Tag: Nicole Kidman

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Uncle Sam (Part 2)

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

 

Continuing my tribute to the great New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who died on July 13th…

 

Sam Neill got top billing alongside Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the highest-grossing movie of all time until James Cameron’s Titanic was released four years later.  While it was gratifying that Neill’s career get a boost from his involvement in such a blockbuster, I have to say I’m not  a great fan of it.  That’s probably because prior to seeing the film, I read the book it’s based upon, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), wherein the story and characters are darker, more complex and more interesting than Spielberg’s interpretation of them.

 

As Alan Grant, a palaeontologist asked to assess the titular theme park where, it’s planned, visitors will pay good money to gawk at dinosaurs that’ve been cloned back into life using bits of ancient DNA, Neill is inevitably – and literally – dwarfed by his co-stars, the dinosaurs that Spielberg’s special-effects team, headed Stan Winston, created using then-cutting-edge animatronics and computer-generated imagery.  Still, he invests Grant with enough quirks to make him memorable.

 

He’s sometimes curmudgeonly and not fond of children, even ones who like dinosaurs – see how he spooks one youngster with an account of how velociraptors killed their prey, or how he freaks out the grandchildren of park-owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) by pretending to get fried by an electric fence.  Paradoxically, he can be child-like himself.  When he first sees one of Hammond’s dinosaurs, his wonderment leaves him struggling for words and he almost faints.  And he shows juvenile delight when he encounters a triceratops, which he hails as “my favourite when I was a kid… the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”  (When I was a kid, the triceratops was my favourite dinosaur too.)

 

When Jurassic Park received a royal premiere in London, Neill found himself sitting between his 10-year-old son and Princess Diana.  According to Neill, his son got so worked up at the film’s scary bits that he started farting uncontrollably, and Neill became paranoid about what his royal neighbour would think when she smelled the fumes: “Princess Di is being exposed to the horrors of a little boy’s fart, but she’s going to think it’s me.  I am going to be subliminally blamed for my son’s crimes, and I don’t think she’ll talk to me afterwards.”  However, gallantly, the princess did speak to him later and ‘never mentioned’ the flatulence.  Jeff Goldlum commented drolly on Neill’s anecdote: “I’ve heard him tell that a couple of times and it’s just amazing the lengths that he will go to still blame the boy.”

 

Neill played Grant twice more, in the second sequel Jurassic Park III (2003), which I saw on TV and found pretty inconsequential; and the fifth one, Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which got lousy reviews and which I’m in no rush to see.

 

© Miramax / Buena Vista international / Jan Chapman Productions

 

As well as being in 1993’s biggest blockbuster, Neill was in the same year’s biggest arthouse movie, Jane Campion’s The Piano.  He plays Alisdair Stewart, a settler in 19th century New Zealand who, via an arranged marriage, suddenly acquires a wife, the mute Ada (Holly Hunter).  He also acquires a piano, the playing of which is Ada’s only opportunity to express herself.  Predictably, Alister and Ada don’t enjoy a happy marriage and the piano is the catalyst for trouble.  It becomes the means by which Ada, unable to tolerate Alisdair’s sexual advances, instead discovers sensuality with a neighbouring settler, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), under the pretext of giving him piano lessons.

 

While Keitel’s character first seems weird and brutish, but gradually shows himself capable of tenderness and decency, Neill’s goes the other way – we initially have some sympathy for Alisdair, but he becomes a villain who propels the plot towards its climax of mutilation and attempted suicide (though, ultimately, it ends happily).  In his 2023 autobiography, Did I Ever Tell You This: A Memoir, Neill wrote of the film, “I don’t think I can overestimate how important The Piano is for me in hindsight.  It sits in my funny old CV like a medal on my chest.  It wasn’t my film.  It was Jane Campion’s.  I wasn’t the star of the film.  That was Holly Hunter.  But there is honour to be found in the second fiddle.  Or fourth.  No one notices you much, you don’t get nominated for things.  But you served.  I was there in an important feminist film.  I was there in the front line in an important New Zealand film.”

