Robert DeNiro – Blood and Porridge

June 23, 2025June 23, 2025

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.

© 20^th 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.

June 30, 2024July 7, 2024

One Donald I’m sad to see go

© Avala Film / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

It’s often said you don’t appreciate the value of something until after it’s gone. I felt like that last week on hearing of the death of the great Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. If someone had asked me to list my all-time favourite actors, I wouldn’t have thought of including Sutherland. Yet when he passed away at the age of 88 – having kept working in film and TV until last year – it suddenly struck me how much I was going to miss him.

Sutherland was an actor who could inhabit a range of personalities and project many different moods and emotions, yet whom you always recognised as, basically, himself. His characters might be heroic, dignified, fatherly, tragic, eccentric, sinister, venal, slow-witted, juvenile, gormless or demented – yet you always knew you were watching Donald Sutherland. Whoever he played, he retained that unique quality of Donald Sutherland-ness.

Born in St John, New Brunswick, Sutherland graduated from Victoria University with an interesting-sounding degree in Engineering and Drama, then relocated to Britain in 1957 and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. A few years later, he found his way into Europe’s then-flourishing horror-movie industry. He appeared in the monochrome Italian-French chiller Castle of the Living Dead (1964), starring Christopher Lee, directed by Warren Kiefer, and with a 20-year-old Michael Reeves, who four years later would make 1968’s masterly Witchfinder General, working as assistant director. No doubt for budgetary reasons, Sutherland was cast in three roles, most amusingly in drag, as a witch. He played a good-natured simpleton in Hammer Films’ Fanatic (1965), a blend of the low-key psychological thrillers the studio made when it wasn’t cranking out full-blooded gothic-horror melodramas and the fashionable 1960s sub-genre of ‘hagsploitation’ – the hag here being a dangerous religious nutcase played by Tallulah Bankhead. If the cast wasn’t interesting enough with Sutherland and Bankhead, it also included Stephanie Powers, Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan, future stars of TV shows Hart to Hart (1979-84), George and Mildred (1976-79) and Porridge (1974-77) respectively.

© Amicus Productions / Paramount Pictures

The best remembered of Sutherland’s early horror films is Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), directed by Freddie Francis and produced by Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg – the first of seven anthology horror movies that Subotsky and Rosenberg’s British-based Amicus Productions would specialise in. To be honest, I don’t think the film’s five stories are up to much, but the framing device, wherein five night-time travellers find themselves sharing a train compartment with the mysterious Dr Shreck (Peter Cushing), who uses Tarot cards to foretell each man’s future, is wonderfully atmospheric. Dr Terror also has a fascinating cast. In addition to Sutherland and Cushing, there’s Christopher Lee (again) and another horror-movie veteran, Michael Gough; trumpeter, tap-dancer and TV presenter Roy Castle; disc jockey Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman; and the original M from the James Bond films, Bernard Lee. Sutherland’s segment even has a fleeting appearance by his fellow Canadian Al Mulock, who along with Woody Strode and Jack Elam was gunned down by Charles Bronson in the astonishing opening sequence of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

Sutherland also featured in 1960s British TV, most memorably in 1967 when he played a villain in an episode of the surreal and stylish espionage series The Avengers (1961-69) called The Superlative Seven. This has Patrick Macnee’s debonair John Steed being invited to a bizarre fancy-dress party on board a private jet plane, which, after it takes off, is discovered to be remote-controlled. Eventually, the plane lands Steed and the other, equally-baffled guests on a seemingly deserted island. There, the party start to be murdered one by one. As well as riffing on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), the episode has a science-fictional sub-plot where Sutherland attempts to create a race of super-soldiers. And the guest cast includes Charlotte Rampling and Brian Blessed before they became famous too.

That same year, Sutherland turned up in Robert Aldrich’s loud, raucous and violent war movie The Dirty Dozen, about 12 convicts trained by the US Army and sent to France on a suicide mission against the Wehrmacht prior to the D-Day Landings The movie contained so many famous actors playing characters who weren’t among the 12 convicts – Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker and Robert Ryan – that, over the years, folk have become confused about who actually played the Dirty Dozen. I’ve even heard a few people declare that, with Sutherland dead, that’s all the Dozen gone. Well, no – because actors Stuart Cooper and Colin Maitland, who played two more of the Dozen, are still on the go.

