While producer Sam Katzman was busy exploiting the youth culture in the U.S. with quickie productions like Twist Around the Clock (1961) and Don’t Knock the Twist (1962), his contemporary Milton Subotsky was doing the same in England but with a different musical focus. London was in the midst of a British jazz revival driven by the music of New Orleans and Dixieland and this is the sound that inspired It’s Trad, Dad! (1962, aka Ring-a-Ding Rhythm), which also marks the feature film debut of Richard Lester, whose subsequent film was A Hard Day’s Night (1964) for The Beatles.  Subotsky didn’t just stack the deck with jazz groups though; he also added a generous helping of current pop acts and even tried to scoop Katzman with showcasing Chubby Checker in the new novelty dance, the twist (Katzman still beat him to the punch with Twist Around the Clock which was released first in the U.S.).     

The threadbare plot – two teenagers organize a music festival in their small town despite resistance from the mayor and his closed-minded supporters – is merely an excuse to string together an array of musical acts – 26 in all! But what distinguishes It’s Trad, Dad! from countless other pop music film pastiches is the stylish look and sense of fun that Richard Lester brings to it plus the impressive lineup of musical talent which covers the pop spectrum from Dixieland (Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen) to rhythm ‘n blues (Gary “U.S.” Bonds) to ballads (John Leyton) to rock ‘n roll (Gene Vincent).

Gene Vincent in It’s Trad, Dad! aka Ring-a-Ding Rhythm (1962), directed by Richard Lester

Richard Lester had already garnered considerable acclaim – and an Oscar® nomination – for his witty movie short, The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959), but it was a thirty minute pilot he had made called Have Jazz, Will Travel that convinced producer Milton Subotsky to hire Lester to direct It’s Trad, Dad!. In an interview with director Steven Soderbergh for The Guardian, Lester said, “Subotsky sent me a 24-page script and I said “I think I can do something with it” – it was with pop-stars, with Gene Vincent and Helen Shapiro and a lot of trad bands, so I said, “I’ve been around this kind of music all my life. I think I know how to deal with it as soon as you get a first draft screenplay I’d be delighted to read it.” He said, “That’s the shooting script and you start in three weeks.” I said, “But it’s only 24 pages long” but he said, “You’ll find a way to pad it out.” So we gathered these poor pop people with this feast of moveable sets behind them and shot them three a day. At the end of the last week of shooting, the Twist started – Chubby Checker and his first big twist success. So I said to Milton “I think it would be a great idea. We could be the first film in history to have the twist in it. He’s in New York. I could go over and shoot him.” And he said “If you pay your own way you can go.” So I did and we got him in the film, and that was one of the contributing factors to getting A Hard Day’s Night.”

Helen Shapiro and Richard Lester on the set of It’s Trad, Dad! (1962)

Any Richard Lester fan can look at It’s Trad, Dad! and see the fresh and distinctive techniques that would fully emerge in Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. For one thing, Lester’s playful editing style keeps the viewer constantly engaged while also paying tribute to the musicians on display. Del Shannon is presented in emotional close-ups as he belts out “She Never Talked About Me” while The Brook Brothers are juxtaposed with oversized images of themselves as they perform “Double Trouble.” In the Burt Bacharach composition, “Another Tear Falls”, performed by Gene McDaniels, Lester establishes a moody confessional tone as cigarette smoke curls around the singer and in Acker Bilk’s showcase number, “Frankie and Johnny,” he cuts between humorous stills that illustrate the lyrics and iconic signature shots of the famed clarinet player. Among the other musical standouts are the decidedly offbeat version of “Everybody Loves My Baby” by the Temperance Seven, “Lose Your Inhibition Twist” by Chubby Checker, the dreamy “What Am I To Do?” by the Paris Sisters and Ottilie Patterson bringing down the house with “Down by the Riverside.”

Chubby Checker in It’s Trad, Dad! (1962)

Lester’s satiric sense of humor is also evident in the way he depicts the generation gap conflict between the teenagers and their elders. Small town bureaucracy also becomes a target for parody and so does the music industry, particularly in the scenes in which three popular British disc jockeys of the period – Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Peter Murray – play themselves and come off as vain and self-absorbed media personalities.  As the film’s youthful protagonists, Helen Shapiro and Craig Douglas were cast not because they were skilled actors but because they were popular singers at the time. Douglas is a pleasant but unremarkable light pop vocalist but Shapiro is a little dynamo with a powerful voice comparable to Brenda Lee. At the time of It’s Trad, Dad!, Shapiro was one of England’s top female vocalists with such major hits as 1961’s “Walking Back to Happiness” to her credit. Unfortunately, she never managed to break into the American top forty market despite catchy tunes like “Let’s Talk About Love” which she performs in It’s Trad, Dad!. She did go on to star in another teenage musical, Play It Cool (1962) featuring Billy Fury and the Satellites and Bobby Vee but her biggest claim to fame was opening for The Beatles on their first major tour (it was said that John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote “Misery” for her.)  Musical revue films aimed at teenage audiences such as It’s Trad, Dad! rarely get any respect or favorable notices from the critics but Lester’s film proved one of the few exceptions. The Times’ David Robinson wrote “Lester’s immoderate interest in technical tricks – speeded up action, multiple exposures, eccentric angles, tricky masking and so on…is all done with such frank enjoyment and at such a determined pace that criticism is disarmed” and London reviewer Philip French called it “One of the most imaginative British movies of the decade.” Lester, in fact, would later admit that “I’ve had the best reviews out of It’s Trad, Dad! that I’ve ever gotten.” Sony released It’s Trad, Dad under the U.S. release title Ring-a-Ding Rhythm as an on-demand DVD in 2012 through Sony’s Special Collection series. The film also turns up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies.

Acker Bilk is featured in Ring-a-Ding Rhythm aka It’s Trad, Dad!

Other Websites of Interest:

http://andrewwe2.tripod.com/Its_Trad_Dad.html

http://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/nov/08/guardianinterviewsatbfisouthbank3

http://www.billboard.com/artist/303417/helen-shapiro/biography

http://www.timeout.com/london/film/its-trad-dad

http://andrewwe2.tripod.com/Its_Trad_Dad.html

• This article originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website and used these source materials: The Films of Richard Lester by Neil Sinyard; “Richard Lester Interviewed by Steven Soderbergh,” The Guardian, 11/8/1999; screenonline; Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock ‘n Roll Movies by Marshall Crenshaw; Rock on Film by David Ehrenstein & Bill Reed

Senta Berger is in charge in Jean-Pierre Desagnat’s Les Etrangers (1969)

It’s a rare thing when a crime thriller departs from the usual formulaic expectations and rewards the viewer with a much more unpredictable and entertaining twist on a familiar genre. Such is the case with Les étrangers (aka The Strangers, 1969), which begins with a carefully planned diamond heist in a remote desert town that goes spectacularly awry before transitioning into a deadly game of cat and mouse between a fleeing fugitive and a couple that offer him temporary shelter. This is a superior B-movie that feels like an A-picture with its iconic international cast of actors from France (Michel Constantin), Austria (Senta Berger), Spain (Julián Mateos) and South Africa (Hans Meyer), a spaghetti western-flavored score by Michel Magne and Francoise de Roubaix, and atmospheric cinematography by Marcel Grignon, who received an Oscar nomination for Is Paris Burning? (1967) and filmed such cult favorites as Roger Vadim’s Vice and Virtue (1963) and Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast (1975).    

From start to finish, the eighty-six minute feature is well paced and tautly directed by Jean-Pierre Desagnat, who is little known outside of France. The bulk of his rather modest filmography has been for French television but he did manage to direct a handful of feature films such as OSS 117 – Double Agent (1968) and Vertigo for a Killer (1970, French title: Vertige pour un tueur). On the basis of Les étrangers, I’m curious to explore more of his work.

Julian Mateos plays a cold-blooded killer who plots a diamond robbery in Les Etrangers (1969)

[Spoilers ahead] Set in New Mexico but filmed in Spain, Desagnat’s thriller utilizes the sun-scorched landscape and sweltering climate to add an additional layer of intensity to the pressure cooker situation that unfolds. Kaine (Mateos), the only surviving member from the bank heist, eludes the pursuing police by jumping into a river. He emerges later and hides the stolen diamonds in an abandoned mine, taking precautions to create a bobby-trap for anyone that tries to remove them. But exhaustion and lack of water takes its toll and Kaine is later found unconscious by Chamoun (Constantin) who carries him back to his remote ranch with the help of his donkey.

Michel Constantin (foreground) and Julian Mateos on the donkey in Les Etrangers (1969)

Once there, Kaine quickly recovers but is suspicious of Chamoun and his sexy companion May (Berger) and constantly tries to manipulate the situation to his advantage. One of the most compelling aspects of the film is the way it withholds information about this reclusive couple, preferring instead to offer up small details as the story progresses. One thing becomes obvious early on, Kaine is a ruthless sociopathic killer who can’t be trusted for a second but Chamoun and May seem to be on to him from the get-go and know more then they’re telling. Their friendly relationship with Blade (Meyer), the local police captain, is more than a little suspicious. Complicating matters is the arrival of a pair of hit men looking for Chamoun and their visit to Chamoun’s isolated ranch is one of the more surprising sequences in the film.

Senta Berger in Jean-Pierre Desagnat’s Les Etrangers (1969)

The zigzagging narrative builds to a brief but immensely satisfying final confrontation in which justice is violently served. Along the way are occasional moments of quirky comedy involving two none-too-observant local cops who work for Blade and Chamoun’s beer-drinking donkey who appears to have a telepathic connection with his master. There is also something curiously appealing and bizarre about Chamoun and May’s rustic desert hideaway. They keep their beer cold in the well and don’t have electricity except in their bedroom which inexplicably has a TV (we see them watching a Euro-crime film prior to a romantic fadeout – one of the few scenes of physical intimacy in the film).  A major virtue is the impeccable casting and Mateos is alternatively charismatic and repulsive in the grandstanding role of the snake-like Kaine. He has a particularly memorable freakout scene with May in which he candidly reveals that he had a wretched childhood and that his mother was “the only person I ever loved.” He then hysterically refutes everything after overpowering May, yelling “I lied to you. I never had a mother…I never loved anybody. Women are all poison. You all hate me!”

Julian Mateos attacks Senta Berger in Les etrangers (1969)

Mateos is probably familiar to Western film fans for prominent roles in Return of the Seven (1966), Shalako (1968) and Catlow (1971) but I first encountered him in Jules Dassin’s 10:30 P.M. Summer (1966), an overly arty, romantic triangle melodrama in which he plays a murderer on the run who is sheltered by Melina Mercouri.  Providing the perfect contrast to Mateos’ volatile madman in Les étrangers is Michel Constantin as the laconic but physically intimidating Chamoun who comes from the “less is more” school of acting practiced by such superstars as Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. Like Bronson, Constantin has a similar kind of craggy, ugly-handsome appeal and though he was quite popular in European genre films, he never enjoyed the kind of international success Bronson claimed. A former factory worker, his first major role in Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (1960) as a resourceful prison inmate launched his career (he had previously appeared in an uncredited role in the Brigitte Bardot sex comedy Plucking the Daisy, 1956). After Le Trou, his tough guy persona, which has a quietly menacing side, was well showcased in such cult crime dramas as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966, aka Second Breath), Alain Cavalier’s Mise à sac (1967, aka Pillaged) and Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man (1972).

Iconic French tough guy star Michel Constantin

Of the three leads, Senta Berger has the most impressive resume which includes over 140 film and TV credits and began in the early fifties in West German cinema. She easily made the transition to U.S. and international productions in the early sixties with appearances opposite Richard Widmark in The Secret Ways (1961), Kerwin Matthews in Walt Disney’s The Waltz King (1963) and Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, rivals for her affection, in Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (she later appeared in Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, 1977 ). Unlike a lot of the gorgeous sex sirens who were popular during the sixties, Berger was also an accomplished actress and went on to work with such acclaimed directors as Michael Verhoeven (Wer I’m Glashaus liebt…, 1971), Volker Schlöndorff (Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass, 1972), Wim Wenders (The Scarlet Letter, 1973) and Mario Monicelli (Le due vite di Mattia Pascal, 1985). Berger is still working today but Les étrangers is representative of her peak years and she is alternately tough and alluring as the enigmatic May. If you’ve ever wanted to see Berger wielding a shotgun, beating a man with chains or threatening someone with a hot poker, this is your film.

Senta Berger & Michel Constantin contemplate their escape options in Les etrangers (1969)

At one time, Les étrangers was available from European Trash Cinema in a very good widescreen DVD-R print of the English language version. It might be out of print now and currently the film is not available in any format. Nor can you stream it on YouTube like so many obscure international films. With a little luck, some enterprising DVD/Blu-Ray distributor might bring this B-movie gem back to the fold.  

In 1941, the unexpected success of Buck Privates – a whopping $10 million dollar B-movie blockbuster – officially launched the comedy team of Abbott and Costello who became Universal Studios’ most profitable film franchise for more than a decade (The duo made their debut in One Night in the Tropics (1940) in supporting roles but the musical comedy with top billed Allan Jones and Nancy Kelly was not a boxoffice hit). Naturally, it inspired other studios to follow suit but it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Case in point – Wally Brown and Alan Carney (no relation to Art Carney), two former nightclub comedians recruited by RKO for a series of low-budget farces beginning with The Adventures of a Rookie (1943), a blatant attempt to ape the formula of Buck Privates. For critics who thought the humor of Abbott and Costello was déclassé, Zombies on Broadway (194) was a further step down but perfect for eight year old boys who enjoyed the simple concept of two nitwits with one (Brown) assuming superiority over his dim bulb pal (Carney).  

Alan Carney (in makeup chair), Wally Brown on the right

Certainly Brown and Carney posed no threat to Abbott and Costello and are mostly forgotten today, but their most representative film, Zombies on Broadway (1945), might have actually inspired Universal to match up Bud and Lou with monsters with their popular genre parody, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

Calypso singer Sir Lancelot aka Lancelot Victor Edward Pinard

Filmed on leftover RKO sets from Tarzan and the Amazons (1945) and Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Zombies on Broadway even featured two actors from the latter film – calypso singer Sir Lancelot and Darby Jones, repeating his role as a zombie with ping pong ball-like eyes.

Darby Jones sneaks up on Anne Jeffreys in Zombies on Broadway (1945)

The plot revolves around two inept Broadway press agents (Brown & Carney) ordered by their gangster boss (Sheldon Leonard) to produce a real zombie for the grand opening of his new night spot, “The Zombie Hut.” Their search leads them to the tropical isle of San Sebastian where they encounter the suspicious Dr. Paul Renault (Bela Lugosi). Although Renault’s henchman tells the duo that the good doctor is there “to study a blight that affects banana trees,” we know he is busy trying – and failing – to create the perfect zombie. And Brown and Carney, along with a local cabaret performer (Anne Jeffreys), are ideal guinea pigs for the mad scientist’s on-going experiments.

Why can’t we have a zombie nightclub like this one?

In the slapstick hijinks that ensue – and yes, there’s a monkey involved – Carney gets transformed into a zombie and is brought back to New York as the night club’s star attraction. Right before the curtain rises with the audience chanting “We want a zombie!, We want a zombie!”, there is a last minute change of plans, the result of a stray hypodermic needle containing the zombie potion.    Bela Lugosi had just completed a minor supporting role, teamed opposite Boris Karloff, in The Body Snatcher (1945) for producer Val Lewton when he signed on for Zombies on Broadway, directed by Gordon Douglas (Them!, 1954). It wasn’t the first time he had parodied his horror film image – he’d been tormented by the Bowery Boys earlier in Spooks Run Wild (1941) and Ghosts on the Loose (1943). But here Lugosi plays it relatively straight and the contrast between his dark, glowering demeanor and Brown and Carney’s goofiness worked well. So well, in fact, that RKO teamed them up for a sequel, Genius at Work (1946), with Anne Jeffreys again providing the sex appeal.

Bela Lugosi and his latest experiment Anne Jeffreys in Zombies on Broadway (1945)

While Zombies on Broadway proved to be an agreeable programmer for undiscriminating audiences of the forties, it was mostly dismissed by critics such as the New York Herald Tribune which called it “an appalling little film.” Even future director Joe Dante, a teenage correspondent for Famous Monsters of Filmland, dismissed it in his article on the most feeble horror films of all time: “Pretty funny except when it was supposed to be!….The comedy scenes were pretty grim, playing in a style that reminded one of Abbott and Costello with the Black Plague.”

True, a lot of the comic patter falls flat and there are those cringe-inducing moments of racial stereotypes played for comedy that were typical of its era – the nervous black janitor, superstitious natives, etc. But even with all of those handicaps, it’s not as bad as its reputation and even Michael Weldon’s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film proclaimed it “a very strange film,” which is some kind of recommendation.

Nick Stewart as Worthington in Zombies on Broadway (1945)

The funniest scenes involve Carney – one where he gets his foot stuck on an ox skull, another where he emits a “silent scream” as he’s abducted from his bed, and all of his scenes as a pop-eyed zombie. His makeup is hilarious and maybe the reason these sequences work so well is because Carney is mute – there’s no thudding dialogue to deliver and the humor is purely visual.

Alan Carney with his new zombie eyes, Anne Jeffreys in the background in Zombies on Broadway (1945)

Also, Anne Jeffreys is appropriately sassy as the knife-throwing nightclub chanteuse and it’s hard to forget Darby Jones as the main zombie; his uniquely angular body is just as distinctive as Michael Rennie’s alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Best of all is that title which is bound to produce smiles of disbelief whenever you mention it to fellow film travelers. Zombies on Broadway is currently on DVD as part of the Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box set available from Warner Home Video; the other titles include The Walking Dead (Karloff), Frankenstein 1970 (Karloff) and You’ll Find Out with Karloff, Lugosi AND Peter Lorre.

Alan Carney likes the zombie lifestyle in Zombies on Broadway (1945)

Other links of interest:

http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/zombies-broadway-nearly-kills-career/

http://www.blackhorrormovies.com/zombiesonbroadway.htm

http://www.foodbeautyandadog.com/blog/darby-jones-the-original-zombie

http://marcoonthebass.blogspot.com/2012/04/story-behind-shame-and-scandal-calypso.html

Gillo Pontecorvo began as a documentarian and his interest in social and political issues was already evident in early works like Giovanni (1955), which follows a textile laborer and her female co-workers through punishing work conditions into a full-blown protest against the factory owners. So it comes as no surprise that his first feature length film, The Wide Blue Road (aka La Grande Strada Azzurra, 1957), has an underlying social agenda even if it looks like a slice-of-life melodrama on the surface.  

A fisherman (Yves Montand) and his two sons in the late period neorealism drama, The Wide Blue Road (1957)

Unfortunately, U.S. audiences weren’t able to see The Wide Blue Road until 2001 when the combined efforts of Milestone Films, director Jonathan Demme and actor Dustin Hoffman resulted in the film’s official American premiere 44 years after its original release. Pontecorvo, an Italian director who is best known for The Battle of Algiers (1965), a fiery, impassioned account of the Algerian guerilla struggle against the French (1954 -1957), has stated that the title refers to the “image of a boat, in late afternoon, drawing a line in the sea, a trail.”

Yves Montand and Alida Valli in The Wide Blue Road (1957)

The story, which could be interpreted as a political allegory, follows a renegade fisherman named Giovanni Squarciò (Yves Montand) who resorts to illegal tactics in order to provide for his family. While the other fishermen from his economically depressed village use nets to catch their fish, Squarciò succeeds in bringing in larger catches through the use of dynamite. Surprisingly, the other fishermen don’t resent Squarciò’s methods; instead they admire him for his daring. The Coast Guard, however, feel otherwise and vow to punish Squarciò for his open defiance of them.

A scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Wide Blue Road aka La grande strada assurra (1957)

The Wide Blue Road is heavily influenced by the Italian Neorealism movement, particularly the films of Roberto Rossellini, but it also predates the French New Wave of the late fifties in its stylistic approach to the social and political issues of the story. At first glance, the film is a beautifully photographed character study about conflicts within a peasant fishing village, but underneath is another scenario that pits capitalist ingenuity against Communist collectivism. Regardless of his intentions, Pontecorvo reportedly was very disappointed with his first feature, saying in a New York Times interview with Bill Desowitz, “I was so sad that it didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I wanted to shoot it in black and white, and I felt Alida [Valli] was too exquisite to play the wife of a fisherman, and I felt it had too much melodrama. But Rossellini told me: ‘Don’t be stupid! This is only your first film. It’s not that bad. There will be more.'”