 

As many have noted, The Piano is an example of how Neill used his screen presence to generous effect.  He didn’t hog the limelight but gave his co-stars space to perform to their full potential.  This was especially so with his female co-stars.  While Neill reined himself in a little, they got the chance to bloom in their roles – not only Holly Hunter in The Piano, but Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), and reportedly – I’ve unfortunately never seen it – Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979).

 

In 1995, Neill worked with cult American director John Carpenter and made the horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which critics greeted unenthusiastically at the time but which, gradually, has been re-evaluated and is seen now as a misunderstood classic.  It features Neill as an insurance investigator called John Trent, who’s hired by a publishing company to track down its missing star author (Jurgen Prochnow).  The author’s name is Sutter Kane and though his initials, and massive sales, suggest he was inspired by Stephen King, his tales of cosmic horror and fearsome ancient beings called the ‘Old Ones’ indicate he’s based on the legendary Providence writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Trent’s investigations bring him into ever-stranger situations where he encounters characters and settings from Kane’s fiction.  It’s as if the writer is controlling what happens in reality – which is worrying, since his new novel concerns the end of the world.

 

© New Line Cinema

 

While I’m glad a movie involving Sam Neill, John Carpenter and H.P. Lovecraft has received some retrospective love, I’m afraid I agree with those unenthusiastic critics in 1995.  Like many of Carpenter’s later movies, there’s just too much going on in In the Mouth of Madness and you get the impression the director’s throwing everything at the wall in the hope some of it sticks.  That said, the movie has some memorable moments, such as a scene where Trent and a client discuss business in a restaurant, not noticing a mad axeman creating mayhem in the street outside their window.  Carpenter also stages a spooky sequence wherein a night-time cyclist keeps inexplicably reappearing in front of a cruising car – and keeps changing.

 

I prefer an earlier Neill-Carpenter collaboration, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), an adaptation of H.F. Saint’s 1987 novel of the same name, itself inspired by H.G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man (1897).  It’s a somewhat awkward film – the tension between the studio, Warner Bros, who wanted an out-and-out comedy, and the star, Chevy Chase, who wanted to show he could do ‘serious acting’, is palpable – but nonetheless I think it’s underrated.  I certainly enjoyed Memoirs of an Invisible Man more than director Carpenter did, who once said of it: “I really wanted to quit the business after that movie…  I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say there were personalities on that film.  He shall not be named who needs to be killed.  No, no, no, that’s terrible.  He needs to be set on fire…  No, no, no.  Anyway, it’s all fine.  I survived it.”  Presumably Carpenter was referring to Chase, who has a reputation for being, shall we say, difficult.  Even an invisible Chevy Chase was too much for him.

 

Carpenter certainly didn’t mean Neill, who played the film’s slightly James Mason-like villain.  “I love working with him,” the director said of Neill.  “He comes prepared.  He knows what he’s going to do.  He reacts to other actors who are there.  I mean, he’s just a dream come true.”

 

© Paramount Pictures / Golar Productions / Impact Pictures

 

Another horror movie Neill made in the 1990s, which initially got savaged by the critics but was retrospectively reassessed and lauded as a classic, is Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997).  Set in 2047, it’s about an experimental spaceship that’d disappeared during its maiden voyage inexplicably reappearing years later with no sign of its crew.  When a rescue mission, whose members include Neill, investigate, it becomes clear the ship’s hyperdrive system accidentally sent it into another dimension – a dimension known to religious folk as ‘hell’ – and back.  And it’s returned with something nasty on board.

 

Well, I’m sorry to be a misery-guts again, but I also agree with the 1997 reviews of Event Horizon and don’t see it as an unappreciated masterpiece.  It strikes me as a muddled mixture of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987), with that old chestnut of ‘characters being tormented by their innermost fears brought to life’ thrown in.  To be fair to Paul W. S. Anderson, the studio, Paramount Pictures, removed much footage from his original edit, believing it was too gory and horrific, and the finished product was not what he and scriptwriter Philip Eisner had envisioned.  Incidentally, as Neill’s character is Australian, he had him wear a uniform with an Australian flag-patch – but one where the Union-Jack part of it has been replaced by the Aboriginal flag.  Neill hoped that by 2047 a more tolerant, Pauline Hanson-free Australia would better honour its indigenous inhabitants.

