From wikipedia.org / © Sean Koo
Having just paid tribute to the centenarian Mel Brooks, I hadn’t intended to post another film-related entry so soon on this blog. Sadly, however, Sam Neill, whom I admired both as an actor and as a person, passed away three days ago and I thought I should pen some words in honour of him too.
Neill’s passing was made even sadder by the fact he’d recently been declared cancer-free after a five-year battle against the disease. Seemingly, his immune system was so weakened by the treatment he’d received that he fell prey to pneumonia. Rima Te Wiata, Neill’s co-star in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) told the New Zealand Herald: “It really sucks, actually… I think he would be like: ‘For goodness sake, I got over my cancer. And now look, now I get pneumonia. What next?'”
Though officially a New Zealander, Neill could also be called a Northern Irishman because in 1947 he was born in Omagh, county-town of County Tyrone (17 miles away from where I spent my childhood), to New Zealand and English parents. He moved from there to Christchurch in 1954 and presumably, if he’d ever acquired a Northern Irish accent, he soon lost it. Decades later, when he played the psychotic Belfast policeman Chester Campbell in the first two seasons of the TV show Peaky Blinders (2013-14), he asked two mates – Northern Irish actors Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt – for coaching so that he could produce a convincing ‘Norn Irn’ accent.
He also began life as ‘Nigel’, but by the age of 11 had taken to calling himself ‘Sam’. When he started acting, he was glad he’d chosen the blokey ‘Sam’ over the slightly effete ‘Nigel’. In an interview published recently in the Guardian, he commented, “If I’d stayed with Nigel Neill, I don’t think I would have had a film career.” He’d obviously never encountered the great screenwriter Nigel Kneale, whose creations included the Quatermass films and TV dramas.
Though he’d done film and TV work throughout the 1970s, including Roger Donaldson’s thriller Sleeping Dogs (1977), described on its Wikipedia page as “the first feature-length 35 mm film produced entirely in New Zealand”, Neill first came to my attention in 1981, when I was a horror-film-obsessed teenager and when he appeared in two fairly high-profile horror films, Graham Baker’s Omen III: The Final Conflict and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. I read about them in film magazines like Starburst and Fangoria, though I was too young to see them in a cinema because in the UK they were given ‘X’ certificates, meaning only people aged 18 and over could see them. In the case of Possession, I didn’t even have a chance to see it later on video for it ended up on the Britain’s infamous (and idiotic) ‘video nasties’ list, deemed likely to ‘deprave or corrupt’ its viewers and thus banned from home viewing.
© Mace Neufeld Productions / 20th Century Fox
Omen III: The Final Conflict was the third in the trilogy that’d started with Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) and continued with Don Taylor’s Damien – Omen II (1978) and that told the tale of Damien Thorn, the son of Satan and the Antichrist who, according to Biblical prophecies, will rise to power in end times. Unlike the earlier two movies, where Damien is depicted as a kid (first played by Harvey Spender Stephens, then Jonathan Scott-Taylor), he’s now an adult. Portrayed by Neill, he’s the powerful CEO of Thorn Industries and soon into the film also becomes US ambassador to Britain, a position from which he hopes to launch his biggest project yet – the thwarting of the Second Coming of Christ.
As Damien, Neill is suave enough to be convincing as a powerful operator in purely human affairs, one who can rub shoulders with top people in top places and get what he wants; whilst also having a sinisterness and darkness that makes you accept him as the same, infernal creature he was in the earlier films (especially the disturbingly baleful Spender Stephens in the first Omen). Alas, Neill is the only thing of value in the film. Coming after the original, which was very enjoyable hokum, and the second film, which at least had its moments, The Final Countdown is a damp squib. Unlike his predecessors Donner and Taylor, Graham Baker doesn’t have the directing chops to properly mount the Omen films’ main attractions – the set-piece ‘accidents’, elaborate, supernaturally-engineered and inevitably fatal, that bump off anyone who gets in Damien’s way. That said, the scene early on where the previous American ambassador commits ‘suicide’ and conveniently creates a job opening for him, is agreeably splattery.
A far less conventional horror film, and a far better one, is the same year’s Possession. Though it defies all description, you could say it was a particularly traumatic and traumatising break-up movie… Or a brooding parable about the Cold War (it was filmed in West Berlin)… Or a psychological thriller involving doppelgangers… Or a body-horror film wherein a woman makes repeated love to a vilely tentacled, half-human, half-squid creature… Or an espionage thriller leading to an apocalyptic World War III finale.
Director Andrzej Żuławski – himself suffering from depression after recently being expelled from his native Poland – put Neill and his co-star Isabelle Adjani through the wringer during the film’s making. Neill remarked in 2021 that he ‘escaped’ from the movie with his ‘sanity barely intact’. Adjani suffered even more, though, and supposedly needed a couple of years to get over the experience. That’s understandable when, for instance, you see the berserk intensity of the now-legendary sequence where she suffers a miscarriage in a subway corridor. Actually, a young Gaspar Noé must have been highly impressed by that sequence because he basically got Sofia Boutella to recreate it in his 2018 movie Climax.
Things were looking up for Neill’s career in 1983, when he played the title role in Reilly, Ace of Spies, a 12-part TV series dramatizing the life of real-life superspy Sidney Reilly during the first quarter of the 20th century. Reilly was scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin and directed by Jim Goddard and Martin Campbell and Campbell, a fellow Kiwi, would later direct two James Bond movies, Goldeneye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006). In fact, for a time in the mid-1980s it looked like Neill was in with a shout of becoming the next James Bond. (It makes sense – there have been Scottish, Australian, Welsh and Irish Bonds, so why not a New Zealand one?)
In the Guardian interview I mentioned earlier, he was asked about the Bond role. He said he would have accepted it if it’d been offered to him, but added: “I’m also aware that I wouldn’t have enjoyed my life so much if I was an ex-Bond. That’s what people would say when I went for my morning coffee. ‘Look – it’s what’s-his-name, who used to be James Bond?’ ‘Yeah, he was the one I never really liked.’”
In 1989 he had a good role in Philip Noyce’s Dead Calm, a maritime thriller / horror movie that conveys both the claustrophobia of being at sea – you’re stuck in the confined space of a boat – and the agoraphobia of it – you’re out on a vast, empty mass of water, far from civilisation and help. Neil and Nicole Kidman (in her seventh, and breakout, film role) play a couple who, while yachting, discover a sinking schooner. They pick up one survivor (Billy Zane) who – surprise! – turns out to be a crazed killer.
Still, I had the impression that during the late 1980s Neil’s moment had passed and he was destined to spend his remaining career in movies’ supporting casts as a reliable character actor. This was suggested, for example, by his role in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, where he gets fourth-place billing after Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn. He plays the second-in-command to Connery’s Captain Marko Ramius, and a participant in a plot whereby the only submarine-commander in the Soviet fleet with a Scottish accent, and his officers, commandeer a super-submarine called Red October and attempt to defect with it to the West. When Neill’s character starts waxing lyrically to Connery about the rabbit farm he plans to start up after they reach America, you know he’s going to get killed before the end.
© Mace Neufeld Productions / Paramount Productions
However, then, Neill’s fortunes took an upswing – because Steven Spielberg and blockbuster-dom came knocking.
To be continued…