Director Gillo Pontecorvo

Pontecorvo would go on to make such controversial films as Kapo (1960), which was set in a Polish concentration camp, and the internationally acclaimed The Battle of Algiers, both of which were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscars. Burn! (1969), starring Marlon Brando as a diplomat trying to suppress a slave revolt on a Portuguese-controlled Caribbean island, was the last Pontecorvo feature to receive a decent theatrical release in the U.S.

Marlon Brando in Burn! aka Queimada (1969)

Despite Pontecorvo’s reservations about The Wide Blue Road, the film has many ardent supporters, such as Jonathan Demme, who said, “the use of locations and the acting is extraordinary. This is no curio; this is a great, great tragic story. It brought me to tears. And what can you say about Yves? He was such an ultra-testosterone romantic male. I just couldn’t believe it when I heard that the film had never been distributed in the U.S.”

Yves Montand & Alida Valli in The Wide Blue Road (1957).

For anyone unfamiliar with French actor/singer Yves Montand, The Wide Blue Road is a great introduction to this magnetic screen presence. While deservedly famous for his macho portrayal of a dynamite-carrying truck driver in The Wages of Fear (1953), Pontecorvo’s film is an even better showcase for Montand’s talents. Interestingly enough, the actor’s own background is very close to the outsider character he plays in The Wide Blue Road; the son of Italian immigrants living in France, Montand grew up in poverty and supported himself with a variety of occupations – busboy, bartender, factory laborer – before gaining fame as a chansonnier in Paris under the “sponsorship” of internationally renown singer Edith Piaf.

Yves Montand & Alida Valli in The Wide Blue Road (1957)

Pontecorvo recalled that during the filming of The Wide Blue Road, “Yves was such a showman. He was not only very patient with me, but he served as my assistant. He would do anything you asked. He couldn’t swim and was afraid at first, but we attached a rope to him and he made it look so easy with that graceful body of his.” Graceful might not be the best word to describe Montand’s famous dog-paddling scene but everything else he does in the film looks effortless, and inspired New York Times critic Stephen Holden to write that Montand gives “a star performance radiant with macho glamour.”

The one aspect of The Wide Blue Road that prevents many current day viewers from sympathizing with Montand’s Squarciò is his flagrant use of dynamite to catch fish. Not only is such a practice completely destructive to marine life and the local ecosystem but a guaranteed way to hasten the extinction of numerous ocean species. Instead of looking like a gutsy, lone wolf survivalist, Squarciò sets a bad example for the human race with his entitled behavior – here is a man who knows he is at the top of the food chain and all lower life forms are fair game for his exploitation.

Yves Montand (foreground) in The Wide Blue Road (1957)

Still, it has to be said that Montand is enormously charismatic in this film and it’s fascinating to see the beautiful Alida Valli (The Third Man, The Paradine Case) in a deglamorized role as his wife, Rosetta. The Wide Blue Road also features an early performance by Mario Girotti, who would later change his name to Terence Hill and become an international star, thanks to his appearances in such popular spaghetti Westerns as They Call Me Trinity (1970) and My Name Is Nobody (1973). Spanish actor Francisco Rabal is also prominently featured as Squarciò’s former best friend, Salvatore. Rabal has one of the most versatile and envious filmographies of any film actor in the 20th century having appeared in films by Juan Antonio Bardem (Death of a Cyclist), Luis Bunuel (Nazarin, Viridiana, Belle du Jour), Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Eclisse), Jacques Rivette (The Nun), Valerio Zurlini (The Desert of the Tartars), William Friedkin (Sorcerer, a remake of The Wages of Fear) and Carlos Saura (Goya in Bordeaux) to name just a few.

Francisco Rabal (left) & Mario Girotti (aka Terence Hill) in The Wide Blue Road (1957)

The Wide Blue Road has yet to be released on Blu-Ray but you might be able to find an affordable DVD of it if you are willing to go on an extensive internet hunt. Unfortunately, current used copies are going for as high as $96 on Amazon and Milestone Films only offers a DVD institutional rate with PPR and 3-Year Streaming for $249.00. But if films like Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1981), Nashville Girl (1976) and The Sicilian Connection (1971) can all get Blu-Ray upgrades in 2015, maybe there is hope for The Wide Blue Road.  * This is a revised and extended version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Looking for a Halloween film to creep you out? How about The Blood on Satan’s Claw? 

Something evil is plowed up in the field in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

While plowing his fields, a farmer unearths the skeletal remains of something unearthly and rushes off to inform the local authorities. When they return to investigate, the evidence is gone but shortly thereafter a series of strange events plague the village: a young girl goes mad after encountering something in an attic room, her fiancé amputates his own hand in an imagined attack in bed, children begin to wander off and disappear in the woods. Evil spreads through the village like a plague and a teenage girl, Angel Blake, becomes the instrument of an unknown fiend, leading her young followers in sacrificial rituals that will result in the rebirth of a satanic being.    Following on the heels of Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) in 1968, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) is a lesser known tale of rural violence similarly set in the 17th century when witch hunts and the persecution of people accused of devil worship was at its height in England and Scotland. Initially envisioned by the producers as an anthology horror film in the manner of such Amicus productions as Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) and Torture Garden (1967), the separate story threads, through the insistence of the director Piers Haggard, were stitched together by screenwriter Robert Wynne-Simmons to form a single narrative about a village under siege from something unspeakable.

Villagers worry about the strange happenings in their village in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Unlike Reeves’s Witchfinder General, which was dominated by Vincent Price’s frighteningly intense performance as the infamous Matthew Hopkins, The Blood on Satan’s Claw was more ambiguous and disturbing in its approach to depictions of good and evil. For example, there is no conventional hero in Satan’s Claw (the original release title in England) and The Judge, with his rigid beliefs and dour manner, becomes the villagers’ savior by default. There is no other authority figure present that has the power or support to restore a rational sense of order to the village. The Judge’s approach to controlling the situation, however, is not dissimilar to a tyrant’s organized plan for ethnic cleansing.

Patrick Wymark as The Judge in The Blood on Satan’s Claw

In an interview with David Taylor for Shock: The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema, scenarist Wynne-Simmons revealed “The central theme of the whole film was the stamping out of the old religions. Not by Christianity, but by an atheistic belief that all sorts of things must be blocked out of the mind. So the Judge represents a dogged enlightenment, if you like, who is saying ‘Don’t let these things lurk in dark corners. Bring it out into the open and then get rid of it. When it becomes a fully fledged cult, it will show itself.”

Linda Hayden as Angel Blake, the Devil’s tool in The Blood on Satan’s Claw

Due to the critical and commercial success of Reeves’s Witchfinder General, the Tigon Studio executives who produced The Blood on Satan’s Claw pressured the screenwriter and director to replicate some of the same elements for their film such as changing the setting from its original Victorian era to the time of Matthew Hopkins. “There were certain other things which had to be added,” Wynne-Simmons recalled. “One was the Book of Witches, which I thought was quite dreadful…For heaven’s sake, everyone’s heard of witches! They don’t really need to look them up in a book! The other addition was the witch-ducking scene. This had to be included because it had been so successful in Witchfinder General, so they wanted to repeat it. I didn’t mind that so much, as it did show the incredible stupidity of people at the time.”   

It is the original touches added by Wynne-Simmons and Piers Haggard, however, that give The Blood on Satan’s Claw a resonance other period thrillers rarely achieve. These include contemporary parallels between Angel Blake’s coven and the Manson Family as well as similarities to the notorious Mary Bell murder case which scandalized England in 1968. Haggard’s determination to shoot the majority of the film on location in a valley in the Chiltern Hills, a chalk escarpment in Southeast England, grounds the film in a believable bucolic setting where the lyrical, pastoral mood often gives way to a darker and more horrific tone.

The genesis of The Blood on Satan’s Claw began with twenty-two-year-old Cambridge graduate Robert Wynne-Simmons who told interviewer David Taylor (Shock: The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema): “I was just out of University and looking to find work in the film industry. So I didn’t have any track record at all and I wrote the obligatory hundred letters. It was on the first of January that I got a reply…from a producer called Chris Neame, who was working, I think, for Tony Tenser at Tigon. He’d been collecting on behalf of the other producers – there were about four people involved here – a number of potential scripts from which to make a film.”

Tony Tenser of Tigon Productions

Wynne-Simmons quickly learned how soon Tigon wanted to put the picture in production: “They’d done a deal with Pinewood in advance, to get a low rate from the studio. It was booked for April 1 – which sort of seemed vaguely appropriate! The letter said we’ve got thirty possible outlines that we’ve been presented with and we notice that you’ve done some writing – I’d written some plays and things at university – do you have anything to offer us? Before I’d really got my head together, I rang them up and said yes, there was something really exciting coming and they said could they have it by next Thursday!”

Wynne-Simmons revisited some of the unpublished short stories he had written as an undergraduate and adapted two of them for his first pass at a screenplay. “The first episode had to do with Simon Williams and Tamara Ustinov, and the whole idea of her going mad and being forced by the unpleasant aunt into the spare bedroom, where something nasty was lurking….Then there was another story about a group of schoolchildren who found something nasty in a field.”

A man (Simon Williams) driven insane after a night of terror is led away in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).

Initially, the demon who appears in the village and motivates the events that occur was not intended to be Satan nor was there any intention to make the villagers devil worshippers or members of a witch coven. “It was deliberately ambiguous…Essentially it was a God-Devil…The idea was that a God who demanded an unpleasant sacrificial type of worship was coming alive again. Also, there was this sort of feeling that evil though this creature might be, it was somehow more ‘alive’ than the Patrick Wymark character, whose viewpoint was essentially a dead one.”

Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews) carries the body of Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury) in a scene from The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

The Tigon producers were not completely satisfied with the first draft of the screenplay which was set during the early Victorian era and had a scene of “The Judge arriving aboard a steam train, which was meant to be an image of him steamrolling the whole movement,” according to Wynne-Simmons. Tigon also wasn’t happy with the ambiguity in the script and the finale which was not the dramatic showdown between good and evil they envisioned. Wynne-Simmons confessed that “In the original script, the last scene was probably more destructive than it was in the eventual film. Patrick Wymark had militiamen with him who actually gunned people down. There was a mass grave dug and that was their end. So it was really a very, very destructive thing. Rough justice, where he just obliterated this crowd of people.”

The Judge confronts the Demon in the climax of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Despite the changes Wynne-Simmons had to make to the screenplay of Blood on Satan’s Claw, he was never quite able to transform the character of The Judge into the film’s hero, even with him welding a cross-like sword in the finale: “…the person who is wielding the cross is usually the ‘Van Helsing’ [the hero of “Dracula”] force of good, and it was very difficult to reconcile the character of The Judge with the forces of good! This would have reduced his ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the minimum, sort of make him halfway acceptable.”

The original script was titled “The Devil’s Skin” but Tigon wanted something else and during filming the movie was known as “The Devil’s Touch” but was released as Satan’s Skin and then retitled and re-released as The Blood on Satan’s Claw. At least all of these titles were better than the suggestion of Tony Tenser who owned Tigon; he wanted to call the film “The Ghouls Are Amongst Us.”   While Wynne-Simmons was busy with script revisions, Tigon began casting about for a director and showed some interest in Piers Haggard, a young director who had just completed his first feature film, Wedding Night (1969), which was screened for the Tigon executives (but not released theatrically until after The Blood on Satan’s Claw).

Director Piers Haggard (The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Venom) as he appears today

Two of the producers, Peter Andrews and Malcolm Heyworth, were suitably impressed with Wedding Night and offered Haggard Blood on Satan’s Claw though he is still puzzled about why they chose him. “I don’t think I’d ever been to a horror film,” he stated. “I was very arty. I’d worked at the National Theatre and in television, doing series like Callan and various BBC plays…So I couldn’t have done a Hammer horror film…well, in the way that would have been accepted.”

Angel Blake’s cult convenes in the forest in this scene from The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Haggard realized that the film’s success would depend on a convincing sense of place and time as well as four or five dramatically powerful sequences which Wynne-Simmons’s screenplay had strategically placed throughout the narrative. It was also his desire to make a “folk horror tale,” one that tapped into the darkness of local legends in the rural English countryside.

The aspect of Wynne-Simmons’s screenplay that immediately struck Haggard was the rural setting and the lyrical, poetic approach to the subject matter. “I was isolated until I went to university at seventeen,” Haggard said, “and those are the formative years. Your imagination is formed at that time. I had an absolutely passionate feeling for the countryside in a very Wordsworthian sense: the light on the bank, the feeling of beech trees in spring, so pale and green; the light on the river or the river at night; walking down the lane with no lights, guiding yourself by looking up at the stars. A very strong and vivid sense of country life.”

An atmospheric scene from The Blood on Satan’s Claw, directed by Piers Haggard

One of the first things that Haggard did after being hired to direct Blood on Satan’s Claw was convince the producers that the script would work better as one story and not three and they eventually agreed. Wynne-Simmons then had to stitch the three stories together in a more cohesive fashion but due to the rushed production schedule never really resolved some of the problems and continuity holes in the screenplay. For example, the character of Isobel Banham is dropped from the story after her face is clawed by the insane Rosalind Barton, never to be seen again.

The Judge (Patrick Wymark) contemplates the strange events at a remote village in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Another continuity error that actually worked to the film’s advantage in the opinion of some is the disappearance of The Judge from the middle section of the film. In stitching together the three stories, Wynne-Simmons was never able to solve how to reintroduce The Judge into the story before his climactic appearance at the end. However, his return, when the village is almost completely engulfed in evil, makes a more unexpected and ambiguous finale. Marc Wilkinson, a composer for London’s National Theatre who was hired to write the score for Blood on Satan’s Claw, based his music on other orchestral works which depicted the Devil in musical form and used a thirteen note descending pattern in the score.

Bix Bottom Valley in England was where a large portion of The Blood on Satan’s Claw was filmed

Although Tigon executives insisted that Satan’s Claw be filmed at Pinewood Studios to avoid the additional expense of location shooting, Haggard held out until they agreed to let him shoot the bulk of the movie at Bix Bottom, “a small valley midway between the towns of Nettlebed and Henley-on-Thames in the Chiltern hills. The name Bix was a holdout from the days when the valley was used as a base for the Roman army – specifically the Roman century B IX,” according to David Taylor.

Haggard has fond memories of producer Tony Tenser who gave him a first-rate education in controlling film budgets, production costs, promotion ideas and monitoring box office intake.

Patrick Wymark displays something disturbing while Barry Andrews reacts in the background

Because of the limited budget, Haggard assembled a cast of mostly unknown actors who were working in television and theatre with the exception of well known character actor Patrick Wymark who had previously appeared (playing Cromwell) in Witchfinder General. (He is also famous as the predatory landlord in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion [1965]). The only other actor audiences might have recognized was Linda Hayden who had attracted some notoriety for her role as the teenage nymphet in Baby Love (1968) and for her appearance opposite Christopher Lee in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970). Among actors and film crews Wymark was known as a heavy drinker and co-star Simon Williams recalled one incident that caused him some anxiety when Wymark returned from lunch drunk. “There was a scene where he had to thump me one. Tamara had gone insane and I’d gone a bit hysterical, and he had to slap me to get me to pull myself together…He did actually hurt me quite a lot.”

Milton Reid (inside the door frame) waits to be summoned by the Judge (Patrick Wymark) in The Blood on Satan’s Claw

Among the supporting cast is Milton Reid, who appears as the mute dog handler and accompanies The Judge at the climax. He also appeared as the mute mulatto in the Hammer film Night Creatures (1962, aka Captain Clegg). Other film appearances include Blood of the Vampire (1958) as an executioner, Dr. No (1962) as a bodyguard for the title villain, Berserk! (1967) as the circus strong man, Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and many more.

Milton Reid in Night Creatures (1962, aka Captain Clegg)

Prior to his film career as an extra and minor supporting actor, Reid (born in 1917) was a popular wrestler in England known as “The Mighty Chang” due to his Fu Manchu moustache and Asian features (his mother was Mongolian and his father was Scottish). In 1987 while living in India, he mysteriously vanished and his family never learned if he died or what happened to him despite unproven sources that state he died of a heart attack.

Simon Williams has a small but memorable role in the first third of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

Others in the cast of Satan’s Claw include Tamara Ustinov, the daughter of Peter Ustinov and the niece of Angela Lansbury. Michele Dotrice is the daughter of actor Roy Dotrice (The Heroes of Telemark [1965], Lock Up Your Daughters [1969]) who dubbed the voice of Harvey Keitel in Saturn 3. Simon Williams is the son of actor and dramatist Hugh Williams who co-wrote The Grass Is Greener and other plays with his wife, Margaret Vyner. Anthony Ainley is the son of actor Henry Ainley who was a popular stage actor renowned for his performances in the plays of Shakespeare.

The director, cast and crew were amused by the fact that screenwriter Wynne-Simmons had the look of a young, earnest scholar and was shy which was such a contrast to the person they had imagined as the screenwriter of this disturbing, horrific tale.

A doctor attempts to remove a patch of Satan’s skin from a cult member in this grisly scene

The opening scene of the fields being plowed by Barry Andrews was also the very first scene that was filmed for the movie.

Haggard credits a lot of the film’s effectiveness to cinematographer Dick Bush who had recently left the BBC to work in feature films. “Dick Bush…taught me something that I’ve used ever since. He said, “You’re shooting these wide shots in the woods, so you must have a dark foreground. Particularly in a horror film, where who knows what might be lurking in the foreground.’ It taught me that it was terribly important to identify the highlight in each frame.”

Linda Hayden as Angel Blake becomes more demonic in appearance as the movie progresses.

Linda Hayden recalled that she cut her foot badly on the first day of shooting and had to be rushed to the closest local hospital for stitches. Her unexpected appearance, in costume and makeup, made quite an impression on the other patients there who were mostly senior citizens.

The famous Devil’s skin removal scene – where Michele Dotrice is strapped to a table and a patch of fur is surgically removed from her thigh – was inspired by Wynne-Simmons’s memory of an operation performed on him at home on the kitchen table by a doctor when he was young.

The strange fur patches on Michele Dotrice’s skin the doctor and fellow villagers.

Costar Simon Williams recalled that he had some reservations about working for Tigon at the time: “The whole thing had quite an “iffy” feel about it. Rumours were going about Tigon and we were all cashing our cheques quite quickly.” Tigon would soon shut down production for good in 1972 after the release of Neither the Sea Nor the Sand.  Williams also remembered filming the scene where he is attacked by the furry hand. “They had a little insert shot of my hand reaching for the dagger and I was doing a lot of business of inching my fingers forward and twitching them. Piers said, ‘Cut! Cut! Cut! Simon, don’t overact with your fingers.’

One of the most powerful sequences in Blood on Satan’s Claw – the rape/murder of Cathy Vespers – was unplanned and spontaneous. “I didn’t have the idea of Wendy Padbury [Cathy] being beaten with May blossoms, “recalled Haggard, “until the morning of the shoot…I was trying to devise some rituals that might seem meaningful for ignorant and superstitious people. It was an inversion of the stations of the cross in the Catholic Church. Likewise, the chant was written on the spot.”

Linda Hayden (left) prepares a terrible fate for Wendy Padbury in The Blood on Satan’s Claw

Tamara Ustinov recalled in David Taylor’s account of the film’s production that “when they did the rape scene with Wendy Padbury, I remember she got very upset. I think Piers had said, “Look, you’ve got to make this really realistic”……I think that maybe it all went a bit far. But looking at what’s done now, that’s nothing…compared to what films are like now.”

Some scenes of nudity were deleted or obscured by darkness in prints of The Blood on Satan’s Claw

After viewing the film British censor John Trevelyan cautioned Haggard, saying “The thing is, Piers, it’s sex and violence. You can have sex. That’s alright. Violence is alright. But sex and violence…this is what we have to think carefully about.” He then suggested that Haggard remove 6-8 seconds from the rape scene which he did although screenwriter Wynne-Simmons later commented: “The result of the censor’s intervention was to make the scene more censorable, in my mind. Because what you then have is a scene with a rape which is largely played out on the faces of the people watching it.”

Angel (Linda Hayden) attempts to seduce the village priest (Anthony Ainley) in The Blood on Satan’s Claw

Wynne-Simmons recalls that for the final scene in the film where The Judge confronts the Devil executive producer Tony Tenser demonstrated how he wanted the scene to be played by imitating Satan and hopping around on one leg.

Haggard noted in the DVD commentary of the film that Blood on Satan’s Claw was blessed with good weather for most of the exterior shooting and didn’t have to rely on day for night scenes which he feels rarely works in movies.

