One Million Years BC – Blood and Porridge

June 14, 2023July 18, 2023

Jurassic snark

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

As yet another grim reminder that time stops for no man or woman, and that I’m gradually de-evolving into a doddery, senile old git, I’ve just read in a newspaper that it is now, exactly, thirty years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the epic monster movie about dinosaurs being cloned from ancient bits of DNA to be put on display in a lavish theme park. It was based on a novel, published three years earlier, by Michael Crichton, and of course it led to a franchise of sequels and reboots that, despite being increasingly lame, generated billions of box-office dollars.

Wow! Thirty years? Was the original Jurassic Park movie really that long ago?

Anyway, readers, brace yourselves for a big shock. I thought the 1993 movie was pretty lame itself. Although a lot of people nowadays view the original Jurassic Park as a classic – here’s a hot-off-the-presses feature at the BBC website’s ‘Culture’ section praising it for how it ‘made scary movies accessible for young children’; and here’s another feature at the Guardian praising it for its prescient warnings about ‘self-styled geniuses’ who exploit new technology for their aggrandisement without thinking through the potential consequences – I found it a big let-down.

This was because I made the mistake of reading Crichton’s Jurassic Park-the-book before I went to see Spielberg’s Jurassic–Park-the-movie, and I felt miffed when what’d I’d visualised in my head during the book failed to materialise on the cinema screen. And before you read further, here’s a spoiler alert. This entry will give away a lot about the plots of both the book and the film.

Three decades ago, I certainly had high hopes for the film. Firstly, with Spielberg at the helm and a ton of Hollywood money behind it, Jurassic Park looked like being a very rare beast, a dinosaur movie with proper dinosaurs in it. I’ve always loved the idea of dinosaur movies, but apart from those ones where the prehistoric beasties were powered by stop-motion animation – like the silent-movie version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) and the original King Kong (1933), whose dinosaurs were animated by Willis O’Brien, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), whose special effects were the work of the late, great Ray Harryhausen – dinosaur movies before 1993 had contained dinosaurs that looked, frankly, rubbish.

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

I’m thinking of ones where the dinosaurs were plainly stuntmen lumbering about in rubbery dinosaur suits, like The Land Unknown (1957). Or magnified glove puppets, like The Land that Time Forgot (1974). Or unfortunate modern-day lizards who’d also been magnified and had had fake spikes, horns and fins glued onto them to make them look big and fierce. The worst offender in that last category is surely Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 remake of The Lost World, during which Claude Rains exclaimed at the sight of one supposed sauropod: “It’s a mighty brontosaurus!” While I was watching the film on TV, at the age of ten, I yelled back: “No, it’s not! It’s just a stupid iguana!”

The big-budget Jurassic Park was going to employ all the latest advances in animatronics and computer-generated imagery to get its dinosaurs right, so I wouldn’t have to worry about having my intelligence insulted by the spectacle of men in monster suits and overblown puppets and lizards.

Secondly, there was a buzz about Jurassic Park because it was rumoured that, for the first time in yonks, Spielberg was going to do something dark. He’d spent the past dozen years making movies with unbearably-high schmaltz levels: movies about cute aliens phoning home (1982’s ET), and ghostly pilots moping about their still-alive girlfriends (1989’s Always), and Robin Williams turning out to be Peter Pan (1991’s Hook). Once upon a time, though, he’d directed punchy, at times nightmarish films like Duel (1972) and Jaws (1975). Prior to Jurassic Park’s release, I was told by more than one film magazine to expect Spielberg to be back to his old schmaltz-free best. Supposedly, Jurassic Park was going to be like Jaws on dry land.

As for Michael Crichton’s original novel – well, it would never be mistaken for great literature but, reading it, I did think that with cutting-edge special effects and a skilful director it could make a hell of a movie. Many of its scenes seemed intensely cinematic. Actually, this wasn’t a surprise because Crichton himself had made films. Most notably, he’d wrote and directed 1973’s Westworld, which is about a futuristic theme park that allows its visitors to enact their most homicidal fantasies in mock-ups of the American Wild West, medieval Europe and Roman-era Pompeii. These are populated by scores of human-like robots whom it’s okay to shoot or hack or stab to death because they can’t actually die. Of course, a glitch in the system eventually compels the robots to start fighting back and then it’s the holiday-makers who get slaughtered. Westworld, in fact, is a prototype for Jurassic Park, with the same theme-park setting but with robots instead of dinosaurs as the exhibits-that-turn-nasty.

