Tag: Alfred Hitchcock

Posted on

Mama Mia

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

One more post in advance of Halloween…

 

I’ve now watched all of the X trilogy of horror movies directed and written by Ti West and starring Mia Goth (who also co-wrote one of them).  These are X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024), which focus on the characters of ruthlessly determined actress Maxine Minx and frustrated wannabe actress Pearl Douglas, both played by Goth.  At its best, the trilogy is great.  At its worst, it’s still good fun.

 

X is the story of some city-folk heading out into the countryside and falling prey to a foe their slick city ways can’t deal with.  Yes, that’s the plot of half the horror movies ever made, from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), from John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), from Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002) to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).  In West’s spin on it, the city-folk are six young filmmakers, including Goth’s character Maxine.  The year is 1979 and they intend to make a porno movie on the quick and on the cheap.  As a market for their product, they’re eyeing the up-and-coming technology of VHS, which will allow people to pay money and watch steamy movies they’re never likely to see in their local cinemas.  The filmmakers have rented a building on an out-of-the-way farm for the shoot, a farm belonging to an elderly couple called Howard and Pearl.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

Incidentally, Howard and Pearl are also the names of an elderly couple featured in the BBC’s long-running, almost never-ending – and terrible – situation comedy Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010).  I guess an American like West wouldn’t have known that.  Though maybe Mia Goth, who’s English, could have warned him that those character names were likely to give viewers from the United Kingdom PTSD-type flashbacks to Last of the Summer Wine.

 

X‘s Pearl is clearly unhinged and she’s about to get worse.  Ruminating on her current wrinkly decrepitude, mourning the loss of her youth, and jealously resenting the nubile young bodies performing sex-acts for the cameras on the other side of the farmstead, the old woman flips.  Bloody mayhem ensues, involving guns, knives, pitchforks and a large alligator who hungrily lurks in a pond elsewhere on the premises.  The scene where Maxine takes a naked dip in the pond, not suspecting that its scaly occupant is slowly closing in on her, is one of the creepiest things in the movie.  Rarely have aerial shots been so unnerving.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

In all three movies, West revels in the setting.  X takes place during a Texas summer and the heat and sweatiness are nicely conveyed by the 1970s-aesthetic of the visuals.  The daytime shots, at least, have a faintly bleached and blurry look that evoke all sorts of bucolic American horror movies really made in that decade – the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the likes of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Jack Starrett’s Race with the Devil (1975) and Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm (1976).  Meanwhile, the way Pearl embodies the horrors of the aging process gives the film an extra depth.  This theme is touched upon both melancholically, as when Pearl realises how much Maxine resembles her when she was young, and queasily, with Pearl shuffling down to the makeshift film studio, spying on the actors doing their sex scenes and imagining she’s taking part herself.

 

But X’s greatest gimmick is its casting, for Mia Goth plays not one, but two characters.  She’s Maxine and Pearl.  The latter role required her to spend ‘a good 10 hours in the make-up chair’ in order to get the old-lady prosthetics applied.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

X ends with Maxine’s escape from the farm.  She drives off into the night, still determined to make it big as an actress.  But what comes next isn’t a sequel but a prequel.  If it was plausible for Goth to play Pearl with heavy make-up as an old woman, she could obviously play the character without make-up as a young woman.  Hence, we got Pearl, also released in 2022.  This is set in 1918 with the title character stuck on her parents’ farm (the same one as in X, though disarmingly smart and new-looking compared with the crumbling, rundown version of it in the previous film) whilst waiting for husband Howard to return from World War I.  She’s especially stuck because the Spanish flu pandemic, the early 20th century’s equivalent of Covid-19, is raging and Pearl’s family are isolating themselves.  It doesn’t help matters that her father (Matthew Sunderland) has been crippled by a stroke and her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is humourless, censorious and bitter.  Pearl responds to the situation by fantasising about becoming an all-singing, all-dancing silent-movie star – which increasingly provokes Ruth’s wrath.

 

Meanwhile, Pearl is already subject to the psychopathy that’ll lead to X’s bloody events 60 years later.  In an early scene, she takes a hay-fork to an unfortunate goose who didn’t display sufficient enthusiasm for a show she put on for the animals in the barn. She then goes to the pond and feeds the dead fowl to an alligator, whom she’s named Theda after the silent movie actress Theda Bara (and who’s presumably the granny of the alligator in X).

 

Though her mother is determined to clip her wings, other things seemingly pull Pearl in the direction of her dreams – namely, the flattery of a handsome but lecherous projector at the local town’s movie theatre, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a travelling dance troupe, the auditions for which are being held in the local church.  Predictably, during the ensuing conflicts, betrayals and disappointments, Pearl snaps.  The bodies pile up and Theda the Alligator gets some unexpected meals.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

 

Even more so than X, Pearl shows West and Goth at the top of their games.  The director excels in orchestrating the showbiz-y fantasies that Pearl weaves around herself, including one set in a cornfield and involving a scarecrow that’s inspired by The Wizard of Oz (1939).  We can’t help but pity her even though we know she’s turning into a monster.  And Goth is amazing.  She’s particularly awesome at the end, when Howard finally arrives back from the war and finds the farmhouse kitchen in a less than decorous state.  Pearl presents herself – “I’m so happy you’re home!” – with a rictus-like smile, simultaneously heartfelt and terrifying, that seems to stay on her features forever.  No wonder Peter Bradshaw, film critic in The Guardian newspaper, hailed Goth as ‘the Judy Garland of horror’.

 

Pearl isn’t around for MaXXXine, released in 2024 and set in 1985, six years after the events of X.  But we glimpse her in flashbacks and her presence is felt in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes.  This is when Maxine – now in Hollywood and trying to graduate from starring in porn movies to starring in something slightly more upmarket, i.e., horror movies – sits in a make-up chair and has a cast made of her head.  With her face buried in the cast, and blinded by it, she suffers a panic attack and imagines Pearl is in the room, caressing her, as she did during one creepy moment in X.

 

Whereas the action in X and in much of Pearl was confined to a farm, MaXXXine is far more expansive.  Its story unfolds all over Los Angeles, from the Hollywood Hills to the back-lots of Universal Studios (where, significantly, we see the Bates house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), from the city’s luxurious mansions to its ultra-dodgy strip-clubs, peepshows and back alleyways.  But it’s the time rather than the place that gives the film its vibe.  MaXXXine unashamedly immerses itself in the garish sleaze and excessiveness of the 1980s: big hair, Ray-Ban sunglasses, spandex, lip-gloss, neon colours, graffiti, cocaine, hustlers, flashy convertibles with personalised number-plates, X-rated video stores, lascivious hair-metal bands, gory slasher movies and general ‘me’-generation greed.  West depicts this world as a cesspit, but a somehow joyous cesspit.  Maxine, of course, has taken to it like a duck to water.

 

But it’s still water that contains alligators.  Maxine gets caught up in a murder spree by an apparently Satan-worshipping serial killer who’s targeting people close to her.  She also has to deal with a crooked private investigator, played with scenery-chewing magnificence by Kevin Bacon, who knows she was present at the bloodbath at Pearl and Howard’s farm in 1979.  These things happen while she’s pursuing what she believes is her big break – a starring role in a schlocky horror sequel called The Puritan II, about to be filmed by a hard-as-nails lady director (Elizabeth Debicki).

 

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

 

This leads to the first of a few unsatisfactory things in MaXXXine’s plotting.  Maxine is so determined to hold onto the film-role that she refuses to cooperate with the cops investigating the serial killer, because getting involved in a murder case will prevent her working on The Puritan II.  We know that Maxine is now in some ways as psychopathically ruthless as Pearl – early on, she’s shown dealing with a would-be mugger in a manner that’ll bring a grimace to the face of anyone possessing a pair of testicles – but come on.  Your friends are being slaughtered around you.  There’s a good chance you’ll be next.  How could you not go to the cops, important impending film-role or not?

 

Also awkward is the film’s ending, which veers off into a completely different style of movie – admittedly still a 1980s style, that of a Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson action thriller.  At the same time, when the identity of the villain is finally revealed, it’s scarcely a surprise, since it was heavily signalled beforehand.