The village reverend (Anthony Ainley, bound in ropes) is falsely accused of Cathy Vespers’ murder

Strong performances, particularly by Linda Hayden as the seductive Angel Blake and Patrick Wymark as the Judge, an atmospheric score by Marc Wilkinson and impressive cinematography by Dick Bush (who went on to lens several films for Ken Russell including Savage Messiah [1972], Mahler [1974], Tommy [1975] and Crimes of Passion [1984]) place The Blood on Satan’s Claw in the top tier of great British horror films.

The film provoked some minor controversy when it was first released due to its graphic violence, particularly the scene where an offending patch of “Satan’s skin” is surgically removed from the thigh of a squirming cult member (Michele Dotrice). And in the United States, where the movie was unceremoniously dumped on the grindhouse and drive-in circuits with The Beast in the Cellar as the second feature, scenes featuring nudity such as Linda Hayden’s attempted seduction of a priest were darkened to avoid an X rating.  Like most horror films of the early seventies, The Blood on Satan’s Claw received little attention from the major critics with a few exceptions. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, “Blood on Satan’s Claw is cinematic diabolism of some style and intelligence…a horror movie of more than routine interest.” Judith Crist said, it “…offers a satisfying sense of sunlight-and-terror.” And Films and Filming noted, “For a pleasant variation on the usual unsubtle, corny examples of the current British horror genre, this is one for the collectors.”

Ralph (Barry Andrews, far left) and The Judge (Patrick Wymark) watch Reverend Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley) toy with a serpent.

Genre enthusiasts at the time, however, championed the film with John Duvoli of Cinefantastique leading the charge. “When 1971 is behind us, I hope I may be able to point to this neat little witchcraft thriller as one of the “sleeper” highlights of the year. I could hardly have expected a film as literate as this from the prolific but undistinguished Tony Tenser…The opening scenes are Lovecraftian in structure….The fact that we never really understand the creation, nature or form of the demon, his intent or the circumstances by which he controls his disciples, is at once a flaw and strength of the film…Ignore the title and programmer status. It deserves to be seen.”

The seductive Linda Hayden in The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).

Haggard said that during a visit to America he met director Jonathan Demme who praised Blood on Satan’s Claw, along with others in the Hollywood film industry who saw the movie during its U.S. release and loved it. Haggard also revealed that he kept a finger of the Devil model used in his film as a memento. Most of Haggard’s work after Satan’s Claw has been in British television; he directed the Bob Hoskins version of Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and several episodes of the Quatermass sci-fi TV series. Other films have included The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980) with Peter Sellers and Helen Mirren, the infamous killer snake feature Venom (1981) starring Oliver Reed, Klaus Kinski and Sarah Miles, and A Summer Story (1988), based on the John Galsworthy story.  

Since its release in 1971, The Blood on Satan’s Claw has been elevated to classic status by many film historians and horror film reference writers. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide called it a “richly atmospheric horror film with erotic overtones, somewhat gruesome at times.” Andy Boot of Fragments of Fear: An Illustrated History of British Horror Films deemed it “…a concerted effort to recapture the glories of Witchfinder General…it had a downbeat feel that was depressing without having the reasoned misanthropy of the Reeves film…but the direction and cutting gives the film an unsettling, disorienting feel…The finale is frightening not because of the cheesy monster, but because Wymark makes you believe that, although he must kill the creature, he is absolutely terrified of it. Photographer Dick Bush films the story in glorious autumnal colours, and this lushness contrasts nicely with the darkness of the tale.”

The Judge (Patrick Wymark) is a very ambiguous and unlikely hero in The Blood on Satan’s Claw

Thanks to its availability on DVD and Blu-Ray in the UK (you have to have an all-region player to view it in the U.S.) and occasional showings on such networks as Turner Classic Movies, The Blood on Satan’s Claw enjoys a still-growing cult following today.   SOURCES:
“Don’t Overact With Your Fingers!: The Making of Blood on Satan’s Claw” by David Taylor from Shock; The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema edited by Stefan Jaworzyn
The Blood on Satan’s Claw DVD commentary by Piers Haggard, Robert Wynn-Simmons, & Linda Hayden

* This article is a revised and edited version of various articles on the film that first appeared on the TCM Underground website.

Website links of interest:

http://mjsimpson-films.blogspot.com/2013/11/interview-piers-haggard.html

https://darklonelywater.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/from-baby-love-to-satans-claw-linda-haydens-cult-career/

http://diaboliquemagazine.com/blood-on-satans-claw-blu-ray-review/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110123/Child-killer-Mary-Bell-grandmother-51-But-I-left-grief-says-victims-mother.html

http://moviemorlocks.com/tag/milton-reid/

http://www.wymark.org.uk/life.html

http://www.classichorrorfilmsguide.co.uk/tigon.html

Charles Denner retreats from the world in Life Upside Down (1964), directed by Alain Jessua

Films that explore mental illness, especially Hollywood productions such as The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of Eve and A Brilliant Mind, usually tend to be heavy on the histrionics providing highly dramatic showcases and Oscar award opportunities for actors. But a descent into madness isn’t always signaled by wildly disruptive or overwrought behavior from the afflicted. Sometimes the illness can creep up slowly by degrees and pass for something more fleeting and subtle that avoids detection during the early stages. Life Upside Down (La vie à l’envers), directed by Alain Jessua, is a remarkable example of this, presenting a man who goes quietly mad while interpreting his erratic behavior as a profound new self-awareness.    

French director Alain Jessua as he looked in the sixties

The 1964 release marked the feature film debut of the 32-year-old filmmaker/screenwriter and is a remarkably self-assured and original first effort that was critically praised by many during its original release. It was nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and won for Best First Work. It also was in the running for Best Foreign Language Film in the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Sadly, the film is little-known today and difficult to see on any format although you can stream a less than satisfactory version of it on Youtube where the original aspect ratio is compromised and there are no English subtitles. I recently revisited a DVD-R copy of the film from ETC (European Trash Cinema) and discovered that not only does the film hold up well but grows more intriguing upon subsequent viewings.   Under the credits, we see a portable tape recorder on rewind. The play button is pressed and the narrator, Jacques Valin (Charles Denner), begins his tale: “I can’t say when it started. Thinking back, it must have been about two months ago…” Presented in flashback, Life Upside Down is told from Jacques’ perspective, often sharing his delusional visions and thoughts as his mental breakdown proceeds to a final haunting fadeout.

Charles Denner & Anna Gaylor (at center) embark on a disastrous marriage in Life Upside Down

While the tone of the film is often as cool and detached as Jacques’ observations of others and himself, this is not some clinical case study but an unconventional character portrait punctuated with absurd humor, tragedy (a suicide attempt) and urban angst. The striking black and white cinematography by Jacques Robin moves fluidly between the protagonist’s interior and exterior worlds recording selected sociological and psychological details but also capturing his heightened senses in scenes of lyrical beauty. And the sound design of the film reinforces Jacques’ bemused vision, alternating between an off-kilter, Dave Brubeck-like jazz score from Jacques Louisser, natural sound and pure silence.

When we first see Jacques, he is working as a real estate agent in Paris. He’s a dapper, attractive man with precise, almost robotic gestures and a pleasant, low-key demeanor. But his inner thoughts reveal he is dissatisfied and dismissive of his job. “I had just made a deal – a stupid couple giving up their place for one just like it.”

Jacques (Charles Denner) is visited by his wife Viviane (Anna Gaylor) at his real estate job

When he arrives home, he takes note of the sloppy housekeeping of his live-in girlfriend Viviane (Anna Gaylor), who is out on a modeling/actress assignment. Jacques takes a bath and then settles into an easy chair to read the newspaper. Alone and completely relaxed, Jacques has his first epiphany. A blissful inner peace envelops him and he drifts into a dreamlike state that is interrupted by the arrival of Viviane, whose voice is first heard as a distant echo.

Jacques (Charles Denner) experiences an unexplained euforia in Life Upside Down (1964)

This moment of complete self-absorption is the beginning of a recurring mental state that leads to Jacques’ slow but inexorable withdrawal from daily routines, responsibilities and the realities of his own life. Over the period of two months, Jacques goes from being a newlywed to jobless to unemployed wanderer to estranged husband to sanatorium inmate. The motivation or reasons behind Jacques’ downward spiral remain ambiguous but Jessua’s film offers just enough information to provide multiple interpretations of the protagonist’s behavior.

Jacques (Charles Denner) becomes absorbed by his stripped-down, all white existence in Life Upside Down (1964).

Is Jacques staging a private revolt against society? Is it a sense of self-loathing and failure that has driven him to reject the world? Or is he finally expressing himself for the first time in his life and no one can accept it? The final scene in Life Upside Down is particularly tantalizing because Jacques has finally found nirvana. It also raises the question of whether a mental patient like Jacques should be left to his own delusions or cured. Jacques obviously doesn’t want to be cured and he doesn’t need medication or drugs to achieve his peculiar altered state. In some curious ways, Jacques shares many similarities with the withdrawn, non-communicative title character of Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener.

Charles Denner is mesmerizing as Jacques and sustains our curiosity about him without succumbing to sentimentality or melodrama. He is alternately charming, maddening, cynical, inscrutable, cruel or placid. In one of the more unforgettable sequences, Jacques takes Viviane to the countryside for a picnic and leaves her alone while he goes for a walk in the woods. He then finds a hiding place to spy on her and observes her slowly escalating panic as she realizes he may have abandoned her or worse. Later in the film, Jacques’ voyeurism is even more pronounced (and so is his dehumanization) when he takes a separate apartment across from Viviane’s so he can watch her impassively from a distance.

Jacques (Charles Denner) would rather be somewhere else than the country in this scene from Alain Jessua’s Life Upside Down (1964). Anna Gaylor plays his wife Viviane.

Jacques’ mental flights of fancy also provide some of the most hypnotic and visually eloquent moments in the film. “To me every day was alike…like walking down an endless corridor with rooms on either side smelling of cheap food and polish,” he confesses and we see images of Jacques on an empty subway escalator or wandering down a long hallway or staring at the surface texture of windows, walls or furniture. As his delusions become more constant, he wanders the streets of Paris which are remarkably free of cars, people and bustling street life. “I walked in a crowd and whenever I wanted, I could make people disappear,” he boasts.

Jacques (Charles Denner) imagines Paris as a world of his own with no other people in Life Upside Down (1964).

At the time Charles Denner made Life Upside Down he was still a rising young actor in French cinema. He had just appeared in the title role of Landru (1963), Claude Chabrol’s poisonous satire about a Bluebeard-like serial killer modeled on a famous murderer. Denner would go on to work with such renowned directors as Louis Malle (The Thief of Paris), Marcel Carne (Les assassins de l’ordre) and Claude Sautet (Mado) but he is probably best known for his signature role in Costa-Gavras’s Z and his many collaborations with Claude Lelouch (The Crook, And Now My Love, Second Chance, Robert et Robert) and Francois Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black, Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, The Man Who Loved Women). His final film was Golden Eighties, directed by the late Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). Denner died on September 10, 1995 from cancer at the age of 69.

Anna Gaylor and Charles Denner star in Alain Jessua’s Life Upside Down (1964).

Although Denner is in practically every scene of Life Upside Down, the supporting cast is unusually strong and includes Paul Bousquet as Jacques’s free-spirited, acrobat friend Paul, Jean Yanne and Yvonne Clech as the husband-wife owners of a small real estate company that employ Jacques and Anna Gaylor as Viviane. Taylor’s performance is particularly impressive because she is first introduced as a rather naive and clueless romantic whose character becomes more sympathetic and admirable as she attempts to understand and aid her increasingly delusional husband.

Viviane (Anna Gaylor) paints her toenails while her husband studies her like a science experiment in Life Upside Down (1964).

Life Upside Down arrived toward the end of the French New Wave, which was at its height between 1959 and 1965. But Jessua is not usually associated with the pioneers of that movement and stands alone as one of the more original and idiosyncratic filmmakers to emerge during the Post-New Wave years. The Killing Game (Jeu de massacre aka Comic Strip Hero, 1967), Jessua’s second feature film, was even more enthusiastically received by critics upon its release. A wickedly clever comedy-fantasy about a triangle involving two cartoonists and a wealthy playboy, the film works as both a critique of pop culture and a playful mind game that may or may not involve real murders. It is ripe for rediscovery but, like most of Jessua’s works, difficult to find or view on any format outside of bootleg copies.

This 1964 French film is also known as Jeu de Massacre and The Killing Game.

After The Killing Game, most critics appeared to lose interest in Jessua’s work and his later films were rarely seen outside Europe. Only Traitement de choc (1973) received some limited distribution in the U.S. under the title Shock Treatment and that was mainly due to the high profile stars (Alain Delon, Annie Girardot) and a sinister storyline (a health spa for the wealthy exploits immigrants in secret experiments) that pigeonholed the film in the horror genre. Other Jessua films that explore similarly dark storylines or straddle the borders of horror and sci-fi are Armagedon (1977), The Dogs (1982) and Frankenstein 90 (1984). Perhaps some enterprising programmer at MoMA or Film Forum will one day put together a retrospective of Jessua’s work but until then, Life Upside Down remains a highly accessible and fascinating entry point….if you have the good fortune to see it.

jacques (Charles Denner) imagines the world as a long empty corridor with closed doors in Life Upside Down (1964).

Other website links of interest:

http://www.newwavefilm.com/interviews/alain-jessua-interview.shtml

http://theblowupmoment.blogspot.com/2012/11/la-vie-lenvers-alain-jessua-1964.html

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D04E5DF143DE13ABC4D51DFBF66838F679EDE

The Dogs (1979), one of Alain Jessua’s later films

Robert J. Flaherty (left) and W.S. Van Dyke collaborated on White Shadows in the South Seas (1928).

Either by accident or design, MGM came up with the most unlikely partnership in the history of motion pictures in the late twenties. Imagine if you can a collaboration between Robert Flaherty, the filmmaker who is generally credited with pioneering the documentary form (though some film scholars take issue with that classification), and W. S. Van Dyke II, who was known in the industry as “One Take Woody” because of his quick, cost-saving shooting schedule. Flaherty’s filmmaking method was just the opposite. His painstaking preparation for each film was legendary; both Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) took over two years to complete. Somehow these two men were brought together by MGM mogul Irving J. Thalberg for White Shadows in the South Seas (1928).  

Rumor has it that Thalberg bought Frederick O’Brien’s book because he found the title intriguing and not because of its powerful story which was a bitter denunciation of white civilization and its destructive effects on the lifestyles and cultural traditions of a Polynesian paradise.

Monte Blue and Raquel Torres in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

The central focus of White Shadows in the South Seas is Matthew Lloyd (Monte Blue), an alcoholic doctor who is shanghaied by an unscrupulous pearl trader and winds up being marooned on a Pacific island where the natives have never seen a white man. Lloyd falls in love with Fayaway (Raquel Torres), a native girl, and begins an idyllic existence. But Lloyd’s corrupt nature and inherent greed emerge when he is revered as a god and brings about the destruction of the island community through alcohol, lust, and disease.

Monte Blue and Raquel Torres enjoy a brief idyllic romance in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

Flaherty agreed to direct White Shadows in the South Seas because he was friends with the author Frederick O’Brien and was recognized as an expert on Pacific Island culture (He had spent over 20 months on the island of Savai’i in the Somoas filming Moana). Van Dyke was brought on board to head up the technical unit and the entire crew traveled to the island of Papeete in Tahiti for filming.

Raquel Torres on the set of White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

Right from the beginning, things began to go wrong. The unit’s interpreter was arrested a day after the crew arrived due to a past run-in with the local authorities. That situation immediately made the islanders suspicious of the movie people. Complicating the situation were tropical downpours that delayed filming, a climate that quickly spoiled food and basic edibles, and the unavailability of portable lights and generators for location shooting.  But the biggest problem was that Flaherty’s slow, meticulous method of filmmaking was trying the patience of the entire crew. In W. S. Van Dyke’s journal, the assistant director wrote, “Everyone hates everyone else’s guts. They are fighting like mad. Flaherty doesn’t know a thing….I have never seen a troop in a more deplorable condition. I am spending my days running around trying to pat them on the back and telling them to carry on as we will get home all the quicker. They are not sore at me, and when I am shooting they behave alright, but the minute Flaherty starts in, they start.”

Monte Blue (center, beside native boy) in the wedding ceremony scene from White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

Flaherty knew his attempt to create a natural, ethnographic portrait was doomed when he came upon his disinterested crew members sitting on the sand, listening to a radio concert broadcast from the Coconut Grove, a popular Hollywood nightclub. Even though the natives were singing Polynesian songs in the nearby coconut grove, the crew were only interested in returning home. Reportedly, Flaherty said in disgust, “Why not go back and make the picture in the Coconut Grove?” He soon quit the production and returned home to Hollywood leaving MGM to frantically try and salvage the film.

Raquel Torres as the native girl Fayaway in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

Van Dyke was soon promoted to director and successfully rallied the troops to complete the filming in Tahiti. Back on the MGM lot at Culver City, he shot some additional material for White Shadows in the South Seas including a typhoon at sea and a shipwreck. Then the studio decided to make White Shadows in the South Seas their first sound film so they added synchronized music and sound effects including cries, laughs, whistling, and one spoken word, “Hello.”

An example of an intertitle card from White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) which spells out the film’s moral

Despite all the behind-the-scenes difficulties, White Shadows in the South Seas was enthusiastically received by audiences and a surprising number of film critics. Motion Picture Magazine called it “a picture ravishing to the eye and appealing to the heart” while The Film Spectator proclaimed, “Nothing finer than White Shadows in the South Seas ever has come to the screen.” Variety singled out the film’s cinematography, in particular, for praise, stating that “the panchromatic work in this feature is outstanding. It’s so good it very likely makes these Marquesas Islands look better than they really are.” Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times was one of the few who voiced any criticism. He pronounced the film merely “average” and complained about MGM’s promotion of the feature as the first sound film as it had almost no dialogue and relied on sound effects and music.  The cinematography by Clyde De Vinna went on to win an Oscar and the film launched W.S. Van Dyke’s directorial career. He would return to the South Seas the following year for another exotic picture – The Pagan – but this time, he completed the picture in one month and, in the process, delivered a profitable box office attraction.

Ramon Novarro and Dorothy Janis (aka Dorothy King) star in The Pagan (1929).

Flaherty also returned to the subject of native life in the South Seas with Tabu (1931), which was a collaboration with German director F. W. Murnau. They both share screenplay credits but their partnership was no more harmonious than the Flaherty-Van Dyke teaming and Flaherty ended up selling his stake in the film to Murnau. The final cut of Tabu reflects more of Murnau’s vision for the film than Flaherty’s but it was appraised by most critics as being far superior to White Shadows in the South Seas and is still admired for its pictorial beauty today. Unfortunately, Murnau died in a car accident before the premiere of Tabu. As for Flaherty, he opted for no more collaborations if possible (an exception was 1937’s Elephant Boy, co-directed with Zoltan Korda) and returned to independent filmmaking, working on several short form documentaries before delivering his next acknowledged masterpiece in 1934 – Man of Aran.

A scene from Robert J. Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934)

White Shadows on the South Seas is currently available on DVD from the Warner Archive collection. http://www.wbshop.com/product/white+shadows+in+the+south+seas+%28mod%29+1000179935.do?sortby=ourPicks&refType=&from=Search   * This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website

Other website links of interest:

http://www.randybyers.net/?p=2847

http://www.academia.edu/2585979/White_Shadows_in_the_South_Seas_and_Cultural_Ambivalence

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0150/7896/files/Tabu_press_kit.pdf

An intertitle card from White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)

Think of the teeming hub of humanity that is New York City and then imagine a person with a highly contagious and deadly disease wandering among the masses, spreading death and panic. Based on an actual case in 1946 – a smallpox scare in which millions of New Yorkers received free vaccinations – The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) is a fictionalized dramatization of that incident. It stars Evelyn Keyes as Sheila Bennet, a modern day “Typhoid Mary” who contracts smallpox in Cuba while serving as a courier for Matt (Charles Korvin), her no-good musician boyfriend, in a stolen diamond smuggling scheme.

Smallpox vaccine is administered to citizens of New York City in 1947 during an outbreak of the disease

The film develops a steady, escalating sense of tension from the very first scene as Sheila arrives in New York City’s crowded Penn Station, aware that she is being shadowed by a U.S. Treasury agent. Already feverish and weak from the disease (Sheila has no idea of her lethal condition), she manages to elude her pursuer and slip incognito into Matt’s apartment where she holes up and tries to get well. In the meantime, her contagious condition has already infected numerous people. When Dr. Ben Wood (William Bishop) discovers that smallpox is the cause, he tries to prevent a major epidemic by involving city officials and the Health Department.