From wikipedia.org / © Jon Chase, Harvard News Office

I knew Crichton’s novel would get trimmed as it was turned into a film, but I was dismayed at how much of it was trimmed. While Jaws shed a few gratuitous sub-plots that’d made its source novel, the 1974 bestseller by Peter Benchley, seem flabby, and it was a lean, muscular movie as a result, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was pared to the bone. In its final reel the park’s pack of deadly velociraptors have escaped from their compound, the surviving humans are running around trying to avoid being eaten by them, and that’s about it. The velociraptors rampage through the book’s final chapters too, but there are other matters adding to the suspense. It becomes clear that some velociraptors have managed to board the supply-ship that services the island where the park is located, and there’s a real danger that they’ll reach the American mainland and become an ultra-lethal invasive species. The humans are also on a desperate quest to count the hatched eggs in the velociraptors’ nests, so that they can calculate just how many of the scaly killers are on the loose.

Also simplified are the fates of the characters. The main characters, palaeontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and the billionaire mastermind behind the park, John Hammond, don’t all make it to the end of the book. Malcolm expires from injuries sustained from a dinosaur attack while Hammond dies after he hears the roar of a tyrannosaurus rex, panics and falls down a hillside. (Ironically, the roar comes from the park’s PA system – Hammond’s two young grandchildren have been mucking around in a control room with some dinosaur recordings.) Meanwhile, certain secondary characters, like the park’s lawyer Gennaro and its game warden Muldoon, survive the dino-carnage. Gennaro is even allowed to show a degree of courage, which is unusual for a fictional corporate lawyer.

In the movie, though, Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Hammond are played by big-name stars – Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and veteran British actor / director Sir Richard Attenborough – who clearly had it in their contracts that none of them would suffer the indignity of being eaten by a dinosaur. So, they all survive. But because this is a monster movie, which demands that monsters eat people at regular intervals, the supporting characters are gradually bumped off, including Gennaro and Muldoon. This makes the plot very predictable. Interestingly, one supporting character who got killed in the book but made it out of the movie alive is the geneticist Henry Wu. Played by B.D. Wong, he’s ironically become the character with the most appearances in the Jurassic Park franchise – Wu’s now turned up in four of the movies.

Meanwhile, the casting of Attenborough symptomizes one of the film’s worst features. The cuddly, twinkly Attenborough, who one year later would play Santa Claus in a remake of Miracle on 34^th Street, is way nicer than the John Hammond of the book, who’s a callous, conniving and delusional arsehole. He should have been played by Christopher Lee or Donald Pleasence.

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Spielberg couldn’t bring himself to be nasty to Hammond, whom he probably regarded as a kindred spirit. Hammond at his dinosaur theme park, like Spielberg in Hollywood, is merely trying to wow the masses by giving them spectacles they haven’t seen before. How could he be bad? Thus, we get a maudlin scene where Hammond explains his motives to Dern’s character by reminiscing about his first venture in the entertainment business – a flea circus. (Attenborough also gives Hammond the worst Scottish accent in movie history, so he tells Dern how he brought his wee flea circus “doon sooth frae Scotland” to London.) Look how big the fleas are in his circus now, Spielberg seems to tell us. What a visionary!

The softening of Hammond’s character infects the rest of the film. Though some of the velociraptor and tyrannosaurus-rex scenes are scary, it’s all a bit too feel-good. Spielberg wants us to be awed by the dinosaurs, not shit ourselves at them. John Williams’ musical score adds to the problem – his Jurassic Park theme, according to Billboard magazine, oozes with ‘astonishment, joy and wonder’; but since this is supposedly a sci-fi horror movie, shouldn’t it be oozing with some old-fashioned fear too?

But my biggest frustration about the film was that while Spielberg portrays Hammond as being like Walt Disney, the park isn’t like Disneyland – and it ought to be. In the novel Crichton wonderfully juxtaposes the primeval and the high-tech. There might be hordes of monstrous reptiles from earth’s distant past stumping around the wilds of Hammond’s island, but at the same time the place bristles with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras and is honeycombed with service tunnels crammed full of power-cables. At its centre is Hammond’s console-packed control room where he squats like a space-age spider in a technological web. The joy of the book is watching all this technology slowly, gradually start to malfunction and break down – until finally it’s useless. And meanwhile, the prehistoric stars of the show are clawing at the scenery, hungry to get at the humans who’ve been pulling the levers behind it.

You don’t really get this impression in the film. Attenborough’s control room looks a bit dingy, like he’s set it up in his garden shed. And the dinosaurs just seem to be out in big fields with big fences around them – nothing in the background but foliage, nothing underneath but soil. This Jurassic Park is more like Jurassic Farm.

No, while I sat through Jurassic Park in a cinema 22 years ago, I didn’t feel like I was watching a classic. The main thing I felt was a huge sense of disappointment – crushing me as effectively as if one of the behemoths onscreen had suddenly stepped out into the auditorium and trod on me. For the authentic Jurassic Park thrill-ride, check out Crichton’s book.