© Kenneth Hyman Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The Dirty Dozen’s success led to Sutherland being cast in more World War II movies. Most notable of these was 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, in which Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly, a soldier in an American platoon in 1944 France, learns there’s a fortune in Nazi gold stashed in a bank behind enemy lines and persuades his fellow soldiers, including Sutherland and Telly Savalas, to help him steal it. Sutherland’s character is a loopy tank commander called Oddball who, with a blatant disregard for historical authenticity, was added to the script to satirise the then-ubiquitous hippy movement. He says spaced-out things like, “Don’t hit me with those negative waves so early in the morning!” or, “Woof, woof, woof! That’s my other dog imitation.” I suspect that for people my age – well, males my age – in the UK, Oddball is the character we’ll remember Sutherland best as, because British TV seemed to show Kelly’s Heroes every other week when we were kids.

Sutherland was also in 1976’s The Eagle Has Landed, playing an IRA man who aids some German commandoes, headed by that well-known German, Michael Caine, on a mission in England to assassinate Winston Churchill. Of Sutherland’s performance, the best that can said is that there are non-Irish actors who’ve played Irishmen with worse Irish accents.

Another war movie was M*A*S*H (1970), Robert Altman’s scabrous black comedy set during the 1950s conflict in Korea, in which Sutherland played insolent and rebellious US Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, was the third-most popular movie of its year and gave Sutherland iconic status. I have to say that, though I like Robert Altman’s movies generally, M*A*S*H has not aged well. Today, much of its humour feels juvenile and mean-spirited, especially when directed towards Sally Kellerman’s Major Houlihan character, rather than ‘anti-establishment’, which it was hailed as at the time. Altman famously loathed the M*A*S*H TV show that was spun off from his movie and ran from 1972 to 1983, but I suspect time has been kinder to its gentler brand of humour.

© Casey Productions / Eldorado Productions / British Lion Films

Afterwards, Sutherland was in prestigious films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Fellini’s Casanova (1975) and Bernard Bertolucci’s 1900 (1975) – none of which I’ve seen. But it’s in Nicolas Roeg’s masterly horror film Don’t Look Now (1973) that, of his movies I have seen, I believe he does his best work. Don’t Look Now is an adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier story in which a grief-stricken couple try to get over the death of their daughter by immersing themselves in a restoration project in Venice – only to be haunted by sightings of a small figure in a red coat who at least resembles their deceased daughter. The film has two set-pieces at its beginning and end whose emotional impact has rarely been matched in the horror genre – Sutherland features heavily in both. Films about the supernatural, despite focusing on death, memories of the departed and the possibility of an afterlife, don’t usually capture the feeling of grief that well. But the pained, brittle performances by Sutherland and his co-star Julie Christie convey it with extreme poignancy. With their performances augmented by Nicolas Roeg’s camerawork, visual imagery and memorably-elliptical approach to storytelling, Don’t Look Now is a film for the ages.

Though for me Don’t Look Now gives Sutherland his best role, it’s Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) that gives him his best image. This is Hollywood’s second adaptation of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (1955), wherein a low-key invasion of earth is staged by alien pod-people who gradually replace all the real people. The image in question, now a popular meme, comes in the final moments when Sutherland, the film’s hero, reacts to another character by pointing at her, adopting a grotesque, gawking expression and emitting an inhuman squeal. This tells us the pod-people have now replaced him too. The original Body Snatchers movie, made by Don Siegel in 1956, was set in small-town America, but Kaufman’s version audaciously shifts the action to San Francisco, and the result is just as good. Actually, I was going to say filmmakers have treated Finney’s novel well, for in 1993 Abel Ferrara directed another version that was decent too. But then I remembered there was a fourth version made in 2007 with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and it was rubbish.