Evelyn Keyes as Sheila Bennet, a woman infected with smallpox in The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

As they frantically race against time to quarantine victims and vaccinate local residents without creating widespread panic, Sheila once again takes to the streets, this time in search of Matt who has taken the diamonds and run off with her sister Francie (Lola Albright). Armed with a gun, Sheila closes in on her two-timing lover while the police and city officials follow in close pursuit, hoping to stop her before she can further infect anyone.   The Killer That Stalked New York, directed by Earl McEvoy, was completed just after the general release of Panic in the Streets (1950), a major 20th-Century-Fox production from director Elia Kazan that featured a similar plot; a criminal (Jack Palance) infected with a deadly pulmonary variation of the bubonic plague is running loose in the streets of New Orleans while the police have 48 hours to catch him before an epidemic breaks out.

Jack Palance is a criminal infected with the “pneumonic plague” in Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950)

Due to the critical and box office success of the latter film, Columbia Pictures decided to shelve The Killer That Stalked New York for six months so that it wouldn’t suffer in comparison. They needn’t have bothered since most critics and moviegoers at the time considered McEvoy’s film little more than a typical B-movie.  Bosley Crowther in The New York Times dismissed it, writing “…unfortunately, the script of Harry Essex, based on a factual magazine piece [“Smallpox, the Killer That Stalks New York” by Milton Lehman in Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan Magazine], has a bad tendency to ramble…And the performances of the principal characters, while adequate, have little punch…a potentially but not sufficiently intriguing film.”

A manhunt is under way for Evelyn Keyes as The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

Clearly undervalued during its original release, The Killer That Stalked New York is an atmospheric and occasionally taut little thriller that benefits greatly from the documentary-like approach that cinematographer Joseph Biroc brings to the film, utilizing real New York City locations. Although sometimes classified as a film noir, it is a bit of a stretch to pigeonhole the film in that genre as it doesn’t really conform to many noir conventions or trademarks. Other than Evelyn Keyes functioning as a literal femme fatale, the film is closer to a strange hybrid of revenge melodrama and public service health documentary. It even ends with this acknowledgment: “To the men and women of public health–the first line of defense between mankind and disease. We gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the departments of health and hospitals of New York and Los Angeles.”  As the vengeful angel of death, Evelyn Keyes is rarely sympathetic nor is she intended to be. She’s a walking plague that needs to be neutralized and during the course of the film she quickly dissolves into a sweaty, delirious mess.

Evelyn Keyes as a smallpox victim in The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

It’s a long way from her more glamorous roles such as the ethereal beauty of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) or the sassy, red-headed genie from A Thousand and One Nights (1945). Despite this, she makes Sheila a compelling presence that is more than just a clichéd menace that drives the narrative.

Evelyn Keyes in a film noir-like shot from Earl McEvoy’s The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

At this point in her career, Keyes had already established herself in the film noir genre with The Face Behind the Mask (1941) and Johnny O’Clock (1947). Her greatest achievements in the genre lay ahead, however, with her unforgettable performances in Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951) and Phil Karlson’s 99 River Street (1953).

Brad Dexter and Evelyn Keyes set off sparks in 99 River Street (1953)

During the filming of The Killer That Stalked New York, Keyes was involved in an affair with actor Kirk Douglas, a situation that created tension between her and studio mogul Harry Cohn. Because of his personal dislike of Douglas, Cohn forbade Keyes to invite him to the set and it resulted in the actress buying out her Columbia contract and going independent after completing the film.

Kirk Douglas and Evelyn Keyes circa 1953

Originally Lew Ayres was slated to play Dr. Wood in The Killer That Stalked New York after producer Allen Miner first bought the film rights but that changed when the project was sold to Columbia and producer Robert Cohn took over. That’s when William Bishop, a western and action-adventure film veteran (Coroner Creek, The Tougher They Come), was brought in to replace Ayres.

Among the other cast members you’ll recognize in The Killer That Stalked New York are Dorothy Malone as the nurse who first treats the smallpox carrier, Carl Benton Reid as a city commissioner, Connie Gilchrist as a nosy landlady, Richard Egan as a cop, character actor Whit Bissell as a flophouse manager, and Jim Backus (the voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo) in the uncharacteristic role of a predatory bar owner who tries to force himself on Sheila…with fatal results.  While the major studios still attempt to update and improve on unsurpassed classics like 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front (a new version by Roger Donaldson is pending) or boxoffice hits like 1960’s The Magnificent Seven (Antoine Fuqua’s reboot with Denzel Washington is arriving in Fall 2016), they would probably encounter less flak from film buffs for retooling quirky and original B-movie plots from movies which have no resonance with most moviegoers. The disturbing premise of The Killer That Stalked New York is certainly strong enough to warrant a bigger budget, faster-paced remake with an A-list actress who can play tough and sexy like Jennifer Lawrence.  The Killer That Stalked New York was released on DVD in 2010 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in a 2-disc set entitled Bad Girls of Film Noir Volume 1. It also included Two of a Kind, Bad for Each Other and The Glass Wall. The print quality of Sony’s set is very good and, in the case of The Killer That Stalked New York, the black and white contrast levels are particularly striking. To date, this is still your best option for viewing this once-obscure, hard-to-see B-movie.  * This is a revised and expanded version of an article that first appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Website links of interest:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1624122/pdf/amjphnation01122-0009.pdf

http://www.wnyc.org/story/smallpox-in-new-york-city/

http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2010/04/killer-that-stalked-new-york.html

https://shadowsandsatin.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/remembering-evelyn-keyes/

http://haphazard-stuff.blogspot.com/2015/09/99-river-street-1953-review.html

Barry Evans is at the center of things in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Among the many films to emerge from the “Swinging London” film phenomenon of the sixties, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967) followed in the wake of such popular titles as Georgy Girl (1966), Morgan! (1966) and Alfie (all 1966) but is not as well known to American audiences. Based on Hunter Davies’ first novel, the film is a giddy, high-spirited time capsule of its era with day-glo colors, groovy fashions, British slang and playful cinematic techniques influenced by Richard Lester’s Beatles films such as speeded up motion, still frames, and the breaking of the fourth wall; the protagonist, Jamie McGregor (Barry Evans), constantly addresses the viewer in the manner of a confessional.   The entire movie is set in and around “Newtown” (Stevenage in Hertfordshire), an antiseptic, modern suburb of London, where Jamie lives, works (as a delivery boy and stock clerk at a grocery) and goes to school. There is only one thing on Jamie’s mind – SEX – and the entire storyline is devoted to his pursuit of losing his virginity.

Barry Evans is more than curious in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Although Jamie’s go-getter attitude suggests he’s an Alfie in the making, he’s much less successful when it comes to actual conquests and the movie chronicles one sexual misadventure after another, each one played for laughs, with Jamie coming close to but never succeeding in his quest. In fact, the entire movie is one long, unconsummated tease that withholds Jamie’s pleasure until the final act. It’s a comic exercise in sexual frustration similar in tone to Michel Deville’s Benjamin (1968) in which the title character (Pierre Clementi) is continually interrupted in his attempts at lovemaking.

Pierre Clementi & Catherine Deneuve in Benjamin (1968).

When Jamie finally hooks up with his dream girl, Mary (Judy Geeson), he is shocked to discover she is as sexually adventurous and independent as he aspires to be but the film, directed by Clive Donner, doesn’t treat this revelation with irony. Instead he imposes a moralistic ending on the movie that only reinforces Jamie’s chauvinistic attitudes (as well as those of the male-dominated film industry at the time): Good girls don’t have premarital sex and aren’t promiscuous.

The gorgeous Judy Geeson in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), directed by Clive Donner

Donner, whose earlier films The Caretaker [1963], based on the Harold Pinter play, and Nothing But the Best [1964], had been well received by the critics, is clearly aiming for a more commercial, youth-oriented film with Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. The result, however, is a mixed message farce with a trendy, pop art veneer, the swinging London sounds of The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, and a stuffy bourgeois sensibility underneath it all, which makes the occasional nude scenes appear all the more voyeuristic.

Judy Geeson goes skinny-dipping as Barry Evans prepares to join her in Here We Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

The film actually ran into censorship trouble in England and the au natural swimming sequence with Barry Evans and Judy Geeson was excised from the film during its original release.

Most critics at the time treated Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush as an unexceptional sex comedy for teenagers. Typical of the general reaction was Hollis Alpert in Saturday Review who wrote, “The film for all its lighthearted cheerfulness, does not amount to much.” Renata Adler of The New York Times was much harsher, noting, “Its awfulness is cumulative – and if you also don’t mind voices pitched to a shrill unpleasantness, there is still the plot. It is a kind of cross between Billy Liar [1963] and Closely Watched Trains [1966]….some of the scenes are dull while others have some of the tasteless excesses of What’s New, Pussycat? [1965] but from a pictorial point of view – of what a new fantasy of mod love and courtship might look like.”   But there were some positive reviews as well such as Variety which stated, “Clive Donner’s production has a nimble alertness to juvenile characteristics and a nice flair for comedy…it’s pleasantly salted with lines about young sexual ambitions and their difficult achievement…Barry Evans wins both sympathy and laughs as the boy.” And more recent reassessments include Bruce Eder’s entry in Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock’n’Roll in the Movies which asserted, “Of all the “with-it” youth films of the 1960s, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush is the one that broke the most ground. Its take on teenage sex was relatively honest, and it didn’t pander. In some respects, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush seems like a British analog to The Graduate [1967].”

Barry Evans tries to score with Angela Scoular in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

While it definitely is not in the same league with The Graduate, Mulberry Bush holds up much better today than many of its contemporaries and is always visually engaging with occasional moments of sharp satire (Jamie’s claustrophobic home life with his parents and brother) and appropriate off-color humor (Jamie’s mom inspecting his underwear in the presence of a girlfriend). Whether intentional or not, the film’s setting with its drab, uniform housing developments and lack of green space adds another layer of desperation to Jamie’s situation and despite the surface gaiety, the stark reality beneath is just as depressing as a Ken Loach film such as Family Life (1971).

Barry Evans is a would-be Alfie in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Barry Evans, in his film debut, makes an animated, cheeky protagonist who may occasionally remind you of the young Albert Finney in Tom Jones (1963) in some of his facial expressions and mannerisms. It was a promising showcase for the young actor but it didn’t lead to a successful film career and Evans is mostly known today for his work in two popular British television shows, Doctor in the House [1969-1970] and Mind Your Language [1977-1979].

Barry Evans & Judy Geeson go sailing in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

The other leading players in Mulberry Bush – the various “birds” who are pursued by Jamie – includes Judy Geeson, who is a complete knockout and the most fleshed-out character; the rest – Angela Scoular, Sheila White, Adrienne Posta, Vanessa Howard and Diane Keen – function as eye candy and obstacles to Jamie’s sexual education. But the real scene stealer in the film is Denholm Elliott as a decadent aristocrat with a wine fetish who finds a captive audience in Jamie during his weekend visit to see his daughter.

Denholm Elliott is the real scene-stealer in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Even though Mulberry Bush was often lumped in with other “Swinging London” based features, it was actually shot on location in Stevenage in Hertfordshire. The reason it wasn’t actually filmed in London was because the daily crew fee would have been much higher and unaffordable.

Scottish author Hunter Davies, who also penned the screenplay, was disappointed that the film wasn’t set in his native Carlisle. He also had to tone down the British cultural references and local slang because the distributor didn’t want to jeopardize their box office potential in the American market. As someone who has read Davies’ book, I can attest that the novel is a much more grubby, deglamorized coming-of-age confessional with a gay encounter that was not included in the film.

Author Hunter Davies, author of The Beatles, in the 1980s.

Davies is probably best known for his 1968 biography The Beatles which was approved by Brian Epstein, the group’s manager at the time. Davies is also the author of The Glory Game (1972), which is generally regarded as one of the best books ever written about football. Today Davies continues to write about football and other sports in his weekly column for the New Statesman.  Of particular interest to rock music fans is the soundtrack for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. At the time of filming singer/songwriter and multi-talented musician Steve Winwood was performing with both The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, both of whom are featured on the film’s soundtrack which was released in November of 1967. The Spencer Davis Group had just released the single “I’m a Man,” which became a huge pop hit. In December Traffic released its first album “Mr. Fantasy” and in March Winwood officially left The Spencer Davis Group for Traffic. The church rave scene with The Spencer Davis Group in the movie takes place at Bowes Lyon, an actual music club in Stevenage where The Who once played in 1965.   Here is some additional information about the cast and crew of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

Director Clive Donner began his film career as an editor on the 1944 film On Approval and then moved into directing, first in television in 1951 on the Hallmark Hall of Fame, and then in motion pictures with the 1962 feature, Some People featuring David Hemmings in a story about three bikers who form a rock ‘n’ roll band.

Director Clive Donner with Judy Geeson on the set of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Donner made Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush after he completed the Peter Sellers-Peter O’Toole comedy, What’s New, Pussycat? (1965). Most film critics feel that his best work has been The Caretaker (1963), an adaptation of the Harold Pinter play which won the special prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, Nothing But the Best (1964) starring Alan Bates, and Rogue Male (1976), a made-for-TV feature with Peter O’Toole that won a BAFTA award (British Academy of Film & Television Arts) and was a remake of Fritz Lang’s 1941 thriller Man Hunt.

Donner co-produced Mulberry Bush with writer Larry Kramer who also provided some additional dialogue. Kramer is best known as the author of the play The Normal Heart and founded the AIDS advocacy group, ACT UP, in 1987. Kramer also wrote the screenplays for Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) and the 1973 megabomb musical remake of Lost Horizon.

Cinematographer Alex Thomson

Cinematographer Alex Thomson had only shot one film prior to Mulberry Bush – the Israeli comedy Ervinka (1967) – but this was an excellent showcase for his craft and led to a highly successful film career. In addition to receiving an Oscar® nomination for his work on Excalibur [1981] and British Film award nominations for Eureka [1984], Legend [1985] and Hamlet [1996], he has also lensed Labyrinth [1986], The Krays [1990] and Black Beauty [1994] to list a few.

Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was a promising and highly appealing screen debut for actor Barry Evans who plays Jamie, the skirt-chasing grocery clerk. Unfortunately, his film career never progressed beyond a few roles such as Ingild in Clive Donner’s period epic Alfred the Great (1969) and Eli Frome in Pete Walker’s 1971 thriller, Die Screaming, Marianne.

Barry Evans (left) & Robin Nedwell in the British TV series, Doctor in the House.

Instead, Evans became a television star during the seventies, first appearing in the popular Doctor in the House series as Michael Upton and then repeating that same character in the Doctor at Large series that followed. His last major success was in the TV series Mind Your Language (1977-1979).

After Evans appeared in the TV series Emery Presents: Legacy of Murder (1982), he didn’t receive any more job offers and to support himself he became a minicab driver in Leicestershire. He did return to the screen one more time in 1993 with a supporting role in the remake of Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Barry Evans at the beginning of his career in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Evans died on February 10, 1997 at his bungalow in Claybrooke Magna, Leicestershire. He was only 53 years old and the cause of his death has never been confirmed. According to the information at wiki.answers.com “His death…was attributed by the British Authorities…to alcohol consumption, but there were mysterious circumstances, which they failed to mention to the public. He was fully laid out on the sofa, when police found his body. They had come to inform him that they had found his stolen J-Reg Montego car, and he (Barry Evans) had previously reported that there had been a burglary at his home, and quite a few items were missing. Barry Evans had also made a call to a friend at 5 am in the morning, and had been very upset. The autopsy revealed that he had died of a blow to his head besides the high alcohol content in his blood – perhaps a Homicide.”

Judy Geeson and Barry Evans in a publicity shot for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Except for the obscure 1963 drama Wings of Mystery, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was Judy Geeson’s first major film role. She had appeared in various British television programs prior to that but the Clive Donner film gave her wide exposure that led to her casting opposite Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love and the Joan Crawford horror thriller, Berserk! (both 1967).

For a brief period of time, Geeson looked as if she might be the next “Julie Christie.” She received critical acclaim for several of her performances in such dramatic fare as Peter Hall’s Three Into Two Won’t Go [1969] with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, Ted Kotcheff’s Two Gentlemen Sharing [1969], One of Those Things [1971], an offbeat melodrama filmed in Denmark with a British cast, and Richard Fleisher’s disturbing account of serial killer John Christie, 10 Rillington Place (1971), which co-starred Richard Attenborough and John Hurt. Unfortunately, due to either limited opportunities or unlucky career decisions, the actress ended up accepting roles in B-movie genre films and sex comedies such as Percy’s Progress [1974], Adventures of a Taxi Driver [1976], and Inseminoid [1981]. Beginning in the late seventies and continuing to the present, she began to concentrate more on television work and less on motion pictures.

BERSERK!, from left: Peter Burton, Judy Geeson and Joan Crawford star in Berserk (1967)

Geeson was briefly married to Kristoffer Tabori, the son of director Don Siegel and actress Viveca Lindfors. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she owned an antique store called Blanche until 2009. In recent years she appeared at a revival screening of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush when it was shown at the Egyptian Theatre as part of the Hollywood Cinematique’s regular programming.

Angela Scoular displays her mod gear in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Angela Scoular, who plays Caroline in Mulberry Bush, divided her time between television work and moviemaking for most of her career though none of her film roles resulted in a breakout hit. She did appear in a number of major films but only in minor supporting roles such as A Countess from Hong Kong [1967], directed by Charlie Chaplin, Casino Royale [1967], On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [1969] and The Adventurers [1970], based on the Harold Robbins bestseller. She committed suicide in April 2011 by drinking a corrosive cleaning fluid.

Adrienne Posta has a fondness for chips in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Adrienne Posta, cast in the role of Linda in Mulberry Bush, appeared in several popular British films of the late sixties and early seventies – To Sir, with Love, Up the Junction [1968], Some Girls Do [1969] and Spring and Port Wine [1970] – before concentrating on television work in later years.

Vanessa Howard and Peter Cushing in Corruption (1968)

It was in the role of Audrey in Mulberry Bush that Vanessa Howard made her film debut. Her brief movie career included such cult horror favorites as The Blood Beast Terror [1968], Corruption [1968], the black comedy Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly [1969] and What Became of Jack and Jill? [1972]. She retired from movies after marrying Hollywood producer Robert Chartoff (Point Blank [1967], Rocky [1976], New York, New York [1977]). They divorced in 1983 and Howard died in 2010 at the age of 62.

French film poster for Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush

While Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush was mostly a showcase for young, up-and-coming actors, Maxine Audley and Denholm Elliott as Caroline’s decadent aristocratic parents practically stole the movie in their brief scenes. Audley had a long and distinguished career, appearing in such movies as The Prince and the Showgirl [1957] with Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, The Vikings [1958], Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom [1960] and The Agony and the Ecstasy [1965]. Elliott was one of England’s most distinguished character actors, scoring an Oscar® nomination for Best Supporting Actor in A Room with a View [1985], and winning a younger audience with his appearances in Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981] and Trading Places [1983].

Nicky Henson and Vanessa Howard in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

In minor supporting roles in Mulberry Bush, you’ll spot such familiar British supporting players as Nicky Henson (Witchfinder General [1968], There’s a Girl in My Soup [1970], Psychomania [1973]), Roy Holder (The Taming of the Shrew [1967], Loot [1970], The Land That Time Forgot [1975]) and Donald Pleasence’s daughter, Angela, who has appeared in such horror films as From Beyond the Grave (1973), Symptoms (1974) and The Godsend (1980).

Barry Evans in a scene from Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967)

Until recent years Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush has remained one of the more difficult films to see on any format until 2010 when BFI released a dual DVD/Blu-Ray of it. But unless you have an all-region player, it is still unavailable as a domestic release in the U.S. 

• This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other Website links of interest:

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/2010/11/09/here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush-1968/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-barry-evans-1278359.html

http://jon-doloresdelargo.blogspot.com/2011/06/mysterious-death-of-barry-evans.html

http://moviemorlocks.com/2010/09/16/clive-donners-here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush-1967/

http://www.british60scinema.net/unsung-films/here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush/

Often overlooked in the Spaghetti Western hall of fame, The Ruthless Four (1968) is a riveting, well-crafted tale of a ill-fated search for hidden gold that bears some thematic similarities to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. While it is not quite in the same league as John Huston’s 1948 classic, the cast alone should still pique the interest of any film buff starting with the top-billed Van Heflin and Gilbert Roland, two Hollywood legends with some classic Westerns to their credit; Heflin with Shane (1953) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and Roland with his series of “Cisco Kid” oaters that began with The Gay Cavalier in 1946. The curiosity factor is also undeniable with the eclectic casting of Uruguay-born actor George Hilton, a veteran of countless giallos and Euro-westerns, and the inimitable Klaus Kinski, who has a substantial role here unlike many of his genre efforts where his appearance is often little more than a cameo or brief walk-on.   