© Alfred A. Knopf

May 31, 2023July 18, 2023

When novelists and films collide

From Wikipedia / © Antonio Monda

May 19^th saw the death of Martin Amis, reckoned by some to be the greatest British novelist of his generation. I have to say that’s not an opinion I shared, although I liked his 1984 novel Money and some of the stories in his 1987 collection Einstein’s Monsters. Anyway, one thing I noticed about the lengthy obituaries of Amis I read after his passing – none of them mentioned the fact that he wrote the script for 1980’s science-fiction movie Saturn 3. This features a saucy robot, programmed with the libido of Harvey Keitel, pursuing Farah Fawcett around a base on one of Saturn’s moons. Why the omission? No doubt Amis’s obituarists declined to mention it out of respect. Saturn 3 was an embarrassment and Amis surely left it off his CV.

However, Amis and Saturn 3 do highlight how, over the decades, well-respected authors have been involved with the film industry – a world less interested in creative endeavour and excellence and more interested in giving the public what it wants, putting bums on seats and making a fast buck – and the results have frequently not been pretty.

Here are a few of my favourite examples of novelists and filmmakers colliding and the movies birthed by those collisions being, let’s say, memorable for the wrong reasons.

© Amicus Productions

John Brunner and The Terrornauts (1967)

The science-fiction author John Brunner was highly regarded in his day and won both the Hugo and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards for his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar. Also, his 1979 novel The Jagged Orbit netted another BSFA award and his pessimistic and prescient 1972 novel, The Sheep Look Up, about extreme pollution and environmental disaster, was much admired too. Though he’s not so well-remembered now, the BBC website did devote a feature to him in its Culture section a few years back.

Perplexingly, the only film script Brunner ever wrote was for the ultra-low-budget British sci-fi movie The Terrornauts (1967), which is about some astronomers contacting the remnants of an alien civilisation stowed away on an asteroid, being abducted and taken to that asteroid, and eventually having to fight off an invasion fleet that’s heading towards earth. Brunner’s script was based on a book called The Wailing Asteroid (1960) by another sci-fi writer, Murray Leinster. I saw The Terrornauts on late-night TV when I was 11 and even at that young age thought it was dreadful, with its poverty-row special effects, its cardboard sets, and the thuddingly incongruous presence of comedy actors Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes, inserted into the proceedings for alleged ‘comic relief’. Still, The Terrornauts was so terrible that it burned itself into my memory and I’ve never been able to forget the bloody thing since. For the filmmakers, I guess that was some sort of achievement.

Chief among those filmmakers was producer Milton Subotsky, who ran Amicus Productions with Max J. Rosenberg during the 1960s and 1970s and was better known for making horror movies. I read an interview with Brunner once and he confessed to writing The Terrornauts as a favour to Subotsky, who was a friend of his. Subotsky and Rosenberg, incidentally, had form in getting literary folk to pen their screenplays. They drew at various times on Robert Bloch, Margaret Drabble, Harold Pinter and Clive James, the latter for a film that never got off the drawing board. And for their 1974 lost world / dinosaur epic The Land That Time Forgot, they hired another esteemed science-fiction writer, Michael Moorcock. The low-budget dinosaurs in The Land That Time Forgot are rubbery and a bit laughable by today’s standards, but Moorcock was gracious enough to describe the film as ‘a workmanlike piece of crap.’

And speaking of dinosaurs…

© Hammer Films

J.G. Ballard and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969)

Ballard is one of my all-time favourite writers. While a few filmmakers have come close to successfully translating his disturbing, dystopian and hallucinogenic literary visions into celluloid, such as David Cronenberg did with Crash (1996) and Ben Wheatley with High–Rise (2015), the pulpy When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was, weirdly, the only film that Ballard himself scripted. This was a sequel by Hammer Films – like Subotsky and Rosenberg’s Amicus, a British company best known for making horror movies – to its 1965 epic One Million Years BC, featuring Raquel Welch as a fur-bikini-clad cavewoman and with splendid stop-motion-animation dinosaurs courtesy of special-effects genius Ray Harryhausen.

While One Million Years BC is a movie to watch and enjoy with your brain set at low gear, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth is one where you need to switch your brain off altogether. Aside from the obvious scientific absurdity of human beings and dinosaurs being shown to exist at the same time, when they’d really missed each other by 65 million years, the film ends with a natural cataclysm so violent that part of the earth breaks off and creates the moon. But somehow, its main characters survive the carnage. The dinosaurs this time were animated by Jim Danforth and, though not up to Harryhausen’s standard, they’re good fun.

How, you wonder, did Ballard get emmeshed in such hokum? In his 2008 autobiography Miracles of Life, he gives an amusing account of meeting Hammer producers Aida Young and Tony Hinds when they were trying to brainstorm ideas for the film. The meeting had not gone well, but then Ballard rather desperately suggested that the big cataclysm at the end contain not a tidal wave crashing in, but one surging out from the shoreline. This would reveal “’…All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology… There was silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door… ‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’”

© Rothernorth Films / Redemption Films

Fay Weldon and Killer’s Moon (1978)

Here’s the most mind-boggling collaboration on this list. On one hand, we have the feminist author Fay Weldon, who in works like The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) strove to “write about and give a voice to women who are often overlooked or not featured in the media.” On the other, we have Alan Birkinshaw’s bonkers, grubby, low-budget horror effort Killer’s Moon, which seems the last thing Weldon would get involved with. Yet, uncredited, she rewrote the film’s dialogue.