© Solofilm / United Artists

As he grew older, Sutherland’s work in films and television inevitably saw him shift from being a leading man to being a grizzled character actor and then an esteemed ‘elder-statesman’ guest-star. His movies included star-laden Oscar-bait (1980’s Ordinary People), daft Alistair Maclean adaptations (1979’s Bear Island), slightly less daft Ken Follett adaptations (1981’s Eye of the Needle), overripe John Grisham adaptations (1996’s A Time to Kill), overstuffed British flops (1985’s Revolution), Sylvester Stallone movies (1989’s Lock Up), Clint Eastwood movies (2000’s Space Cowboys), paranoid Oliver Stone conspiracy thrillers (1991’s JFK), preposterous Roland Emmerich disaster movies (2022’s Moonfall) and Emma Thompson-scripted Jane Austen costume-dramas (2005’s Pride and Prejudice).

He made three films with his son Kiefer – who, when I first saw him onscreen in the 1980s, made me think, “Wow, he looks just like his dad!” – the afore-mentioned A Time to Kill, plus 1983’s Max Dugan Returns and 2015’s Forsaken. And he featured in four Hunger Games movies (2012-15), playing Snow, the despot running the future North American territory of Panem. I haven’t seen any of the Hunger Games series, but a future dystopian America ruled by a president called Donald sounds terrifyingly prescient.

Ironically, in the 1990s, Sutherland returned to his 1960s roots and started making horror movies again. He was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), a clodhopping film that a few years later led to a sublime TV show; 1994’s The Puppet Masters, based on a short story by Robert Heinlein, which was a low-budget but not unenjoyable retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; 1998’s police-occult thriller Fallen, in which he rubbed shoulders with Denzel Washington and John Goodman; and 1999’s Virus, an Alien rip-off set on board a ship, in which Sutherland’s over-the-top villain is one of the few redeeming features – his old seadog is so sea-doggish he only lacks a pegleg and a parrot on his shoulder. Horror-adjacent is his role as Ronald Bartel in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991). He’s an incarcerated pyromaniac whom William Baldwin and Robert De Niro’s firemen-investigators turn to for help when they’re trying to catch the person responsible for a series of deadly, fiery arson attacks. Thus, he’s the Hannibal Lector of the fire-raising world.

However, while I write this, the Donald Sutherland performance that keeps coming to mind – accompanied by the lovely, plaintive song that accompanies it – is the one he essayed in the video for Kate Bush’s single Cloudbusting (1985). He’s a kindly inventor who creates a rainmaking machine, only to be taken away by some sinister men in suits, who obviously believe there are things man was not meant to know. This rather vitiates the song’s optimistic lyric, “Ooh, I just know that something good is gonna happen…” It’s left for Sutherland’s son, played by Bush, to complete his work. I visited the video on YouTube the other day and was touched to discover how the comments below were packed with people paying tribute to Sutherland.

© EMI

May 23, 2024May 23, 2024

The jolly films of Roger (Part 2)

© American International Pictures

Following on from my last blog-post, in which I paid tribute to the prolific, indefatigable and – it has to be said – thrifty filmmaker Roger Corman who died on May 9th, here’s a round-up of my favourite films that Corman directed.

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Character actor Dick Miller worked regularly with Roger Corman. His biggest role for him was in a movie that’s also Corman’s best work of the 1950s, the horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood. Miller plays a would-be avant-garde sculptor called Walter Paisley who’s increasingly frustrated at his lack of talent. This isn’t helped by the fact that, to make ends meet, he has to work as a busboy at the local Beatnik café, which is full of pretentious tossers going on about what creative geniuses they are. “Be a nose! Be a nose!” the hapless Paisley cries as he tries and fails to fashion a recognisable human visage out of a lump of clay. After accidentally killing his landlady’s cat and then killing an undercover cop who’s trying to implicate him in some drug-dealing at the café (Paisley memorably cleaves his head with a skillet), he hits on a way of producing perfectly proportioned statues: committing murder and coating the bodies in clay. Frankly, the resulting corpse-statues look hideous, but that doesn’t stop the Beatniks at the café proclaiming Paisley an artistic genius.

