.  While the stage was evidently Melvin’s first love, I remember him mainly for turning up in a lot of admirable, or at least memorably oddball, films: Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966), Desmond Davis’s Smashing Time (1967), Stephen Weeks’s Ghost Story (1974) and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). 

 

Melvin also appeared in four films directed by that wonderful ‘enfant terrible’ of 1960-70s British cinema, Ken Russell: The Devils, The Boy Friend (both 1971), Lisztomania (1975) and Prisoner of Honour (1991), plus in various items of Russell’s television work.  And he was in a half-dozen films directed by the equally-noteworthy Peter Medak: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972), Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974), The Krays (1990), Let Him Have It (1991), David Copperfield (2000) and The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018).  That last film was a documentary about the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun and Medak’s own meditation on why the film was such a disaster, why it never got released by the studio, and why it nearly put an end to his filmmaking career.  (The answer to all those questions is in the documentary’s title.)  Melvin popped up to tell a few anecdotes from his time on Noonday Sun, still as bright as a button even though by then he was well into this eighties.

 

As a little tribute to Melvin, here’s a reposting of something I wrote back in 2019 about a film that features one of his best performances – Ken Russell’s gloriously provocative The Devils.

 

I wrote the following piece after watching a 111-minute version of The Devils – the ultra-controversial 1971 film starring Oliver Reed and directed by Reed’s friend, and some would say partner-in-crime, Ken Russell – on a DVD put out by the British Film Institute and introduced by Mark Kermode.  However, I understand that a longer version of the film, with an extra six minutes of restored footage, has been available since 2004.

 

If you haven’t seen The Devils in any of its versions, don’t read on.  There will be spoilers galore.

 

Based on historical events in 17th century France, and on two works inspired by those events, Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon (1952) and John Whiting’s play The Devils (1961), the film deals with skulduggery at national and local levels.  The power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (played by Christopher Logue, who was best known as a poet) encourages Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to create a centralised and authoritarian France, with the Catholic Church entrenched as keeper of the national faith.  This means taking action against those French cities where power has become so entrenched that they function like autonomous city-states.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Particularly irksome to Richelieu is the city of Loudon, which has kept its independence thanks to its huge fortified city walls and which has a dismaying tendency to treat its Protestant citizens as equals of the Catholic ones.  Richelieu sends his agent, Baron Jean de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), with orders to demolish Loudon’s walls and bring the city to heel.  However, de Laubardemont is thwarted when confronted by Urbain Grandier (Reed), an eloquent and powerful city priest who’s able to bring the citizenry onto the streets to resist him and his soldiers.

 

Grandier’s political principles might be high-minded but his personal ones are anything but.  A philanderer and predator, he’s already impregnated and abandoned one woman (Georgina Hale) and is busy wooing another (Gemma Jones), whom he marries in a secret ceremony after claiming to have found theological justification that priests can become husbands.

 

Meanwhile, de Laubardemont joins forces with members of the local clergy, judiciary and trades whom Grandier has offended for personal or professional reasons and they conspire to destroy him.  Their means of doing so comes from an unexpected source – the scoliosis-stricken Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), abbess of a Loudon convent.  Although she’s never met Grandier, Sister Jeanne has worshipped him from afar, first in a spiritual way and then – through a series of increasingly perverse and graphic visions – in an ungodly, sensual one.  Eventually she becomes deranged, her hysteria infects the nuns under her governance, and she accuses Grandier of using witchcraft to possess and corrupt her and her convent.  De Laudardemont and his allies promptly summon the witch-hunting Father Barre (Michael Gothard) to investigate.  When they’ve gathered enough ‘evidence’, they have Grandier charged with witchcraft and put him on trial for his life.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

With its mixture of politics, sex, violence and religion, which Russell respectively depicts cynically, explicitly, unflinchingly and sacrilegiously, The Devils was and still is a provocative watch.  It had an ‘X’ certificate slapped on it in the USA, which meant few Americans got to see it.  X-certificate movies were assumed to be pornographic ones and got few theatre-bookings.  In addition, both the studio, Warner Brothers, and the censors took scissors to its more inflammatory scenes.  And Britain’s establishment critics were aghast.  The prissy and grumpy Leslie Halliwell, whose Filmgoers’ Companion books were for many years the only film-reference books British people read, dismissed it as ‘outrageously sick’ and ‘in howling bad taste from beginning to end’, while the hostility shown by the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker culminated in a bust-up in a TV studio where Russell smacked the critic over the head with a rolled-up copy of his own newspaper.

 

These days, predictably, all that condemnatory water has passed well under the bridge.  Younger critics and filmmakers recognise Russell as a flamboyant auteur who added welcome dashes of flair, colour, imagination and daringness to a British film industry that was long accustomed to making stodgy historical costume dramas and dreary kitchen-sink dramas and seemed unaware that cinema is supposed to be, you know, cinematic.  And The Devils is acknowledged as his masterpiece.  For instance, Ben Wheatley, director of Kill List (2011) and High Rise (2016), has said, “The Devils to me stands alone in Ken Russell’s work.  It has all the fierceness and craziness of his movies, but it also has a seriousness and an intensity that isn’t in his other movies.”

 

Anyway, what’s my assessment The Devils?  Well, I’ll start with what I regard as the movie’s weakness.  Although it’s intended to be over the top, it goes a bit too over the top during the lengthy sequences where Father Barre and his lackeys invade the convent searching for proof of Grandier’s demonic influence.  Barre has already, secretly, threatened the nuns with execution unless they agree to behave hysterically.  And on cue, those nuns put on a hell of a show – a chaotic fracas of nudity, licentiousness, writhing, screaming, eye-goggling, tongue-waggling, attempted copulation with candlesticks and lewd carry-on with a giant effigy of Christ on the cross.  At this point, you feel you’re watching not so much a Ken Russell film as a parody of a Ken Russell film.  Which come to think of it, was what his later Lair of the White Worm (1988) was.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Otherwise, I think The Devils is magnificent.  Its highlights include the stylised sets by a young Derek Jarman, which eschew the grime, grubbiness and gloom you associate with life four centuries ago and instead are dazzlingly white and clean, but also disturbingly clinical.  These include Sister’s Jeanne’s convent, whose warren of chambers and passageways have the look of some germ-free medical institution – presumably one for the insane – and Richelieu’s headquarters, which resemble a cross between a giant bank-vault and a well-scrubbed prison and are disconcertingly staffed by priests and nuns.  The Devils’ policy of telling a historical story but not with historically accurate backdrops would appear in later British movies, most notably those made by Jarman himself when he became a director, such as Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991).  And I suspect that an also-young Peter Greenaway was making notes, because The Devils has sequences reminiscent of his films, for example, one where Russell’s camera closes in on the still figure of de Laubardemont while he stands against a painting-like tableau.

 

The performances are another highlight.  The band of conspirators set on eliminating Grandier are played by a splendid rogue’s gallery of British character actors.  Dudley Sutton makes a credibly villainous de Laubardemont, his rottenness tempered with a soldierly practicality and matter-of-factness.  Northern Irish actor Max Adrian and British sitcom stalwart Brian Murphy – yes, that’s George from George and Mildred (1976-80) – are fabulously contemptible as the pair of quack medical practitioners who fall out with Grandier when he catches them trying to treat a plague victim with glass globes containing bees placed over the buboes and, even more bizarrely, a stuffed crocodile.  “What fresh lunacy is this?” Grandier bellows at them, a line that became the title of Robert Sellers’ biography of Oliver Reed, published in 2013.

 

There are excellent turns too from the impish Georgina Hale, embittered but endearing as the woman Grandier has wronged, and John Woodvine – Doctor Hirsch in the 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London – as her magistrate father, whose enmity for Grandier helps seal his fate.  Meanwhile, decked out in hippy-esque hair and John Lennon specs, Michael Gothard gives a barnstorming performance as the witch-hunting Father Barre.  Gothard’s volubility will surprise viewers who remember him chiefly as Locque, Roger Moore’s silent, expressionless foe in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only.  More nuanced is Murray Melvin, playing Father Mignon, a priest suspicious of Grandier who first alerts the conspirators to what’s happening in the convent.  Later – but too late – he realises that Grandier is innocent of the charges against him.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Gemma Jones is sympathetic and convincing as Madeleine, the woman whom Grandier covertly marries and the film’s only properly virtuous character.  Abandoning his philandering ways, he comes to regard her as his soulmate.  It’s difficult to imagine that Jones in The Devils is the same actress who plays the title character’s mother in the Bridget Jones trilogy (2001-16) – three smooth, smug and determined-to-play-it-safe movies that seem the polar opposite of everything Russell stood for in the British film industry.

 

Ultimately, though, The Devils belongs to its two stars.  Vanessa Redgrave’s portrayal of Sister Jeanne ranges from the unhinged and monstrous to the pitiful and pathetic, often within the same scene.  Twisted both mentally and physically, the war in her soul between sensuous yearning and stultifying piety is symbolised externally by the contrast between her comely face and the grotesque hump protruding from her back.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

 

Then there’s Reed, at the height of his acting powers – powers that, alas, would wane as his thirst for alcohol increased and he became more famous as a drunken fixture on TV chat-shows than as a serious film actor.  He dominates The Devils.  He makes Grandier absolutely believable as, simultaneously, a heroic leader of men, a cerebral theologian and a sensation-hungry scoundrel.   His performance reaches a peak of intensity during the trial scenes.  Reed stuck to films and avoided the theatre, lacking the patience to go out and parrot the same lines night after night.  However, when you see him in verbal combat with Sutton before a row of judges (fearsomely clad in Ku Klux Klan-like white robes), you feel this would have been a brilliant piece of acting to watch live on a stage.