Killer’s Moon has a quartet of escaped lunatics (wearing bowler hats like the Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange) stalking the Lake District and terrorising some teenaged girls on a school trip whose coach has broken down. The loonies’ psychiatric treatment has included being dosed with LSD and now, mistakenly, they believe themselves to be dreaming. This makes them think they’re free to indulge without any repercussions in their darkest fantasies, which consist of rape, murder and animal mutilation. But don’t worry, animal-lovers. The dog that loses a limb early on, and spends the rest of the film hobbling about on three legs, was three-legged in real life. According to Killer’s Moon’s Wikipedia entry, she “was originally a pub dog who had lost a leg as the result of a shotgun wound sustained during an armed robbery. She was later awarded the doggy Victoria Cross award for bravery.”

Weldon’s involvement was for a familial reason. Director Birkinshaw was none other than her brother. She grumbled that by working on Killer’s Moon, she’d turned it into a ‘cult film’, but that’s exaggerating things a bit. Seen in 2023, Killer’s Moon is no cult film. It’s still daft, badly-made tat, and the bits of it that once seemed shocking just seem funny today.

© ITC Entertainment

Martin Amis and Saturn 3 (1980)

And now the movie that inspired this entry, the dire Saturn 3. Amis’s script was based on a story by John Barry – not the composer most famous for his work on the James Bond films, but John Barry the set designer on Star Wars (1977), who died of meningitis the year before Saturn 3 was released. Horror writer Stephen Gallagher was assigned the job of writing Saturn 3’s tie-in novelisation and once said of it: “The script was terrible. I thought it was bad then but in retrospect, and with experience, I can see how truly inept it was.” Gallagher added that this may not have been Amis’s fault and the script could have fallen victim to the film industry’s penchant for endless re-writing. He heard later that “every script-doctor in town had taken an uncredited swing at it, so it’s impossible to say if it was stillborn or had been gangbanged to death.”

Supposedly, Amis based some of his novel Money on his experiences with Saturn 3. It’s even said that one of Money’s characters, the ageing movie star Lorne Guyland, who’s convinced of his enduring youth and virility and isn’t afraid to disrobe and flaunt his body in an effort to prove it, was inspired by Saturn 3’s star Kirk Douglas. Years later, Amis remarked: “When actors get old they get obsessed with wanting to be nude… And Kirk wanted to be naked.”

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

Norman Mailer and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)

Three years after the publication of his crime-noir pastiche Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Norman Mailer got the chance to turn the book into a film starring Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Lawrence Tierney and Wings Hauser. The venerable American novelist was both co-scripter and director. I wrote extensively about Tough Guys Don’t Dance-the-movie a couple of months ago, so I won’t repeat here too much of what I said. It was, I wrote, “a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness”, where the cast visibly struggle “as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness. At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, ‘make out five times a night. That’s why I call him Mr Five.’ Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument. ‘I made you come 16 times – in a night.’ ‘And none of them was any good!’”

And of course, there’s the scene where hero Ryan O’Neal “finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – ‘Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!’ – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.”

© Scott Free Productions / 20^th Century Fox

Cormac McCarthy and The Counselor (2013)

Also not having much success with sexy dialogue was legendary American author Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the script for the Ridley Scott-directed movie The Counselor. At one point in The Counselor, we get an auto-erotic scene – that’s ‘auto’ as in ‘involving automobiles’ – where Cameron Diaz makes out with Javier Bardem’s sports car. While grinding against the windscreen on her way to a climax, and flashing a certain part of her anatomy at Bardem on the other side of the glass, he likens the sight to “one of those catfish things, one of the bottom-feeders you see go up the side of the fish tank.”

Most critics panned The Counselor, presumably because they’d hoped that it would combine the intensity of McCarthy’s celebrated ultra-violent Western novel Blood Meridan (1985) with the intensity of Scott’s darkly-perverse space-horror movie Alien (1980). What they got, though, was a bewildering crime thriller about drug cartels that, to quote Mark Kermode in the Observer, “gets an A-list cast to recite B-movie dialogue with C-minus results.”

Michel Houellebecq and the KIRAC arthouse porn movie (2023)

Many writers have turned up in films as actors, usually in supporting or cameo roles – Maya Angelou, William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Salman Rushdie and, indeed, Norman Mailer and Martin Amis (who as a blond 13-year-old starred in 1965’s A High Wind in Jamaica). I doubt, though, if any of these have generated as much noise as French author Michel Houellebecq’s recent, er, performance in a film production from radical Dutch art collective KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics). I haven’t managed to find the title of the film — which sounds like it belongs to the ‘arthouse porn’ category — in the news reports about it.