Their lack of taste in sculpture mirrors their lack of taste in poetry. At the beginning we hear Beatnik bard Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton) delivering an epic, and epicly bad, poem called Life is a Bum, which goes: “Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art… The Artist is, all others are not… Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, Jerk? Dead, dead, dead! They were not born before they were born, they were not born… Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive, alive, alive! They were born…!”

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

The Raven (1963)

As a kid, I loved this movie, the fifth of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American International Pictures. The tale of a trio of feuding magicians played by Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, it’s more fantasy than horror – but spiced with delightfully ghoulish moments, such as when a torturer checks the temperature of a red-hot poker by pressing it into his own arm, or when Price opens a little casket and is discombobulated to find it full of human eyeballs. (“I’d rather not say,” he croaks when Lorre asks him what’s inside.) It’s like a version of Walt Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) for morbid children.

Needless to say, the film’s connection with Edgar Allan Poe is extremely loose. In fact, it’s only Karloff turning Lorre into a raven twice during the film that allows Corman to tack the title of Poe’s most famous poem onto it and have Price recite the poem mellifluously during its opening scene. Meanwhile, in the role of Lorre’s son, we get a 26-year-old and amusingly wooden Jack Nicholson.

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

A non-gothic movie Corman made whilst in the middle of his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the usual visual spectrum perceptible to humans.

I wrote about this movie last year in a post about its scriptwriter, Ray Russell. “Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distance edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.”

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Corman’s majestic adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, scripted by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell (with a second Poe story, Hop Frog, stitched into the plot for good measure) and beautifully shot by the great Nicolas Roeg, showcases Vincent Price at his sumptuously evil best. He’s Prince Prospero, who’s holed up in his castle with an entourage of loathsome aristocrats while a plague, the Red Death, decimates the countryside outside. Price and friends happily live a life of decadence, fuelled by drink, drugs, sex and diabolism – rather like Boris Johnson and his lackeys and minions partying at No 10, Downing Street, during Covid-19 and breaking all their own lockdown restrictions – while refusing to help the neighbourhood’s terrified peasants. However, when they decide to enliven their social calendar with a fancy-dress masque, the masque is gate-crashed by a mysterious, Ingmar Bergman-esque figure swathed in a red robe. Guess who that is.

© Alta Vista Productions / Anglo-Amalgamated / Warner Pathé

Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Made the same year as Masque, Corman’s Ligeia has Price in a more sympathetic role, playing a haunted and reclusive man who tries to put his troubles behind him and find happiness with a new wife (Elizabeth Shepherd). Unfortunately, his former wife, though dead, is still around in spirit form and won’t leave him in peace. Tomb of Ligeia has a slightly over-the-top ending, but the build-up to it, involving black cats, flag-stoned passageways, cobwebs, candlelight, hypnosis, Egyptology and some spectacular monasterial ruins filmed at Castle Acre Priory near Swaffham in England’s County Suffolk, is spookily wonderful.

The Wild Angels (1966)

“Just what is it that you want to do…?” “Well, we wanna be free, we wanna to be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do…. We’re gonna have a good time, we’re gonna have a party!”

Scottish alternative rock / dance band Primal Scream immortalised this exchange from Corman’s The Wild Angels, between Frank Maxwell’s preacher and Peter Fonda’s Hells Angel, by sampling it on their 1990 dancefloor hit Loaded. Though to be fair, the American grunge band Mudhoney got there first when they sampled it on their song In and Out of Grace two years earlier. It’s also recited at the climax of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s underrated sci-fi / horror satire from 2013, during the face-off between Simon Pegg and a supercilious alien intelligence voiced by Bill Nighy.

In addition to Fonda, The Wild Angels features Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd – supposedly Dern and Ladd’s daughter Laura was conceived during filming, so Laura Dern is something else we have Roger Corman to thank for – and the baby-faced Michael J. Pollard shortly before he played W.C. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The script, officially written by long-term Corman associate Charles B. Griffith and unofficially rewritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is minimalist. While there’s stuff about Fonda’s Hells Angels chapter pursuing a stolen bike, and about Dern’s character being shot by the cops and having to be rescued from a hospital, it’s mainly a frame for scenes in which the Angels offend Middle America. Corman did his research by throwing parties with free beer and marijuana for real Hells Angels. He had Griffith attend them and make notes while those Angels recounted their wild (and no doubt exaggerated) tales of life on the road.