 

By the start of the 21st century, and his sixth decade, Neill had become something of an institution and seemed the personification of the word ‘avuncular’.  A good example of this is in the Australian movie The Dish (2000), a gentle comedy in which he plays the boss of an Australian radio telescope that, in 1969, is landed with the job of relaying film-footage from the Apollo 11 moon-mission to the eagerly-awaiting world’s TV screens. This isn’t easy for Neill and his team as, first, they suffer a crippling power cut and then, on July 20th, the day of the landing, a violent storm threatens to blow their dish over.  Neill is reassuringly calm and reasonable throughout.  Thinking about the film now, I can’t recall any moment in it where he didn’t seem to be wearing a cardigan or puffing at a pipe.

 

© Madman Films / Piki Films / Defender Films

 

He’s somewhat less avuncular, but still loveable, in Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016).  He plays Hector, a grumpy old misfit who takes to the New Zealand mountains with his chubby, juvenile-delinquent foster-kid Ricky (Julian Dennison) when the latter panics about being returned to state care.  They soon have police, social services, vigilantes and the media after them.  Along the way they encounter hardship, killer wild boars and a literally tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic called Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby) but also form a genuine, father-son bond.  Director Taiki Waititi creates an affecting and funny movie but avoids easy laughs and cloying sentimentality.  Neill and Dennison’s characters take some hard knocks and their happy ending is hard won.

 

During the 21st century Neill also became a fixture on television – appearing in shows like The Tudors (2007), Crusoe (2008-9), Happy Town (2010), Alcatraz (2012), Peaky Blinders (2013-14), Old School (2014), Tutankhamun (2016), The Twelve (2022-25) and Apples Never Fall (2024) –  and on social media, where he regularly posted updates about Two Paddocks, his beloved farm and vineyard in New Zealand’s Central Otago wine region.  Famously, Neill named the animals on his farm after celebrities he knew in showbusiness, supposedly because it made him less inclined to eat them: “Well, you can’t eat a friend…  I’m not a vegetarian, but I have a ram called Jeff Goldblum.  You wouldn’t want to eat Jeff, would you?”

 

This led to some memorable moments as, for example, Neill posted, “MICHAEL FASSBENDER ASSAULTED!” – his rooster, named after Michael Fassbender, had had his tail-feathers torn out by a rogue dog.  Or a comment he made about Helena Bonham-Carter, one of his cows: “She’s had 16 calves now.  She’s up for it, if nothing else.”  Or a sad disclosure that Meryl Streep, a chicken, had been “…killed by a ferret recently.”  During Covid-19, his gentle and good-humoured updates about his farm and its whimsically-named inhabitants was an antidote to the stress and boredom of lockdown.  They certainly cheered me up more than, say , Gal Gadot and a bunch of her thespian pals crooning John Lennon’s Imagine on Instagram.

 

In a 2023 interview in the Guardian, Neill opined, “I’m not afraid to die but it would annoy me. Because I’d really like another decade or two, you know? We’ve built all these lovely terraces, we’ve got these olive trees and cypresses, and I want to be around to see it all mature. And I’ve got my lovely little grandchildren. I want to see them get big…  But as for the dying? I couldn’t care less.”  A lot of people would have loved to have got another decade or two of Sam Neill, and his acting talents, and his sense of fun.  But we should be grateful for what we did get.

 

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

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Uncle Sam (Part 1)

 

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.

 

© Gaumont Distribution

 

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…

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Favourite southern gothic movies (Part 1)

 

© Paul Gregory Productions / United Artists

 

The smash-hit movie Sinners (2025), which I wrote about recently, has got me thinking about other films that fall into the ‘southern-gothic’ category.  Southern gothic is a genre Wikipedia defines as a work “heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South”, commonly featuring “deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters sometimes having physical deformities or insanity; decayed or derelict settings and grotesque situations”; and ingredients like “poverty, alienation, crime, violence, forbidden sexuality, or hoodoo magic.”