Houellebecq, it transpires, agreed to be filmed having sex in the movie and signed a waiver saying that the only restriction on his participation was that his face and his ‘block and tackle’ didn’t appear together in the same shot. KIRAC didn’t even extend an invitation to him originally. It was Qianyun Lysis, Houellebecq’s better half, who suggested they use her husband – and no, it’s not her, but another woman who appears in bed with Houellebecq in the film. Now anyone who’s read his sex-filled and provocative novels, such as Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001), would assume this sort of thing is right up Houellebecq’s street. However, he lost his enthusiasm for the project after a few days of filming (and after the deed had been captured on camera). He then denounced the production and has since been trying, and failing, to stop KIRAC releasing the film in France and Netherlands.

If I was crass and prurient, I would roll my eyes at this and give a little cry of “Oh là là!” But I’m not. So, I won’t.

© From Wikipedia / © Fronteiras do Pensamento

February 21, 2023February 21, 2023

When Raquel ruled

© 20^th Century Fox

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

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

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

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

© 20^th Century Fox

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

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

One Million Years BC (1966)

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

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts

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

Bedazzled (1967)

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

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

© 20^th Century Fox

Bandolero (1968)

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

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

Hannie Caulder (1971)

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

© Tigon Films / Paramount Pictures

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

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

The Three / Four Musketeers (1973-74)

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

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

© 20^th Century Fox

February 4, 2022February 15, 2022

Branagh’s Belfast

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Kenneth Branagh has seemed the embodiment of classical, theatrical Englishness for a long time – at least since his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V, in which he raged “Cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’” Meanwhile, over the years, I’ve enjoyed shocking people by pointing out to them that Branagh isn’t actually English. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1960. He and his family left there for England in 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles. He ended up in Berkshire, where he dropped his Belfast accent and ‘acquired received pronunciation to avoid bullying.’ Thus began the plummy-voiced Branagh we know today.

In fact, Branagh’s early life wasn’t dissimilar to mine, for I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland until the age of 11, when my family moved to the town of Peebles, in the Borders region of Scotland. I was a couple of years older than Branagh was at the time of moving and couldn’t shed my accent so easily – not that I needed to, because although my new classmates in Peebles sometimes took the piss out of the way I spoke, I was never bullied. Come to think of it, acquiring ‘received pronunciation to avoid bullying’ probably wouldn’t have been a good policy at Peebles High School. Folk would have picked on you more for sounding like a posh tosser.

Before Branagh made a name for himself as the star, director and adaptor of Henry V, I’d known of his Northern Irish connections because I’d seen him appear in a quartet of TV plays written by the Northern Irish dramatist Graham Reid. These were Too Late to Talk to Billy (1982), A Matter of Choice for Billy (1983), A Coming to Terms for Billy (1984) and Lorna (1987), and were about the tribulations of a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, the Martins. The Martins’ problems aren’t caused by the Troubles but by their own flawed, damaged and abrasive personalities. The widowed father Norman (James Ellis) is an unrepentant hard man, incapable of showing his gentler feelings, while his eldest child and only son Billy (Branagh) is embittered about how Norman treated his late mother. It’s left to the eldest daughter, the mild-mannered Lorna (Brid Brennan), to act as a surrogate mother to the family’s younger children. During the plays, unexpected things happen – Norman mellows under the influence of a woman he forms a relationship with while working in England, Lorna develops some unexpected steel and Billy, dismayingly, begins to show some of the worst traits of his dad. In the four plays Branagh had no problem readopting his old Belfast accent, so I was surprised when a few years later I went to the cinema and heard him speaking fluent Shakespeare in Henry V.

Branagh has revisited his Belfast roots with his latest movie Belfast, which was released in the USA last year and has just been released in Britain. Inspired by Branagh’s experiences during the late 1960s, it tells the story of another working-class Protestant family, one less dysfunctional than the Martins in the Billy plays: a couple simply entitled ‘Ma’ (Catriona Balfe) and ‘Pa’ (Jamie Dornan), and their older son Will (Lewis McAskie) and younger son Buddy (Jude Hill). Pa spends his working life in England and is considering moving his family over to live with him, something that doesn’t appeal to Ma and the boys. “I know nothing else but Belfast,” she protests. For one thing, they have strong family ties in the city, most notably Pa’s parents, the droll Pop (Ciaran Hines) and stern but kindly Granny (Judi Dench). Then the Troubles erupt and Protestant paramilitaries led by local thug Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) chase the Catholic families out of their neighbourhood. As the paramilitaries’ grip on the area tightens, Pa falls foul of Clanton and it becomes clear that, like it or not, his family will have to leave too.