© American International Pictures

At least Griffith and Bogdanovich don’t pull their punches. In the script, the Angels come across as pretty assholey, particularly with their love for Nazi symbols and memorabilia. This causes a confrontation between them and a World-War-II veteran (Dick Miller again) early in the movie. When Dern’s character dies and they organise a funeral for him – predictably, the church service degenerates into an orgy – the coffin is draped in a Nazi flag. The real Hells Angels, some of whom had appeared in the film, were so annoyed by Corman’s portrayal of them that they threatened to both kill him and sue him (presumably not in that order). If that wasn’t enough, Corman had Frank ‘Dodgy Connections’ Sinatra breathing down his neck, concerned about daughter Nancy’s safety among the Angels on the set. Actually, the story of an exploitation director making a biker movie who unwittingly antagonises the Hells Angels and the Mafia sounds like it would make a good exploitation movie.

The Trip (1967)

Corman, Fonda and Dern were united for this movie, scripted by one Jack Nicholson. Yes, it’s about a trip, a hallucinogenic one, experienced by a TV commercial director played by Fonda, wearing a sensible red V-necked sweater. He takes LSD as a reaction to the break-up of his marriage and the trip initially happens at the home of, and under the watchful eye of, a friend played by Dern, wearing a sensible eggshell-blue polo-neck and fawn jacket. These scenes were filmed in the house of Albert Lee, leader of the rock band Love. The cost-conscious Corman was surely pleased to discover that Lee’s house had so much psychedelic décor already it hardly needed to be dressed up for the film. However, when Fonda hallucinates that he’s killed Dern – he hasn’t – he panics and flees down to Sunset Strip. Then things really get groovy.

Seen today, The Trip is inevitably something of a museum piece and the low budget means some of its fantasy scenes are ropey. Bits where Fonda, now wearing a baggy white shirt like a romantic poet, is pursued by medieval, cloaked-and-cowled figures on horseback through what is obviously modern-day California are particularly cringey. But there are enough genuinely weird things – Fonda having a question-and-answer session with Dennis Hopper on a carousel, Fonda making love to a lady under some heavily patterned lighting that makes them look like psychedelically-coloured chameleons, Fonda having a panic attack inside Dern’s wardrobe – to make it memorable. And if you enjoy a good 1960s-movie psych-out sequence, the one where the heavily-tripping Fonda blunders into a night club during a live rock performance is awesome.

© American International Pictures

Bloody Mama (1970)

Like The Wild Angels, this Corman movie isn’t so much a story as a series of outrages, with reprobates lurching from one confrontation to another. Unlike The Wild Angels, the characters in Bloody Mama are based, very loosely, on historical figures – Depression-era America’s notorious Barker-Karpis Gang, supposedly led by matriarch Kate ‘Ma’ Barker. Many have argued that Ma Barker’s reputation as a criminal mastermind was invented by the media and by J. Edgar Hoover, keen to justify the FBI killing an old woman when they finally caught up with her and shot her. As the fictionalised Ma Barker, lording it over her four gormless gangster sons, Shelley Winters gives a scenery-chomping performance that dominates the film and blinds you to its various budgetary and exploitative shortcomings. God-fearing, gun-toting, racist, incestuous and psychotic, she seems a monstrous metaphor for America itself. This is underlined when she herds her sons around the piano to sing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Among the sons, Don Stroud gets most to do as Ma’s eldest, Herman. He’s a hulking thug to begin with but, in some unexpected character development, gradually forms a mind of his own. Film buffs, though, will be more excited by the presence of a young Robert De Niro, playing well-medicated son Lloyd. At one point he gets high on glue, causing an uncomprehending Winters to exclaim, “When you’re working on those model airplanes, you get to acting awful silly!”

Incidentally, Bloody Mama was such a money spinner for American International Pictures that they demanded another Depression-era gangster movie. Corman, though, was willing only to produce the follow-up, Boxcar Bertha (1972), and a young lad called Martin Scorsese got the directing gig.