 

There follows the film’s cruel and despairing finale.  Grandier is found guilty and subjected to torture by Barre, who uses a hammer to smash his feet to a pulp.  Then he’s burned alive in the middle of a city square, in front of a nightmarishly drunken and jeering crowd – no longer does Grandier command the loyalty and affection of Loudon’s citizens.  Particularly horrible are the moments when Grandier continues to pontificate in a half-defiant, half-pleading voice while his face blackens and blisters in the flames.  This was filmed long before the advent of CGI and everything depended on the skills of the actors, the make-up people and the practical special effects team.  I imagine the scene was a difficult and gruelling one to shoot, especially for Reed.

 

The Devils certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.  My partner, who’s no prude, doesn’t particularly like it.  She admires the film’s performances and set design, but its dearth of sympathetic characters and surfeit of totally unsympathetic ones, and its unrelenting display of human venality, hypocrisy and superstitious stupidity, prevent her from enjoying it much.  However, if you can stomach the film’s bleak view of mankind, and you value Ken Russell’s operatic directing style, The Devils is second to none.

 

Or indeed, second to nun…  Well, I’m sure Ken and Ollie would have appreciated the pun.

 

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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When Raquel ruled

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Raquel Welch was probably the cinematic sex symbol as far as unreconstructed blokes in the Anglosphere were concerned – blokes who were a bit intimidated by the exoticness and general foreignness of, say, Brigitte Bardot or Ursula Andress.  Welch, who sadly died last week at the age of 82, was Chicago born but raised in San Diego.  Her time in the latter location seemed to imbue her with a healthy, clean-cut Californian glow that was an obvious physical advantage to her in her film roles.  Cerebrally, though, she didn’t win a lot of respect from her (mostly male) peers.  This sorry state-of-affairs was epitomised by some advice that Don Chaffey, director of One Million Years BC (1966), offered her early on in that movie’s filming.  Her function, he explained, was not to think, but merely to run from one rock to another.

 

I should say that when Raquel Welch was at the height of her popularity, I was too young to actually fancy her.  Instead, I just remember her as a talismanic presence in a number of movies that I found incredibly enjoyable at the time and that have stayed in my memory during the decades since.  Here are my half-dozen favourites that showcase the late, great Ms Welch.

 

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

In this science fiction epic, Welch plays Cora Peterson, technical assistant to a brain surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) and member of a medical team who are miniatured in a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously injured scientist.  Why?  Well, there’s a blood clot lodged deep in his brain that can’t be reached on an operating table, and the only option is to have miniature people inside him zapping the pesky clot to buggery with a laser beam.  Which makes sense.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

As the scientist is a leading expert in the field of miniaturisation, which apparently is being developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it’s no surprise when it transpires that the Soviets have put a secret agent on board the submarine to sabotage the mission.  Neither is it a surprise when this secret agent turns out to be a character played by the reliably-twitchy Donald Pleasence.  Actually, Pleasence’s death-scene, in which he falls victim to a hungry white blood-cell, is worth the price of admission alone.

 

Yes, it’s all very silly.  In fact, when he wrote the film’s novelisation, the respected sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov tied himself in knots trying to make its plot seem more scientifically feasible.  But with imaginative sets representing the inside of the human body, and decent special effects depicting the movements of the cast and their submarine within this strange micro-verse, and capable direction by underrated filmmaker Richard Fleischer, it’s a piece of hokum that’s both entertaining and memorable.

 

One Million Years BC (1966)

To be fair to director Don Chaffey, running from rock to rock was pretty much all that Welch, as the cavewoman Loana, and John Richardson as her caveman beau Tumak, needed to do for the duration of One Million Years BC, whilst trying to escape the claws and fangs of legendary special-effects man Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion-animation dinosaurs.  The film, made by Hammer Films, is even sillier than Fantastic Voyage.  Not scripted with much attention to paleontological science, it depicts Welch, Richardson and the rest of the human cast existing alongside monster-lizards in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch.  Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s splendid work transforms it into pulp-art and its poster, with Welch standing imposingly in a fur bikini, became one of the great cinematic images of the 1960s.  It’s the last poster, for instance, on the wall of Tim Robbins’ cell in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), sneakily concealing the tunnel that he’s digging out of the place.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

 

In the late 1990s, while I was living in Edinburgh, Ray Harryhausen appeared one day at the (now sadly defunct) Lumiere Cinema to give a talk about his movie-making career.  I attended, and I recall the queue that formed afterwards at Harryhausen’s table as people got him to autograph items related to his films.  Many of these were posters and video cassettes of One Million Years BC and I remember him demanding, “Did you buy these because of my dinosaurs or because Raquel Welch is on the cover in a fur bikini?”

 

Bedazzled (1967)

This being the late 1960s, it was inevitable that Welch would appear in a number of self-consciously groovy, achingly unfunny swinging-sixties comedy-movies, such as Leslie H. Martinson’s Fathom (1967) and Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969).  However, I do like Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, a comic retelling of the Faust story with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.  Cook is the devil, trying to ensnare the soul of the hapless Moore, and he enlists the Seven Deadly Sins to help him.  Welch, as Lust, is definitely the most fetching of the sins – not that she has much competition, considering that, for instance, Barry Humphries plays Envy.

 

By the way – a shout-out for Bedazzled’s lovely opening credits, orchestrated by Maurice Binder and accompanied by Moore’s brassy but also subtly-melancholic theme music.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

Bandolero (1968)

God, when I was a western-daft 10-year-old, I loved Bandolero.  Directed by seemingly inexhaustible western-movie director Andrew V. McLaglen, it contained everything I could have hoped for – action, humour, bank robberies, ghost towns, a gang of outlaws, a rival gang (consisting of bloodthirsty Mexican desperadoes, the bandoleros of the title), a tenacious sheriff and his posse, and a climactic shoot-out where (nearly) everyone gets killed.  The cast is excellent too.  In addition to Welch, there’s Dean Martin and James Stewart as the brothers leading the outlaws, the ever-reliable George Kennedy as the sheriff, and a supporting cast of familiar faces like Andrew Prine, Will Greer and Denver Pyle.  You even get a glimpse of former Tarzan actor Jock Mahoney, playing Welch’s quickly-killed-off husband.

 

All right, even at the age of 10, I knew Bandolero was pushing it a bit to have us believe that Dean Martin and James Stewart could be siblings.  Still, it seemed more credible than another western I saw at the same time, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), which posited Dean Martin and John Wayne as siblings.

 

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Another western and a rare beast indeed, a British-made western.  It’s immeasurably better than other British efforts in the genre, such as Michael Winner’s dreadful Chatto’s Land (1972) or, gulp, Carry On Cowboy (1965).  And unlike Bandolero, which had Welch as a damsel in distress, Hannie Caulder has her playing a proactive, implacable female Clint Eastwood-type, seeking revenge on the three outlaw scumbags who raped her and murdered her husband.

 

© Tigon Films / Paramount Pictures

 

Admittedly, the tone of Hannie Caulder is badly fractured.  The villains who behave so heinously towards Welch in the movie’s early stages are otherwise portrayed as a trio of comic bumblers in the tradition of the Three Stooges, and the humour feels jarring.  But if you can get past that, you’ll enjoy a cast that’s even better than the cast of Bandolero.  Essaying the villains are legendary character actors Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam, Robert Culp turns up as a bounty hunter trying to help Welch out, and Northern Irish actor Stephen Boyd, one of Welch’s Fantastic Voyage co-stars, makes a cameo as a mysterious preacher.  The fact that Hannie Caulder was made by Tigon Films, a company more famous for its horror movies like Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), perhaps accounts for producer Tony Tenser casting Christopher Lee as the gunsmith who provides Welch with the customised weapon necessary for taking down her antagonists.  There’s even room for Diana Dors, a sex symbol from an earlier era, playing the mistress of a bordello adept at battering obnoxious customers with her frilly umbrella.

 

Almost inevitably, Hannie Caulder is much-loved by Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as an influence on his Kill Bill movies (2003-4).

 

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

This double-movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novel was directed by Richard Lester, the man who helmed the two comedic Beatles movies in the 1960s.  He’d even, at one point, considered making a film where the Fab Four played the musketeers.  The Three and Four Musketeers are laced with many of Lester’s comic touches, often involving his regular collaborator Roy Kinnear, and Spike Milligan, who appears in the first film as Welch’s husband – surely the unlikeliest husband she was ever paired with onscreen.  Welch herself shows good comic talent, for example, at the end of The Three Musketeers where she gets knocked over by a jousting dummy.  At the same time, the films’ action sequences, orchestrated by the great sword-fight choreographer William Hobbs, look unnervingly realistic.  They come across as haphazard, exhausting and, yes, dangerous.  With Lester’s humour and Hobbs’ authenticity, then, the films shouldn’t work…  But somehow, they do.

 

In my mind, however, what makes these the best cinematic version of Dumas’ book is the fact that they’re packed with 1970s cinematic icons – Welch as heroine Constance Bonacieux, Michael York as hero d’Artagnan, Faye Dunaway as the villainous Milady, Christopher Lee as the equally villainous Rochefort, Charlton Heston as the equally, equally villainous Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Reed as the brooding and frankly Oliver Reed-like Athos…  And so on.  Welch appeared in a few more films afterwards, but none were especially memorable and her time as English-language cinema’s number-one female pin-up had evidently passed.  But she could have done much worse than step out of the limelight with the Musketeers movies.