 

However, criticising a film paying homage to the 1980s for being illogical is self-defeating, considering that bona fide 1980s movies were hardly known for their logic.  It’s telling that one 1980s movie  MaXXXine has been compared to is Brian De Palma’s violent thriller Body Double (1984).  (Both have scenes prominently featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs, Relax in Body Double, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome in MaXXXine.)  Body Double is regarded as a classic now, but on its release the critics dismissed it as De Palma at his most throwaway, as a series of stylish set-pieces in search of a plot.  MaXXXine is a similar, De Palma-esque mixture of splendidness and shonkiness.

 

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

 

Anyway, there’s much to enjoy in it.  Goth’s first scene as Maxine is brilliant.  It culminates in her emerging from the audition for The Puritan II and contemptuously informing the long queue of would-be starlets waiting outside that they’re wasting their time because she has the job in the bag.  She then struts off to the sound of ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’.  The cast is great too.  As well as Goth, Bacon and Debicki, it has Giancarlo Esposito playing Maxine’s shady agent.  Esposito, of course, was the terrifying Gus Fring in Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Better Call Saul (2015-22) and here he does a shockingly Gus Fring-like thing near the movie’s end.

 

In my opinion, then, X is the best horror movie of the three, Pearl is the best movie full-stop, and MaXXXine, despite its flaws, is very entertaining.  I wonder if West and Goth will get around to making a fourth film.  Goth has played Pearl young and old, but played Maxine only young.  How about a fourth movie set in the 2020s, with Maxine now as aged as Pearl was in X and living reclusively like the embittered Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

 

Being a horror movie, though, it would be in the vein of what used to be called ‘psycho-biddy’ or ‘hagsploitation’ movies.  These constituted a sub-genre of horror that featured aging female movie stars playing old ladies who’ve become psychopathically loopy: for example, Betty Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) Zsa Zsa Gabor in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and Lana Turner in Persecution (1974).  I have every confidence that the mighty Mia Goth, in old-lady make-up, would hold her own among the likes of Davis, Crawford, Bankhead, Gabor, Winters and Turner.

 

Come to think of it, she’s done it already, in X.

 

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

Posted on

A. N. Other

 

© Coronet Books

 

It’ll be Halloween in a fortnight’s time.  I was reminded of this when, the other day, I saw the British press start on its annual pre-Halloween custom of complaining about British people celebrating Halloween too enthusiastically.  They shouldn’t be doing this because, supposedly, the festival isn’t British but American.  Here’s the latest whinge from Guardian columnist Zoe Williams.  It seems to have escaped these British (i.e., English) commentators that Halloween started long ago in Scotland (still a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) and Ireland (part of which is still a constituent nation, or province, of the United Kingdom) and was then brought to America by Scottish and Irish settlers.  So, if you view Halloween as ‘un-British’, you don’t know what you’re talking about.  Or maybe you believe Scotland and Northern Ireland aren’t still part of clapped-out Brexit Britain.  If only…

 

Anyway, as is my pre-Halloween custom every year, here’s the first of a few entries that are in keeping with the creepiness of the season.  I begin with a review of the bestselling 1971 horror novel The Other by Thomas Tryon.

 

Thomas Tryon made his name rather spectacularly as a novelist in 1971 with his debut effort The Other.  This spent more than half-a-year in The New York Times bestseller list and sold over 3.5 million copies.  It also – along with the similar success of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) – helped inspire a boom in horror fiction that meant during the 1970s and 1980s bookshop-racks and shelves were crammed with lurid-covered horror paperbacks while authors like John Farris, James Herbert, Shaun Hutson, Dean Koontz, Graham Masterton, Robert R. McCammon, Michael McDowell, John Saul, Guy N. Smith and Whitley Streiber, not to mention a young Stephen King, had themselves ‘a nice little earner’.  But before that, in the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas Tryon was better known as the TV and movie actor Tom Tryon.  And yes, this makes me sound ancient, but I knew him for his acting before I knew him for his writing.

 

As a youngster, I was obsessed with sci-fi movies and westerns, so I remembered seeing him in 1958’s sci-fi potboiler, the gloriously titled I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and in the run-of-the-mill 1965 western (scripted by Sam Peckinpah) The Glory Guys.  I don’t remember him, but must also have seen him, in the epic 1963 recreation of the D-Day landings The Longest Day, in which he acted alongside John Wayne.  However, as that movie seemed to feature every actor in the American, British, French and German phonebooks at the time, it’s not surprising that I missed him.

 

© 20th Century Fox

© Columbia Pictures

 

It was surely frustrating for Tryon-the-actor that his biggest roles were in B-movies, while in more prestigious fare he was relegated to the supporting cast.  Plus, to supplement his movie income, he had to do a lot of TV work.  Perhaps the closest he came to the big time was playing the main character in Otto Preminger’s prestigious 1963 move The Cardinal, an adaptation of Henry Morton Robinson’s hugely bestselling – but now forgotten – novel of the same name from 1950.  Ironically, this may have been the film that made him resolve to give up acting, because he had a hideous time working with the notoriously dictatorial Preminger.  According to the director’s Wikipedia entry, “Preminger would scream at him, zoom in on his shaking hands, and repeatedly fire and rehire him, with the result that Tryon was hospitalised with a body rash and peeling skin, due to nerves.”  On his own Wikipedia entry, Tryon is quoted as saying of The Cardinal, “To this day, I cannot look at that film. It’s because of Preminger.  He was a tyrant who ruled by terror.  He tied me up in knots. He screamed at me. He called me names.  He said I was lazy.  He said I was a fool.  He never cursed me.  His insults were far more personal.”

 

I wonder if it’s because of the horrors Preminger inflicted on him that when Tryon reinvented himself as a novelist, his first book, The Other, was a horror one.  I also wonder if his debut was influenced by the fact that in 1960 he narrowly missed getting the role of Sam Loomis,  lover of Janet Leigh’s doomed Marion Crane, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The Psycho-esque element becomes more noticeable the further you go into Tryon’s novel.

 

The Other centres on a sensitive, imaginative and kind-hearted boy called Niles Perry who lives in a large, rambling house in New England in 1935 with several family members: his agoraphobic mother Alexandra, his spritely Russian-emigrant grandmother Ada, his Uncle George, his Aunt Vee and his annoying cousin Russell… and his twin brother Holland, who despite being Niles’s closest confidant is aloof, elusive and mean-spirited.  We get an idea of the meanness of Holland’s spirit early on when we see him kill one of Russell’s pet rats.  Niles reacts to this with horror and promptly tries to give the unfortunate rodent a funeral using a ‘Sunshine Biscuit box’ as a coffin and a bunch of clover as a wreath.  But out of misguided sibling loyalty, he refuses to believe his brother is a wrong ’un and persists in hanging out with him and trying to stay in his good books.

 

Meanwhile, a shadow hangs over the household thanks to the recent death of Niles and Holland’s father Vining Perry.  He died “while moving the last of the heavy baskets from the threshing floor of the barn down to the apple cellar for winter storage…  Father started down with a basket…  he was halfway down when, hearing a noise, he looked up to see the door, the heavy iron-bound trapdoor, come crashing down on his head…”  As we learn more about Holland’s malignant nature, we begin to wonder if Vining’s death was really an accident.

 

The book features several more deaths, and near-deaths, and there’s also a big, macabre twist that I have to say I saw coming from very early on.  To be fair to Tryon, when he penned the book in 1971, that twist might have been less of a stale trope in horror fiction – it might have seemed fresh and caught his readers by genuine surprise.

 

What I find interesting, though, is that while the book contains its share of incidents, its pace feels very leisurely and in between the scary bits there’s a lot of other stuff.  You get back-stories – most notably Ada’s, which describes her experiences as a young woman in Russia – and sub-plots, including one about a ‘game’ that the hyper-imaginative Niles plays with his grandmother, whereby he almost supernaturally projects himself into the bodies of other creatures, like birds and dragonflies, so that he can see the world through their eyes.  Tryon, who was born in Connecticut in 1926 and would have been a boy too at this time, also delights in making references to the culture and events of the era – from the popular radio-comedy show Amos ‘n’ Andy to the Irish tenor John McCormack, to the hubbub over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby.  Indeed, horribly, the plot echoes the Lindbergh case near the end.