When I first started writing this tribute to Roger Corman, I was going to title it THE MAN WHO ROGERED HOLLYWOOD, though I soon decided that sounded disrespectful. But Corman literally did roger Hollywood. Without his opportunities and tutelage, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, Nicholson, etc., might never have got to where they did, and many landmark movies during the last half-century of Hollywood’s history – from the Godfather movies to the Scorsese-De Niro collaborations, from the Terminator and Avatar series to a host of classic films including Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1989), Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1993) and Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential (1997) – might not have seen the light of day. And many of his own movies, cheap though they were, were a great deal of fun. No wonder Quentin Tarantino loved him.

Not bad for the guy who directed It Conquered the World (1956) and produced Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010).

December 25, 2022December 26, 2022

The alternative Christmas movie list

The cinema at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum is currently showing a season of Christmas-themed films so a few days ago my partner and I visited it to catch a showing of John McTiernan’s action classic Die Hard (1987). My partner hadn’t seen it before and I’d only seen it on a small screen back in the prehistoric days of Betamax video cassettes.

I know every festive season an argument erupts on social media about whether Die Hard is or isn’t a Christmas movie, but seeing it again in 2022 I have to say it seems very Christmassy, much more than I remembered. It’s got Christmas trees, Christmas decorations, Christmas presents, Christmas carols and Christmas Santa hats – one gets planted cheekily on the corpse of a dead terrorist which Bruce Willis’s John McClane sends down in a lift to taunt the remaining bad guys. There’s also a limousine stereo playing Run DMC’s Christmas in Hollis (1987) – ”Don’t you have any Christmas music?” McClane grumbles from the back seat. And Die Hard has Alan Rickman as the villainous and sublimely withering Hans Gruber, who’s a sort of anti-Santa Claus. Gruber’s intonation is priceless as he reads the message McClane has written in blood on the dead terrorist’s chest: “Now I have a machine gun. Ho… ho… ho.”

However, I tend not to be aficionado of Christmas movies, for two reasons. Firstly, the way that Christmas is presented in these movies has never corresponded to Christmas as I know it. For example, as a kid, when I heard Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas in the 1954 film of the same name and then looked out of my window in Scotland at the late-December weather, what I saw wasn’t Bing’s white, fluffy snow-scape. What I saw was usually a charcoal-grey sky, leaking charcoal-grey rain down onto a charcoal-grey terrain.

Secondly, Christmas movies are, nearly without exception, rubbish. Most of them eschew anything resembling quality and dial the schmaltz and saccharine up to 11 and assume that’ll satisfy audiences instead – which unfortunately, in many cases, it does. The biggest offender in my opinion is Richard Curtis’s Love, Actually (2003), which I prefer to think of as Shite, Actually. That thing wouldn’t have got anywhere near being a good film even if they’d rewritten the Alan Rickman character and allowed him to start killing people.

Still, there’s a small handful of what are officially deemed ‘Christmas movies’ that I like. Die Hard is one and others include The Snowman (1982), Gremlins (1986), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Rare Exports (2010) and The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) – any film that has Gonzo the Great playing Charles Dickens is fine by me.

There’s also a number of movies that aren’t officially counted as Christmas movies, even though they take place during the festive season, that I like too. No doubt they aren’t included in the accepted Christmas canon because they’re dark in tone and don’t conform to the Richard Curtis Law of Christmas-Movie Pap and Sentimentality. Anyway, it’s in honour of those non-conforming films that I offer the following – my list of favourite alternative Christmas movies.

Brazil (1985)

Terry Gilliam’s take on George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) has so much going on thematically and visually that it’s easy to forget it’s set at Christmas-time. But while we try to get our heads around the workings of the dystopian society depicted in Brazil – where labyrinthine bureaucratic systems and labyrinthine plumbing systems go wrong with equal regularity, one with deadly results and the other with disgustingly gloopy ones – we’re assailed by Yuletide trappings: Christmas parties, presents, trees, music. There’s a family reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) – just before a terrifying squad of secret-police goons come crashing into their home, wrongly sent by a bureaucratic mistake involving a fly getting stuck inside a typewriter. There are Christmas-decorated department stores that become hellholes – even more hellish than normal at this time of year – when terrorist bombs explode.