 

© 20th Century Fox

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Norm!

 

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

 

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives.  Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins.  Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former.  As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love.  Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

 

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go.  To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement.  From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

 

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky.  Morales survived and divorced him two years later.  For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

 

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott.  Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs.  Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

 

And yet…  I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees.  This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

 

© Rhinehart & Company

 

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II.  Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry.  It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war.  The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot.  They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other.  In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union.  The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

 

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island.  If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

 

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word.  Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly,  Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’  It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

 

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process.  Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together.  However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park.  This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

 

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

 

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs.  Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot.  Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

 

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water.  At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam.  To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here.  About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

 

© Penguin Books

 

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself.  Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too.  At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person.  Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

 

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight.  This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine).  With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event.  It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country.  Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it.  And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

 

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good.  Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all.  And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest…  The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

 

Random House USA Inc

 

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.  Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously.  It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler.  Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

 

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish.  Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night.  Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book.  Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

 

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street.  He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

 

© Penguin Random House

 

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies.  Sounds good, yes?  Well, no.  The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987).  And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality.  It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

 

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’.  (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.)  Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this.  Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man!   Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

 

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day.  This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die.  Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness.  At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night.  That’s why I call him Mr Five.”  Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument.  “I made you come 16 times – in a night.”  “And none of them was any good!”

 

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad.  I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993).  Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange…  There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash.  Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

 

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

 

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel.  Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them.  Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff.  My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

 

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man!  Oh God!  Oh man!  Oh God!”

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The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

 

© Penguin Books

 

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.  Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films.  However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966).   I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

 

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)…  Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland.  My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age.  To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself.  “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

 

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21st century.  Starting with Moonraker.

 

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise.  The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint.  It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly…  And we know that they know…  So, let’s have a ball!”  The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

 

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest.  But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take.  I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

 

© Eon Films

 

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier.  Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast.  From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union.  Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards.  This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be.  Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un.  In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

 

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base.  After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course.  Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union.  The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however.  Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms.  So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

 

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles.  (Goodhead… Get it?  Good… head…?)  In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name.  I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

 

© Eon Films

 

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot.  It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict.  And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it.  I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time.  I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it.  And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else.  Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

 

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s.  Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity.  I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946.  Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war.  From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it.  Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white.  Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

 

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain.  Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget.  He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods.  Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about.  Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time.  It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

 

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves.  My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean.  ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’”  Fleming took note of the complaints.  None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

 

© Hammer Films

 

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi.  The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie.  They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out.  For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

 

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology.  I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

 

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role.  You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions.  Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45.  Yikes, I thought.  If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

 

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women.  Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.

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The alternative Christmas movie list

 

© Pan-Canadian Film Distributors

 

The cinema at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum is currently showing a season of Christmas-themed films so a few days ago my partner and I visited it to catch a showing of John McTiernan’s action classic Die Hard (1987).  My partner hadn’t seen it before and I’d only seen it on a small screen back in the prehistoric days of Betamax video cassettes.

 

I know every festive season an argument erupts on social media about whether Die Hard is or isn’t a Christmas movie, but seeing it again in 2022 I have to say it seems very Christmassy, much more than I remembered.  It’s got Christmas trees, Christmas decorations, Christmas presents, Christmas carols and Christmas Santa hats – one gets planted cheekily on the corpse of a dead terrorist which Bruce Willis’s John McClane sends down in a lift to taunt the remaining bad guys.  There’s also a limousine stereo playing Run DMC’s Christmas in Hollis (1987) – ”Don’t you have any Christmas music?” McClane grumbles from the back seat.  And Die Hard has Alan Rickman as the villainous and sublimely withering Hans Gruber, who’s a sort of anti-Santa Claus.  Gruber’s intonation is priceless as he reads the message McClane has written in blood on the dead terrorist’s chest: “Now I have a machine gun.  Ho… ho… ho.”

 

From amazon.com / © 20th Century Fox

 

However, I tend not to be aficionado of Christmas movies, for two reasons.  Firstly, the way that Christmas is presented in these movies has never corresponded to Christmas as I know it.  For example, as a kid, when I heard Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas in the 1954 film of the same name and then looked out of my window in Scotland at the late-December weather, what I saw wasn’t Bing’s white, fluffy snow-scape.   What I saw was usually a charcoal-grey sky, leaking charcoal-grey rain down onto a charcoal-grey terrain.

 

Secondly, Christmas movies are, nearly without exception, rubbish.  Most of them eschew anything resembling quality and dial the schmaltz and saccharine up to 11 and assume that’ll satisfy audiences instead – which unfortunately, in many cases, it does.  The biggest offender in my opinion is Richard Curtis’s Love, Actually (2003), which I prefer to think of as Shite, Actually.  That thing wouldn’t have got anywhere near being a good film even if they’d rewritten the Alan Rickman character and allowed him to start killing people.

 

Still, there’s a small handful of what are officially deemed ‘Christmas movies’ that I like.  Die Hard is one and others include The Snowman (1982), Gremlins (1986), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Rare Exports (2010) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) – any film that has Gonzo the Great playing Charles Dickens is fine by me.

 

There’s also a number of movies that aren’t officially counted as Christmas movies, even though they take place during the festive season, that I like too.  No doubt they aren’t included in the accepted Christmas canon because they’re dark in tone and don’t conform to the Richard Curtis Law of Christmas-Movie Pap and Sentimentality.  Anyway, it’s in honour of those non-conforming films that I offer the following – my list of favourite alternative Christmas movies.

 

© Embassy International Pictures / Universal Pictures

 

Brazil (1985)

Terry Gilliam’s take on George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) has so much going on thematically and visually that it’s easy to forget it’s set at Christmas-time.  But while we try to get our heads around the workings of the dystopian society depicted in Brazil – where labyrinthine bureaucratic systems and labyrinthine plumbing systems go wrong with equal regularity, one with deadly results and the other with disgustingly gloopy ones – we’re assailed by Yuletide trappings: Christmas parties, presents, trees, music.  There’s a family reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) – just before a terrifying squad of secret-police goons come crashing into their home, wrongly sent by a bureaucratic mistake involving a fly getting stuck inside a typewriter.  There are Christmas-decorated department stores that become hellholes – even more hellish than normal at this time of year – when terrorist bombs explode.

 

On a more symbolic level, the fate that befalls Robert DeNiro’s Harry Tuttle character – surreally engulfed in a mass of paper – suggests the horror of frantic, last-minute Christmas present-wrapping, when you begin to fear the unruly, recalcitrant paper is going to swallow you up.  And, late on, when Brazil’s everyman hero Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is imprisoned and facing torture, he gets a visit from Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), a senior official in the Ministry of Information, who ironically shows up wearing a Santa Claus outfit.  This underlines the fact that, like many an authoritarian, Helpmann believes he’s being benevolent towards his subjects, though in reality he’s anything but.

 

© Cinema Entertainment Enterprises

 

Rabid (1977)

As you might expect, Christmas with Canadian director David Cronenberg is not exactly cosy.  Set during the festive season in and around Montreal, Cronenberg’s Rabid tells the tale of a woman (Marilyn Chambers) developing a weird, parasitic skin-puncturing / blood-draining orifice under her armpit following some experimental surgery.  She soon becomes a plague-spreader – her new body part infecting people who turn into ravening, blood-craving monsters.  One negative thing I always felt about Christmas was the sense of confinement – being stuck indoors because the weather was foul and because there was nothing to do outside anyway due to everything being closed.  Rabid conveys a similar feeling by showing Montreal under martial law, its wintry streets silent save for the trucks prowling around removing corpses from the sidewalks.  Though a more obvious Christmassy moment is when carnage erupts in a shopping mall and the cops unwittingly gun down the store Santa Claus.

 

The Silent Partner (1978)

You have to hand it to those Canadians – back in the 1970s, at least, they knew how to stage a dark Christmas movie.  Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner (1978) is an excellent thriller, often amusing but with a few moments of nasty violence to keep the audience on edge.  Its villain is the psychotic but intelligent criminal Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer).  Reikle becomes a formidable opponent for – and, as the film progresses, the title’s sinister ‘silent partner’ to – the film’s hero, Miles Cullen (Elliot Gould), a mild-mannered teller working in the Toronto bank that Reikle decides to rob.  As it’s Christmas time, and the shopping mall where the bank’s located is overflowing with festive cheer, Reikle carries out the crime disguised as a mall Santa Claus.  However, he meets his match in Miles.  After Reikle botches the robbery, Miles uses it as an opportunity to fill his own pockets with the supposedly ‘stolen’ money.  Reikle is predictably disgruntled by this and a game of cat-and-mouse ensues between them.

 

The Silent Partner later moves its action to a different time of year, but not before we see Miles at that traditional festive fixture, the staff Christmas party, where he has to listen to his weary, cynical workmates speculating longingly about what they’d do with the stolen money if they had it.  His colleagues include a very young John Candy, sporting an alarming 1970s side-parted hairdo.

 

© Hammer Films / British Lion Films

 

Cash on Demand (1961)

While we’re on the subject of movies about bank workers finding themselves in unhappy alliances with bank robbers, let’s mention the superlative Hammer Films B-movie Cash on Demand, directed by Quentin Lawrence, with Peter Cushing – better known for appearing in the studio’s horror films – as a snotty, uptight bank manager called Fordyce, who’s forced to help a criminal, Hepburn (Andre Morell), intent on robbing his bank.  Unlike The Silent Partner, Cash on Demand doesn’t show any violence but a lot of nastiness is implied, with Hepburn matter-of-factly informing Fordyce that he’s kidnapped his family and is going to start torturing them with electrical shocks if he doesn’t cooperate.