 

You also get a lot of description of the house, its outhouses and grounds, the local town and the surrounding countryside. Tryon illustrates these things with a nice turn of phrase and embroiders the descriptions with precise details that no doubt come from his own childhood memories.  Of a carnival that installs itself in the town one evening, he writes: “On either side of a narrow avenue carpeted with a debris of strewn popcorn and crumpled Dixie cups, booths, shabby, limp, furnished third-rate amusement: Win-a-doll; Madam Zora, Stargazer; Chan Yu the Disappearing Marvel; Zuleika, the World’s Only True Half Man-Half Woman.”  The Perrys’ barn, meanwhile, is “venerable, swaybacked, lichen-spotted, musty, sitting on a small rise beside the icehouse road.  Upon the roof-tree was a cupola, a four-windowed affair where pigeons were housed.  This was the highest point anywhere around, and on this small peaked roof sat a weathervane, a peregrine falcon, emblem of the Perrys, commanding the view.”  At best, Tryon evokes the New England of his childhood with the vivacity that, say, Ray Bradbury evoked the Midwest or Davis Grubb evoked the South.

 

I do wonder, though, if the book was submitted to a publisher today – when writers are urged to be economical with their prose and to-the-point with their plots – would it ever escape from the slush pile?  Its fondness for descriptions and digressions, with the chills and nastiness served up only sporadically, makes it seem rather old-fashioned now…  and not just because it’s set in 1935.

 

But that’s not meant as a criticism.  The Other was a slow read for me, and it took me time to get through it, but by the time I finished it I’d found it a rewarding book.  And it was a surprisingly downbeat one – the chills and nastiness, when they come, are chilling and nasty.  You needn’t expect a happy ending for anyone, not even the youngest and most innocent of the book’s characters.  Indeed, as an author, Thomas Tryon treats his characters with a cruelty similar to that meted out to him, as an actor, by the ghastly Otto Preminger.

 

From centipedepress.com

Posted on

Mither

 

© Jim Barton / From wikipedia.org

 

Today, September 18th, is the tenth anniversary of 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence.  Yes, a decade has now passed since the Scottish electorate voted, by a majority of 55% to 45%, in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom. 

 

In the referendum’s aftermath, I was inspired to write a short story entitled Mither.  This poked fun at a narrative peddled by the mainstream media that the referendum had turned Scotland into a bitterly divided country – parents, children, siblings who’d previously lived together in harmony suddenly transformed into rabid yes-sers and no-ers who were at each other’s throats, families in turmoil, that sort of thing.  It also paid homage to a classic and highly influential movie.  Needless to say, the story was too weird and too daft to ever get published.

 

However, ten years on, I thought I would take advantage of the occasion and post it here.  I now give you…  Mither.

 

© Labour for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I must have dozed while I sat in the office and read the literature that’d landed on our porch floor that morning.  I hadn’t heard her go out.  I only heard the porch door scrape open and shut as she came back.

 

‘Mither,’ I said when she entered the office.  ‘You were outside.’

 

She settled into the armchair with the tartan-patterned cushions that’d been her seat – her throne, we called it – when she ran the business by herself.  Now that I was mostly in charge, I had my own seat in the office but I kept the throne there should she want to use it.  She smoothed her skirt across her knees.  She was a modern-minded woman – at times too modern-minded because she had some ideas you’d expect more in a giddy teenager – but she avoided trousers and stuck to old-fashioned long skirts.  ‘Aye, Norrie.  I’ve been out and about.’

 

I didn’t like the sound of that but before I could quiz her she leaned forward from the throne and took the leaflet out of my hand.  ‘What’s this you’re reading?  Don’t say they’ve shovelled more shite through our door.’

 

It pained me to hear her genteel voice soiled by coarse language.  But I stayed patient.  ‘It’s actually interesting, Mither.  It’s an interview with a normal young couple, a professional young couple, about what might happen if the referendum result is…’  I searched for a word that’d cause minimum offence.  ‘Unexpected.’

 

Mither sighed and her eyes swivelled up in their sockets.

 

‘Now I ken you’re sceptical, Mither.  But they seem decent.  He’s called Kenneth and she’s called Gina.  And they’re worried about the effect independence would have on them.’

 

Mither’s eyes swivelled down again.  Then I saw them twitch from side to side while they scanned the text on the leaflet.

 

I pressed on.  ‘It wouldn’t have a good effect, Mither.  It’d be bad for them.’  Why did my voice tremble?  Why was I afraid?  ‘The financial uncertainty. How would decent hardworking people like them – like me – cope if all the business fled south and the prices shot up?  And the banks…  Why, I read in the paper the other day about an expert who said the bank machines would stop dispensing cash if the vote was yes.’

 

‘Does,’ asked Mither, ‘this say what Kenneth does for a living?’

 

‘And even if we still have cash, Mither, what would our currency be?  We won’t have the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls down in Westminster won’t allow it.  We’ll have to make do with some banana-republic-type currency.  Or worse, the euro!’

 

‘Norrie,’ said Mither, ‘calm down.  Does this leaflet actually say what Kenneth’s job is?’

 

‘Aye, of course it does.’  I faltered.  ‘Well, no. Maybe it doesn’t.’

 

She sighed.  ‘It certainly doesn’t, Norrie.  And I’ll tell you why.’  She raised the leaflet so that I could see a picture of Kenneth, Gina and their children on it.  She placed a fingertip against Kenneth.  ‘It’s because he’s Kenneth Braithwaite, who’s one of our local councillors.  One of our Conservative Party councillors.  But that fact isn’t mentioned here.  It pretends that he’s an ordinary unbiased person like you or me.’

 

I chuckled nervously.  ‘Now Mither.  I wouldn’t say you were unbiased.’

 

Mither rose from her throne.  ‘I am unbiased.  My mind’s open to facts and I form opinions and make decisions based on those facts.  Facts, mind you.  Not the propaganda, smears and scaremongering that’s poured out of the political, business and media establishments during the last year.  Not the drivel that’s clogged and befuddled your impressionable young mind.’

 

Before I could reply, she tore the leaflet down the middle and returned it to my hands in two pieces.  Then she hustled out of the office and shut the door behind her with enough force to make a stuffed owl wobble and almost fall off a nearby shelf.  I heard her shoes go clacking up the stairs and then another door slam, presumably the one leading into her room.

 

I seethed.  How I hated, how I loathed this referendum!  Setting family members against one another day after day!  I looked at the leaflet again and realised that by a creepy coincidence Mither had ripped it down the middle of the family-picture.  Now Kenneth and a little boy occupied one half of it while Gina and a little girl were sundered and separate in the other half.

 

A family literally torn apart.

***

I hated the referendum but I couldn’t wait for the day of it, September 18th, to come – and take place and be over with.  The problem was that the time until then seemed to pass very slowly.  And during this time it felt like a war of attrition was being waged against me.  I grew more tired and depressed the longer those separatists raved in the media and on the streets and from the literature they popped through the slot in our porch door.  A rash of yes stickers and posters spread along the windows in the street-fronts of our neighbourhood.  Some of them even appeared on the houses of people I’d thought were decent and sensible.

 

I began to panic.  God, could it happen?  I had visions of the doors padlocked and the windows boarded up on the old family business and Mither and I living in poverty alongside hundreds of thousands of other suddenly-penniless Scots.  While around us, food prices and fuel prices skyrocketed, the banks and financial companies whisked all their offices away to London, the housing market disappeared into a giant hole, the hospitals became like those in the developing world, and terrorist cells congregated in Glasgow and Edinburgh and prepared to attack England across the new border.

 

But worst of all was the madness this referendum campaign inspired in Mither.