 

So, here’s the first half-dozen entries in my list of favourite southern-gothic movies.  I should say I’ve left out ones that are just as classifiable as horror movies or lean heavily into the supernatural.  Otherwise, the list would be twice as long.  For that reason, there’s no Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Lucio Fulchi’s The Beyond (1981), Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) or Bill Paxton’s Frailty (2001).  I’ve even omitted Sinners, the movie that inspired this list in the first place.

 

Similarly, I’ve left out a couple of potential southern-gothic films that more comfortably exist as fantasies, for example, Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where art Thou? (2000), Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).

 

Anyway, boys and belles, let’s cut to the chase and wade into that cinematic bayou…

 

Swamp Water (1941)

A clean-cut, somewhat naïve young lad (Dana Andrews) goes looking for his lost dog in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp one day and discovers a dishevelled fugitive (Walter Brennan), who’s been hiding out in the wilderness since being accused of murdering a deputy.  Andrews forms a partnership with Brennan.  In the local town, he sells the hides of the animals Brennan hunts and traps in the swamp whilst also keeping a protective eye on the fugitive’s vulnerable daughter (Anne Baxter).  Later, Andrews learns that Brennan wasn’t responsible for the deputy’s death and the real killers – whose number include Ward Bond and John Carradine – decide to go gunning for Brennan and eliminate him before the truth comes out.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

The first American movie made by the great French director Jean Renoir, Swamp Water doesn’t frighten the horses too much and even has a happy ending.  But its setting, the murky, alligator-and-snake-ridden swamp, earns it its southern gothic spurs.  Walter Brennan, whom I knew and loved in my childhood as Stumpy, John Wayne’s gnarly old deputy in Howard Hawkes’ Rio Bravo (1959), is fine; though I find the hero played by Dana Andrews – later to star in Don Siegel’s masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – a bit of a simpleton and rather annoying.  Meanwhile, parts of this film seem to have inspired the 2012 movie Mud featuring, in the Brennan role, one Matthew McConnaughey.  Of whom we will hear more later…

 

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Based on the just-as-good 1953 novel by Davis Grubb and directed by legendary thespian Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter, more than any other film on this list, deserves the title ‘cinematic classic’.  The 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll in Sight and Sound magazine, for instance, ranked it at number 25.  Sadly, it was Laughton’s sole credit as director.  Despite its massive reputation later, the critics of the day couldn’t get their heads around it and slagged it off and the film was a flop, deterring him from directing again.

 

Night of the Hunter focuses on phony preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), really a murderer and crook.  During a sojourn in a West Virginia prison for stealing a car, Powell learns from a cellmate, who killed two men during a bank robbery and is awaiting execution, that the bank money he stole is hidden away somewhere in his household.  Once he’s a free man again, Powell proceeds to his late cellmate’s town, does his preacher act, ingratiates himself into the community, and ends up marrying the dead man’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters).  The key to finding the hidden loot, it transpires, is Willa’s young son John (William McClellan Chapin) and even younger daughter Pearl (Sarah Jane Bruce) – but John is instinctively distrustful of his new stepdad.  After Powell kills Willa, John escapes with Pearl and they take the money with them.  They find refuge in the home of a tough but kindly old woman called Rachel (Lillian Gish), and it’s Rachel who has to withstand both the charms and the wrath of Powell when he comes hunting the children.

 

Laughton imbues the film with a weird, off-kilter feel that’s almost fairy-tale-like at times.  This is most evident in the sequence where the kids escape from Powell in a rowing boat.  Powell’s ogre-ish silhouette appears above the nocturnal riverbank and comes loping down towards them.  They barely manage to get the boat into the river and Powell flounders in the mud behind them, emitting a bloodcurdling bellow of rage.  Then things get really phantasmagorical.  Little Pearl, oblivious to the danger she’s been in, sings a lullaby while their boat drifts beneath a hauntingly starry sky and past spider’s webs and croaking toads that loom spookily in the foreground.