 

And, like The Silent Partner, the attempted robbery in Cash on Demand takes place during Christmas, with a Salvation Army band playing carols outside Fordyce’s bank.  Indeed, there’s a Scrooge / Christmas Carol subtext to the plot.  Fordyce begins the film as an insufferable prick, contemptuous of his workers, who are more interested in their upcoming Christmas do than the day’s toil at their desks.  However, by the ordeal’s end – and after his staff have come to his rescue – Fordyce is a much more appreciative soul, not just of his family but of the people who work for him.

 

© Amicus Productions / Metromedia Producers Corporation

 

Tales from the Crypt (1972)

Cushing also appears in the cast of the British horror anthology movie Tales from the Crypt, along with such notables as Sir Ralph Richardson, Ian Hendry and Patrick Magee.  Its first episode, All through the House, has the future Alexis Colby and all-round super-diva Joan Collins murdering her wealthy husband on Christmas Eve.  Just before she can make the murder – bashing his head in with a poker while he was reading a newspaper, smoking a cigar and wearing a Santa hat – look like an accident – falling down the cellar stairs – fate intervenes in the form of an escaped homicidal maniac who’s prowling outside and is dressed as Santa Claus.  We spend the story waiting to hear why he’s dressed as Santa Claus, but we never do – he just is.  In the climactic scene, Ms Collins gets her just desserts by being strangled by the maniac.  Actually, it looks like he’s just giving her a shoulder massage, but it’s still good, grisly, Yuletide fun.

 

© Rizzoli Film / Seda Spettacoll / Cineriz

 

Deep Red (1976)

Dario Argento’s ultra-stylish giallo movie Deep Red (Italian title Profondo Rosso) has David Hemmings investigating a string of gruesome murders around Turin.  It’s only tenuously a Christmas movie – the opening scene involves a child witnessing a murder next to a Christmas tree – but generally, in its dark way, the film feels Christmasy.  It’s due in part to the richness of Argento’s visuals and in part to the Christmas-like music by Argento’s frequent collaborators, German progressive-rock band Goblin, which alternates between a baroque organ-driven theme and a plaintive child’s refrain.  Meanwhile, the cackling clockwork puppet that makes a brief but unforgettable appearance is the sort of Christmas present you’d give to a child you really don’t like.

 

The Proposition (2005)

What does this Nick Cave-scripted, John Hillcoat-directed Australian western have to do with Christmas?  Well, the movie’s finale is a masterpiece of festive-season irony.  It has a beleaguered police captain and his wife, played by Ray Winstone and Emily Watson, prepare for their Christmas dinner – turkey, sprouts, pudding et al – with civilised English decorum in the midst of the festering, dusty, fly-ridden hellhole that was the 1880s Australian Outback.  There’s also a gang of vengeful, blood-crazed bushrangers on their way intending to kill Winstone and rape Watson, even while Winstone and Watson arrange the Christmas cutlery and crackers on their dining table.

 

Australians I know have described the weirdness of trying to celebrate a European-style Christmas against the backdrop of Australia’s sweltering December climate, and Cave’s script taps into that weirdness.  The Proposition is, incidentally, one of the mankiest films I’ve seen, with the grime-encrusted, matted-haired characters on view paying absolutely no attention to their personal hygiene.  The best thing Santa Claus could do for this lot is leave a few bottles of shampoo and conditioner in their stockings.

 

© UK Film Council / Sony Pictures Releasing

 

The Proposition would make a great Australian double-bill with my favourite Christmas movie of all time, which is…  Drum-roll…

 

Wake in Fright (1973)

One of the films that helped kick-start what is now known as Australia’s cinematic New Wave, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright is a reworking of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) – with a schoolteacher called John Grant (Gary Bond), not some schoolchildren, stranded in an isolated, primitive environment where the onion-skins of civilisation are gradually peeled off him and he descends into savagery.  The twist is that Grant isn’t stuck on a desert island but in a hellish Australian Outback town called Bundanyabba, where he’s foolishly gambled away the money he was using to travel home to Sydney.  And the brutish behaviour of Bundanyabba’s locals that infects him and drags him down isn’t, it’s implied, any different from that in any other Australian Outback town.

 

Famous for its scenes of squalor, drunkenness, brawling, vandalism, vomit, sweat-stains, flies, animal-slaughter and Donald Pleasence going bananas, Wake in Fright still qualifies as a Christmas movie.  Grant is trying to get back to Sydney for the Christmas vacation and events in Bundanyabba take place against a festive background of Christmas trees, decorations and carols.  Meanwhile, a scene near the end where a stained and begrimed Grant wakes up on a floor, haunted by memories from the night before of drinking about a hundred pints, gunning down about two dozen kangaroos, wrecking a pub, and shagging Donald Pleasance, will strike a chord with anyone who’s woken up in a similar state, with similarly traumatic memories, the morning after the work Christmas party.

 

© NLT Productions / Group W Films / United Artists

 

Merry Christmas!

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Coltrane’s sweetest notes

 

© BBC

 

Actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane, who died on October 14th, seemed part of the furniture in British TV shows and films when I was in my late teens and twenties.  His performing talents, gallus manner and considerable physique made him impossible to ignore.

 

Also, as someone who’d grown up mostly in Scotland, I – and everyone I knew – appreciated the fact that he was a Scottish lad.  Originally, he’d been one Anthony MacMillan from Rutherglen, with his stage name inspired by the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.  It’s fair to say that Scotland did not get much attention in the London-centric media of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, except when it fleetingly made the news as the site of yet another factory or colliery closure. (Admittedly, things are only slightly better in 2022.)  Thus, seeing Coltrane on popular, national telly or in movies reaching international audiences, and seeing him be unashamedly Scottish too, felt like a victory.

 

Anyway, here are a dozen of my dozen favourite TV and cinematic moments involving Robbie Coltrane.

 

The Young Ones (1984)

Coltrane made three appearances in the groundbreakingly anarchic BBC comedy show The Young Ones.  I remember him best in the episode Bambi, which may have been the first time he registered on my radar.  Bambi is the one where Rik (Rik Mayall), Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), Neil (Nigel Planer) and Mike (Christopher Ryan) appear on University Challenge (up against a snooty team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’ comprised of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton), while Motorhead play The Ace of Spades in their living room.  Observing the shenanigans through a microscope is Coltrane as a genteel, old-fashioned Scottish doctor (“Absolutely amazing! Human beings the size of amoebas!”), possibly modelled on Dr Finlay in the 1930s stories by A.J. Cronin.  Coltrane brings the episode to an abrupt end when he accidentally drops an éclair on the specimen slide, burying Rik, Vyvyan and co. in creamy goo.

 

Laugh???  I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984)

During the early 1980s, Coltrane featured in three TV comedy sketch shows, Alfresco (1983-84), which also featured the afore-mentioned Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Elton; A Kick Up The Eighties (1984); and Laugh??? I Almost Paid My Licence Fee (1984).  In the latter, Coltrane made several memorable appearances as a West-of-Scotland Orangeman called Mason Boyne.  With his imposing bulk and craggy features, and wearing a black suit, bowler hat and sash,  Coltrane certainly looked the part.  Laugh? was produced by BBC Scotland and this was one of the very few times when the broadcaster was bold enough to have a go at the Orange Order and its paranoia about all things Popish.  “It’s all here, Matthew Chapter 2, Verses 1-10,” says Boyne, citing the Bible in support of his assertion that the Pope is the Antichrist.  “All you have to do is… jumble the words up a bit.”

 

© BBC

 

Caravaggio (1986)

Throughout the 1980s Coltrane had supporting or minor roles in many British or made-in-Britain films.  These include, incidentally, several forgotten fantasy and science-fiction ones: Death Watch (1980), Flash Gordon (1980), Britannia Hospital (1982), Krull (1983) and Slipstream (1989).  Okay, Flash Gordon hasn’t been forgotten – unfortunately.  Anyway, in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, he gives a performance that’s stayed in my memory more than most.  He plays Scipione Borghese, the 17th century cardinal who becomes the patron of the turbulent Italian painter.  As usual with Jarman, there’s striking set design, deliberately littered with anachronisms, and the film sees the debuts of Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean.

 

Mona Lisa (1986)

Coltrane also provides good support in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa.  He plays Thomas, a garage-owner who offers sanctuary for the movie’s main character, old friend and harassed ex-convict George, played by the incomparable Bob Hoskins.  Thomas has no bearing on the film’s plot, which sees George employed by a gangster (Michael Caine) to drive around and look after high-class prostitute Simone (Cathy Tyson), whom he gradually falls in love with. But the friendship Thomas offers George is one of the few specks of light in a bleak film.  His best line comes when he walks in on George while George is watching a dodgy video he’s obtained – discovering to his horror that it features his beloved Simone in some hardcore porn.  Innocently, Thomas asks, “Channel 4, is it?”