 

She sensed when I was worn out.  While I was napping, or nodding off behind the desk in the office, or slumped in a stupor in front of the TV, she’d leave her room and creep down the stairs and do things.

 

These might be wee things.  If I wasn’t in the office, she might use the computer and I’d discover hours later that it was open at frightful separatist websites like Bella Caledonia or National Collective or Wings over Scotland.  The day’s Scottish Daily Express might disappear from the kitchen table and turn up, scrunched into a ball, in the recycling bin in the corner.  Or if the Express was left on the table, any photographs in it of Alistair Darling or George Osborne might have shocking words like tosser or bampot graffiti-ed across them in Mither’s curly handwriting.

 

More worrying was her tendency sometimes to sneak outdoors.  It would’ve been bad enough in normal times because she was too old and frail to be wandering the streets alone.  But in these dangerous times, who knew what she was up to and who she was associating with?

 

© National Collective / From Stirling Centre of Scottish Studies

 

The evidence disturbed me.  When I visited her room I found a growing collection of things that she could only have acquired during trips outside – little Scottish saltire and lion-rampant flags, booklets of essays and poems written in support of independence, brochures for events with sinister titles like Imagi-Nation and Yestival, posters where the word can’t had the t scrawled out so that they read can instead.  She’d amassed badges, stickers and flyers with the word yes emblazoned on them.  What a disgusting-sounding word yes had become to me.  I’d contemplate Mither and imagine that horrible word spurting from her lips –

 

‘Yes!  Yes!  Yes – !’

 

And she’d argue.  Goodness me, what had got into the woman to make her so bloody-minded?  In between quoting names of people I’d never heard of, but who were undoubtedly up to no good, like Gerry Hassan, David Greig and Lesley Riddoch, she’d taunt me mercilessly.

 

‘So go on.  Tell me.  Explain.  Why can we not be independent?’

 

‘Because… We can’t!  We just can’t!  We’re too… too…’

 

‘Too wee?’

 

‘Aye!  Well, no.  Not that, not only that.  We’re also…’

 

‘Too poor?’

 

‘Aye, that’s true, Scotland’s too poor to be independent.  But the main reason is that we’re…’

 

‘Too stupid?’

 

‘Och stop it, Mither!  Stop!  You’re putting words in my mouth!’

 

‘But you agree with that basic proposition?  Scotland can’t be independent because it’s too small, its economy’s too weak and its people aren’t educated enough?’  She sighed.  ‘That’s what we’re up against.  A mass of our fellow Scots, yourself included, brainwashed by the establishment into believing their own inferiority!’

 

I stormed out of the room at that point.  What horrible people had she been talking to?

 

A few weeks before the referendum-day, her madness reached what I assumed was its peak.  After the last guests had left the premises and after I’d washed and put away the breakfast things, I took the vacuum cleaner into the porch and started on the carpet there.  It took me a minute to notice something odd about the rack on the porch wall where I stored leaflets about local attractions that our guests might be interested in: Rosslyn Chapel, Abbotsford, Traquair House, Melrose Abbey and so on.  The leaflets in the rack had changed.  The tourist ones had disappeared.  In their place were different ones.  Political ones.

 

© Women for Independence / From wikipedia.org

 

I put down the vacuum-hose and approached the rack.  Crammed into it now were leaflets I’d seen in her room advertising those sinister-sounding events like Imagi-Nation and Yestival and other ones promoting the unsavoury websites she’d consulted on the computer like National Collective, Bella Caledonia and Wings over Scotland.  Also there were leaflets for organisations with different but strangely-repetitive names: Women for Independence, Liberals for Independence, Polish for Independence, Asians for Independence, English for Independence, Farmers for Independence…  One organisation, whose leaflets were merely sheets of photocopied and folded-up A4 paper, was even called Hoteliers for Independence.

 

I couldn’t help reading that Hoteliers for Independence leaflet.  It ended with the exhortation, ‘Please contact Hoteliers for Independence for more information at…’ and gave an address.  My insides turned cold as I read the address.  I found myself pivoting around inside the porch and facing different internal doors that led to different parts of the guesthouse.  I half-expected one door to have hanging on it a sign that said HOTELIERS FOR INDEPENDENCE – THIS WAY.

 

Then I peered up towards the first floor, where a certain bedroom was located, and lamented, ‘Oh, Mither.’

***

One afternoon, close to September 18th, I woke from an unplanned doze at the desk in the office.  I’d been dreaming.  A voice in the dream had droned about – what else? – that ghastly referendum.  Disconcertingly, back in the conscious world, the voice continued to talk to me.  I realised it came from a shelf above me, where the radio was positioned between a stuffed gull and a stuffed pheasant.  The radio was tuned in to a local station and the voice belonged to a newsreader.  He was explaining that a politician, a Labour Party MP, was visiting our region today.

 

This MP had toured the high streets and town centres of Scotland lately.  To get people’s attention he’d place a crate on the pavement, stand on top of the crate and deliver a speech from it.  He’d speak bravely in favour of Great Britain and the Union of Parliaments and denounce the separatists and their vile foolish notions of independence.  And I’d heard from recent news reports that the separatists hadn’t taken kindly to his tour.  Well, as bullies, they wouldn’t.  They’d gone to his speaking appearances with the purpose of heckling him and shouting him down.

 

Then the newsreader named the town the MP was due to speak in this afternoon.  It was our town.

 

And immediately I felt uneasy because I realised I hadn’t seen or heard anything of Mither for the past while.  I went upstairs and knocked on her door.  There was no reply.  The guesthouse was empty that afternoon and so I hung the BACK SOON sign in the porch-window, went out and locked the door after me.  Then I headed for the middle of town.

 

It wasn’t hard to find where the Labour MP was speaking because of the hubbub.  The MP seemed to have turned his microphone’s volume to maximum so that he could drown out the heckling and shouting from the separatists in his audience.  I emerged from a vennel, onto the high street, and saw the crowd ahead of me.  It contained fewer people than I’d expected.  Some of them wore no badges and carried no placards – among them, I thought I glimpsed Kenneth and Gina from the brochure that Mither had ripped up – and some had badges and placards saying yes.  Looming above everyone was the MP on his crate.

 

© Thomas Nugent / From wikipedia.org

 

The separatists present were trying to make themselves heard – without success, thanks to the MP’s bellowing voice and the amplification provided by the microphone.  It wasn’t until I reached the edge of the small crowd that I could understand what they were saying.

 

‘Answer the question, Murphy!’

 

‘He won’t answer the question!’

 

‘Quit shouting, man, and answer the question for God’s sake!’

 

Then I saw a figure standing at the back of the crowd a few yards along from me.  The figure wore a long flowing skirt, a woollen cardigan and a lacy Sunday bonnet that obscured its face.  A handbag dangled from one of its elbows and a small egg carton was clasped in its hands.  As I watched, the figure prised the lid off the carton,  lifted one of the six eggs inside and stretched back an arm in readiness to throw it –

 

I rushed at her and shouted, ‘Mither! Oh my God!’

 

What happened next is confusing.  I remember reaching her and knocking the carton from her hands so that eggs flew in all directions.  I remember not being able to halt myself in time and crashing into her so that she fell and I fell too, on top of her.  But then, somehow, I found myself lying alone on the ground.  Mither had disappeared.  She must’ve been sprightlier than I’d thought.  She’d gathered herself up and hurried away and left me there.

 

One of the eggs had made its way into my right hand.  Now it was a ruin of broken shell.  Meanwhile, the yolks, whites and shell-pieces of other eggs formed a gelatinous mess on the front of my woollen cardigan.

 

Then I was being helped to my feet.  Around me, I heard voices:

 

‘Who is it?’

 

‘Some auld lady.’

 

‘No, wait… Christ!  It’s a man!’

 

‘It’s young Bates.  You ken, Norrie Bates?  Him that runs the Bates Bed and Breakfast?’

 

‘Why’s he togged out like that?’