The Ruthless Four, which has been released under a number of alternate titles such as Every Man for Himself, Sam Cooper’s Gold and Ognuno per sé, opens with a double-cross and sets up a scenario of paranoia and mutual betrayal for the reminder of the film. Prospector Sam Cooper (Heflin) is forced to kill his partner Slim in self-defense when the greedy ingrate tries to murder him outside a remote mine and make off with several bags of gold dust they excavated together. Things go from bad to worse when Cooper is ambushed by thieves on his way back to town. They steal his horses and supplies and leave him to die in the desert while overlooking his bags of gold in their haste. Cooper manages to survive through stubborn determination and buries some of the bags, dumping the rest in a lake except for a small amount which he uses to register a claim with the town official.

Van Heflin is stranded in an unforgiving desert in The Ruthless Four (1968)

Needing a partner he can trust, Cooper contacts his adopted son Manolo (Hilton) whom he hasn’t seen in years but desperately needs for the task of retrieving the gold. Events take an unexpected turn when Manolo insists that his close friend ‘The Blond’ (Kinski) join them as a much-needed extra person to help with the manual labor and provide protection. Suspicious about this new development, Cooper asks Mason (Roland), a former friend, to come along as a fourth partner despite the fact that their own history is marked by betrayal. As the quartet make their way to the site of the buried gold, secret agendas and ulterior motives emerge among the four men as they are stalked by hired gunmen intent on claiming the gold for themselves.

The Ruthless Four take cover during a surprise ambush in the desert

While the basic premise may sound overly familiar and formulaic, The Ruthless Four is particularly memorable for the sharply etched characterizations of the quartet. No one would consider any of them sympathetic or even likable human beings. Cooper is revealed to be a man who has spent his life obsessed with striking it rich, alienating anyone of importance to him in the process – his wife, adopted son and friends. Heflin is appropriately grizzled and driven as Cooper and manages to depict this lonely, self-deluded character in a way that actually evokes some sympathy for his plight.

Van Heflin stars as Sam Cooper in the spaghetti western, The Ruthless Four (1968)

Gilbert Roland is also perfectly cast as the calculating, steely eyed Mason. On the surface, he looks as cunning and cocksure as Clint Eastwood’s No Name drifter in the Sergio Leone Dollars trilogy, but Roland also manages to invest his character with a believable vulnerability (a past bout with Malaria has made Mason dependent on quinine tablets; without them he goes into crippling convulsions). Roland was 63 at the time he made this film and he looks remarkably fit when you consider that his career began in the silent era.

Gilbert Roland as Mason in The Ruthless Four (1968), directed by Giorgio Capitani

While both Heflin and Roland bring a mythic, Old West quality to their portrayals, they are overshadowed by Klaus Kinski as the enigmatic ‘Blonde.’ The German actor is completely mesmerizing here and manages to upstage his co-stars in scene after scene through his eccentric performance style and innovative costume changes. He first appears disguised as a priest but later adopts various headgear to draw attention to himself – a black Amish-style hat, a burlap sack hoodie while mining and a black burnoose for desert wear. He also goes hatless, displaying his long, shaggy locks in a style that looks closer to a sixties rock ‘n’ roll star. Reputedly, both Heflin and Roland found Kinski to be a very difficult co-star, probably due to his penchant for improvising little bits of business on the spot to deflect attention from the other actors but the ploy is completely consistent with his demonic and unpredictable antagonist.

Klaus Kinski as the mysterious ‘Blonde’ in The Ruthless Four (1968)

George Hilton, sporting a deep tan (or is it bronze skin makeup?), is tasked with delineating the most ambiguous character – the twitchy and deceptive Manolo. It’s an erratic performance but it works because Manolo is supposed to be completely neurotic and amoral. He alternates between feigning affection for Cooper and succumbing meekly to whatever the Blonde commands him to do. The homoerotic overtones of the relationship between Manolo and the Blonde are omnipresent in all of their scenes together with Kinski often invading Manolo’s personal space and dominating him both emotionally and physically despite his more diminutive build. There’s even something not-quite-right about Cooper’s determined attempts to forge a closer bond with his adoptive son in the first half of the film when they frequent a steam bath and later share a bedroom. You could even seen the film as a fatalistic journey between two embattled couples, an older, world-weary pair and the younger, more predatory twosome.

George Hilton as the deceitful Manolo in The Ruthless Four (1968)

If anything, the gay subtext lends an additional layer of tension and anxiety to the volatile pairings in the film. The screenplay, by the way, is credited to Augusto Caminito (Grand Slam, The Designated Victim) and Fernando Di Leo, who is better known for directing some of the most popular crime dramas in the poliziotteschi genre such as The Italian Connection (1972), The Boss (1973) and Kidnap Syndicate (1975).  Giorgio Capitani, the director of The Ruthless Four, rarely dabbled in the Western genre and is better known for his light comedies (Lobster for Breakfast, I Hate Blondes) and Italian television series and made-for-TV movies. Despite this, The Ruthless Four is a well-paced, consistently engaging drama with some superb action sequences (an ambush at a seemingly deserted dwelling, the climatic shootouts) mixed in with quirky, almost surreal interludes such as a desert rainstorm sequence which has Kinski and Hilton wallowing ecstatically in the muck. In addition, the sun scorched landscapes of Almeria, Spain are strikingly rendered by cinematographer Sergio D’Offizi (Don’t Torture a Duckling) and the unobtrusive but atmospheric music score by Carlo Rustichelli (Blood and Black Lace) provides the requisite drama and menace as needed.

Klaus Kinski (far left) aims his gun at his fellow gold hunters in The Ruthless Four (1968)

The film is highly regarded by many spaghetti western aficionados and director/film historican Alex Cox in his excellent survey of the genre, 10,000 Ways to Die, praises The Ruthless Four, writing, “The film is an excellent, tightly constructed thriller: a Treasure of the Sierra Madre in reverse, in which the hero loses everything, except the gold…The film didn’t do huge business, and has been hard to find. This is a shame because, as a thoroughly entertaining action film, with world-class leads, which anticipates (somewhat less romantically) Brokeback Mountain, Every Man for Himself [The Ruthless Four] is in a class of its own.”

Van Heflin is pinned down in the climatic shootout in The Ruthless Four (1968)

The Ruthless Four certainly deserves to be better known and maybe in time it will if an enterprising DVD/Blu-Ray company like Arrow Video acquires it and makes it available again for spaghetti western enthusiasts. In the meantime, you can view the film on Youtube or acquire a perfectly acceptable, letterboxed, English dubbed DVD-R of the French version – Chacun pour soi – from European Trash Cinema, which includes a few brief scenes offered in Italian only with no subtitles.

Klaus Kinski is a psycho with a gun in The Ruthless Four (1968)

Other links of interest:

http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Ognuno_per_se

http://homepages.sover.net/~ozus/ruthlessfour.html

http://sonofcelluloid.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-ruthless-four-1968.html

http://eddieonfilm.blogspot.com/2009/12/centennial-tributes-van-heflin.html

Kay Francis has that come-hither look in Mandalay (1934), an often overlooked Pre-Code drama

Today her place in film history rates little more than a footnote in the ascendancy of Warner Bros. as a major Hollywood studio, but Kay Francis was their first major female star whom they had lured away from Paramount in 1931. During her peak years for the studio between 1932 and 1935, she specialized in melodramas, soap operas and lightweight comedies which accented her elegance and chic fashion sense but also stereotyped her in increasingly inferior films.

She was dethroned by Bette Davis as Warners’ top star in 1936 and, by 1938, she was labeled “box office poison” in an article by The Hollywood Reporter. Still, there are several essential must-see titles among the more than sixty-five movies that she made (Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise [1932], Jewel Robbery [1932], Wonder Bar [1934], for example) and Mandalay (1934) is one of her best dramatic showcases as well as an enormously entertaining, eyebrow-raising Pre-Code wonder. (It was made before the Code was officially enforced but released after the fact.)   

Kay Francis and Ricardo Cortez star in the 1934 Pre-Code melodrama, Mandalay

Tanya (Kay Francis), a Russian refugee living in Rangoon, is romantically involved with Tony (Ricardo Cortez), a gunrunner with ties to underworld connections. When he finds himself in deep debt to Nick (Warner Oland), the owner of the notorious nightclub Jardin d’Orient, he abandons Tanya there with the understanding that Nick will put her to work as the “club hostess” in exchange for his debts. At first despairing, Tanya quickly decides to follow the advice of Madame Lacalles (Rafaela Ottiano), the former club hostess, who tells her, “You’ll find out that it’s easier to make men do what you want them to, than to fall in love and have them make a fool of you. Anyway, you’re pretty enough to go a long way if you use your head.” Tanya’s rise to waterfront fame and notoriety as “Spot White,” the star attraction at the Jardin d’Orient, gets her threatened with deportation and a morals charge but she uses blackmail against the accusing authority – a former customer – and manages to escape Rangoon on her own terms on a ferry boat bound for Mandalay. Traveling under the name Marjorie Lang, Tanya finds herself drawn to fellow passenger Dr. Gregory Burton (Lyle Talbot), an alcoholic with a troubled past. A romance begins to develop between the two lost souls when the ferry stops for new passengers and Nick comes abroad, anxious to win Tanya back and put her to work as the hostess of his own nightclub.

Ruth Donnelly, Lyle Talbot (center) and Lucien Littlefield are enjoying a vacation outside the law in Mandalay (1934), directed by Michael Curtiz

While Mandalay was treated no differently by the studio brass than any other programmer churned out in assembly-line fashion, director Michael Curtiz brought a sense of style and vitality to the film which distinguishes it from other B-movie potboilers. Although it was shot on the Warners’ backlot, Curtiz creates an atmospheric and exotic recreation of the Rangoon waterfront and its decadent, nocturnal world of gunrunners, shady businessmen, entertainers and cafe girls. Mandalay is also brimming with lurid situations and details that managed to escape the censor’s scissors, even though Warner executive Hal Wallis was well aware of the movie’s objectionable content and noted it in interoffice memos to Curtiz. Here is one memo to Curtiz dated October 21, 1933: “I am just looking at your dailies…Generally your stuff is beautiful and I don’t want to start limiting you and restricting you…However, when you show [contract star] Kay Francis in the bathtub with [contract star Ricardo] Cortez in the shot and a close-up of Kay Francis in the tub and show her stepping out of the tub and going into Cortez’s arms, then you get me to the point where I am going to have to tell you to stick to the script and not to do anything else. For God’s sake, Mike, you have been making pictures long enough to know that it is impossible to show a man and a woman who are not married in a scene of this kind. The situation itself, is censorable enough with Cortez and Francis living [together]… Hal Wallis” (from Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951) by Rudy Behlmer). The scene in question in Wallis’ memo is one of the sexier post-Code screen moments as Francis drops her bath towel to the cabin floor as the camera provides us with an erotic image of the actress’s lovely bare legs, still glistening with beads of water from her bath.

Kay Francis contemplates the hell she has accepted as her life in Mandalay (1934)

Wallis also fired off a cautionary memo to screenwriter Robert Presnell about his depiction of the Jardin d’Orient: “Naturally, in the scene in the Orient Cafe, it should be shot carefully, that is, making it more of a night club and gambling house than to indicate that it is a hook shop [House of prostitution]. I don’t feel we are sacrificing anything by doing this because people will put their own interpretation on it and know what kind of an establishment it is and what Francis is doing there…”

Kay Francis (left) with Ricardo Cortez in the Pre-Code melodrama Mandalay (1934), directed by Ricardo Cortez

Often Presnell was able to convey the obvious in his dialogue by having the characters talk circles around it such as this exchange between Tanya and Tony when he first brings her to the Jardin d’Orient and she observes the provocatively dressed female servers.

Tanya: “All these girls. What are they?”

Tony: “Just like cafe girls anywhere.”

“You mean…?”

“I mean exactly that my dear…”

Kay Francis, striking a typical pose, in Mandalay (1934), one of the great, lesser known Pre-Code films

In other scenes, however, Curtiz accents Francis’s physical allure, particularly in one sequence where we first see her as her alter ego, “Spot White,” descending a staircase in a tight, sparkly dress with a white fur. Curtiz then cuts to a series of reaction shots of the male customers, mostly tight close-ups, in which lust, desire and more indecent thoughts can be read flashing across their faces. It’s reminiscent of a similar scene in William Wellman’s Pre-Code melodrama, Safe in Hell (1931), in which fugitive-from-justice Dorothy Mackaill makes her first appearance before the assorted criminals, deviants and assorted male riff-raff in her desert island boarding house.

Dorothy MacKaill plays a less than elegant ‘cafe girl’ in the down and dirty Pre-Code drama, Safe in Hell (1931), directed by William Wellman

[Spoiler Alert] Even the resolution to Mandalay is unexpected. When Tony returns to strong-arm Tanya into joining him as a business partner after faking his death earlier, she poisons him and, in agony, he staggers to a window and falls out of it into the river below. There are no witnesses to his murder and since he was already assumed dead, Tanya escapes punishment.

Kay Francis plays a woman of many talents in the Pre-Code melodrama, Mandalay (1934)

The movie ends on a close-up of her beatific face as she disembarks for Mandalay with her new lover, Dr. Burton. They are on their way to help cure villagers suffering from the plague and while it is suggested that they both may die of the same, Tanya escapes the fate of most post-Code heroines who have sinned and committed murder. There is a sense of redemption and salvation in that final shot that mirrors the closing scene in Jezebel (1938) in which Bette Davis and Henry Fonda are transported to a leper colony for quarantine.

Henry Fonda and Bette Davis star in William Wyler’s Jezebel (1938)

Kay Francis’s performance in Mandalay proves she was more than just a stylish mannequin, dressed in designer clothes and jewels. She convincingly runs the gamut of emotions here from ecstasy to despair to tough-as-nails fortitude to desperation, even if the storyline is often absurd. And she’s backed up by a solid cast of Warner contract players such as Ricardo Cortez, oozing betrayal and avarice out of every pore as Tony, Warner Oland, sinister despite his Asian character stereotype and makeup, and Ruth Donnelly, who provides some welcome comic relief in the film. In her brief scene with Francis, she slips in some clever digs at male/female relationships and the double standard: “You certainly can wear clothes. You know I bought a dress in Paris. My husband made me take it off. Said I looked nude. You know, like a wet seal. It’s funny how men are. They like to see other women wear things like that but want their own wives to wear Mother Hubbards. Haven’t you noticed?” 

Mandalay proved to be another moneymaker for the studio and was well received by most critics, even if it wasn’t perceived as anything more than a well executed B-movie. Francis was still popular at this point in her career but she was already being assigned parts rejected by other actresses. Mandalay had supposedly been slated as a project for Ruth Chatterton.

Ruth Chatteron, the critically acclaimed star of such films as Madame X (1929) and Dodsworth (1936)

The film is also significant as one of Shirley Temple’s early appearances – most of her scenes were deleted except for a brief shot of her being carried in a woman’s arms. She wouldn’t become a full-fledged movie star until the release of Little Miss Marker later that same year.

Shirley Temple in Little Miss Marker (1934)

Mandalay, which is often broadcast on Turner Classic Movies (the next airing is scheduled for Jan. 13, 2016 at 12:45 pm ET), is available as one of four films in the DVD collection,  Forbidden Hollywood: Volume 6 from Warner Archive. It is not available as a single disc. The other films in the collection include The Wet Parade, Downstairs and Massacre.

* This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Sources for this article include Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951) by Rudy Behlmer; Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career by Lynn Kear & John Rossman; The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz by James C. Robertson; The Dame in the Kimono by Leonard J. Leff & Jerold L. Simmons    

Other Website links of interest:

http://pre-code.com/famous-pre-code-actresses/kay-francis/

http://www.cinemagraphe.com/kay-francis.php

http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2006/12/kay-francis-in-mandalay-1934.html

http://moviemorlocks.com/2013/09/30/a-forgotten-star-to-remember-kay-francis/

http://shebloggedbynight.com/2008/mandalay-1934/

http://www.bearmanormedia.com/kay-francis-i-cant-wait-to-be-forgotten-her-life-on-film-and-stage-by-scott-obrien

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s4178forb6.html

Michel Piccoli and his polyurethane companion in Luis Garcia Berlanga’s Life Size (Grandeur Nature, 1974)

The topic of men preferring lifelike dolls or mannequins to real women is nothing new in cinema and has been treated as poignant character study (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007), rom-com fantasy (Mannequin, 1987) and bleak psychological drama (The Doll aka Vaxdockan, 1962) to mention just a few examples of the different paths taken. Luis Garcia Berlanga’s Life Size (French title: Grandeur nature, 1974) takes a more ambiguous approach to its tale of a successful dentist and his new obsession and could be interpreted as a critique of misogyny, an attack on bourgeois values or a dark, perversely amusing character study. 

Life Size is actually all of these things but what sustains the film through its decidedly bizarre but sketch-like narrative is Michel Piccoli’s fully committed performance in the leading role. For the most part, self-absorbed, offensive, lustful, delusional and pathetic, Piccoli’s dentist (also named Michel) is rarely likable or sympathetic despite a veneer of polite professionalism and cultivated charm. Still, Piccoli’s performance keeps the viewer in suspense as to how far he will go in acting out his fantasy life. It also must be said that the lifelike sex doll deserves second billing since she appears in almost every scene and remains an unsettling presence throughout. When she is photographed in long shots, low-light conditions or from certain angles, she almost looks real as if Berlunga had hired an actress to play her on occasion. The doll’s appearance is overtly sexualized with her firm, full beasts and exposed crotch but Michel accents her availability even further when he uses a dentist’s tool to extend her tongue and position it in a lascivious expression.

Michel Piccoli’s main co-star in the subversive satire, Life Size (1974)

When Life Size opens, Michel is already in the final stages of breaking away from his old life and preparing for the next phase which doesn’t include his wife Isabelle (Rada Rassimov) or anyone else except his new polyurethane companion. We overhear some cryptic dialogue exchanges between Michel and others that suggest the dentist has recently weathered a difficult period marked by various affairs, therapy sessions and a bout of impotence which may have adversely affected his psyche. And the scenes between Michel and his wife make it clear their marriage is dead in the water but Isabelle pretends to humor him, either as an attempt to regain her self-respect or out of a burning curiosity.

Michel Piccoli is not amused by his wife’s impersonation of his sex doll in Life Size (1974), co-starring Rada Rassimov

When she finally confronts the reality that she has been rejected in favor of an anatomically correct sex doll, she is clearly stunned. But she stages a final attempt to win Michel back in one of the film’s most memorable sequences. He finds her in his bedroom, nude in a wheelchair except for black panties and a cigarette in her mouth, arranged in the same provocative pose of the previously glimpsed sex doll. Michel inspects her dispassionately and then reacts, pulling off her wig and dumping Isabelle out of the chair and into his closet while listing the reasons she will never measure up. His new lover, he boasts, is fireproof, never sick and she never cries.

Michel Piccoli and his companion enjoy some quality knitting time with Michel’s mom (Valentine Tessier) in Life Size (1974).

The most intriguing aspect of Life Size is the way everyone in Michel’s circle of acquaintances respond to his new companion. Michel’s mother (Valentine Tessier) briefly appropriates the doll to keep her company as she knits and incessantly chats. A fashion designer whom Michel has engaged to dress the doll shows too much interest in her assignment and is brusquely dismissed (Michel tells the doll, “That was your first lesson in recognizing a lesbian.”). Michel’s cook (Queta Claver) places the doll in bed with her infant son as a comforting presence (Michel finds the baby suckling the doll’s breast) while the handyman (Manuel Alexandre) ravages the doll when he is supposed to be fixing the furnace (Michel captures the shocking incident on video, recorded by home security system cameras).

Michel Piccoli stars in Luis Garcia Berlanga’s Life Size (1974), a study in loneliness and alienation.

Michel’s own relationship with the doll is schizophrenic and vacillates between treating her as a virginal innocent or abusing her as a shameless whore. He constantly renames her to fit the mood of his fantasy (Monique, Camille, Cayetanna are just a few of the monikers) such as a mock wedding ceremony, a vacation by the sea or a brutal bathtub rape. He also records their relationship on video tape and we see the couple watching themselves on a TV monitor; the doll is dressed in man’s clothing similar to Marlene Dietrich in Morocco while Michel cavorts in front of her, doing high kicks while fondling himself in a thick fur coat.