 

Tutti Frutti (1987)

The pinnacle of Coltrane’s 1980s work, the tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti is surely the best piece of television to come out of Scotland.  At the time, I remember the New Musical Express hailing it as ‘the best TV show ever’, though sadly those know-nothing kids running the 2022 online version of the NME didn’t even mention Tutti Frutti in their Coltrane obituary.  Written by John Byrne, Tutti Frutti has Coltrane as Danny McGlone, who’s drafted in to sing for a vintage Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, is killed in a car accident.  The Majestics are on a death-spiral, largely due to the antics of guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves, who died last year).  Driver styles himself as ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’, but his personal life is a destructive shambles.  The band’s conniving manager Eddie Clockerty (a never-better Richard Wilson) doesn’t help things, either.

 

One consolation for Danny is another recent addition to the band’s line-up – guitarist Suzy Kettles, played by Emma Thomson with an impressively convincing Glaswegian accent. He gradually falls for the sassy Suzy, though she has her own issues – an abusive ex-husband, who happens to be a dentist.  Can Danny and Suzy get together while, around them, everything descends into a hellhole of fights, farce, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and extreme dental violence?  Due to copyright problems over its title song, written and recorded by Little Richard in 1955, Tutti Frutti didn’t get another airing for a very long time.  Happily, it’s now available on DVD and three years ago was shown again on BBC Scotland.

 

© BBC

 

Blackadder the Third (1987)

Coltrane played the celebrated lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson three times on stage and screen.  His best-remembered performance as the famously irascible Johnson is in the Ink and Incapability episode of the much-loved TV comedy Blackadder, wherein the crafty title character (Rowan Atkinson) and his hapless minion Baldrick (Tony Robinson) accidentally incinerate the one and only copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) prior to its publication.  This leaves them with just one night to write a replacement dictionary before Johnson finds out and inflicts his wrath upon them.  In the funniest scene, Johnson boasts that his dictionary “contains every word in our beloved language.”  To which Blackadder offers him his “most enthusiastic contrafibularities.”  He sticks the knife in by adding, “I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.”

 

Henry V (1989)

Sir John Falstaff, a prominent character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is actually dead at the start of Henry V.  However, in this cinematic version, writer and director Kenneth Branagh couldn’t bear to leave out the portly, garrulous rogue, so he showed Coltrane as Falstaff in an all-too-brief flashback.  Falstaff was a role Coltrane was clearly born to play and it’s a tragedy he never got cast in a proper adaptation of the two Henry IV plays (or for that matter The Merry Wives of Windsor).

 

Nuns on the Run (1990)

Nuns on the Run, which has Coltrane and Monty Python’s Eric Idle as criminals trying to escape some nastier criminals and taking refuge, and donning disguises, in a convent, is truly a one-joke film.  That joke is seeing Coltrane dressed as and pretending to be a nun.  It’s a pretty hilarious one, I have to admit.  Though totally inconsequential, Nuns on the Run works better than another comedy he was in during the same period, The Pope Must Die (1991).  North American distributors, nervous about the film’s sacrilegious title and noticing Coltrane’s girth, unsubtly renamed it The Pope Must Diet.

 

© HandMade Films / 20th Century Fox

 

The Bogie Man (1992)

This TV film adapted to the small screen the Alan Grant / John Wagner comic book about a Scotsman with psychiatric issues who believes he’s Humphrey Bogart (or characters Bogie played in the movies) and goes around fighting crime. The TV version was panned by the critics, disowned by Grant and Wagner, and as far as I known has never been reshown.  While I found it underwhelming, I enjoyed Coltrane’s performance as the lead character – occasionally, when not channelling Bogart, he lapses into impersonating Sean Connery and Arnold Schwarzenegger too.  Also, Craig Ferguson, years before he became a superstar on American television, gives a nice supporting turn as the cop on Coltrane’s trail.

 

Cracker (1993-95)

Arguably Coltrane’s greatest role, his work in Cracker as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist helping out a dysfunctional team of detectives (Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Somerville, Lorcan Cranitch) won him the British Academy Award for Best Actor three years in a row.  Grim and intense, with the only humour coming from the arrogant, flamboyant and self-destructive Fitz, the show was at its most gruelling during its To Be a Somebody story at the start of season 2.  This involves a terrifyingly credible killer (Robert Carlyle), who’s ended up the way he is largely because of trauma he suffered in the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.  It also features the murder of one of the show’s main characters.

 

© Granada Television

 

Goldeneye (1995) and The World is Not Enough (1999)

Coltrane’s entertaining turns as ex-KGB man Dimitri Valentin, now a would-be entrepreneur in post-Communist Russia, are among the highlights of these two Bond movies, which have Pierce Brosnan playing 007.  Valentin certainly gets the best lines.  In Goldeneye, when Bond holds a gun to the back of his head and he hears the click of its safety catch, he observes: “Walther PPK, 7.65 millimetre. Only three men I know use such a gun.  I believe I’ve killed two of them.”   And in The World Is Not Enough, when Bond interrogates him about sultry oil tycoon Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whom Bond has recently bedded, and demands, “What’s your business with Elektra King?”, he retorts, “I thought you were the one giving her the business.”  Valentin, who runs a hellish-sounding country-and-western club in one film and a caviar factory in the other, was devised at a time when Russian oligarchs could be depicted as lovable, comic Arthur-Daley-from-Minder-type grifters; and not sinister billionaires laundering mountains of dirty money in the City of London and buying their way into the heart of the British establishment.

 

From Hell (2001)

Like The Bogey Man, this movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s labyrinthine graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, published in instalments from 1989 to 1998, was disdained by its original creator.  However, if you can erase all memories of Moore’s From Hell and focus solely on the film, it’s decent.  For one thing, it looks at the Ripper’s hideous murders from the perspective of characters commonly neglected in previous films on the subject – his female victims.  Coltrane gives a solid performance as Sergeant George Godley, the loyal, capable and intelligent assistant to the film’s hero, the vulnerable, opium-raddled Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp).  A scene where Godley and Abberline are filmed from behind as they approach the funeral ceremony of one Ripper victim, dressed in black suits and bowler hats, even evokes Laurel and Hardy.  (In fact, at one time, Coltrane and Robert Carlyle had tried unsuccessfully to get a Laurel and Hardy movie off the ground.)

 

Thereafter, Coltrane achieved global popularity playing Hagrid in eight Harry Potter movies and got regular gigs doing voice-work in items like The Gruffalo (2009) and Brave (2012).  None of this was my cup of tea, but good on him for securing well-deserved fame and, presumably, fortune too.  It’s just a pity that a few years ago ill-health caught up with him, which deprived our TV and movie screens of his always-welcome presence.

 

© Eon Productions

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In good company

 

© Palace Productions / ITC / Cannon

 

The fact that it’s almost Halloween, and the death a week ago of venerable film, theatre and TV actress Angela Lansbury, give me an excuse to repost this item that I originally wrote in 2018 about the elegant fantasy-horror movie The Company of Wolves (1984).  I wasn’t a great fan of her long-running ‘cosy’ detective series Murder She Wrote (1984-96), so I consider this to be Angela’s finest hour. 

 

The Company of Wolves, the 1984 werewolf movie directed by Neil Jordan, based on fiction by Angela Carter and co-scripted by Jordan and Carter, is one of my favourite films of the 1980s – of any genre, not just horror.

 

No doubt part of my fondness for the film stems from its source material, because I’m a big fan of the late Angela Carter and her sumptuous gothic prose.  While I was doing an MA in 2008-2009 at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where Carter had once taught creative writing, I was delighted one day when I got chatting with an elderly assistant at the campus bookshop and she reminisced about Carter and how she used to wander around “in a big billowy dress.”

 

© Penguin Books

 

The Company of Wolves began life as a short story featured in her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber.  Considering how other stories in the book are adult, gothic reworkings of such fairy tales and myths as Beauty and the Beast (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), Snow White (The Snow Child) and Bluebeard (the title story), it’s no surprise that The Company of Wolves is a version of Little Red Riding Hood with, as its villain, not a big bad wolf but an even bigger and badder werewolf.

 

Carter’s Company of Wolves takes its time getting to its main plotline, though.  It begins by recounting several shorter tales and anecdotes that explore wolf and werewolf lore, and the Red Riding Hood character doesn’t set off into the forest to visit Grandmother’s house until halfway through its ten pages.  Additionally, The Company of Wolves is part of a triptych of werewolf-related stories in The Bloody Chamber – it’s sandwiched between ones called The Werewolf and Wolf-Alice (which as well as being an Angela Carter story is the name of a not-bad alternative rock / indie band).  Not only does Jordan’s movie copy the rambling, episodic and anecdotal structure of the fictional Company of Wolves, but it also borrows elements from its two hairy neighbours in the collection.

 

Translating into celluloid Carter’s ornate prose style – which, for example, describes a midwinter forest with “huddled mounds of birds, succumbed to the lethargy of the season, heaped on the creaking boughs and too forlorn to sing” and “bright frills of the winter fungi on the blotched trunks of the trees” and “a hare as lean as a rasher of bacon streaking across the path where the thin sunlight dapples the russet brakes of last year’s bracken” – was a job to which the Irish director and writer Neil Jordan was well suited.   His CV includes atmospheric and flamboyant supernatural movies like Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), plus the twisted, gothic Irish psycho-comedy The Butcher Boy (1997); and many of his supposedly more realistic films like Angel (1982), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) are imbued with a phantasmagorical quality too.