 

Someone took my arm and led me away.  Behind us, the MP, who seemed not to have noticed the commotion with Mither and me, kept roaring into his microphone.  We turned a corner into a side-street and paused there.  I identified the man steering me as Dougie Bremner, who was the proprietor of another B and B in the town, a few streets away from ours.  He’d always seemed a gentle friendly type and it surprised me to see a yes badge stuck to his jacket lapel.

 

© Yes Scotland / From wikipedia.org

 

Dougie looked perplexed.  He scanned me up and down as if my appearance was a puzzle he wanted to solve.  ‘Norrie,’ he said at last.  ‘I think you need to go home.  As fast as you can manage.’

 

My head ached.  Something was squeezing my skull, which in turn was squeezing my brain.  I raised a hand and found my head enclosed in a lady’s bonnet.  It exuded two ribbons that were knotted under my chin.  In a final gesture of spite Mither must’ve fastened it on my head before she’d escaped.  ‘Aye,’ I whispered.  ‘I’ll go home.’

 

‘By the way,’ added Dougie, who seemed greatly troubled now.  ‘How’s your mither?  I haven’t seen her for a while.’

***

It was the morning of September 19th.  The radio had disappeared from the office and I guessed it’d travelled upstairs to Mither’s room and informed her of the result.  Still, in case she hadn’t heard, I felt obliged to go to her room and let her know.

 

She looked very small, thin and frail as she huddled there amid the paraphernalia she’d acquired, the flags, placards, badges, posters, leaflets and booklets.  On the floor around her, in a serpentine coil, there even lay a blue-and-white woollen scarf with a pair of knitting needles embedded in one unfinished end of it.  That was another lark she’d been up to.  Knitting for independence.

 

Because she looked so weak and unwell now, I understood that she knew.  The result seemed to have drained the life from her, leaving her a husk.

 

But I repeated the news.  ‘Mither.  It’s a no.’

 

She didn’t answer.  No sound came from her mouth, which was stretched back in a rictus – if I hadn’t known she was grimacing in pain and dismay, I’d have thought she was grinning.  I looked into her eyes, trying to find a glimmer of acknowledgement for me, a spark of recognition that I was standing before her.  But the eyes were blank and gaping, almost like they weren’t eyes at all but two dark holes.

 

And although I was relieved and delighted about the result, I suddenly and inexplicably felt as though a part of me was dead.

 

© Paramount Pictures / From tvtropes.org

 

With apologies to Robert Bloch, Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins.  No apologies to Jim Murphy.

 

And tomorrow, on September 19th, I’ll raise a glass to the memory of the late Charlie Massie, who cheered me up after the result ten years ago by taking me on a pub crawl in Delhi.  Though it probably wasn’t wise to go into the bar in the British High Commission, where we ended up stuck at a table in front of a giant TV screen, showing the news, with a lengthy interview in progress with Boris Johnson.  Bojo was spewing shite about how great it was that the Jocks had embraced the Union and all the benefits that went with it.  Those future Union benefits would include Brexit and having him as Prime Minister. 

Posted on

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2023

 

From pixabay.com / © socialneuron

 

It’s Halloween today.  In keeping with tradition on this blog, I’ll celebrate the occasion by displaying ten pieces of macabre, spooky or unsettling artwork that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

 

To start on a musical note…  Here’s a flutist painted by the late Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose work suggested Hieronymus Bosch combined with H.R. Giger and frequently depicted apocalyptic hellscapes populated by wraith-like figures.  By Beksinski’s standards, this is a fairly sedate and playful piece.  Its ochre-bathed figure is characteristically skeletal, but what impresses is how its multiple fingers, knuckles, joints, bones and tendons fuse chaotically to the flute and become a grotesque mechanism that’s an extension of it.

 

Beksinski met a tragic end in 2005 – after a traumatic few years during which he’d seen the death of his wife and the suicide of his son, he was murdered in a dispute over a small sum of money.  Still, interest in his art has burgeoned since his death and there’s now a host of stuff about him on YouTube.

 

© Zdzislaw Beksinski

 

Moving eastwards from Poland to Ukraine – yes, a place that’s suffered plenty of real-life horror in the past two years.  Yuri Hill is a Kiev-based artist who specialises in digital painting and whose work often depicts things worryingly pagan and primordial lurking in the forest.  This piece is particularly good.  As you study its crepuscular grey-blue murk, more and more details filter into view – not just the drooping, feathery branches of towering conifers, but the strange, bestial furriness of the figures and the Herne-the-Hunter-like antlers sprouting from their heads.  The fact that they’re moving about on stilts just adds to the strangeness.  For those of you wanting to see more of his work, Hill’s Instagram account is accessible here and his page on artstation.com here.

 

© Yuri Hill

 

From folk-horror to J-horror, i.e., Japanese horror, whose psychological, supernatural and urban-myth-derived traditions clearly inform this painting.  Entitled Red Laugh, it’s the work of Yuko Tatsushima, who’s been described as both a ‘rockstar’ and an ‘outsider’ in Japanese painting.  Even before we get to the grotesque subject matter, with the face missing an eyeball and some prominent, autopsy-like stitches running up its throat, the scratchy paint-strokes almost make you wonder if the artist did it with broken, bloody fingernails.

 

Indeed, the composition has a howl of rage about it that’s common in Tatsushima’s work.  It frequently addresses sexual oppression, harassment and assault, things Japanese society – all societies, for that matter – often tries to look away from and things the artist has been a victim of herself.  Such is the Francis Bacon-style intensity of Tatsushima’s creations that this YouTube film about her comes with a warning that its images might be ‘too disturbing for more sensitive viewers’.

 

© Yuko Tatsushima / From sugoii-Japan.com

 

That seems far, far removed from my next picture, which celebrates the cosy tradition of classical British horror fiction, set in wooden-panelled Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms and populated by crusty, tweedy gentlemen.  It’s by Charles W. Stewart, one of the few people who can claim to have been born in the Philippines but brought up in Galloway in Scotland, and whose enthusiasm for illustrating was apparently matched for his enthusiasm for ballet and costume design.  Stewart, clearly a man of many interests, selected the stories and did the illustrations for a 1997 collection entitled Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales, which was published four years before his death.  The volume includes fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn, Vernon Lee, M.R. James and Walter de la Mare.

 

Stewart’s illustration here, which shows an antiquarian discovering he has unexpected company whilst engaged in some nocturnal research, is presumably for M.R. James’s Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.  The story ends with the fictional equivalent of a cinematic jump-scare: “…his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow…  Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down, grey, horny and wrinkled…”

 

© Folio Society

 

One of the greatest early scares in film history occurred in the 1925 silent version of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, which starred the remarkable Lon Chaney Sr in the title role.  The mysterious masked phantom gets unmasked whilst playing at his beloved organ.  Unable to stop herself, the singer Christine (Mary Philbin) whips the mask off from behind. The audience is confronted by the phantom’s horribly gaunt, stretched and skull-like face in the screen’s foreground – at this point, supposedly, some 1925 audience-members fainted.  Then he turns around and the audience is traumatised a second time as they see Christine reacting in horror to his deformed visage too.  Anyway, here’s a regal portrait of Chaney Sr’s Phantom of the Opera, sans mask, courtesy of Pittsburgh artist Daniel R. Horne, who’s painted a number of classic movie monsters.

 

© Daniel R. Horne

 

There were scares a-plenty in the films of director Alfred Hitchcock.  Indeed, he was perhaps cinema’s greatest practitioner in the genres of suspense and horror.  So popular was Hitchcock among the public in his heyday that he licensed his name to dozens of collections of crime, mystery, thriller, espionage and horror short stories, whose titles ranged from Alfred Hitchcock’s Coffin Break (1974) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Hard Day at the Scaffold (1967), from Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum (1965) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Sinister Spies (1966).  These had introductions purporting to be written by the great man himself, but they were actually penned by publishing-house editors.

 

I’m partial to this cover illustration from the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense (1967), which includes Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds (alongside the likes of Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, Roald Dahl’s Man from the South and Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper).  Hitchcock, of course, filmed The Birds in 1963.  The cover’s artist isn’t identified, but with those brutally-pecky gulls, and the victim’s screaming face, he or she does a good job of capturing the directness of du Maurier’s grim, claustrophobic original.  Hitchcock’s treatment of it is more mannered and expansive, though still brilliant.