Two lovers share a cigarette in Life Size (1974), directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga

[Spoiler alert] Life Size spirals down into utter bleakness in the final twenty minutes when Michel’s companion is stolen during a Christmas party at his flat. With the help of his handyman, he tracks down the kidnapped doll and observes her being gang-raped by a crowd of drunken men in a remote barracks. The doll is rescued but Michel’s insane jealousy causes him to impulsively drive his speeding car into the Seine (most of the film is set in and around Paris). In the final shot, we see an anonymous man on a bridge staring at the semi-nude body of the doll as it floats away. That fadeout is open to interpretation but, for me, Life Size is ultimately a despairing look at a world where artificial companions are preferable to human ones.

Michel Piccoli has one of his jealous rages in Life Size (1974), a wicked black comedy from Luis Garcia Berlanga

While Berlanga never made another film quite as eccentric as Life Size, it shares similarities with his earlier work. Along with Luis Bunuel and Juan Antonio Bardem, Berlanga’s films were often reactions to the government-controlled cinema of the Franco regime and he satirized everything from foreign aid programs (Welcome, Mr. Marshall, 1952) to social mores (Plácido, a Best Foreign Language Oscar nominee in 1962), to capital punishment (El Verdugo, 1963). Most film historians agree that the early sixties marked Berlanga’s peak as a filmmaker though he would continue to make movies until 1999 (he died in 2010). His final feature, París-Timbuctú, about a world weary plastic surgeon (Michel Piccoli again) who decides to drop out of Parisian society and disappear, is similar to Life Size in its depiction of human loneliness and alienation. Unfortunately, Berlanga’s work is rarely revived or mentioned today though his keen sense of satire and black comedy was obviously an influence on the Spanish filmmakers who emerged in the post-Franco years such as Pedro Almodóvar, Bigas Luna and Alex de la Iglesia.

Director Juan Luis Berlanga as he appeared during his heyday in the early sixties

As for Life Size, it never had a proper theatrical release in the U.S. and the few critics who saw it found it inferior to his earlier work. Writing about the film, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said, “The trouble with Luis Berlanga’s exhaustive movie is that what he has to say could probably be squeezed into about ten minutes without much sweat.” Yet I think the film is well worth seeking out by adventurous cinephiles and fans of Michel Piccoli.

Still acting at the age of 90, Piccoli is one of the unsung heroes of European cinema and has worked with some of the world’s greatest directors and appeared in such key works as Jean Renoir’s French CanCan, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Agnes Varda’s Les Creatures, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, Louis Malle’s Atlantic City and Leo Carax’s Holy Motors to name just a few. And his performance in Life Size is in the tradition of the kind of anti-bourgeois protagonists and social outlaws he portrayed so masterfully in Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead and La Grande Bouffe, Bunuel’s Belle du Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Claude Faraldo’s Themroc.  Life Size is currently unavailable in any format in the U.S. except as a bootleg DVD-R through specialty distributors. However, the Spanish language version Tamaño Natural is available on Blu-Ray in Europe and you can probably purchase a copy of it from Amazon if you own an all-region player.

Other websites of Interest:

http://www.cahiersducinema.com/Evenement-The-Actor-and-the-Secret.html

http://www.filmsdefrance.com/biography/michel-piccoli.html

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406801170.html

http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=12865

http://cineuropa.org/vd.aspx?t=video&l=en&did=24785

http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/berlanga/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/movies/16berlanga.html?_r=0

Most moviegoers know Howard Keel as the brawny, baritone singing star of such MGM musicals as Show Boat (1951), Kiss Me Kate (1953) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) but occasionally the actor would appear in straight dramatic vehicles such as Desperate Search (1952) or Ride, Vaquero! (1953), which proved he was more than competent as a rugged leading man. Floods of Fear (1959), one of his least known films, falls into this latter category and is a surprisingly taut and suspenseful thriller that was originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post under the pulp fiction title of A Girl, a Man and a River.   

Howard Keel (on right) attends to an injured man while Anne Heywood and Cyril Cusack look on in Floods of Fear (1958), directed by Charles Crichton

Filmed in England at Pinewood Studios, Floods of Fear was Keel’s second film production in Great Britain; the first was his movie debut, The Small Voice (aka The Hideout) in 1949. At this point in his career, Keel was no longer under contract to MGM (1955’s Kismet was his last film for them) and he was accepting freelance work in television (a 1958 remake of Roberta) and film (Frank Borzage’s big budget 1959 epic, The Big Fisherman).

Howard Keel as an escaped prisoner (who was falsely incarcerated) defends himself in Floods of Fear (1958).

Floods of Fear, produced by Sydney Box (The Seventh Veil, 1945), was a decidedly different role for Keel, however, and played against his clean-cut hero image. In this film, he plays a hardened convict named Donovan who escapes from a prison detail while helping build a barrier for an impending flood. The raging waters not only sweep away Donovan but also a fellow prisoner, Peebles (Cyril Cusack), and the guard, Sharkey (Harry H. Corbett), who was supervising them. The trio wash up at the flooded farmhouse of Dr. Matthews (John Phillips), who is away attending victims at a crisis center. At first the three survivors think the house is abandoned until Elizabeth (Anne Heywood), the doctor’s daughter, appears and the tension begins.

Escaped prisoner Cyril Cusack attacks Anne Heywood in the disaster drama, Floods of Fear (1958)

While Peebles is clearly a dangerous criminal with designs on Elizabeth, Donovan is a more brooding, tight-lipped enigma who is serving time for murdering the wife of his former business partner, Jack Murphy (John Crawford). It soon becomes obvious that Donovan was framed for that crime and now that he is free, he intends to find Murphy and take his revenge. But first the small group must survive the torrential rains and flooding that swamp the house and continue to rise with no help in sight. 

In his autobiography Only Make Believe: My Life in Show Business, Keel recalled the filming of Floods of Fear: “All the flood scenes were filmed on one of the large stages at Pinewood Studios. The water had to be both dirty and cold, and it was. They couldn’t heat it for fear it might get rancid. That was another tough picture. Anne Heywood never once protested about the water. [Charles] Crichton, who had a great sense of humor, had directed some very funny pictures. Cyril Cusack and I were good friends. We had a little contest over Anne. He was a real cutie, as well as a hell of an actor, but I won out.”

A brief romantic interlude for Howard Keel and Anne Heywood in the disaster drama, Floods of Fear (1958)

If Floods of Fear was a change of pace for Keel, it was also true for the director as well. Crichton was best known for such popular Ealing comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) and the late career hit, A Fish Called Wanda (1988). In comparison, Floods of Fear is a B-movie gem which combines film noir elements with the excitement of a disaster film.

Howard Keel and Anne Heywood try to navigate to safety in Floods of Fear (1958)

Beautifully shot by award-winning cinematographer Christopher Challis (The Victors [1963], Arabesque [1966]) with a stirring score by Alan Rawsthorne (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, 1951), the film is also distinguished by the fine ensemble acting, especially by Cyril Cusack as the malicious and homicidal Peebles. He has a volatile nervous energy and feral-like physical quality that could easily have served as an inspiration to Tim Roth, who somewhat resembles Cusack in size and manner in such movies as Made in Britain (1982) and Pulp Fiction (1994).

Director Charles Crichton on the set of Floods of Fear (1958)

Floods of Fear is not currently available on any format in the U.S. but if you have an all-region DVD/Blu-Ray player you may be able to find a copy of it from European distributors. It also has aired before on Turner Classic Movies and may again in the future.

Anne Heywood has a panic attack in the disaster drama, Floods of Fear (1958)

*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other website links of interest:

http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2013/12/floods-of-fear-1958.html

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/directors/Charles-Crichton

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/audio/id/937841/

http://aghs.jimdo.com/the-actress-anne-heywood-born-violet-joan-pretty/

Howard Keel stars as the brawny hero of Floods of Fear, co-starring Anne Heywood.

Gary Bond stars in the 1971 cult classic Wake in Fright aka Outback, directed by Ted Kotcheff

Retitled and released as Outback in the U.S. and Great Britain in 1971, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright was barely noticed by American critics and moviegoers and quickly vanished from screens. What attention it did receive in England at the time was mostly critical of the film’s negative depiction of the Australian Outback region and its inhabitants. And despite the fact that it was a huge critical success at Cannes and was nominated for the Golden Palm, the film went missing soon after and until recently was considered a lost film.     

If you saw the brash, exhilarating survey of Australian exploitation films, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), you would have seen a bizarre, over-the-top clip from Wake in Fright where Peter Whittle (a well known middleweight Aussie boxer) engages in hand to hand combat with an angry, wounded kangaroo. Despite the extreme nature of the clip though, Wake in Fright is no exploitation film. And it’s no art house darling either. It’s a blunt, powerful and disturbing emotional experience with a surreal visual quality and probably the crowning achievement of Ted Kotcheff’s career.

Man vs. kangaroo in one of the more disturbing images in Wake in Fright (1971)

The Canadian-born director is best known for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), a coming-of-age, character driven tale that helped launch Richard Dreyfuss as a leading man, and a string of commercial hits – Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), North Dallas Forty (1979), First Blood (1982) and Uncommon Valor (1983). He also enjoyed some critical acclaim and another Golden Palm nomination at Cannes for Joshua Then and Now (1985) starring James Woods as an unorthodox writer in a story with a Jewish working class background similar to Duddy Kravitzv (both were based on novels by Mordecai Richler).

Micheline Lanctôt & Richard Dreyfuss star in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974)

He’s also had his share of flops (Billy Two Hats, Switching Channels, Winter People) and is equally capable of such lowbrow fare as Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). In all, Kotcheff is a talented, above average film and TV director but probably not a major figure in contemporary cinema….until you consider Wake in Fright. Just as some writers stake their reputations on one great novel and a lot of lesser works, so is the case with some filmmakers who have scored a major cinema triumph and never directed anything else to equal or surpass it. I suspect this is the case with Kotcheff but even if Wake in Fright was the only film he ever made, it would be cause enough to guarantee him a permanent place in the annals of film history.

Director Ted Kotcheff

The original title Wake in Fright is much more appropriate than Outback because this is truly a journey into darkness despite taking place, for the most part, under a blazing, unforgiving sun.  It brilliantly creates a nightmare state with its own twisted logic and rules. It is an adult horror film in the best sense of the term; one that explores the impact of a strange environment and culture on one’s identity and how circumstances can lead one to discover a dark side of himself that he never knew existed.

The kangaroo hunting party in Outback (aka Wake in Fright), 1971

The painterly cinematography of Brian West evokes an inferno-like landscape through a palette of burnt sienna, oranges, yellows and browns. Occasionally he will use a primary color accent such as a red lamp or a blue beer bottle to stand out amid the muted surroundings. Several of the interior scenes are highlighted by a sickly green lighting scheme and dust is everywhere (Kotcheff admitted going overboard on the use of Fuller’s Earth, a favorite of art directors). Adding to the unsettling mood is John Scott’s subtle music score which mirrors the increasingly dark direction of the narrative.

Gary Bond at the start of a holiday that will become an endurance test in Wake in Fright (1971).

Based on the novel by Kenneth Cook, a popular and highly prolific Australian journalist/TV personality/screenwriter, Wake in Fright was a bestseller in its own country and the storyline and setting was inspired by Cook’s early years of working as a radio journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Company while stationed in Broken Hill, a remote mining town in South Wales, Australia. Reputedly Cook was a larger-than-life personality whom some critics compared to Ernest Hemingway in terms of his machismo if not literary style. And Broken Hill, which he once referred to as “unmitigated boil of horror,” served him well as a metaphor for the rowdy, male-dominated society of the Outback.

Hunting and drinking are the main activities in the Outback as depicted by director Ted Kotcheff in the bleak, psychological drama Wake in Fright (1971)

The story opens with a stunning 360-degree camera pan that reveals the vast emptiness of a dusty, sun-baked desert wasteland before coming to rest on a railroad trestle that runs between two shacks, one of them a one-room schoolhouse. Inside a mixture of elementary, middle and high school students wait to be dismissed for the Christmas holidays by their schoolteacher, John Grant (Gary Bond). After the children scurry off to their homes, Grant walks across the tracks to his boarding house on the other side, packs a few things in a suitcase and has some drinks and a smoke with his landlord (John Meillon) before departing for Sydney where he will spend his vacation. But Grant will never reach Sydney. Instead he gets stranded in Bundanyabba, referred to by locals as “The Yabba,” after losing all of his money in an illegal gambling den playing “Two-Up,” a double coin toss game.

An overhead view of the coin toss gambling game “Two-Up” in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971)

From this point on, Grant finds himself completely at the mercy of strangers whose aggressive hospitality he can’t refuse and that means matching them drink for drink in the long hours that run into the dawn. Days become weeks as Grant sinks into an alcoholic haze and chance encounters that take him deeper and deeper into the Outback, culminating in a nighttime kangaroo hunt which becomes a test of his manhood. The horror doesn’t end there though.  Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Wake in Fright explores the fine line between civilized behavior and savagery and the effect is not life-affirming. A more brutal, primeval vision of a closed male society, remote and isolated, is hard to imagine. Women barely exist in this universe. In fact, with the exception of the schoolchildren at the beginning, there are only three female characters in the movie – a detached hotel clerk, a barmaid and the lost, defeated wife of one of the men who befriends Grant. They are all practically invisible in this manly world of blood sports, drinking, brawling and gambling. It’s a place where no moral compass exists or room for self-reflection.

Male culture and macho behavior in the Outback is explored in Wake in Fright (1971)

In Cook’s view, the Outback is a place that is vehemently anti-intellectual and anti-feeling; everything is dulled by alcohol and only the baser instincts are intact. The macho behavior on display is, in fact, exaggerated due to the absence of women and Kotcheff, in the DVD commentary, states that men outnumber women three to one in the Outback. He also noted that the suicide rate for women in the region is five times the national average, an understandable fact when you consider the harsh conditions of the region.

Donald Pleasence takes his pleasure in the arid, dusty Outback region of Australia in Wake in Fright (1971)

Part of the film’s power can be attributed to the stellar cast and top billed Donald Pleasence gives what I feel might be his greatest performance as Doc Tydon. Though he is essentially a supporting character, he serves as a prophetic warning to Grant. This debased human being was once a functioning member of society like the schoolteacher but the Outback “freed” him to become himself. “I’m a doctor of medicine and a tramp by temperment and also an alcoholic,” Tydon admits almost gleefully to Grant.

Donald Pleasence places his bet in a gambling den in Wake in Fright (1971)

Chips Rafferty, one of the most famous and iconic actors in Australian cinema, is equally memorable as Jock Crawford, a formidable community leader in the “Yabba” who takes Grant on a tour of the local attractions. Crawford’s subtle contempt for this city bred outsider is hard to ignore and adds a sinister tension to their scenes together (this was Rafferty’s last film role; he died a few months after filming).

Local native Chips Rafferty (left) has some advice for visitor Gary Bond in Wake in Fright aka Outback (1971)

Sylvia Kay (Kotcheff’s wife in real life) makes the most of her brief scenes and is alternately pitiful and poignant in the bleak sequence where she attempts to seduce Grant in the desert while her husband and his blokes get roaring drunk. She lies down on the hard ground, mute but longing for sex and human contact and Grant’s drunken reaction – he vomits while trying to penetrate her – is typical of the film’s underlying sense of despair.

A sexual encounter between Gary Bond and Sylvia Kay becomes a cry of despair in Wake in Fright (1971)

Wake in Fright also features Jack Thompson in his feature film debut as a testosterone-driven hunter; the actor would go on to become one of his country’s top stars appearing in such critically acclaimed films as Sunday Too Far Away (1975), The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978) and Breaker Morant (1980).

Jack Thompson is exhilarated by the thrill of the hunt in Wake in Fright (1971)

Last but not least is Gary Bond as the ill-fated John Grant. Bond is not that well known outside of his native England where he was a popular and prolific actor on television series like The Main Chance and BBC Play of the Month. He worked on American TV series as well but his film work was minimal with small roles in Zulu (1964) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). Wake in Fright remains his only major film role (he died in 1994 after a long battle with AIDS). Bond is perfectly cast as the repressed, weak-willed central character and bears some physical similarities to Richard Chamberlain. If there is a flaw in the film, it is the fact that John Grant remains a cipher from beginning to end. Despite everything that happens to him, you don’t know at the fadeout whether he has become a numb shell of a man or simply blotted out his horrendous ordeal and returned to his boring life of servitude to the state.

Schoolteacher Gary Bond is reduced to a state of alcoholic desperation in Wake in Fright (1971)

I was surprised to learn in the DVD audio commentary for Wake in Fright that Dirk Bogarde had originally been cast in the film with Joseph Losey slated to direct. Now THAT would have been an entirely different film. It didn’t work out of course and there were later rumors that James Mason was going to be cast in the role of Doc Tydon, the part that Pleasence played.

Gary Bond reacts to the kangaroo slaughter in Wake in Fright (1971)

One final word of caution about Wake in Fright. It does contain some brutal and hard to watch animal violence in the final third during the kangaroo hunt. Although Kotcheff stated that he abhors cruelty to animals and didn’t harm any during the filming, the horrific nighttime hunt sequence incorporated real footage from Australian hunters as they stalked and killed kangaroos with high-powered rifles. Of course, there are other things to shock and offend in Wake in Fright such as male rape, the killing and eating of an uncooked rabbit and a rifle to the head suicide attempt. In fact, fifteen minutes of objectionable content was reportedly removed for the U.S. release version but this is the original edit and it’s not likely to become a popular chick flick.

Chips Rafferty (left) and Gary Bond in a scene from Wake in Fright aka Outback (1971), directed by Ted Kotcheff

When Wake in Fright opened as Outback in the U.S., it did garner some critical praise but not enough to have any impact on the ticket sales. Roger Greenspan of The New York Times wrote that the movie exuded “a sense of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror and that is not quite like anything else I can remember feeling at the movies….The crisp snap of a pull-tab aluminum beer can may never replace the creaking door as a clue to horror, but in “Outback” it makes a reasonable try. There are, of course, more spectacular invocations, such as a pair of kangaroo hunts—one by day, one by night…But scarier for me is a scene in one of the city’s great sprawling saloons, a moment of hushed, terrifying solemnity when in a kind of lunatic praise of long-departed soldiers, sailors and airmen, the drinkers are admonished over a spectral loudspeaker, “Lest We Forget!”

Gary Bond takes aim in the unsettling Australian drama, Wake in Fright (1971)

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that Kotcheff and screenwriter Evan Jones approached their subject “as if they were cultural anthropologists examining a newly developed form of primitive life – the primitivism of the master race. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got on to something bigger than the plot. And, even though the movie retreats into its narrow frame, you come out with a sense of epic horror.”

The Alamo Drafthouse Blu-Ray cover of Wake in Fright

Thanks to the relentless efforts of Anthony Buckley, the film’s editor, and the preservation efforts of the National Film & Sound Archive of Australia, Wake in Fright was restored to its original cut in 2009 on DVD in the PAL format (you need an all-region DVD player to view it) with a host of extra features including an audio commentary by Kotcheff and Buckley. In 2013 Drafthouse Films released a Blu-Ray/DVD combo of the film for the U.S. market and it includes the same extra features from the NFSA release. Since then, Wake in Fright has enjoyed a rapidly growing critical revival. The film has gained additional exposure and acclaim from various film festival screenings like Telluride in the past few years as well as the avid support of such fans as Martin Scorsese who first saw it at Cannes in 1971. The director even admits that the film looks even better now due to current film preservation technology than it did in its original theatrical prints.

A scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971)

Scorsese also makes a case for Wake in Fright as a seminal film that helped launch the Australian cinema renaissance of the ‘70s, which is debatable but certainly worth considering. 1971 was also the same year of Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout, another film set in the Outback. Curiously, both films were made by non-Australians, both outsiders to the burgeoning film industry at the time.  You could also make a case for 1970 as the real beginning of the Australian New Wave with Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly and Phillip Leacock’s Adam’s Woman leading the pack. Regardless of the mediocre boxoffice performance of these earlier productions, they did draw attention to Australia as a promising film location and obviously encouraged the country’s filmmakers to make their own feature films. By the late seventies such major talents as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce and George Miller had emerged at the forefront of this new film movement. But I can’t help but think that Wake in Fright started the brushfire that became a creative firestorm.

Donald Pleasence in an iconic scene from Wake in Fright (1971)

For more information on the epic restoration saga of Wake in Fright, see the featurette on YouTube or read the DVD liner notes about it on the Umbrella Entertainment release. – http://mumbrella.com.au/forever-young-restoration-and-preservation-987

*This is an updated and revised version of an article that first appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog.