 

With The Company of Wolves, Jordan and his production team – take a bow, cinematographer Bryan Loftus, production designer Anton Furst and art director Stuart Rose – excel themselves in crafting   a physical setting for Carter’s stories.  The movie mostly takes place in a pre-industrial village and a huge, surrounding, Ruritanian forest.  It’s an environment that’s both quaint with thatched cottages, cobbled streets, mossy churchyards and humped stone bridges and lush with bright-coloured flowers, shaggy trees, trailing vines,  beds of fallen leaves and nests of speckled eggs (which, disconcertingly, hatch and release tiny homunculi).  Yet it’s also a claustrophobic place of misshapen branches, drifting fogs, deep snowbanks and, obviously, wolf-howls that pierce out of the dark recesses of the forest.  In other words, it’s part Romantic poem, part fevered dream and part Hammer horror.

 

© Palace Productions / ITC / Cannon

 

If anything, the plotting in the film of The Company of Wolves is more disorientating than that in the original story.  The central structure is similar.  We get a clutch of little stories about werewolves – here told to teenage heroine Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) by her grandmother (Angela Lansbury) and then, later, told by Rosaleen herself – before the film settles down to its main narrative, which is what happens one day when Rosaleen dons a red woollen shawl, leaves her village and takes a walk through the forest to her grandmother’s secluded cottage.

 

However, the film places this within a framing device that has Rosaleen as a modern-day girl who, while taking an afternoon nap in her bedroom, dreams about being in a fairy-tale village in a fairy-tale forest.  As we descend through Rosaleen’s subconscious to the main part of the dream, we also pass through a creepy transitional zone populated by human-sized versions of the dolls and toys in her bedroom, which calls to mind another Angela Carter work, the 1967 novel The Magic Toyshop.  At the film’s end, this stories-told-within-a-dream framework collapses, for poor modern-day Rosaleen wakes from her dream to find real wolves crashing through the walls of her room.  None of which matters, of course.  The Company of Wolves isn’t a film to be processed logically.  It’s one to be experienced.

 

It hasn’t much character development, since the characters are archetypes rather than proper human beings, but it’s still well acted by a first-rate cast.  Sarah Patterson does what’s required of her as Rosaleen and German actor, dancer and choreographer Micha Bergese is appropriately lithe, flirtatious and predatory as the young hunstsman whom Rosaleen encounters on the way to her grandmother’s house.  (His eyebrows meet above his nose, which is a dead giveaway.)  Angela Lansbury makes a wonderfully spry and wily grandmother and the film also features the excellent trio of David Warner as Rosaleen’s father in both the dream world and the real one, Graham Crowden as the village’s amiable priest, and Brian Glover as the village’s resident Yorkshireman.  At one point, Glover pontificates in true Yorkshire fashion: “If you think wolves are big now, you should have seen them when I were a lad!”

 

In the cast too are Terence Stamp and Jordan’s long-time collaborator Stephen Rea, both of whom appear in the first two stories narrated by Lansbury.  Stamp has a cameo as the Devil, selling a youth a magical balm that, once applied, has lycanthropic consequences.  Rea plays a man who mysteriously disappears on his wedding night and then equally mysteriously reappears seven years later, to discover that his wife has since remarried and sired a brood of children with her new husband.  In the film’s most gruesome sequence, Rea shows his displeasure by becoming a werewolf – a painful process because, to facilitate the transformation, he has to tear his own skin off.

 

© Palace Productions / ITC / Cannon

 

With the young, virginal Rosaleen setting out on a journey and being waylaid by a literally beastly male, but then taking control of the situation and resolving it in her own fashion, there’s obviously a lot happening beneath the film’s surface.  However, I like the fact that while The Company of Wolves is concerned with themes of female empowerment and sexuality, it isn’t a polemic.  Yes, one of Lansbury’s tales ends with an instance of domestic violence, and one of Rosaleen’s tales deals with a wronged woman getting her revenge on the cad responsible.  But her parents are depicted as having a loving and sharing relationship.  Despite coming to this film after villainous roles in Time After Time (1979), The Time Bandits (1981) and Tron (1982), Warner plays a gentle soul here; and Rosaleen’s mother (Tusse Silberg) points out to her that “if there’s a beast in man, it meets its match in women too.”  Meanwhile, a village boy (Shane Johnstone) who takes a shine to Rosaleen, while evidently a lustful scamp, is good-hearted enough and shows concern for her safety.

 

This nuance extends to the film’s portrayal of the church.  It’s hardly an institution of oppressive patriarchy.  Rosaleen’s final tale has Graham Crowden’s priest showing kindness to a feral wolf-girl, played by experimental 1980s singer-musician Danielle Dax.  “Are you God’s work or the Devil’s?” he asks her.  “Oh, what do I care whose work you are.  You poor, silent creature…”

 

You appreciate Jordan and Carter’s achievement with The Company of Wolves when you consider how many filmmakers since then have tried, and failed, to transform children’s fairy stories into darker, more adult and more gothic movies.  I’m thinking of Terry Gilliam’s disappointingly uneven Brothers Grimm (2005) or the blah Kristen Stewart vehicle Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) or crud like Red Riding Hood (2011) and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013).

 

Probably the best effort has been Matteo Garrone’s Italian / French / British movie Tale of Tales (2015) which, like The Company of Wolves, isn’t afraid to confound expectations and twist and distort logic.  Which, when you think about it, is what the original fairy tales and folk tales that inspired both films did in the first place.

 

© Palace Productions / ITC / Cannon

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Edinburgh Filmhouse fades to black

 

© Filmhouse Trading Limited

 

During the two decades since I last lived in Edinburgh, I’ve spent a lot of time bellyaching about the fact that, for a city that likes to advertise itself as home to the world’s biggest annual cultural festival, Edinburgh has seemed ridiculously determined to rid itself of its live-music venues and make itself about as musically vibrant as, say, Luton.

 

Those two decades have seen the demise of such venues, or part-time or occasional venues, as the Cas Rock, the Tap O’ Lauriston, the Venue, the HMV Picturehouse, Electric Circus, the Citrus Club and – one of my favourite Auld Reekie hangouts – Studio 24.  At one point, I even felt compelled to write on this blog: “So, music lovers of Edinburgh…  Your once proud city has fallen… into the hands of a bunch of suits, nimbies and money-chasing ghouls whose iPods are no doubt crammed with Ed Sheeran, James Blunt and Coldplay songs and whose idea of musical edginess is probably to tuck into a salad in the Hard Rock Café while a paunchy, balding cover band play Hotel California in the corner.”

 

Now, sadly, the blight that’s struck down Edinburgh’s live music scene seems to have infected its film scene too, for last Thursday the news broke that the charity Centre for the Moving Image (CMI) had filed for bankruptcy, with the result that the city’s Filmhouse Cinema, which the CMI has run since 2010, is closing immediately.  This has also meant the abrupt end of the 75-year-old Edinburgh Film Festival, the oldest continually-running film festival in the world, and the closure of the Belmont, the Filmhouse’s sister cinema in Aberdeen.

 

The Filmhouse is, or was, what’s commonly known as an ‘arthouse’ cinema.  ‘Arthouse’ is a label I hate, as it suggests a place showing pretentious movies made by pretentious people who consider themselves ‘artistes’ rather than mere filmmakers – incidentally, Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015) get my vote as the most up-their-own-arses films ever made.  But it’s not about artiness.  In reality, an ‘arthouse’ cinema is often the only place in your neighbourhood where films a little offbeat, non-Hollywood and daring to use a language that isn’t English have a chance of being seen.  That’s while the multiplexes restrict themselves to showing movies about masked and / or caped vigilantes possessing superpowers, with lots of CGI and cameos by Stan Lee.

 

Unlike what’s happened to many of the music venues I mentioned above, the Filmhouse’s sad fate isn’t the result of corporate greed, gentrification, nimbyism and hostility or indifference on the part of the local authorities – although in these straitened times, I doubt if Edinburgh City Council will be swooping to the Filmhouse’s rescue.  Rather, as this recent piece by Mark Cousins in the Guardian makes clear, the cinema’s demise was caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of economic and cultural factors: the huge hike in energy bills that’s currently panicking everyone in the UK bar the super-rich (you know, those people whom Liz Truss wanted to give generous tax cuts to), the loss of custom incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and the slow return of custom afterwards, younger people preferring to watch movies on streaming services at home, and older people becoming, well, older and less likely to go out.

 

Besides offering you the opportunity to see certain films on a big screen that you wouldn’t otherwise see there, what makes cinemas like the Filmhouse precious is that they allow you to come out of the closet as a film nerd.  They’re obviously run by folk with a genuine love for movies and, on their premises, you know you’re surrounded by like-minded punters too. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to live in several cities blessed with such establishments. I have happy memories of them and can still reel off the films I watched on their screens.

 

© Theater Kino

 

For example, in the Japanese city of Sapporo, there was the Theater Kino, which coincidentally must have been one of the smallest cinemas in the country.  At it, I remember seeing David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog (1992), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and – yay! – Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996).  At Cinema City in Norwich, I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (2008), Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop (2009), Tom Hooper’s The Damned United (2009) and Sasha Gervasi’s hilarious but gruelling heavy metal documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008).  And at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle-upon Tyne, I saw Kitano Takeshi’s Zatōishi (2003), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), and, before it went on general release, a special screening of 28 Days Later (2002) attended by director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Alex Garland, who answered questions from the audience afterwards.  (I wanted to ask them how, if the rage-infected zombies had become so angry that they stopped eating food and eventually died of hunger, they didn’t also stop drinking water and die of thirst first, which would have ended the zombie apocalypse much sooner.  However, not wanting to rain on Danny and Alex’s parade, I didn’t.)