 

© Lions, London

 

While many modern artists have taken their inspiration from the cinema, the American painter and illustrator Burt Shonberg could boast that his work turned up in movies. Most notably, Shonberg provided the disturbingly dark-eyed and corpse-faced portraits of former members of the Usher family, which Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) shows to Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation House of Usher (1960).

 

Acclaimed as ‘the premier psychedelic artist of Los Angeles’ from the 1950s until his death in 1977, Shonberg’s work extended beyond hippy-era psychedelia and he flirted with cubism and did some fine pen-and-ink drawings.  Here, however, I’m showing a languid, sultry composition entitled Magical Landscape or Lucifer in the Garden, which depicts an unsettlingly youthful version of Auld Nick.  Obviously, representations of the Devil abound throughout the history of art, but what makes this one memorable are those particularly long pasterns and the strange little sphinx resting on his lap.

 

From cvltnation.com

 

In these art-themed Halloween posts, I also like to honour the festival that comes straight after Halloween – Mexico’s Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November, which features skulls and skeletons as a major theme.  This next picture gets straight to the point.  It’s by David Lozeau, a San Diego artist who’s dedicated much of his career to creating Day of the Dead-inspired artwork, and it shows two skeletons raucously celebrating…  Day of the Dead.  I assume that yellow stuff in the señorita skeleton’s bottle is reposado tequila, which acquires its colour from the oak barrels it matures in.

 

© David Lozeau

 

There’s also an admirable directness about this picture, of a vampire lady, by Argentinian artist Hector Garrido, who passed away in 2020 when he was in his nineties.  Put Garrido’s name into Google Images and you’ll be assailed by countless pictures of G.I. Joe toy-packaging, which he designed back in the 1980s.  However, his main work was creating book covers, most popularly for gothic and romantic novels and for the series about the wholesome juvenile sleuths Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  But Garrido’s CV includes covers for the likes of John Brunner, Ramsey Campbell, Agatha Christie, John Christopher, Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson and Robert Silverberg too.

 

This one comes from a book called A Walk with the Beast, actually a collection of ‘vintage tales of human monsters and were-beasts’ edited by Charles M. Walker.  The stories include one by Vernon Lee, who also appeared in Charles W. Stewart’s Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales.  ‘All fun’ says the book’s single reviewer on amazon.com, so evidently it ‘does what it says on the tin’.

 

© Avon Books

 

And finally, for my final picture, it’s back to Japan for something similarly fun and schlocky – not the cover of a book but one of a Japanese comic-book.  This effort by the late manga-artist Marina Shirakawa is wonderfully sinewy and eye-catching.  It’s full of typical manga-style details – see those simultaneously hideous and gleeful ghouls in the background – and peculiarly Japanese ones, such as the heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform.  Its colour scheme of dark, blue-grey hues, with smudges of blood-red at the back, is memorable too.

 

© From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

 

And that’s it for another year.  Happy Halloween…

Posted on

A Russell-ing in the dark

 

© Penguin Classics

 

Another post for Halloween…

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Santa Clara Productions / American International Pictures

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

So…  How about it Guillermo?

 

From penguinrandomhouse.com / © Charles Martin Bush

Posted on

Du Maurier, du merrier (Part 1)

 

© Penguin Books

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Chichester Partnership

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Films / British Lion Films

 

Expect more on Daphne du Maurier very soon…

Posted on

Seven favourite noirs

 

© Producers Releasing Corporation

 

One thing I’ve tried to do lately is watch more old Hollywood film noirs.  When I was a kid, the BBC used to show lots of ones with Humphrey Bogart, so I saw the likes of High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946) and Key Largo (1948).  But I’m ashamed to say I never got around to watching the many non-Bogey film noirs, even the most famous ones.

 

Well, with lockdown confining me indoors for a good part of the past year, and with many of these films now in the public domain and available to watch on YouTube or archive.org, there’s been no excuse.  I’ve therefore immersed myself in the monochrome 1940s-1950s world of laconic tough guys, slinky femme fatales, guns, hats, raincoats, vintage cars, shadows, cigarette smoke, venetian blinds, whirring fans, neon signs and general, existentialist seediness.  (The genre’s great trick was to convince audiences that such a dark, downbeat world existed and yet have most of its films set in an American state as sunny and optimistic as California.)

 

Here are seven of my favourites…

 

The Woman in the Window (1944)

This little gem is directed by Fritz Lang and stars Edward G. Robinson, who memorably performed in the same year’s Double Indemnity, perhaps the greatest of all film noirs.  However, whereas in Double Indemnity Robinson plays somebody investigating a suspicious death and gradually ratcheting up the pressure on the two people responsible for it, in The Woman in the Window the roles are reversed.  He plays someone responsible for a death who has the screws tightened on him, first by the police, then by a blackmailer.

 

Not that Robinson’s character in Woman resembles the smooth, handsome and immoral one played by Fred McMurray in Double Indemnity.  He’s a timid college lecturer who sees off his vacationing wife and kids at the film’s start and then retires to his gentlemen’s club, where he’s soon complaining to his buddies (Raymond Massey and Edmund Breon) about being middle-aged, past it and doomed to a life lacking in adventure.  Of course, barely has he uttered those words than he’s having an adventure, but not a pleasant one.  On his way home, he stops to admire a portrait of a beautiful woman in a shop window, then meets the woman (Joan Bennett) who modelled for the portrait.  He gets invited back to her apartment for late-night drinks, unexpectedly meets her jealous and violent admirer (Arthur Loft), and finds himself being throttled.  When he tries to fight his assailant off with a pair of scissors, Robinson and Bennett suddenly have a corpse on their hands.

 

Believing they can avoid involving the police and incriminating themselves, they dump the body out in the countryside.   Unfortunately, it transpires that the dead man was more important than they imagined and the District Attorney is soon overseeing an investigation into his murder.  And the District Attorney happens to be the Raymond Massey character, one of Robinson’s best mates.

 

© RKO Pictures

 

What’s particularly good in this film is Robinson’s mixture of horror and fascination towards Massey’s investigation.  He tries to keep clear of it, but at the same time can’t help prying into it – and inevitably incriminates himself a little bit more each time.  I also like the juxtaposition between the cosiness of the gentleman’s club with its armchairs, book-lined walls and roaring hearth fires, which symbolises Robinson’s cloistered, middle-aged existence, and the mean streets outside, full of darkness, rainstorms, criminality and – eek! – the possibility of extra-marital sex.

 

Alas, Woman is spoiled by a ridiculous twist ending, added to wrap up the film on a positive note that would keep the studio (and the Motion Picture Production Code) happy.  You might want to stop the film a few minutes before the finish, while things are still looking bleak for Robinson.  That way, you’ll have a film noir that’s well-nigh perfect.

 

Detour (1945)

Film noirs don’t come any more existentialist than Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, the story of a pianist hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles to meet up with his lover, a nightclub singer who’s trying to make it in Hollywood, and getting implicated in a couple of murders.  It’s ultra-low-budget and a very economical 67 minutes long, but it’s memorable for how it drives home its despairing message.  “Fate,” rambles its hapless hero (Tom Neal) in a voice-over, “or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all…”

 

Even more memorable is its leading female character, Vera (Ann Savage), who’s a femme ferocious rather than a femme fatale.  It’s an understatement to say she enters the film halfway through like a force of nature – she’s more like a tornado of rabid dogs.  When Neal, driving a car whose real owner inopportunely died a little way back up the road, stops and gives Vera a lift, she soon figures out what’s happened and starts blackmailing him into helping her in her own nefarious schemes.  Is there a way he can get the malign Vera out of his life again?  There is, but it’s going to make matters even worse…

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

Kiss of Death (1947)

Directed by Henry Hathaway, better known for westerns like 1969’s True Grit, Kiss of Death is a crime melodrama with some suspenseful sequences.  For example, there’s the opening scene when anti-hero Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) tries to escape in a maddeningly slow elevator from a jewellery robbery he’s just carried out in the middle of the Chrysler Building; and the climactic one, when Nick has to walk out onto a night-time street and get shot at by his criminal nemesis Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) because the cops, with whom he’s now colluding, have informed him that they can only arrest Udo if they catch him with a gun in his hand.   Both sequences are enhanced by their use of stillness and silence.  Mature, the Schwarzenegger / Stallone of his day, didn’t have much range as an actor, but his ruminative passivity is appropriate for the tone here.