 

© Paul Gregory Productions / United Artists

 

As Powell, Robert Mitchum is unforgettable.  He’s by turns magnetic, devious, deranged and, Terminator-style, terrifyingly unstoppable.  His warped charisma is best displayed in the famous scene where he explains why the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are tattooed on his knuckles.  (“H-A-T-E…  It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low…”)  Mitchum’s performance here is the standard against which all other cinematic southern-gothic villains get measured.

 

Incidentally, Shelley Winters didn’t have much luck as a single mom who re-marries a guy who proves to be a wrong ‘un.  A few years later, she was in Stanley Kubrick’s version of Lolita (1962), playing the title character’s hapless mother who weds James Mason’s Humbert Humbert.

 

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Robert Mulligan’s film, like the 1960 Harper Lee novel on which it’s based, is more a legal drama, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the evils of racism than it is a work of southern gothic.  But one character links it to the genre: the reclusive, rarely-seen Boo Radley who’s the subject of a thousand scary stories and rumours among the kids in the Alabama neighbourhood where To Kill a Mockingbird takes place.  Watching this film in my boyhood, I was scared shitless by the scene where the kids sneak onto Boo’s premises at night and, suddenly, his shadow rears up behind one of them.

 

Boo seemed so impressively scary that I was almost disappointed when the twist about his real nature came at the end, though obviously that twist is important for the story’s message about looking beyond appearances and trusting in human decency.  (The fact there was a 1990s indie rock band called the Boo Radleys, whose music I found lame, also lessened poor old Boo’s mystique for me.)

 

© Brentwood Productions / Universal Pictures

 

Now that I think about it, as a kid, I found the scene where the saintly but short-sighted Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) has to go out and shoot a rabid dog pretty frightening too.

 

Cape Fear (1962)

Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch may be the two most famous characters in southern-gothic movies.  Thus, Cape Fear is the King Kong vs. Godzilla of the genre in that it pitches Mitchum (again villainous) against Peck (again heroic).  This time, Mitchum plays ex-convict Max Cady, out of prison after eight years’ incarceration and possessed by hatred for Peck’s Sam Bowden, a respectable Georgia man who testified against him at his trial.  Cady gets revenge by waging an escalating war of nerves against Bowden, his wife and teenaged daughter.  The latter he identifies as a particular weak spot and soon he’s hinting disgustingly to Bowden about what he intends to do to her.

 

Mitchum’s Max Cady is a less complex villain than Harry Powell.  But with his hooded eyes, bemused expression, trashy sartorial style (safari jacket, Panama hat and cigar at all times), slurred but laconic voice, slow but relentless gait and general, oily smugness – leavened with bursts of psychotic violence – he’s as memorable.  Peck doesn’t have a lot to do apart from look harassed and, later, outraged as he discovers Cady has spent his prison-time studying law and knows exactly how to needle and threaten the Bowdens without crossing the line into illegality.  As Bowden’s exasperated police-chief buddy (Martin Balsam) tells him, “You show me a law that prevents crime.”  And when Cady’s actions do reach the point of homicidal criminality, he has the Bowdens cornered in an isolated houseboat at Cape Fear, the North Carolina headland that gives the film its title.

 

© Melville Productions / Universal-International

 

Cape Fear isn’t the work of art that Night of the Hunter was but, tensely directed by J. Lee Thompson, it’s lean, compelling and, for its time, nasty.  I prefer it to the 1991 remake helmed by Martin Scorsese, which has Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte playing Cady and Bowden respectively.  Scorsese’s version has many good features, including a great cast (also Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker and, wonderfully, Mitchum, Peck and Balsam in supporting roles) and a haunting opening-credits sequence by Elaine and Saul Bass.  But I find it too pumped-up – there’s predictably more bloodshed, sex, sleaze and histrionics.  Its ending is particularly over the top and De Niro, simply by being De Niro, brings too much baggage to the role of Cady.  For me, it’s one of Scorsese’s least interesting films.

 

Actually, Cape Fear was remade a second time in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, where Sideshow Bob conducts a very Cady-esque campaign of revenge against Bart Simpson.  And supposedly there’s a new TV show in the works called Cape Fear, to star Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson.   Guess who plays Max Cady and who plays Sam Bowden.