Other website links of interest:

http://intpolicydigest.org/2015/12/04/the-apprenticeship-of-ted-kotcheff-interview-with-the-director-antonio-saillant/

http://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/Interviews/Ted-Kotcheff.aspx

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/interview-wake-in-fright-director-ted-kotcheff-talks-martin-scorsese-how-his-film-was-lost-and-what-a-canadian-was-doing-directing-an-australian-classic-2012101

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le78LmmI6Kc

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-gary-bond-1578043.html

http://www.thewonderfulworldofgarybond.com/profile-of-gary.html  

Gary Bond tries to remember what happened the night before in this scene from Wake in Fright (1971)

“If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”  –  Leonard Cohen

Missing in action since it was first filmed by Tony Palmer in 1972, Bird on a Wire, a documentary account of Leonard Cohen’s European tour, finally surfaced on DVD in 2010 after being painstakenly restored frame by frame by the director who described the long, complicated history on the extra audio features. It’s a shame the film didn’t garner more attention upon its DVD debut but for Cohen fans, the documentary is essential viewing and just as candid, raw and intimate as D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable Bob Dylan portrait, Don’t Look Back (1967), which covered that singer/songwriter’s tour of England in 1965.  

Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire (1972), directed by Tony Palmer

Bird on a Wire opens with a chaotic concert situation in Tel Aviv as aggressive security guards in orange coats try to stop audience members from approaching the stage and interacting with Cohen and his band. One is immediately struck by Cohen’s calm and sensible tone in the face of what appears to be a fascist police state as he says to the guards, “I know you’re just trying to do your job but you don’t have to do it with your fists.” His words have little effect though and so he returns to performing, introducing his next number with, “I’d like to sing you a song for the man in orange.” This doesn’t sit well either and the situation becoming intolerable. Cohen leaves the stage saying, “Let’s disperse quietly and be together somewhere else because the scene isn’t worth it….there’s no point in starting a war right now.”  

Palmer’s documentary, which does not follow the chronological order of the 1972 20-city tour that began in Dublin, jumps around instead in a seemingly random fashion but the overall effect is an unromanticized portrait of life on the road – a casual, homemade production that unfolds in vignettes like a diary video, some of it shot in color, some in black and white. There is footage of Cohen walking on the beach, swimming nude in a pool, fielding questions from journalists, flirting with numerous beautiful women backstage (one can only imagine his countless sexual conquests), showering with band mates and agonizing over his performance, saying more than once, “I disgraced myself, I have.”

There is also a refreshing honesty in his directness with fans, the media and his own touring group, whether he is joking with a backup musician about a poor performance (“It sounded like banging”) to answering a reporter who asks him, “What is success for you?” “Success is survival,” Cohen replies without a trace of smugness.

Leonard Cohen backstage in Tony Palmer’s concert film, Bird on a Wire (1972)

The tour is not without drama and a key episode highlights all the potential problems that can occur in a concert situation. A technical malfunction occurs in the sound system, affecting all the speakers and resulting in poor audio quality and feedback for several venues. A near mutiny situation arises with much finger pointing and accusations of blame. In one startling confrontation, some German fans come backstage to vent their anger and frustration. Cohen, anxious to put an end to the evening and be done with it, begins returning their money personally.

Leonard Cohen on the road in the 1972 concert film/documentary, Bird on the Wire

At the final concert in Jerusalem, Cohen broke down mid-way through his performance and left the stage, apologizing to the audience. We see him distraught backstage and then suddenly decide he needs a shave. He lathers up, shaves and is then coaxed back onstage for an emotional rendition of “So Long, Marianne” that leaves Cohen – and his musicians – in tears (According to one biographer, Cohen and some band members took LSD during his “shave break” and the effects began to kick in while they performed this song).

Allen Ginsbury & Leonard Cohen in 1976

While all of the incidental details of life on the road along with its boring repetition have been well documented in other documentaries and films about music legends and musicians from The Rolling Stones’ C*cksucker Blues (1972) to Backstage (1998) with DMX, Jay-Z and others to the Wilco portrait, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002), it’s particularly interesting to see Cohen in this environment because one doesn’t think of him as a rock star. His music was closer in nature to the French chanteurs such as Jacques Brel (whose music had an enormous effect on him) but his lyrics set him apart from any pop songwriter. Cohen was a poet, first and foremost, who discovered the power of marrying his words to music and was following in the footsteps of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, whose musical recitations of his poetry reached a younger and broader audience in his later years.   

By this point in his career, as Bird on a Wire makes clear, Cohen was struggling to emerge from the Bob Dylan/folk movement stereotyping, despite the fact that his music was singular in nature and closer to a European tradition of performing. And this is the aspect of Palmer’s documentary that is so fascinating – to watch Cohen try to control the artistic process in a collaborative medium.

His creative instincts and ego demand perfection yet he often appears defeated and humbled by his unrealized expectations. In one revealing interview, he tells a reporter, “Sometimes you can live in a song but sometimes it is inhospitable and won’t admit you and you’re left banging at the door and everybody knows it….so it really depends a great deal on the moment, on the kind of shape you are in, how straight you are with yourself at the moment, how straight you’ve been with the audience. So many factors determine whether you are going to be able to make the song live.”

Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel in 1969 (Photo: The Estate of David Gahr/hulton archive)

The best moments of Bird on a Wire are the quieter ones, showing Cohen composing a poem in his hotel room or reciting one for the camera. Likewise, the best musical moments feature Cohen’s sparse, stripped-down compositions where his lyrics and voice pierce the heart and soul. There are moving renditions of “Sisters of Mercy,” “Story of Isaac,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and “Chelsea Hotel,” which he was still working out in terms of lyrics and musical execution. A song about a brief encounter with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, Cohen’s version here of the latter song is more impassioned and profane than the final recorded version and demonstrates the fluid nature of Cohen’s art and his desire for spontaneity, something he found difficult to achieve in a concert tour where he often performed the same songs night after night.

Leonard Cohen, Jennifer Warnes in a scene from the documentary Bird on a Wire (1972)

Cohen fans in particular will get a kick out of seeing and hearing some of the musicians who appeared on his early albums such as organist/producer Bob Johnston and backup vocalist Jennifer Warnes, who would later enjoy top forty fame with “The Right Time of the Night” and “Up Where We Belong” (the theme from An Officer and a Gentleman), and perform her tribute album to Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat.

Tony Palmer, director of Bird on a Wire (1972)

To set the record straight, Palmer’s initial cut of Bird on a Wire was never screened publicly. The BBC saw a rough cut and agreed to buy it in that state but Cohen felt uncomfortable with the existing cut for several reasons, one being that Cohen looked “exhausted” most of the time. In reality, he was and had made it clear from the beginning that he didn’t like touring and often felt like “some parrot chained to his stand night after night.”

Bob Johnston (left), Marty Machat (center), Leonard Cohen

The main reason that the documentary even got made was because his manager, Marty Machat, thought it might broaden Cohen’s exposure, and because he wanted a visual record of the tour for he feared it might be his client’s last one. So Palmer’s rough cut and all of his footage was given back to Machat but there are varying accounts of what happened next.  

Ira B. Nadel, author of Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen wrote that “Cohen was initially unhappy with the arty look of the film and wanted a stronger, documentary texture. He spent nearly six months editing the work, shifting its focus away from visual cliches to the deeper realities of his music….What Cohen wanted was a film that showed the live context of his music and his rapport with his audiences. Bird on a Wire did that but it also showed Cohen emotionally wasted. He felt exposed in the film and thought his vulnerability was inappropriate for public viewing.”

Yet, on the basis of the Bird on a Wire DVD which includes Palmer’s original cut, the above criticism doesn’t jive at all and, in fact, the correct title of the documentary is Bird on a Wire, named after Cohen’s song, not Bird on the Wire. OK, so it’s the difference of one word but the difference of one word makes a world of difference to a poet like Cohen. The only criticism of Bird on a Wire I have is one that is reflective of its era and time; Palmer includes some atrocity footage from the Vietnam War that is underscored by a Cohen song and it is unusually explicit and hard to watch. Plus it’s not needed. Cohen’s lyrics produce a similarly powerful but less manipulative vision of man’s conflicted nature.  

Cohen fans may also want to check out another Leonard Cohen documentary that is being distributed by the MVD Entertainment Group, Leonard Cohen’s Lonesome Heroes, in which the poet’s life and influences are chronicled and discussed by a panel of experts including Judy Collins (who provides the most illuminating insights about the songwriter), Rolling Stone writers Anthony DeCurtis and Michaeal Lydon, and Cohen’s fellow Buddist monk Kigen. An informative primer on the artist with a wealth of interesting archival clips and concert snippets, Lonesome Heroes is somewhat dry and academic in tone but it does shine a light on some of the unexpected musical influences on Cohen’s art such as Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Tex Ritter (who appears in a clip singing “High Noon”) and the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca.  

Certainly there have been many documentary and concert films with Leonard Cohen as the focus. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965), a National Film Board of Canada documentary, directed by Donald Brittain and Don Owen, offers an intriguing look at the poet at an earlier stage in his career before he had even released his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967). And Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, which was recently assembled in 2009 by documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner from unused footage from his original 1997 documentary, Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival. In the latter, Cohen was only featured performing one number, “Suzanne,” but Lerner’s new compilation includes all of the Cohen footage from the Isle of Wight concert and among the selected songs are “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” “Nothing Will Be Fine,” and “The Stranger Song,” which was used by director Robert Altman to open his ethereal western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).  

I was hoping Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 would get a wider theatrical release than just New York and a few cities but it is not yet available for streaming or viewing at this point unless you purchase a copy (It was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2009). In the meantime, treat yourself to Tony Palmer’s Bird on a Wire which has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of time.

• This is a revised and updated version of a post that first appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog.

Websites of interest:

http://www.leonardcohen.com (Official Cohen site)

cohencentric.com (Leonard Cohen Considered)

http://www.hollywoodnorthreport.com/article.php?Article=7983

http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/cover1.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8137028/Bird-on-a-Wire-preview.html

Vittorio Gassman as the overly ambitious Guido in Il Successo (1963)

“The worst poverty is not wanting to be rich!”

Something is gnawing at Guido. It’s the feeling that life is passing him by and he will never be anything but average which, to him, is the same as being a nobody. We’ve all known someone like Guido whose desire to be rich, famous and envied by all becomes his all-consuming obsession. Is it because his parents were peasants? Despite that, he still went to college, has a steady, respectable job at a major real estate firm and is married to Laura, a beautiful, talented woman who is on the fast track to success at a public relations firm with high end clients. So what’s the problem?  

Il Successo, directed by Mauro Morassi, is a tragicomedy that critiques the dangers and ultimate emptiness of unbridled ambition. It’s a morality tale that’s been told many times before in all walks of life from Kirk Douglas’s ruthless boxer in Champion to Laurence Harvey’s scheming careerist in Room at the Top to Charlie Sheen’s easily tempted stockbroker in Wall Street. What keeps the film fresh and engaging is Vittorio Gassman’s charismatic but slippery protagonist.

Guido (Vittorio Gassman) and his wife Laura (Anouk Aimee) at a trendy nightclub in Il Successo (1963)

At first Guido is causally charming with an amusingly cynical wit but after he celebrates his 38th birthday his unhappiness escalates. When he receives inside information from his firm that a large tract of land is going to be developed, he becomes a relentless schemer, exploiting his family, friends, former classmates and even his wife for investment money to buy the adjoining property.

Annie Gorassini and Vittorio Gassman in a scene from Il Successo (1963), directed by Mauro Morassi

In some ways, Il Successo is a kindred spirit with Dino Risi’s highly praised Il Sorpasso (1962) in which Gassman plays an irresponsible, carefree playboy who exposes a shy law student (Jean-Louis Trintignant) to the joys of hedonism during a road trip. Gassman and Trintignant are again paired in Il Successo with the latter playing Guido’s faithful, trusting friend who is content with his unexciting job at a pharmaceutical company. Allegedly Dino Risi also co-directed some of Il Successo though he is uncredited.  To be honest, Il Successo is not as exhilarating or as emotionally rich as Risi’s deceptively lighthearted Il Sorpasso (aka The Easy Life) but it proves once again that Gassman was one of the finest Italian actors of his generation. His ability to convincingly transition from merriment to wounded resentment, for example, or from self-deprecation to arrogant boasting is like watching a well-tuned sportscar go from zero to sixty in seconds. His performance feels natural and true to his character and never contrived or artificial.

Anouk Aimee becomes disillusioned by her husband Vittorio Gassman’s get-rich-quick schemes in Il Successo (1963)

Take, for instance, the scene where Guido convinces his elderly father to sell his family home and farm so he can handle his finances and give the old man a better life. Or the scene where Guido revisits a former schoolmate and successful factory owner he previously insulted only to ask him for a loan without appearing to beg. Il Successo is particularly memorable for these cringe-worthy encounters where you anticipate the worse possible outcomes and the underlying tension is maintained right up to the ironic twist ending.  The film also serves as an appealing showcase for the elegant and graceful Anouk Aimee as Guido’s patient wife, Trintignant as his unpretentious friend and Cristina Gaioni as a self-absorbed maid. And Riccardo Garrone, Umberto D’Orsi and Leopoldo Trieste stand out in vivid supporting roles. Ennis Morricone provides an unobtrusive but upbeat music score that includes Italian pop songs like Gino Paoli’s “Sapore di Sale” and Rita Pavone’s Come the “non c’e nessuno.” In addition, the stylish black and white cinematography is by Alessandro D’Eva who has worked numerous times with Dino Risi on such films as The Tiger and the Pussycat (1967), Mr. Kinky aka The Prophet (1968) and In the Name of the Italian People (1971) – all of which starred Vittorio Gassman.

Vittorio Gassman as Guido uses charm and flirtation to get what he wants in Il Successo (1963)

Director Mauro Morassi, however, is a rather obscure figure in Italian cinema. He began as an assistant director and only helmed four features before dying in 1966 at the age of 41. Il Successo was his final directorial effort.

Vittorio Gassman’s attempts to solicit funding from the lonely wife of a wealthy tycoon is more difficult than he thinks in Il Successo (1963)

Il Successo is a mostly forgotten film today but it is worth seeking out for fans of Gassman and Italian cinema. If you have an all-region DVD player, you can probably find a Region 2 DVD of it on Amazon.

Vittorio Gassman & Anouk Aimee star in Il Successo (1963)

Other links of interest:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jun/30/guardianobituaries1

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/aimee-anouk

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/a-man-apart-jean-louis-trintignant-at-film-forum-6436945

http://www.clevelandmemory.org/mastroianni/tm329.html

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9401E4DE1F30E033A2575AC2A9629C946491D6CF

A Venusian woman (Lorena Velazquez, right) contemplates the breeding potential of an alien suitor in La Nave de los Monstruos (1960)

Curvaceous, scantily clad female aliens from Venus. Monstrous beings from other galaxies. A robot with a soft spot for children. Singing cowboys. Norteño music. And lots of fighting. What could be better? La Nave de los Monstruos (aka The Ship of Monsters) has it all and is one of the more exotic genre hybrids that emerged from Mexico in the early sixties, mixing sci-fi, horror and Western elements into something uniquely original.    A long sought after favorite from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, La Nave de los Monstruos (1960) was remastered to DVD by Lionsgate for the Spanish language market in 2009. It is part of a double feature tribute to the popular Mexican singer/actor Eulalio González who often went by his nickname El Piporro and includes the 1966 crime comedy La Rata. Both are sharp, exceptionally attractive transfers of two movies which had only been previously available on VHS and on poor quality bootlegs. Unfortunately, there is no English subtitle option on either but in the case of La Nave de los Monstruos you shouldn’t have any problem following the narrative.

El Piporro aka Eulalio Gonzalez

El Piporro may be less well known in the U.S. than Cantinflas but he and Tin-Tan (Germán Genaro Cipriano Gomez Valdés Castillo) were easily among the top five most popular singer/comedians of their era. But El Piporro is not the main reason to see La Nave de los Monstruos.

In fact, he’s the least interesting aspect of this madcap fantasy. The more eye-popping attractions are former Miss Universe contestants Lorena Veláquez and Ana Bertha Lepe as man-stalking Venusians and the completely bizarre/goofy monster mash on display which will have you wondering why this title is not as well known as something like Santo vs. Las mujeres vampiro (1962), which also featured Miss Veláquez in an iconic femme fatale role.

A rare color still of Beta (Lorena Veláquez) and her monster posse in La Nave de los Monstruos (1960)

With a less than minimal understanding of Spanish, here is my take on La Nave de los Monstruos, which I think is a great introduction for kids to Mexican fantasy cinema. Two women emissaries from Venus, a planet where the male species has apparently died out and all the female inhabitants dress in outfits that are like glorified one-piece bathing suits, are sent to Earth. Their mission: find some suitable male specimens and return to Venus to repopulate the planet. During their journey to Earth we learn that Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe) and Beta (Lorena Veláquez) have already visited other galaxies because one of their specimens – a frantic, furry looking critter – gets loose and tries to enter the control room. Once they land on Earth, they transfer their cargo of potential breeders to a nearby cave and encase them in transparent cubes.

A potential male specimen for breeding purposes in La Nave de los Monstruos (aka The Ship of Monsters, 1960)

Maybe on their own planets, these male specimens were considered GQ models of their race but to us, they are super freaky scene-stealing actor-in-costume monstrosities that exert their own unique charisma.

Marty Feldman as a mutant spider from outer space?

It’s hard to pick a favorite though the one who looks like a cross between an exposed brain and a Gremlin is pretty darn cute.  I also like the spider-like alien with the extendable arms whose face looks like an arachnid version of Marty Feldman with dual potato noses.

Another alien specimen on the Venusian spacecraft that invades Mexico in La Nave de los Monstruos (1960)

There is also a talking animal skull head and a big-eared Cyclops-like creature which looks inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s one-eyed wonder in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958).

In addition, there is Tor the robot, Gamma and Beta’s loyal servant, who could give Robot Monster a run for his money in terms of bizarre construction. Is that a diving helmet and what do you suppose his shoe size is?

Tor the Robt and El Piporro in La Nave de los Monstruos aka The Ship of Monsters (1960)

As the two gals prepare to go hunting for Earth men, we are introduced to our hero, Lauriano (Eulalio González), riding his horse in the moonlight and singing a song. For a brief moment, it’s as if the projectionist mixed up the reels and put on a cowboy musical but we know we’re back on track when he spots the Venusians and falls off his horse in surprise (he falls off his horse a lot in this movie). The first exchange between Lauriano and the alien women, where they run through a variety of Earth languages before finally identifying Spanish, is typical of the film’s humor. What makes it even more fun are the clunky sci-fi gadgets they use to their advantage such as a stop-motion ray gun that freezes its victim in mid-sentence, allowing the two women to discuss their potential specimen privately. Wouldn’t Earth women love to have one of these around the house, especially during football season? There is also a large transistor radio-like device with a video screen that provides a 10 second history of Mexico for Gamma and Beta’s quick edification.

Beta (Lorena Veláquez, left) and Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe) man their spaceship while various alien specimens hover in the background in The Ship of Monsters (1960)

Without going into a more detailed synopsis I’ll just say that one of the Venusians falls in love with Lauriano and the other one turns out to be some sort of vampire. There is also some very odd interplanetary flirtation going on between the Venusians and their monsters and, in the end, even Tor finds an unlikely love mate.

A typically zany moment from the Mexican sci-fi/singing cowboy fantasy, La Nave de los Monstruos (1960)

The pacing, except for the two scenes in the bar where Lauriano tells tall tales nobody believes, is relatively brisk and you get more monsters and more action than you do in most Santo films, including a great brawl at the end where a slingshot comes into play (a nice ooey, gooey effect).

La Nave de los Monstruos has experienced an upsurge of interest in recent years due to retrospective screenings of it at film festivals in the U.S. such as the 15th Annual San Diego Latino Film Festival in March 2008 and one in TriBeCa in October 2008 (which was where I first learned of it). It was also presented at the BRIC Arts center in Brooklyn in 2009 with “ETHEL, the nation’s premier rock-infused, postclassical string quartet, and the avant-squonk art-rock wild men of Gutbucket,”  providing a live music score.

Beta (Lorena Veláquez) is not just a Venusian but a vampiric shape-shifter.

At the San Diego screening of the film, Lorena Veláquez even made a personal appearance and gave an interview about it, in one instance discussing her scenes with the monsters in charmingly fractured English: “In Saturn the men are monsters. For example I said [to] one of them, “You’re so beautiful.” And you can see [he’s] a monster! And in the other planet we have another man, another monster, he doesn’t have a head, he has just the big brain, not hair, not nothing. I have to kiss one of them. And this is a real experience let me tell you because they….I don’t know what they have in their mouths. They look like they are sweating, they have something in the mouth that when I kiss him, oh my god! What am I doing? But I was so young…maybe it’s water or something but it looks like Jello. Like jelly or something.” The kissing scene in question is indeed memorable mainly because it is presented in such a casual, offhanded manner and you really feel that Beta feels a sexual attraction to the bug-eyed brainiac. Now that is great acting.