 

Elsewhere, the story of Nick renouncing his criminal ways and turning informer for the Assistant District Attorney (Brian Donlevy), which is his only chance of ensuring a decent life for his two young daughters, is weakened by too much moralising and sentimentality.  But it’s a young Richard Widmark as the repulsive Tommy Udo who both steals the show and gives the movie a nasty edge.  Pale, irredeemably rotten and cackling like the Joker, he’s put on trial thanks to Nick’s evidence, but gets acquitted and vows revenge on Nick and his kids.  We’ve already seen him kill the wheelchair-bound mother of another antagonist by propelling her down a staircase, so we know he means business.

 

Woman on the Run (1950)

Down-on-his-luck artist Frank (Ross Elliot) is walking his dog one night when he witnesses a murder.  The police inform Frank that he’s seen a gangland killing and he’ll be expected to testify in court, so that a major criminal can be locked away.  Frank realises this makes him a likely target for the gangsters, decides not to cooperate with the cops and goes on the run instead…  And abruptly, the film’s focus shifts to his wife Eleanor (Ann Sheridan).  Although their marriage hasn’t been happy, Eleanor embarks on a quest to track Frank down, a quest complicated by the fact that she’s being followed by the cops, a persistent newspaper reporter (Dennis O’Keefe) and probably the villains.  During her search, she encounters acquaintances of Frank’s she hadn’t known existed and gradually realises that Frank has been a more affectionate and interesting husband than she gave him credit for.

 

© Fidelity Pictures Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

Woman on the Run is a cleverly constructed film that not only wrong-foots the audience by switching attention from its hero to its heroine, but also has a plot containing a personal, emotional journey as well as the usual crime and police shenanigans.  It makes good use of its San Francisco locations and portrays the Asian-American inhabitants of Chinatown with slightly more depth than you’d expect of a film of the time.  However, my better half, who’s Californian, poured cold water over the film’s climax, which takes place in the amusement park at Ocean Park Pier.  This, she pointed out, is actually in Santa Monica, which is a good 340 miles away from San Francisco.

 

Drive a Crooked Road (1954)

I’d never been much of a Mickey Rooney fan, not when he was playing kids and teenagers in the 1930s and 1940s, nor when he was an all-round entertainer doing Broadway, TV and, in Britain, pantomimes in his old age.  However, Drive a Crooked Road offers a fascinating snapshot of Rooney during his career’s low point in the 1950s.  By then he was too old to play a youngster anymore, but he was too short to make a conventional leading man.  In Drive, he ends up playing a misfit called Eddie Shannon, as lacking in social skills as he is in stature.  Eddie’s happier being surrounded by cars than by other human beings and when he isn’t working as a garage mechanic, he drives in small-scale motor races – which, we learn early on, he’s very good at.

 

One day the glamorous Barbara (Dianne Foster) brings her car to Eddie’s garage for repairs and is soon paying the wee man an inordinate amount of attention.  Poor Eddie is astonished – as the film poster puts it: “Why would a dame like her go for a guy like me?” – but can’t help falling for Barbara and daring to dream that their burgeoning relationship is genuine.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

Of course, this being a film noir, it isn’t genuine.  Barbara is just bait and Eddie is being reeled into the middle of a plot to rob a bank.  Barbara’s real lover, the smug, oily Steve (Kevin McCarthy), plans to use Eddie’s driving skills to transport the stolen money at great speed along a treacherous stretch of road before the police can set up road-blocks.  The script, by a young Blake Edwards before he hit paydirt with the Pink Panther movies in the 1960s and 1970s, contains a surprising subtext about social class.  Raffishly wearing a yachtsman’s cap (and light-years removed from the panic-stricken everyman that McCarthy would play two years later in Don Siegal’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Steve is no criminal low-life but a suave, educated sophisticate.  This makes his manipulation of the humble, blue-collar Eddie seem even more loathsome.

 

Witness to Murder (1954)

What a difference a decade makes.  1944’s Double Indemnity established Barbara Stanwyck as the imperious queen of film noir, gorgeous, ruthless, happy to use men and dump them whenever it suited her.  By 1954’s Witness to Murder, though, Stanwyck was pushing 40 and Hollywood had evidently decided she was better suited to playing dotty, slightly hysterical ladies less in control of their circumstances than they think they are.

 

Witness unluckily appeared at the same time as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and shared a plot component with it: someone looks out of a window, and through someone else’s window, and thinks they see a murder.  It was duly dismissed as an interior imitation of the Hitchcock classic, but it’s more interesting than that.  Whereas Rear Window dwells on the voyeuristic aspects of spying on other people’s business, Witness merely uses it as a way to kickstart its plot.  Cheryl (Barbara Stanwyck) believes she’s seen her neighbour across the street, Albert Richter – an author, a fiancé of a wealthy heiress and a one-time Nazi (but he’s ‘reformed’ now, so that makes him perfectly okay) – murder somebody.  The police don’t believe her and when she tries to conduct her own investigations, her sanity is called into question and she even has to spend time in an asylum.  All good news for Richter (George Sanders), of course. If everyone thinks this inconvenient witness to his crime is barmy, it won’t be a surprise if sooner or later she ‘appears’ to commit suicide.

 

Witness to Murder, then, is as much about the unfairness of the era’s gender attitudes as Drive a Crooked Road is about the unfairness of its class attitudes.  Stanwyck is sympathetic and engaging, Sanders is predictably as smooth as silk, and it’s nicely wrapped up with a Hitchcockian chase-sequence across the unfinished rooftop of an under-construction high-rise.

 

Chester Erskine Productions / United Artists

 

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Directed by Robert Aldrich, scripted by A.I. Bezzerides and based on one of Mickey Spillane’s hardboiled pulp novels about private investigator Mike Hammer, Kiss Me Deadly begins with a startling night-time sequence.  Hammer (played by a suitably blunt Ralph Meeker) is out driving, nearly runs over a distraught woman (Cloris Leachman) and reluctantly gives her a lift.  He soon finds himself in trouble when bad guys in pursuit of the woman force him off the road.  So far, so conventionally noirish.  But things get progressively weirder as Aldrich and Bezzerides dump more and more of the Spillane source material and go off and do their own thing.

 

You don’t get a coherent plot where Hammer moves from A to B and then to C while gradually unravelling the mystery of what happened that night.  Rather, names pop up randomly in conversations, names of people who are still alive and who are already dead.  Trying to find a common thread, Hammer plods between seemingly arbitrary locales, shabby and smart, old-worldly and 1950s cutting edge: scuzzy hotel rooms and apartments, fancy beach-houses, a boxing gym, an immigrant’s garage, a bigshot’s mansion, a modern art gallery, an opera singer’s quarters crammed with precious vinyl.  The threat largely remains anonymous and soon becomes omnipotent.  Hammer hears a lot about ‘they’ but can’t identify who ‘they’ are.  At the same time, ‘they’ seem able to kill people with a god-like ease and lack of consequence.

 

Eventually, we learn that the villains are pursuing something contained in a small box, something that’s massively valuable, powerful and potentially destructive, and there ensues an impressively apocalyptic finale.  Tapping into the scientific and political fears of an America already immersed in the Atomic Age and the Cold War, and about to embark on the Space Race, Kiss Me Deadly is one of the last entries from film noir’s 1940s-1950s golden age.  Indeed, it’s appropriate that by its final scenes, the film seems to have transformed into a newer, more adaptable cinematic genre – science fiction.