© Northern Ireland Screen / Focus Features / Universal Pictures

This basic plot could have made Belfast a grim film, but it’s a funny, good-natured one because these events are seen through the eyes of little Buddy. They have to compete for attention with all the things that matter to a normal nine-year-old boy – things ranging from pursuing your first love to getting initiated into the local kids’ gang, from making trips to the cinema to bonding with your granddad.

Belfast left me with mixed emotions. On one hand, I found it annoyingly overstated in places. On the other, I generally found it rather moving. I’ll explain my conflicting reactions in detail, starting with the negative ones.

I have to admit that until now Henry V is the only film by Branagh that I’ve enjoyed. I wasn’t impressed by his later adaptations of Shakespeare, like Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and I hated his version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). They seemed shrill and over-the-top in both their acting and their visuals. Originally, I thought this was because Branagh didn’t have confidence in the original texts by Shakespeare and Shelley to capture the attention of modern film audiences. He felt obliged to make them as bombastic as possible, pumping them up with the cinematic equivalent of steroids – operatic performances, hammy humour, fast-moving camerawork and so on. Nowadays, though, I just think the problem is that Branagh, basically, is a theatrical man. When you’re on a stage, performing for a live audience, everything has to be big – the voice projection, the gestures, the general drama – in order to be seen and heard. But what’s effective from a distant stage often seems unsubtle when it’s projected in fine detail onto a large movie screen. And that’s the impression I sometimes got with Belfast.

In its plot machinations, visuals and soundtrack, there are some broad brushstrokes indeed. You get heavy-handed pieces of comedy, such as when Buddy cheats at his homework in order to get placed at the desk beside the girl he fancies at school – their teacher positions the pupils from the front to the back of the classroom according to how good or bad their marks are, and Buddy’s sweetheart, the brightest kid in class, is right at the front. (From a teaching point of view, wouldn’t it be sensible to have the less able kids at the front, so you can keep a close eye on them, and the smart ones at the back?)

Meanwhile, Branagh shoots the film in black and white but inserts colour at certain moments. These are when Buddy’s family go to the cinema. Although the auditorium is filmed in monochrome, what’s happening on the screen – action from Hammer’s One Million Years BC (1966) and the movie version of Roald Dahl’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) – appears in its original, glorious technicolour. As a metaphor for how the cinema transports Buddy out of his black-and-white everyday existence and into the colourful dreamworld of the movies, this is pretty clunking.

By far the worst offender, though, is a scene where Pa confronts Billy Clanton on a street. Clanton is holding his family at gunpoint and there’s a squad of British Army soldiers looking on, pointing weapons at everybody. I know we’re meant to be viewing this through Buddy’s eyes. But still, it seems crass and cheesy that at this deadly-serious moment Tex Ritter starts singing Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling from the classic 1952 western High Noon – which Buddy has recently watched on TV – on the soundtrack. Billy Clanton, incidentally, was the name of one of the villainous Clanton Gang who took on the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday during the gunfight at the OK Corral, another touch that’s a bit too obvious.

All that aside, however, I have to say I enjoyed Belfast. It’s nice to see a film about Northern Ireland that isn’t primarily about terrorism, extreme religion or extreme politics, and that focuses on believable, relatable people who are just trying to get on with their lives. It also contains a lot of humour, something that’s usually in short supply in movies about Northern Ireland, even though I remember knowing many funny, witty characters when I lived there. (Ciaran Hines’ genial, good-hearted Pop, who manages to be on Buddy’s wavelength without ever patronising him, initially seemed too good to be true – but again, I realised, I’d known several old guys like him during my childhood.)

Branagh conveys the idea that, as a kid in Northern Ireland, the popular culture of the time enthused you just as it enthused kids in more ‘normal’ societies, and influenced you as much as (if not more than) the riots and bombings that were happening not far from your doorstep. Thus, we see Buddy dressing up like a cast-member of Thunderbirds (1965-66), watching Star Trek (1966-69), playing with Subbuteo and James Bond toy cars, and reading the Marvel comic The Mighty Thor, which allows Branagh to sneakily reference the 2011 movie Thor, which he directed. (I don’t know how easy it was to access Marvel comics in Belfast in 1969, especially as Marvel’s British subsidiary Marvel UK didn’t begin operating until 1972. Still, I remember finding an American edition of The Avengers in Enniskillen in the early 1970s, so I guess it was possible.)

If there’s one thing I find unconvincing about the characters, it’s that the tribal symbols that existed in Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities, even in 1969 before the Troubles hardened people’s senses of identity, are absent. There’s little said or shown about being British or Irish, about Union Jacks or tricolours, about the Orange Order or Gaelic Athletics Association. Actually, at a few points Buddy’s relatives describe themselves as ‘Irish’ (“The Irish were born for leaving – otherwise, the rest of the world would have no pubs…” “All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a Guinness and the sheet music to Danny Boy…”), although I expect most Belfast Protestants would call themselves ‘British’. Compare this with a scene in Graham Reid’s A Coming to Terms for Billy when Norman Martin’s two youngest daughters discuss, unenthusiastically, the prospect of their dad taking them to England. When one points out how disliked the Irish are in England, the other retorts, “We’re not Irish. We’re Protestants!”