On a more symbolic level, the fate that befalls Robert DeNiro’s Harry Tuttle character – surreally engulfed in a mass of paper – suggests the horror of frantic, last-minute Christmas present-wrapping, when you begin to fear the unruly, recalcitrant paper is going to swallow you up. And, late on, when Brazil’s everyman hero Sam (Jonathan Pryce) is imprisoned and facing torture, he gets a visit from Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), a senior official in the Ministry of Information, who ironically shows up wearing a Santa Claus outfit. This underlines the fact that, like many an authoritarian, Helpmann believes he’s being benevolent towards his subjects, though in reality he’s anything but.

Rabid (1977)

As you might expect, Christmas with Canadian director David Cronenberg is not exactly cosy. Set during the festive season in and around Montreal, Cronenberg’s Rabid tells the tale of a woman (Marilyn Chambers) developing a weird, parasitic skin-puncturing / blood-draining orifice under her armpit following some experimental surgery. She soon becomes a plague-spreader – her new body part infecting people who turn into ravening, blood-craving monsters. One negative thing I always felt about Christmas was the sense of confinement – being stuck indoors because the weather was foul and because there was nothing to do outside anyway due to everything being closed. Rabid conveys a similar feeling by showing Montreal under martial law, its wintry streets silent save for the trucks prowling around removing corpses from the sidewalks. Though a more obvious Christmassy moment is when carnage erupts in a shopping mall and the cops unwittingly gun down the store Santa Claus.

The Silent Partner (1978)

You have to hand it to those Canadians – back in the 1970s, at least, they knew how to stage a dark Christmas movie. Daryl Duke’s The Silent Partner (1978) is an excellent thriller, often amusing but with a few moments of nasty violence to keep the audience on edge. Its villain is the psychotic but intelligent criminal Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer). Reikle becomes a formidable opponent for – and, as the film progresses, the title’s sinister ‘silent partner’ to – the film’s hero, Miles Cullen (Elliot Gould), a mild-mannered teller working in the Toronto bank that Reikle decides to rob. As it’s Christmas time, and the shopping mall where the bank’s located is overflowing with festive cheer, Reikle carries out the crime disguised as a mall Santa Claus. However, he meets his match in Miles. After Reikle botches the robbery, Miles uses it as an opportunity to fill his own pockets with the supposedly ‘stolen’ money. Reikle is predictably disgruntled by this and a game of cat-and-mouse ensues between them.

The Silent Partner later moves its action to a different time of year, but not before we see Miles at that traditional festive fixture, the staff Christmas party, where he has to listen to his weary, cynical workmates speculating longingly about what they’d do with the stolen money if they had it. His colleagues include a very young John Candy, sporting an alarming 1970s side-parted hairdo.

Cash on Demand (1961)

While we’re on the subject of movies about bank workers finding themselves in unhappy alliances with bank robbers, let’s mention the superlative Hammer Films B-movie Cash on Demand, directed by Quentin Lawrence, with Peter Cushing – better known for appearing in the studio’s horror films – as a snotty, uptight bank manager called Fordyce, who’s forced to help a criminal, Hepburn (Andre Morell), intent on robbing his bank. Unlike The Silent Partner, Cash on Demand doesn’t show any violence but a lot of nastiness is implied, with Hepburn matter-of-factly informing Fordyce that he’s kidnapped his family and is going to start torturing them with electrical shocks if he doesn’t cooperate.

And, like The Silent Partner, the attempted robbery in Cash on Demand takes place during Christmas, with a Salvation Army band playing carols outside Fordyce’s bank. Indeed, there’s a Scrooge / Christmas Carol subtext to the plot. Fordyce begins the film as an insufferable prick, contemptuous of his workers, who are more interested in their upcoming Christmas do than the day’s toil at their desks. However, by the ordeal’s end – and after his staff have come to his rescue – Fordyce is a much more appreciative soul, not just of his family but of the people who work for him.