 

The Beguiled (1971)

I’ve seen The Beguiled, starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Eastwood’s frequent collaborator Don Siegel, described as a ‘horror western’.  But it’s set during the American Civil War, not out in the wild west, and it’s more broodingly gothic than scary.  It begins with Eastwood’s character, an injured Yankee soldier, arriving on the grounds of a boarding school in Louisiana.  The southern belles in the school – staff and pupils are all female – decide to hand him over to the Confederates, though not before he’s recovered a bit and is less likely to die in the Confederates’ grim prison-camp.

 

However, sneaky Clint soon starts flirting with, wooing and manipulating the ladies around him: a middle-aged headmistress tormented by a guilty secret (Geraldine Page), her gawky, virginal second-in-command (Elizabeth Hartmann), a loyal black maid (Mae Mercer), the regulation school hussy (Jo Ann Harris) and the eccentric twelve-year-old who first discovered him (Pamelyn Ferdin).  But his schemes backfire.  By meddling with the repressed emotions of his rescuers / captors, he suffers unpleasant consequences.  The womenfolk amputating his leg in an amateur surgical operation is just the start of it.

 

Wonderfully atmospheric, The Beguiled is a reminder that Eastwood deserves respect for refusing to play it safe, in his westerns at least, with his popular, macho cinematic persona.  As well as the duplicitous prat he plays here, he’s played ones who are barely-reformed alcoholic murderers (1991’s The Unforgiven) or, basically, ghosts (1973’s High Plains Drifter and 1985’s Pale Rider).  Meanwhile, in 2017, Sofia Coppola directed a remake of The Beguiled, with Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, which was also atmospheric and well-acted.  But I found it so similar to the Eastwood / Siegel movie I wondered what the point of it was.

 

© The Malpaso Company / Universal Pictures

 

Deliverance (1972)

Yes, I know…  Duelling banjos…  “Squeal like a pig…”  John Boorman’s Deliverance, the story of four Atlanta businessmen (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) whose canoe trip down a remote north Georgian river goes horribly awry when they have a run-in with the locals, has been referenced and parodied in countless other movies and TV shows.  As a result, it’s now difficult to appreciate what a punch to the solar plexus the film felt like when it first appeared.  I remember seeing it on TV for the first time when I was 11 or 12 – an age when, really, I shouldn’t have been watching it – and being utterly disturbed by it.

 

What you expect to be a straightforward, good-guys-versus-bad-guys adventure in the wilderness is something much more complicated.  The gorgeous landscapes are juxtaposed with a brooding, then claustrophobic, finally suffocating atmosphere of dread.  It’s also disconcerting how Deliverance coldly disregards cinematic notions of heroism and masculinity.  The ‘city boys’, exemplified by would-be macho, would-be outdoors man Lewis (Reynolds), think they can handle the natural environment here.  In a conventional film of the time, they probably would handle it, eventually.  But in Deliverance, they find themselves hopelessly out of their depth when confronted by the products of the environment they’re traversing, mountain men formed – or malformed – by its harshness.  Meanwhile, poor old Bobby (Beatty) gets his notions of masculinity overturned, hideously, in the film’s most notorious scene.

 

Ironically, the modern civilization the four men represent is hellbent on destroying the place they’re vacationing in, for the river is about to be dammed – the water stored and electricity generated will no doubt be channelled to some faraway city.  As Lewis says, “Do know what’s gonna be here?  Right here?  A lake.  As far as the eyes can see. Hundreds of feet deep.  Hundreds of feet deep.”

 

It wasn’t the ‘squeal like a pig’ scene that upset me most when I first saw Deliverance in my boyhood.  Possibly I was too young then to fully understand what was going on.  No, it was the bit near the end where Ed (Voigt) has a nightmare about the river, now a lake, and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water.  The image of that emerging hand creeped me out for weeks afterwards.

 

And that’s the first half of my list.  More southern-gothic goodness will appear on this blog shortly.

 

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.