Still, Belfast definitely shows that Branagh’s heart is in the right place even if, occasionally, his plotting and filmmaking instincts aren’t. The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous and his use of classic Van Morrison songs on the soundtrack – Warm Love, Jackie Wilson Said, Bright Side of the Road, Days Like This, Carrickfergus and, inevitably at the end, The Healing has Begun – is a reminder that however much Van the Man has degenerated these days into a curmudgeonly, whinging old fart who’d pick a fight with his own shadow, he did, once upon a time, record some wonderful music.

And, ultimately, Branagh shows that despite the terrible things that have gone on there, Northern Ireland is a place that exerts a powerful hold on your affections. This is illustrated in the scene where Ma and Pa break the news to Buddy that they’re all going to leave Belfast and move to England. Poor Buddy promptly bursts into tears.

I remember when my mother took me aside in 1976 and told me that we were going to move to Scotland. I reacted in exactly the same way.

June 29, 2020July 21, 2020

A happy one hundredth to Harryhausen

From facebook.com

I’ve just discovered that today would have been the 100^th birthday of filmmaking and special effects titan Ray Harryhausen. Without the presence of Harryhausen’s movies in my childhood, I suspect I would have developed into a very different, though possibly much more normal, human being. Anyway, to mark the great man’s centenary, here’s what I wrote about him on the sad occasion of his death, back in March 2013.

This week saw the passing of the movie special-effects veteran Ray Harryhausen. Younger filmmakers have been swift to pay tribute to Harryhausen, as they should do – the likes of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi, Tim Burton, Nick Park and Terry Gilliam owe him a huge debt in terms of inspiration.

Ray Harryhausen wasn’t just a special-effects technician – he was a special-effects titan, a man who turned the process of stop-motion animation into an art-form and became arguably the greatest backroom wizard in cinematic history. Harryhausen discovered his vocation when, as a kid in 1933, he was taken to a screening of King Kong. Obsessed with the movie, the young Harryhausen learned how the special-effects man and stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien had used small, intricately-jointed models of Kong to bring the ape to life. Slowly, methodically, incredibly painstakingly, O’Brien made slight adjustments to those models in between shooting them one frame of film at a time. The result of these countless tiny adjustments was that when the footage was played back you had Kong moving onscreen with life-like fluidity.

Harryhausen was soon making his own stop-motion models and eventually he became apprenticed to O’Brien. Before they won an Oscar for 1949’s Mighty Joe Young – a sort of King Kong-lite, about a giant gorilla who instead of swatting biplanes at the top of the Empire State Building rescues children from burning orphanages – O’Brien advised Harryhausen to work on giving his creations characters, not just mechanical movement. He even suggested that the the budding animator go and study anatomy.

Harryhausen took O’Brien’s advice and he strove to invest his animated figures with soul. As a consequence, in this modern era of CGI-drenched fantasy movies, critics commonly complain that today’s computer-generated monsters ‘lack the personality’ of Harryhausen’s creatures. At the news of Harryhausen’s death, the author and critic Kim Newman tweeted: “It now takes 500 pixel-wranglers to do what Ray Harryhausen did better singled-handed.”

My childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s coincided with the final decade of Harryhausen’s film-work – Golden Voyage of Sinbad appeared in cinemas in 1973, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger in 1977 and Clash of the Titans in 1981. Such was the success of Golden Voyage of Sinbad that his original Sinbad movie, 1958’s Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, was subsequently re-released, so I saw that on a big screen too. Meanwhile, Harryhausen’s earlier movies from the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1952), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The First Men in the Moon (1964), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), had become fixtures on TV.

For some annoying reason, ITV insisted on showing many of these films on weekday afternoons, so that they started while kids like myself were still at school. I remember on one occasion I lied to my teacher so that I could get out of school early, run back to my house and catch the beginning of Jason and the Argonauts at half-past-two.

Though I liked monster movies, I quickly became critical of how their special effects were done. I hated films where the giant creatures were clearly men in suits, stomping on model cities composed of shoebox-sized buildings, as was the case with the Japanese Godzilla movies. I was also unimpressed by dinosaurs that were glove-puppets (see 1974’s The Land that Time Forgot) or magnified real-life lizards (as in 1960’s dreadful remake of The Lost World – “It’s a mighty tyrannosaurus!” cast-members would cry at the sight of something that was obviously a blown-up iguana with additional warts and frills glued onto it.)

But Harryhausen’s creatures were different. Their shapes were uniquely monstrous, so that they couldn’t have special-effects men operating them from the inside, and they moved with a strange, graceful autonomy. Furthermore, his dinosaurs were recognisable dinosaurs – brontosaurs, allosaurs, triceratopses – which was important when you were ten years old.