Tales from the Crypt (1972)

Cushing also appears in the cast of the British horror anthology movie Tales from the Crypt, along with such notables as Sir Ralph Richardson, Ian Hendry and Patrick Magee. Its first episode, All through the House, has the future Alexis Colby and all-round super-diva Joan Collins murdering her wealthy husband on Christmas Eve. Just before she can make the murder – bashing his head in with a poker while he was reading a newspaper, smoking a cigar and wearing a Santa hat – look like an accident – falling down the cellar stairs – fate intervenes in the form of an escaped homicidal maniac who’s prowling outside and is dressed as Santa Claus. We spend the story waiting to hear why he’s dressed as Santa Claus, but we never do – he just is. In the climactic scene, Ms Collins gets her just desserts by being strangled by the maniac. Actually, it looks like he’s just giving her a shoulder massage, but it’s still good, grisly, Yuletide fun.

Deep Red (1976)

Dario Argento’s ultra-stylish giallo movie Deep Red (Italian title Profondo Rosso) has David Hemmings investigating a string of gruesome murders around Turin. It’s only tenuously a Christmas movie – the opening scene involves a child witnessing a murder next to a Christmas tree – but generally, in its dark way, the film feels Christmasy. It’s due in part to the richness of Argento’s visuals and in part to the Christmas-like music by Argento’s frequent collaborators, German progressive-rock band Goblin, which alternates between a baroque organ-driven theme and a plaintive child’s refrain. Meanwhile, the cackling clockwork puppet that makes a brief but unforgettable appearance is the sort of Christmas present you’d give to a child you really don’t like.

The Proposition (2005)

What does this Nick Cave-scripted, John Hillcoat-directed Australian western have to do with Christmas? Well, the movie’s finale is a masterpiece of festive-season irony. It has a beleaguered police captain and his wife, played by Ray Winstone and Emily Watson, prepare for their Christmas dinner – turkey, sprouts, pudding et al – with civilised English decorum in the midst of the festering, dusty, fly-ridden hellhole that was the 1880s Australian Outback. There’s also a gang of vengeful, blood-crazed bushrangers on their way intending to kill Winstone and rape Watson, even while Winstone and Watson arrange the Christmas cutlery and crackers on their dining table.

Australians I know have described the weirdness of trying to celebrate a European-style Christmas against the backdrop of Australia’s sweltering December climate, and Cave’s script taps into that weirdness. The Proposition is, incidentally, one of the mankiest films I’ve seen, with the grime-encrusted, matted-haired characters on view paying absolutely no attention to their personal hygiene. The best thing Santa Claus could do for this lot is leave a few bottles of shampoo and conditioner in their stockings.

The Proposition would make a great Australian double-bill with my favourite Christmas movie of all time, which is… Drum-roll…

Wake in Fright (1973)

One of the films that helped kick-start what is now known as Australia’s cinematic New Wave, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright is a reworking of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) – with a schoolteacher called John Grant (Gary Bond), not some schoolchildren, stranded in an isolated, primitive environment where the onion-skins of civilisation are gradually peeled off him and he descends into savagery. The twist is that Grant isn’t stuck on a desert island but in a hellish Australian Outback town called Bundanyabba, where he’s foolishly gambled away the money he was using to travel home to Sydney. And the brutish behaviour of Bundanyabba’s locals that infects him and drags him down isn’t, it’s implied, any different from that in any other Australian Outback town.

Famous for its scenes of squalor, drunkenness, brawling, vandalism, vomit, sweat-stains, flies, animal-slaughter and Donald Pleasence going bananas, Wake in Fright still qualifies as a Christmas movie. Grant is trying to get back to Sydney for the Christmas vacation and events in Bundanyabba take place against a festive background of Christmas trees, decorations and carols. Meanwhile, a scene near the end where a stained and begrimed Grant wakes up on a floor, haunted by memories from the night before of drinking about a hundred pints, gunning down about two dozen kangaroos, wrecking a pub, and shagging Donald Pleasance, will strike a chord with anyone who’s woken up in a similar state, with similarly traumatic memories, the morning after the work Christmas party.

Merry Christmas!