 

© Tyneside Cinema

 

I feel a bit hypocritical pontificating about the loss of the Filmhouse because it’s been a long time since I set foot there – as far as I can remember, the last movie I saw in it was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight back in 2016.  But I have an excuse.  For much of the last dozen years I’ve been living in Africa and Asia.  Still, with the Filmhouse’s closure, as with the closure of many a lovely old pub or lovely old shop, I suspect there’s currently a lot of people expressing outrage and grief about it on social media and in below-the-line comments on news websites who actually haven’t bought a ticket and watched anything on its premises for many years.  Unfortunately, there’s truth in the old capitalist adage: “If you don’t want to lose it… use it.”

 

Here’s a link to an online petition expressing support for the Filmhouse, Belmont and Edinburgh Film Festival and the 102 cinema and festival workers who have just lost their jobs.  And if there is an unexpectedly happy ending, and someone with deep, movie-loving pockets steps in and pulls the Filmhouse back from the brink, let’s hope folk show their appreciation by going to it and putting their bums on its seats again.

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First men in the moon

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

One of the depressing things about being in your (later) middle years is that the people who were your heroes in your youth start to die with an alarming frequency.  Yes, they’ve become old and this is to be expected, but it’s still depressing.  This month has seen the departures of Alan Grant, the Scottish comic-book writer whose career took him from DC Thomson in Dundee to DC Comics in America, and who played a big role in shaping Judge Dredd, the signature character and strip of 2000AD, my favourite comic, as well as writing stories for Strontium Dog, Robo–Hunter and Batman; of the actor L.Q. Jones, who was best known for appearing in American western movies and TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s and was one of the very last, recognisable ‘cowboy actors’ still alive; and of the wonderful English character-actor David Warner, about whom I wrote this blog-entry on his 80th birthday last year.  By a sad coincidence, Jones and Warner were also the final survivors of the repertoire who worked with director Sam Peckinpah in a string of classic movies.

 

And July 2022 saw the death of director Bob Rafelson, whose credits include Head (1968), Five Easy Pieces (1971) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).  By way of a tribute, here’s a slightly updated piece I wrote eight years ago about a Rafelson movie that, I felt, had unfairly disappeared under the radar – 1990’s Mountains of the Moon. 

 

Some of you may be old enough to remember the heyday of Ladybird Books, a company that published children’s books emphasising the educational, the wholesome and the patriotic.  The library at my primary school was stuffed full of them.  Their historical tomes were given special prominence on the shelves.  These dealt with famous figures in British history like Admiral Nelson, Captain Cook, Florence Nightingale and David Livingstone and painted glowing and sanitised portraits of them.

 

These historical characters, according to Ladybird, were fine, upstanding and virtuous, qualities that British people had traditionally prided themselves on having.  Also, the establishment they represented, back in the days of British imperialism and the British Empire, was by extension a fine, upstanding and virtuous thing too.  Needless to say, Ladybird Books didn’t trouble the minds of its young readers with such topics as Admiral Nelson’s dalliance with Mrs Emma Hamilton, or Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer’s orchestration of the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, or indeed Winston Churchill’s opinions of Afghans, the ‘feeble-minded’, women, Jews, Trade Unionists, the Irish, Indians and using chemical weapons.

 

And yet… I can understand anyone, at a young age, being enthusiastic about the damned things.  In my childhood, I loved the Ladybird history books because they served up two things that were vital for a kid: heroes and adventures.  Never mind the fact that they overlooked the moral complexities of character and the moral ambiguities of history.  It was simply, viscerally exciting to read about people who were, supposedly, both incredibly decent and incredibly brave, setting off to perform feats of derring-do in a world that, a couple of centuries ago, seemed full of danger and mystery.

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

This brings me in a roundabout way to Mountains of the Moon, the Bob Rafelson-directed movie from 1990, which tells the story of Victorian explorers Richard Burton and John Speke and their 1857 expedition to find the source of the River Nile.  I suspect the reason I like this film so much is because it lets me have my cake and eat it.  On one hand, it offers a tale of British historical adventure that’s as thrilling as anything in the old Ladybird Books.  On the other hand, it’s critical of the British Empire and the people who ran it.  You can enjoy the exploits of the two protagonists as they battle their way past peril after peril but, simultaneously, you don’t have to feel guilty for doing so.

 

Mind you, I don’t ever remember seeing a Ladybird volume dedicated to Sir Richard Francis Burton, despite the fact that Burton, as his Wikipedia entry puts it, was a ‘geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, Egyptologist and diplomat’ and spoke 29 languages, including Icelandic, Swahili, Amharic, Sanskrit and Hebrew.  The lack of a Ladybird biography on Burton may be down to Burton’s fascination with the sexual practices of the many cultures he visited, which ‘led him to take measurements of the lengths of the sexual organs of male inhabitants of various regions which he included in his travel books’; or to the rumour that during his military career he once went ‘undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers’.  Less salaciously, Burton was simply a loose cannon.  His unruly reputation prevented him from being promoted to the very heights of the British establishment, either as a soldier or as a diplomat.

 

In the Mountains of the Moon, Burton is played by Irish actor Patrick Bergin.  From the movie’s opening scenes – when we see Burton have a spear thrust his mouth by some natives in Somalia, a mishap that’d deter most other people from ever wanting to set foot beyond their front gate again, but with Burton seems only to enflame his passion further for travel and exploration – Bergin does a good job of capturing the man’s versatility, unpredictability and boundless energy.  Indeed, if there’s one thing the film conveys beautifully, it’s the glorious insanity that propels Burton and Speke into the unknown, determined to make sense of it; whilst enduring hardships, indignities and degradations a million miles removed from the cosy, cloistered lives they led in upper-class Victorian Britain.  During the 1857 expedition, Speke – who in Mountains of the Moon is played by Iain Glen – is almost driven mad by beetles crawling into his ears while Burton becomes crippled, his legs swelling up to the point where they need to be lanced.  Come to think of it, the Ladybird books kept clear of stuff like this too.

 

While the film celebrates the two men’s heroism – and heroic powers of endurance – it disdains a British imperial establishment that’s supportive of them because it hopes to enjoy the prestige of their achievements; but that’s also manipulative and untrustworthy.  It’s a historical fact that by the early 1860s Burton and Speke had fallen out, due to a claim by Speke that the source of the Nile lay in Lake Victoria.  This was something that the British press of the time was only too happy to believe and it led to Speke being feted and celebrated.  Meanwhile, Burton’s role in the 1857 expedition was played down.

 

Mountains of the Moon would have you believe that one reason for this was Burton’s Irishness.  His father was of Anglo-Irish stock, though Burton himself was born in Devon.  Here, with Bergin in the role and displaying a recognisable Celtic brogue, Burton seems more Irish than he probably was in real-life.  Speke on the other hand was an English gentleman of the stiff-upper-lip variety, whom the establishment found more palatable to sell as a hero of the Empire.  Actually, it’s a bit ironic that actor Iain Glen is a Scotsman, from Edinburgh.

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

The feud between the two explorers came to a sudden and unexpected end in September 1864, one day before Burton and Speke were scheduled to debate the Nile’s source at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.  Hunting on a relative’s estate, Speke was killed when his gun discharged itself into him while he was climbing over a wall.  This caused speculation that the controversy that’d soured things so badly between him and his old comrade had led Speke to kill himself, although a jury later ruled that it’d been an accident.  Mountains of the Moon remains ambiguous about Speke’s death, but the door is left open for the possibility that, upset about how the establishment had set him and Burton at each other’s throats, Speke committed suicide.

 

Also indicative of British attitudes at the time is the neglect shown to the African guide Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who in Mountains of the Moon is engagingly played by the Kenyan actor Paul Onsongo.  He proved invaluable to Burton and Speke, and later served with Henry Morton Stanley, and crossed Africa from east to west in 1873, and became the British Empire’s most travelled citizen in Africa.  Eventually, he clocked up some 9600 kilometres, most of it covered on foot.  Despite this, we learn in a postscript that nobody ever thought of inviting Bombay to Britain, presumably because of his lowly ‘native’ status.

 

The rest of the cast is good too.  The distinguished theatrical actress Fiona Shaw turns in a lovely performance as Isabel Burton, the woman who manages to capture the rumbustious Burton’s heart.  She doesn’t, though, capture it to the point where he stops voyaging off to the back of beyond for years on end.  As Speke’s publisher, Richard E. Grant gives a performance of superciliousness that only Grant himself seems capable of.  And Bernard Hill sneaks in an endearing late-minute cameo as Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone, who gets involved in a somewhat homoerotic duel with Burton.  Desperate to impress each other, both men strip off to compare their Africa-acquired scars.

 

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

 

In retrospect, the only things that are regrettable about Mountains of the Moon are: (1) how overlooked the film is; and (2) how low-key Patrick Bergin’s film career has been since.  Regarding the second point, although he made a stir as Julia Roberts’ psychotic husband in 1991’s popular but not-very-good Sleeping with the Enemy, Bergin’s fortunes took a tumble with a couple of unfortunate film choices afterwards.  His performance as Robin Hood in the 1991 movie of the same name was buried by the success of the same year’s bigger, brasher, sillier, Kevin Costner-starring, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. Meanwhile he was unlucky enough to play a villain in 1992’s ignorant Tom Clancy / IRA thriller Patriot Games, or as it was known in Ireland, Patronising Games.

