Ben Wheatley – Blood and Porridge

April 21, 2023

The Ken and Ollie show

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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

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

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

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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

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

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

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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

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

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

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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

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

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

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

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

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

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

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

July 28, 2022July 28, 2022

First men in the moon

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

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

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

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

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

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

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

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

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

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

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

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

© Carolco Pictures / Tri-Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2021January 8, 2022

Rab Foster clears the foliage

Rab Foster, the pen-name under which I write fantasy fiction, has just had a short story published in the collection Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3. This is the tenth piece by Mr Foster that’s seen publication in recent years, which I’m pleased, but also surprised about. I’ve always enjoyed reading fantasy literature by the likes of C. L. Moore, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, but for most of the 21^st century I’d assumed there were few outlets where you could get works in the genre published – at least, in its short-story form, which is my speciality. However, lately, there seems to have been a surge in the number of magazines, ezines and anthologies devoted to fantasy fiction, which has created many new opportunities. Maybe this is due to the popularity of the Games of Thrones TV series (2011-19). If so, thanks for that, George R.R. Martin.

I’m particularly happy to have a story published in this collection because it’s been put together by David A. Riley and Jim Pitts at Parallel Universe Publications. Lancastrian artist Jim Pitts has illustrated the volume and I well remember his artwork from 40 years ago when it appeared in a magazine called Fantasy Tales. As I said in a recent blog-entry, Fantasy Tales was the first publication that I, as a young, aspiring and acne-ridden writer, submitted stories to. While they weren’t accepted, one of Fantasy Tales’ editors, Dave Sutton, was decent enough to write back and offer advice about how to make my work more organised and presentable. He told me to leave spaces after punctuation marks when I was typing my manuscripts, so that my sentences didn’t turn into typographical pile-ups. Also, in an effort to build tension, I employed a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, which hit the protagonists with one revelation after another. Probably not a good idea, he pointed out, to have six or seven one-sentence paragraphs in a row…

I remember Fantasy Tales as a gorgeous-looking little magazine, with Pitt’s colour artwork adorning its cover and his intricate, atmospheric black-and-white illustrations on the pages inside. Here’s a few examples.

Anyhow, I’m chuffed that one of my stories is sharing a book with Jim Pitts’ artwork at last.

Rab Foster’s story in Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is entitled The Foliage, and I suspect it’s no coincidence that I started writing it soon after watching the movie In the Earth (2021), a forest-set piece of sci-fi / horror eco-weirdness from filmmaker Ben Wheatley. The story also owes something to a 1976 Doctor Who adventure called The Seeds of Doom, which featured Tom Baker as the Doctor and a marvellously-deranged Tony Beckley and John Challis (who later became a much-loved comedy actor and who, sadly, died in September this year) as the villains. I know nerds between the ages of 15 and 70 will argue till the cows come home about what the scariest ever Doctor Who adventure is, but for my money, The Seeds of Doom is the one.

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, Volume 3 is currently available at amazon.co.uk here and at amazon.com here.