The movies were sometimes less-than-great in other departments. Most notoriously, One Million Years BC, which Harryhausen made for Hammer Films, wasn’t scripted with much attention to paleontological science. It had Raquel Welch and other Playboy Bunny-like cavewomen in fur bikinis living alongside dinosaurs in the Calabrian Stage of the Pleistocene Epoch. Nonetheless, Harryhausen’s work elevated such films into the realms of low art.

Harryhausen came to Edinburgh a dozen years ago and gave a talk at the (now closed) Lumiere Cinema at the back of the National Museum of Scotland. Recently, a literary magazine called the Eildon Tree had published a story of mine that was about growing up in a small town in the 1970s and being dependent on the local fleapit cinema for escape into more exciting and more glamorous worlds. Because of the story’s theme and setting, Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies got mentioned in it a few times. So not only did I attend Harryhausen’s talk, but I brought along a copy of the magazine in case he was doing a signing session afterwards.

Although he was over 80 years old by then, Harryhausen was sharp-witted and good-humoured and he remained in good form despite some stupid questions from the audience. (“Why didn’t you make a movie about the Loch Ness Monster?”) The next day, Peter Jackson was flying him to New Zealand so that he could visit the set of the first Lord of the Rings movie, which was maybe why he was so jovial. There were a lot of kids present and they were entranced by the jointed monster-models from various films that he’d brought with him.

Afterwards, a long queue of people assembled before Harryhausen’s podium with movie memorabilia for him to sign. He observed drily that much of that memorabilia consisted of posters for One Million Years BC, in which Raquel Welch was displayed prominently in her fur bikini – so much for stop-motion animation. Finally, it was my turn. I handed over my copy of the Eildon Tree, open at the page where my story started, and asked if he could autograph it.

“It’s something I’ve had published,” I explained. “It name-checks your Sinbad movies.”

Harryhausen looked at me, chuckled and said, “You know, son, you look a bit like Sinbad yourself!”

That didn’t just make my day – it made my month.

Anyway, to finish, here are my five all-time-favourite Ray Harryhausen monsters.

The Cyclops in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

With its single eye, horn, squashed nose and fang-filled maw, the Cyclops in Harryhausen’s original Sinbad movie was a Satanic-looking thing. During the scene where he lashed one of Sinbad’s crew to a spit and started to roast him over a fire, I seem to remember him licking his lips with hungry anticipation. So evil did the Cyclops seem, in fact, that my ten-year-old self was quite pleased when Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews) finally thrust a flaming torch into his eye and blinded him, and then the bastard plunged over a cliff edge to his death.

Talos in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Everybody raves about the fight with the skeletons at this film’s climax, which is indeed spectacular. But it’s the earlier episode on the Isle of Bronze where the massive statue of Talos comes to life and goes lumbering after the crew of the Argo that’s my favourite part of the film. In particular, the moment where Talos awakens is wonderful. Hercules stands with the supposedly lifeless and inanimate Talos looming high in the background – but suddenly Talos’s head creaks around to look at him. It’s the stuff that childhood nightmares are made of. But I mean that in a good way.

Gwangi in The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

“Not as good as The Valley of Gwangi,” was my disappointed reaction after watching Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993. The earlier film, which has cowboys discovering a lost valley in Mexico where prehistoric life has somehow survived to the present day, was originally an unrealised project by Harryhausen’s mentor Willis O’Brien. The scene where the cowboys, on horseback, manage to lasso an allosaurus — the Gwangi of the title — is a brilliant cinematic moment that’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Kali in Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

The second of the Sinbad movies has John Philip Law in the title role. He’s up against a villainous sorcerer, played by Tom Baker, who was subsequently picked to play Doctor Who on the strength of his performance here. Baker’s villain, like Harryhausen himself, specialises in bringing inanimate objects to life. In the film’s best scene, he animates a statue of the many-armed Hindu Goddess Kali, equips her with half-a-dozen swords and sends her into battle with Sinbad and his men like a giant, whirling lawnmower of death.

Medusa in Clash of the Titans (1981)

Clash of the Titans was Harryhausen’s final film and also one of his most underrated. Indeed, I’ve read that the hostile reviews given to Clash were one reason why he decided to retire at this time. (“An unbearable bore of a film,” bitched Variety, “that will probably put to sleep the few adults stuck taking the kids to it.”) Actually, in the years since, it’s become one of his best-remembered pictures and a little while ago it was remade, though inevitably with loads of crap CGI. Its highlight is the scene where Perseus blunders into Medusa’s darkened lair, which is grotesquely populated by the figures of her turned-to-stone victims, and tries to outwit the serpent-haired, serpent-tailed and asthmatic-sounding monster. And with that memorably scary sequence, the great Ray Harryhausen bowed out of film-making.