 

I suspect these days Bergin derives more pleasure from his music.  He has a band called Patrick Bergin and the Spirit Merchants and they’ve made the Irish top ten.  That said, a few years ago, I was delighted to see him turn up in Ben Wheatley’s tongue-in-cheek gangster / terrorist bloodbath Free Fire (2016).

 

As for the commercial failure of Mountains of the Moon, it certainly didn’t help that its production company (Carolco Pictures) was in the process of going bankrupt at the time and its distributor (Tri-Star) was more interested in promoting another historical drama, Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), which it’d produced itself.  Neither did the film’s lack of bankable ‘big-name’ stars help its fortunes.  But the way the film has been critically neglected is  harder to fathom.  Maybe it had the bad luck to appear at a time when imperial-era British costume epics of the David Lean / James Ivory school were starting to out of fashion, although Mountains of the Moon certainly doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with such staid fare as Chariots of Fire (1982) or A Room with a View (1985).

 

Director Bob Rafelson, alas, has just passed away and the titles that’ll likely be inscribed on his tombstone are of his earlier films, like 1972’s Five Easy Pieces or 1981’s The Postman Always Rings Twice or even Head, that trippy 1968 epic featuring the Monkees.  But at least Rafelson himself recognised the quality of his lost 1990 classic.  “(W)hen people ask me, ‘If you were to come to our country and we will give you some kind of an homage, what movie would you want to show?’” he once told an interviewer, “…I always say, ‘Top of the list is Mountains of the Moon.’”

 

From imdb.com / © Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

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Literary things

 

© The Turman-Foster Company / Universal Pictures

 

I reckon John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing is one of the best horror films ever.  Its story of a shape-shifting alien organism that infiltrates a base in Antarctica, absorbing and assuming the forms of more and more of the base’s human (and canine) personnel, is a masterpiece of claustrophobia, paranoia and all-round scariness.

 

And its special effects, courtesy of make-up / effects genius Rob Bottin, massively raised the bar for what was achievable in horror movies at the time.  During those moments when it reveals itself, Bottin’s alien Thing is a hellish, glistening, squirming, tentacled nightmare made of bits and pieces of all the Earth creatures it’s consumed already.  It resembles a canvas painted and splattered simultaneously by Hieronymus Bosch and Jackson Pollock.

 

What makes Bottin’s work all the more remarkable, and believable, is that it consists of real, solid, practical effects.  For The Thing was made in the days was before digital technology took over and filmmakers went crazy using cartoonish and insubstantial-looking computer-generated imagery.  That’s the reason why I’ve never bothered watching Matthijs van Heijningen Jr’s 2011 prequel to Carpenter’s movie, also called The Thing.  Although practical special effects were used during the prequel’s shooting, studio executives later lost their nerve, decided 2011 audiences couldn’t handle an absence of CGI and had the wretched stuff superimposed over those practical effects in post-production.

 

Anyway, today – June 25th – is exactly 40 years since Carpenter’s The Thing was first released in cinemas.  Which, as well as making me feel bloody ancient, makes we want to post something about it on this blog.  But rather than write about the movie itself, as countless film critics, commentators and enthusiasts have over the years, I thought I’d look instead at its literary roots.  Because The Thing is an adaptation (scripted by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt) of a novella called Who Goes There?, written by science-fiction writer and editor John W. Campbell and published in 1938.

 

Who Goes There? had already been filmed in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby and produced by the legendary Howard Hawks.  The 1951 version keeps the story’s basic premise of the crew of a polar camp coming up against a malevolent alien.  But instead of depicting it as a shape-shifting beastie, which would have been difficult to do convincingly in 1951, the Hawks / Nyby film merely depicts it as a lumbering, pasty-skinned, dome-headed muscle-man played by none other than James Arness, later to star in the 1950s-1970s Western TV show Gunsmoke.   Howard Hawks’s trademark no-nonsense directorial style and brisk, punchy dialogue are much in evidence in The Thing from Another World and it’s often been speculated that he, rather than Nyby, shot much of the film.

 

© Winchester Pictures Corporation / RKO

 

John Carpenter was well-known for his admiration of Howard Hawks and his 1976 movie Assault on Precinct 13 in particular shows a big Hawksian influence.  So, when Carpenter’s version of The Thing was announced, I suspect many critics assumed it’d be a straightforward remake of the 1951 movie.  And I suspect that’s why it got such a hostile reception when it was released in 1982.  For although the movie has since been reappraised and is now regarded as a sci-fi / horror classic, it initially earned Carpenter some of the worst reviews of his career.  I seem to remember, for instance, the Observer slamming it under the headline JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER.  Those 1982 critics got something very different from what they were expecting and didn’t react well.

 

What they got, in fact, was a film capturing the shape-shifting concept of the alien in the real source material, the 1938 story by John W. Campbell – a story most of those critics were probably unfamiliar with.

 

I recently came across and read Who Goes There? online.  What did I think of it?

 

Well, what I immediately thought after reading it was “Phew!”  Experienced in 2022, with its dollops of torturous pose and pages upon pages of dialogue-framed exposition, Campbell’s story is hard going indeed.

 

It’s fun to see so many character-names that crop up in Carpenter’s film – McReady (in the film spelt ‘MacReady’), Blair, Copper, Garry, Norris, Clark, Benning – but the descriptions of those characters are madly overwrought.  The hero McReady is likened by Campbell to “a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked.  Six-feet-four inches he stood…  And he was bronze – his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it.  The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing on the table planks were bronze.  Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath the heavy brows were bronze.”  This Wagnerian, and bronze, version of McReady is far removed from the morose, tetchy git played in the film by Kurt Russell.

 

The scientist Blair, meanwhile, is described with this peculiar sentence: “His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy grey underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial quiff of stiff, greying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow’s head.”  At least he sounds more like his cinematic incarnation, who’s played by the character actor Wilfred Brimley.

 

© Barnes & Noble

 

How the characters discover and bring into their camp their soon-to-be-unwelcome visitor is related in three pages of conversational backstory, which includes such unlikely pieces of dialogue as: “Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has dammed back the ice creeping from the south.”   Later, as the Thing starts to imitate the base’s inhabitants, there are many talky pages where people speculate on its biology, its capabilities and how it can be detected; and also, where they start to crack up with paranoia.  “You sit as still as a bunch of graven images,” exclaims one man while his colleagues regard him suspiciously.  “You don’t say a word, but oh Lord, what expressive eyes you’ve got.  They roll around like a bunch of glass marbles spilling down a table.  They wink and blink and stare and whisper things.”

 

There are moments when Campbell’s prose conveys the bleakness of the situation, recording how the Antarctic wind created an “uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove” and how “the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp”.  But overall, thanks to its dire writing, Who Goes There? is a work to be endured rather than enjoyed.   It isn’t a patch on that other famous 1930s tale of Antarctica-set horror, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936).

 

Still, the story provides the film with its most celebrated scene, the ‘blood-test’ one wherein McReady hits on a method of identifying who’s-been-got and who’s not.  However, while John W. Campbell has McReady laboriously testing the blood of some 35 base-members, in the movie John Carpenter waits until there’s only half-a-dozen men left standing, which makes his enactment of the scene much more intense, focused and suspenseful.

 

And to be fair to Campbell, his story clarifies the Thing’s modus operandi.  At times the film is hazy about just what the humans are up against.  For example, watching The Thing, I was initially puzzled by the idea that the intruder could take the form of more than one victim at a time.  In the story, it’s made clear that when it absorbs an organism it adds the organism’s body mass to its own; and when the organism is replaced, that hives off again with the original’s mass.  Meanwhile, the original Thing goes back to its original bulk too, free to absorb and replicate something else.

 

Then there’s the sub-plot with Blair.  In both the novella and film, Blair loses his mind as the horror unfolds and is locked up for his own and everyone else’s safety.  It later becomes apparent that he’s part of the Thing too, has its alien intelligence, and has spent his time in captivity assembling a mysterious machine.  The novella describes how he’s imprisoned in an equipment storeroom, where he uses pieces of the equipment to fashion a small anti-gravity device that’ll transport him from Antarctica to a populated continent where he can start replicating.  The film is murkier about what he’s up to.  We get a glimpse of some sort of capsule, like a mini-flying saucer, but there’s little explanation why and nothing about his place of incarceration being an equipment storeroom.  I was left with the impression that Blair for some reason had managed to construct a spacecraft out of empty soup cans and pieces of string.

 

Finally, I should point out that Who Goes There? isn’t the only literary work connected with the scary world of The Thing.  In 2010, Clarkesworld Magazine published a short story called The Things, written by Peter Watts, which retells the events of Carpenter’s movie through the eyes, if that’s the word, of the Thing itself.

 

Here, the Thing isn’t such a bad old thing.  It genuinely believes it’s doing the humans a favour by taking them over, which it describes as an act of ‘communion’.  It views their biology as ‘ill-adapted’, ‘inefficient’ and ‘disabled’ and wants to ‘fix’ them.  At times, it’s repulsed by their physical circumstances, calling their brains ‘tumours’ and their bodies ‘bony caverns’.  No wonder it’s upset when the humans respond to its kindness by using flamethrowers on it.

 

A thought-provoking and bleakly-amusing take on John Carpenter’s movie from the very last character in it you’d expect, Peter Watts’ The Things can be read on this webpage.  Meanwhile, John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? is available for reading here.  The 2010 story is 7,000 words long while the 1938 one clocks in at a hefty 30,000 words.  Comparing them, I have to say I agree with the old adage that the best Things come in small packages.

 

© Shasta Publishers