 

Parklane Pictures / United Artists

Posted on

Cinematic heroes 1: Jon Finch

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Anglo-EMI Film Distributors

 

The film and TV actor Jon Finch died seven-and-a-half years ago.  At the time of his passing, late on in 2012, he hadn’t worked for several years and had lived quietly in the English town of Hastings and his death had apparently gone undiscovered for some time.  Word of his funeral wasn’t announced until January 2013.  For that reason, obituaries for him in the British media were intermittent and patchy.  I decided to pen a few words of tribute on this blog and the resulting post seemed to rank high on Google searches about Finch – as I’d said, obituaries for him were intermittent and patchy.  Gratifyingly, a number of people who’d known Finch over the years came across my post and left comments on it.  In fact it was one of this blog’s most commented-on entries.  (And I’m kicking myself that, because this blog had to recently get a post-hacking reboot, those comments from Finch’s friends have now been lost.)

 

Anyway, I thought I’d revisit, rewrite and update what I originally wrote about Finch in 2013 and repost it.  Annoyingly, though, I still haven’t managed to see 1973’s The Final Programme…

 

Jon Finch began his career in television, went into films and ended up back in television.  For a couple of years in the early 1970s, while he was doing film-work, he had the opportunity to become massive, but that didn’t happen.  Finch, who valued his privacy and had a low opinion of the celebrity circus, may well have preferred it that way.

 

He began acting on television in 1964, appearing in ITV’s notoriously dire soap opera Crossroads.  In 1970, like many a British TV actor at the time, he got his break in movies thanks to Hammer Films – who were always looking for cheap acting talent to appear in their low-budget but cheerfully sensationalist horror movies.  He duly provided vampire-hunting support to Peter Cushing in Roy Ward Baker’s okay The Vampire Lovers and appeared in Jimmy Sangster’s dreadful Horror of Frankenstein.  Then Roman Polanski hired him to play the title role in his version of Macbeth, released in 1971, and suddenly Finch’s career trajectory had become exponentially steep.

 

Polanski’s take on Shakespeare’s Scottish play was bloody, dark and bleak – everything that a good production of Macbeth should be, in my opinion.  In this film, what works in favour of Finch as Macbeth, and of his co-star Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth, is the fact that they’re both so young.  The audience therefore feels they have little power over their destiny.  Rather, they’re swept to their tragic ends by dark forces both political and supernatural.

 

Polanski’s Macbeth got an unsympathetic appraisal from many critics, who couldn’t see beyond the film’s high level of violence and who linked it with what Polanski had gone through in August 1969 – when his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others were slaughtered at his house in Beverly Hills by acolytes of hippie-cult nutcase Charles Manson.  New Yorker critic Pauline Kael even wondered if Polanski’s staging of the murder of Macduff’s family was an attempt to recreate the carnage that Manson had orchestrated.  In fact, the film’s screenwriter, celebrated theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, is reputed to have challenged Polanski about the amount of blood displayed in this scene, to which the director retorted, “You should have seen my house last summer.”

 

From Roman Polanski, Finch moved on to Alfred Hitchcock and landed the lead role in 1972’s Frenzy.  Although Frenzy hardly represents Hitchcock at the peak of his artistry, it’s by far and away the best of the director’s last clutch of films, which include Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969) and Family Plot (1976).  It also shows Hitchcock at his most disturbing.  The murder sequence involving Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who plays Finch’s ex-wife, is the most brutal thing he ever did, and the potato-truck ride (where serial strangler Barry Foster tries to retrieve an incriminating piece of evidence from a corpse he’d concealed earlier inside a huge sack of potatoes) is gruelling too.

 

Playing an innocent man accused of and hunted down for Foster’s murders, Finch bravely refrains from making his character sympathetic.  Indeed, he’s something of a shit and has a violent streak, and for a period at the start of the film we think he really is the strangler.   By the time it becomes clear that Foster is actually the culprit, Hitchcock – a master manipulator of his audience’s emotions – has presented him as a chirpy, likeable chap.  Thus, we find ourselves siding more with him than we do with Finch.

 

© Universal Pictures

 

Having worked with two of the world’s greatest directors, Finch seemed destined for international fame and indeed he was soon offered the chance to replace Sean Connery in the James Bond series.  Finch, however, declined and the role went instead to the somewhat less invigorating Roger Moore.  Around this time he also turned down the role of Aramis in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) which, tantalisingly, would have seen him acting alongside another actor with a low opinion of movie stars and movie stardom, Oliver Reed.

 

In fact, in 1973, Finch did play a vaguely James Bond-like character when he took the role of Jerry Cornelius in Robert Fuest’s The Final Programme, which was based on the first of the four Cornelius novels written by Michael Moorcock, set in a surreal, 1960s-esque and science-fiction-tinged world where the fabric of reality is beginning to fray.  I’ve never seen The Final Programme, though from all accounts Fuest did a pretty cack-handed job of it.  In stills, though, Finch at least looks the part of Moorcock’s enigmatic hipster-cum-secret-agent hero.  Moorcock himself disapproved of the film adaptation, although he liked Finch’s performance and paid tribute to him on his website / discussion forum Moorcock’s Miscellany when he heard of his passing: “I was very fond of Jon and was sorry we lost touch…  He was genuinely modest.”

 

Towards the end of the 1970s, Ridley Scott lined Finch up to appear in his ground-breaking sci-fi horror film Alien.  Finch was supposed to play Kane, a character who doesn’t last long in the movie’s script but is certainly pivotal to it.  He’s the unfortunate crewmember who goes exploring the mysterious crashed spaceship and ends up with an alien egg inside his chest.  Two days into filming, however, Finch became too ill to work – either from bronchitis or from complications caused by his recently-diagnosed diabetes, depending on which story you believe – and was replaced by John Hurt.  Thus, he missed appearing in the infamous ‘canteen’ scene where Kane expires and the alien makes its first appearance, one of the most (literally) explosive scenes in horror-movie history.

 

From there on, it was through his television work that Finch remained in the public consciousness.  In the late 1970s, he appeared in the BBC Television Shakespeare, a series of adaptations of all the Bard’s plays.  Though they were criticised for their staginess and the generally conservative manner in which they were brought to the screen, the adaptations certainly couldn’t be faulted for the top-notch acting they contained.  In Richard II (1978), Finch played Henry Bolingbroke to Derek Jacobi’s Richard and John Gielgud’s John of Gaunt.  With Bolingbroke elevated to monarch, he then played the title role in the sequels Henry IV Part One and Part Two (1979), with Anthony Quayle as a jovial, red-cheeked Falstaff and David Gwillim as Henry’s offspring, Prince Hal.  (In reality, Gwillim was only six years younger than Finch.)

 

Still picky about his roles, he passed on the opportunity to play Doyle in Brian Clements’ hugely popular espionage / action series The Professionals (1978-81).  Ironically, the role eventually went to Martin Shaw, who’d played Banquo to Finch’s Macbeth.  On the other hand, out of loyalty to Hammer, he starred in the first episode of the studio’s 1980 anthology series The Hammer House of Horror, in which he played a modern-day composer haunted by a witch who’s popped forward through time from the 17th century (a role performed with memorable relish by Patricia Quinn).  And for a quarter century he gave guest turns in popular shows like The New Avengers, The Bill, Maigret, New Tricks and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

 

Frustratingly, Finch’s role in a 1994 episode of Sherlock Holmes, a combined adaptation of two of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone and The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, didn’t see him appear alongside Jeremy Brett, the actor widely regarded as the screen’s best-ever Holmes – Brett had to be written out of most of the episode due to health problems.  However, as a villain, Finch did get to face up to the almost-as-good Charles Gray, playing Sherlock’s brother Mycroft.

 

Finch’s final appearance was a film one, in Ridley Scott’s 2005 crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, so at least he got to work with that director nearly three decades after his gig in Alien fell through.  Thereafter, he kept a low profile in Hastings, in declining health but seen now and again in some of the local public bars.  I wonder if the regulars in those Hastings pubs were aware that old ‘Finchy’, as he was known, had once headlined films directed by Hitchcock and Polanski and had come within a whisker of being 007.

 

© Playboy Productions / Columbia Productions