The romantic scenes are out of this world in La Nave de los Monstruos (1960)

Ms. Veláquez, who is close to 80 years old now and still looks beautiful, was first discovered in the mid-fifties by actor/director Rene Cardona, whose is best known to U.S. audiences for Survive! (1976), his exploitive version of the famous 1972 Andes plane crash survivors’ ordeal; his son, director Rene Cardona, Jr., is probably even better known in America for such infamous exploitation films as The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972), Tintorera (1977), and Guyana: Crime of the Century (1979). Ms. Veláquez has amassed over 100 film credits to her name and her stunning face and body have graced some of Mexican cinema’s most popular genre films such as The Rape of the Sabines (1962, aka The Shame of the Sabine Women), Doctor of Doom (1963), and Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964). As of 2015 she was still acting and making occasional appearances in Mexican television soap operas.  Ana Bertha Lepe, her voluptuous co-star in La Nave de los Monstruos, had an equally prolific career though it appears she retired from the profession in 2001 after an appearance in the mini-series telenovela, Navidad sin fin. The most unusual detail about her, culled from dubious internet sources, is that in 1960, the year she made Monstruos, her fiancé Agustín de Anda, was shot and killed by her father!

Ana Bertha Lepe stars opposite Tin Tana aka German Valdes in the crime comedy, Rebelde sin casa (1960)

If the above has piqued your interest, what are you waiting for? Of course, you can view the entire film on YouTube but it could be withdrawn at any minute so why not just buy the DVD which is a steal at $8.99. You’ll be transported to some nutty universe where Mexican cowboys, norteño music, beautiful Venusian women and monsters from outer space get mixed up in a blender and served up as the most delightful visual margarita you’ve ever had. 

Other links of interest:

http://blogs.kpbs.org/index.php/movies/comments/lorena_velazquez/

http://www.braineater.com/nave.html

http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=1119

http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-MM5FT02

Margit Carstensen tries to relax by listening to music in Fear of Fear (1975) but it doesn’t stop her increasing bouts of anxiety and depression.

Films about housewives losing their identity in a marriage or slowly going bonkers from the daily rituals of domesticity are plentiful enough to form their own distinctive subgenre. Among the most intriguing of these films, all of which reflect the specific time and cultural moment in which they were made, are Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Chantal Akerman’s landmark 1975 feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quia du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Dusan Makavejev’s Montenegro (1981), and the curious Canadian indie Dancing in the Dark (1986), directed by Leon Marr. But the one I’d like to highlight and which I had the pleasure of revisiting recently on DVD is Fear of Fear (German title: Angst vor der Angst, 1975), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Margit Carstensen confronts herself in R.W. Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear (1975 aka Angst vor der Angst)

Based on a semiautobiographical account by Asta Scheib, a housewife turned writer, Fear of Fear is not usually grouped with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and a handful of others that are considered high water marks in Fassbinder’s career. Yet, in some ways, this modestly budgeted psychological drama is one of his more easily accessible films for a Fassbinder beginner and Margit Carstensen’s inspired performance as an increasingly neurotic housewife is sympathetic and affecting on an emotional level which is not my usual reaction to a Fassbinder film. Many of his finest films often reflect an objective, even detached point of view as if you are observing life under a microscope or they present his subjects in a deliberately stylized and theatrical manner. Fear of Fear is another matter entirely since it was commissioned for German television and has the look and feel of a seventies made-for-TV movie.

Mother (Margit Carstensen) and daughter (Constanze Haas) experience disconnection in Fear of Fear (1975)

Episodic in nature, the movie opens with a typical middle class family scene; Kurt (Ulrich Faulhaber), the father, arrives home from work while his wife Margot (Margit Carstensen) prepares a cake and their daughter Bibi (Constanze Haas) pouts because she isn’t allowed to help. But there is more serious trouble brewing and a telltale closeup of Margot’s hands, frozen in a momentary instance of paralysis, indicates something is not right in this household. It soon becomes apparent that Margot, who is pregnant with her second child, is beset with unexplained panic attacks represented by a momentary, wavy distortion from Margot’s viewpoint and announced by a brief orchestral flourish, courtesy of composer Peer Raben. We do not learn when the attacks started or what set them off but Margot’s fear of recurring incidents drives her to desperation.

One of the many telling details of a housewife’s mental fragmentation in R.W. Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear (1975)

At first Margot tries to ignore her fears by occupying her thoughts with other activities such as reading, playing with her daughter or listening to music. In one of the more memorable scenes, she is transported into a brief state of ecstasy while listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover” on the record player followed by a few bars of “Why Don’t You Try.” (Fassbinder is obviously a Cohen fan as his songs have been used in numerous productions such as 1971’s Beware of a Holy Whore (“So Long Marianne,” “Teachers”), 1975’s Fox and His Friends (“Like a Bird on a Wire”) and even one of his films, a made-for-TV movie, was called Like a Bird on a Wire (1975) after the Cohen composition). But nothing can distract Margot from her fears and after the birth of her second child, her behavior becomes increasingly erratic.  She goes to the doctor and tells him haltingly, “Recently I’ve been feeling….scared. It’s very strange. I have no idea why and…” Her words trail off as he advises, “Well, you’re a sensitive young girl. Very sensitive, in fact. Sometimes the autonomic nervous system acts up but many people are like that. There’s no cause for concern. I’ve prescribed some Valium for you. Take it whenever you feel on edge.”

Margot (Margit Carstensen) has anxiety over her affair with her doctor (Adrian Hoven) in Fear of Fear (1975).

The valium, of course, leads to a full blown dependency and soon Margot is mixing it with cognac. Yet, Margot’s downward spiral does not follow the easily predictable pattern of other drug/alcohol/mental disorder dramas that end on a hopeful note of recovery. Fear of Fear is more ambivalent in its conclusions and suggests that the problem may be a permanent condition that Margot has learned to control. In a revealing shot toward the end, she looks at herself in the mirror and says with happy, brainwashed conviction, “I have a deep depression and I need my pills to pull out of it.”

Fear of Fear is unmistakably a Fassbinder film with all the familiar trademarks on display such as frequent bursts of music to express an internal emotional state or depicting characters in an isolated space or private moments where the audience become voyeurs or detached onlookers. The soap opera elements draw clear parallels to the domestic dramas of Douglas Sirk in their depiction of protagonists being buffeted by social pressures and judgmental peers and neighbors. And the cast is filled out by most of the regular Fassbinder repertory company which includes Brigitte Mira as Margot’s mother-in-law, Irm Hermann as Lore, the sister-in-law, Lilo Pempeit (Fassbinder’s mother) as Mrs. Schall, the stern, disapproving schoolteacher of Bibi, Ingrid Caven as a fellow patient of Margot’s at a mental asylum, Kurt Raab as the ill-fated Herr Hauer, Armin Meier (Fassbinder’s former lover who committed suicide in 1978) as Karli, and Adrian Hoven, who is familiar to European exploitation fans (Mark of the Devil, Jess Franco’s Succubus) as Dr. Merck, the pharmacist who gives Margot unlimited access to valium in exchange for frequent sexual liaisons. It should also be noted that Fear of Fear is more briskly paced than most of Fassbinder’s productions and has a surprisingly lightness of touch despite the dark nature of the storyline.

Margit Carstensen assumes a subservient pose for her always distant husband (Ulrich Faulhaber) in Fear of Fear (1975)

This 1975 TV film was made between Fassbinder’s Mother Kuster Goes to Heaven and I Only Want You to Love Me, a golden period in the director’s prolific career. In some ways, as many critics have pointed out, Fear of Fear could be seen as a companion piece to his 1973 feature Martha, which also starred Margit Carstensen. A nightmare portrait of marriage and finding the perfect mate, the film presents the marital state as one of enslavement and the end result is a classic union of sadist and masochist. The title character’s gradual breakdown in Martha though is due to internal forces, both her own attraction to a strong, domineering man (Karlheinz Bohm, star of Peeping Tom) and his gradual manipulation and cruelty toward her. In Fear of Fear, Margot’s slide into madness appears to be agitated by outside forces which she feels but can’t name.

Margot (Margit Carstensen) experiences overwhelming waves of dissociation in Fear of Fear (1975), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The only person who appears to recognize her distress and is a possible kindred spirit is her neighbor, Herr Bauer, and she shuns him as an oddball, only to identify with him later after he commits suicide. In the end, Fassbinder’s film reveals that you don’t have to be a mad housewife to feel the world can be a cruel and hostile place at times. For who isn’t affected by how others see and treat us? The angst felt by Margot is a universal and existential state experienced by most human beings at some low point in their lives.

Brigitta Mira (far left), Irm Hermann & Margit Carstensen (far right) star in R.W. Fassbinder’s Fear of Fear (1975)

Margit Carstensen gives a riveting performance as Margot and it is a more muted and subtle portrayal in relation to her highly operatic range of emotions in Fassbinder’s Martha. One of the most gifted actresses to work for the director, she appeared in some of his most famous early work such as The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and Nora Helmer (1974), Fassbinder’s TV adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Carstensen had a parting of the ways with the director in 1976 after the making of Chinese Roulette. In Juliane Lorenz’s Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Werner Rainer Fassbinder, she recalled that, “..during the shooting of Chinese Roulette, the game was not only played in the movie but also after work. At the time, we were living on location at the castle near Stockach. By then, the tension between Rainer and myself had become unbearable…He provoked me and tormented me daily with his snide remarks. Finally things came to a head. During one of our nightly games of truth, I asked him – perhaps more bluntly than I should have – if he wanted to stop working with me. After a slight hesitation, he replied, “Yes.” I asked him why, and he said I did not seem sufficiently interested in him.”

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder & Margit Carstensen in happier days

In earlier days, their collaborations were brilliant and Fear of Fear is one of their best. “Rainer and I loved to present people’s shortcomings,” Carstensen said, “to disclose their psyche, their sentimentalities, those multi-faceted aspects which arouse sympathy. It was what bound us together. We never needed to discuss anything. During a shoot, he never indicated how a character should be presented or how certain results might be achieved. Sometimes he surmised that a certain expression of mine had been sparked by accident in the heat of the situation. I don’t think he always knew how carefully I had worked up to such accidents!”  Fear of Fear is still available on DVD. (The original distributor Wellspring Films is no longer in business; it was absorbed by The Weinstein Company in 2006). The film was a new transfer made from a restored print but there are no significant extras other than a trailer for Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, which was finally offered by The Criterion Collection in a collection entitled Early Fassbinder in 2013.

Eva Mattes in Jail Bait (1973), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

And when is someone going to release the director’s rarely seen and long awaited Jail Bait (German title: Wildwechsel, 1973), an affectingly bleak made-for-TV melodrama about teenage lovers turned murderers with Eva Mattes and featuring Fassbinder regulars Hanna Schygulla, Harry Baer, Irm Hermann, Kurt Raab and El Hedi ben Salem (another ill-fated lover of the director). Or his critically acclaimed TV mini-series Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972 aka Acht Stunden sind kein Tag) starring Gottfried John, the malevolent Reinhold in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz?

Gottfried John is the protagonist of the German TV mini-series, Eight Hours are Not a Day (1972), directed by R. W. Fassbinder

*This is a revised and updated version of an article that first appeared on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog.

Other Websites of Interest:

http://www.indiewire.com/article/as_wellspring_closes_examining_the_state_of_the_art_house_distribution

Still Life with Fassbinder: A Master Filmmaker, Frame by Frame

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jail-bait-1977

http://www.satanic-pandemonium.com/2015/01/eight-hours-are-not-day-aka-acht.html

A young Robert Altman ponders a camera set-up.

While it is rarely shown in retrospectives of his work, Robert Altman’s The James Dean Story (1957) is easily one of the more offbeat and poetic examples of documentary filmmaking. Officially cited as his second feature (Altman’s first was The Delinquents, 1957), The James Dean Story was co-produced and co-directed with George W. George, a former writing partner of Altman’s, as a serious exploration of the young actor’s mystique and impact on the youth culture of the fifties.   The project came together quickly in the aftermath of Dean’s death on September 30, 1955. George (the son of inventor Rube Goldberg) pitched the idea of a documentary on Dean to a contact at Warner Bros. who approved the concept. While other producers in Hollywood were furiously shopping the same idea around from studio to studio, Altman, George and cinematographer Lou Lombardo were already on their way to Fairmount, Indiana to shoot the documentary and interview the locals without much in the way of advance preparation.

James Dean in Fairmount, Indiana

Lombardo, who shot the bulk of the interviews and transition footage for the film, would remain a close collaborator of Altman’s for many years, serving as film editor on such signature Altman pictures as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974) and California Split (1974). Lombardo also served as an editor to Sam Peckinpah on The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and eventually helmed two films on his own, the spy thriller Russian Roulette (1975) and the drama P.J. and the Kid (1987) starring Paul Le Mat and Molly Ringwald.   To give the documentary an authentic and intimate point of view, George approached Stewart Stern, a personal friend of Dean’s who had written the screenplay for Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Stern had turned down other offers to write a screenplay about Dean due to the exploitative nature of such an enterprise so soon after the actor’s death. After meeting with George and Altman, however, he was convinced to join their collaboration.

Screenwriter Stewart Stern circa 1988

In Mitchell Zuckoff’s Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Stern described his vision for the documentary: “It wasn’t nice, crisp, uninvolved, objective storytelling because I didn’t feel that way. I wanted to be very sure that Jim came across as human, flawed, searching, lonely, complicated, all those things. But I didn’t want to get into anything that I didn’t know about and I didn’t want to add to the unhealthy side of the legend.”

Originally Marlon Brando was approached to do the film’s narration and he gave it serious consideration. In Robert Altman: American Innovator by Judith M. Kass, the actor said, “Toward the end I think he [Dean] was beginning to find his own way as an actor. But this glorifying of Dean is all wrong. That’s why I believe the documentary could be important. To show he wasn’t a hero; show what he really was – just a lost boy trying to find himself.”

Narrator Martin Gabel, a television and screen actor who appeared in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and Bud Yorkin’s Divorce American Style

In the end, Brando refused the offer and Dennis Hopper was briefly considered before Warner Bros. executives insisted on using Martin Gabel, a former member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Company, to narrate the documentary (Stern was not happy with this choice).

In direct contrast to contemporary documentaries on movie stars, The James Dean Story avoids sensationalism, industry gossip, or celebrity talking heads and instead offers an introspective and occasionally stark portrait of the Indiana farm boy turned superstar. The documentary begins with James Dean’s childhood, when, at the age of nine, he was sent to live with relatives in Fairmount and progresses from there through his brief Hollywood career. There are interviews with Dean’s aunt and uncle in Fairmount, the man who sold him his first motorcycle, former UCLA fraternity brothers, the highway patrolman who sped to the scene of Dean’s fatal car wreck, and Arleen Langer, a New York girl who had a crush on him during his struggling actor days.

Gig Young and James Dean appear in a highway safety promo

Some of the rarely seen material includes a screen test for East of Eden (1955), a highway safety film Dean made with Gig Young, and Altman’s re-enactment of Dean’s high-speed car wreck as well as numerous photographs and film clips from Dean’s career. Altman also provides a virtual travelogue of Dean’s old stomping grounds from his Indiana childhood (with footage of the Fairmount cemetery, the train station, and the Dean farm) to his New York City days to California hangouts like Schwab’s Drug Store.

James Dean in his apartment on West 68th Street, New York City, 1955.

It was during the making of The James Dean Story that Altman became introduced to the zoom lens which he would soon incorporate into his unique style of filmmaking. He also learned a new technique for presenting archival photographs on film from renowned still photographer Louis Clyde Stoumen who called his process “photo motion.” This method dispensed with the traditional presentation of static images, instead adding movement to the photograph as the camera closed-in on specific details in close-up.  After Altman completed principal photography and editing on The James Dean Story, he delivered it to Warner Brothers per their arrangement and they hired musician Leith Stevens to compose a jazzy, evocative score for the film. The studio also coaxed teen idol Tommy Sands to sing the theme song, “Let Me Be Loved,” written especially for the movie by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Then, for some inexplicable reason, Warner Bros. held up the release of The James Dean Story for over a year and a half.  By the time the documentary was released to theatres, the young actor’s death was no longer topical so the studio buried it in double features with a grade-B horror flick, The Black Scorpion (1957). Still, the documentary managed to earn some positive reviews from such high profile critics as Bosley Crowther of The New York Times: “ What should be an effective contribution to the perpetuation of the legend of the late James Dean is achieved in “The James Dean Story,” which was added to the bill at the Paramount yesterday. Intimations of immortality run all through it. It should be irresistible to the Dean fans.”   Unfortunately, The James Dean Story fared poorly at the boxoffice and remained an obscurity for many years. It has since become available on DVD from various distributors and is definitely a curiosity piece.  While the narration has its share of literary cliches and pretentious phrases (“He prowled through the night like a hunter”) that some viewers have found laughable, the film is often moving and offers an unconventional approach to deciphering the James Dean myth. Altman obviously felt some kinship with the ill-fated actor since he too was a mid-Westerner who found success in Hollywood, but he would later take a less favorable look at the James Dean phenomenon in his own production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982).  *This is a revised and extended version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other Websites of Interest:

http://www.avclub.com/article/false-start-robert-altman-and-ithe-james-dean-stor-9370

http://eveineden.blogspot.com/2011/04/james-dean-actor-legend-icon.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/james-dean-new-york-city-shaped-actor-article-1.2524082

http://www.danielmartineckhart.com/2013/10/some-of-many-unknown-faces-of.html

(from left to right) Paul L. Smith, David Carradine, unidentified child actor, Brad Dourif) in Sonny Boy

Occasionally a movie comes along that is so unclassifiable and non-mainstream that you have to wonder who the filmmakers were targeting as their intended audience. Sonny Boy (1989), directed by the virtually unknown Robert Martin Carroll, is a remarkable example of this quandary. Is it an exploitation movie with art-film aspirations? The casting alone – David Carradine, Brad Dourif, Paul L. Smith, Sydney Lassick and Conrad Janis – has built-in cult appeal but the highly eccentric storyline and grotesque characters are completely polarizing. Either you’ll tune out immediately or watch in fascination and disbelief. It is hard to imagine an indifferent viewer.  

According to director Carroll, he saw Sonny Boy as “a complex film with lots to explore. I knew it was troubling while I made it. I kept asking them [the producers] what audience they were going for. When they told me not to worry, I didn’t. I just went for it. I always like to make complex characters that keep the audience guessing as to what they will do.”

Robert Martin Carroll, director of Sonny Boy (1989)

Set outside the sparsely populated desert community of Harmony, New Mexico (not a real place) in 1971, the film covers almost eighteen years in the lives of a criminal clan that includes Slue (Paul L. Smith), the brutal ringleader, his companion Pearl (David Carradine in drag), Weasel (Brad Dourif), a sociopathic accomplice, and Charlie P. (Sydney Lassick), a wheeler-dealer businessman who often acts as a front for the group. As the film opens, Weasel ambushes a young couple at a motel, kills them and steals their car and belongings to sell. When he presents his score to Slue, they discover the couple’s infant son in the back seat. Pearl begs to keep the boy (the title character) as their own but Slue ends up appropriating the child for his own purposes.

David Carradine as Pearl in the 1989 cult film, Sonny Boy

At Sonny’s sixth birthday party, Slue begins a cruel regime of abuse, endurance tests and deprivation intended to slowly transform the boy into an animalistic avenger for the clan, much like a pit bull trained to kill. First he amputates the boy’s tongue and then confines him in a metal container where he is fed scraps through an opening. Occasionally Sonny Boy’s thoughts are presented as voiceover narration, revealing his own warped perception of reality. (It’s highly possible this device was inspired by Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) in which Sissy Spacek and Linda Manz, respectively, were used as observer/narrators.) Reliving his sixth birthday party, Sonny says: “Father cut loose my tongue. A present for my birthday.The gift of silence. Pearl, she put my voice in the freezer for safekeeping. Then we had sweet cake.”

Michael Griffin aka Michael Boston as Sonny Boy

As Sonny grows up, we witness his sadistic treatment through vignettes that show him being dragged through the desert by a car, tied to a pole within a blazing circle of fire and fed live chickens for food. Slue’s reprogramming is so effective that Sonny perceives every new torment as a game of skill that he must master. Once he turns seventeen, however, Sonny becomes Slue’s secret weapon in a power struggle with the mayor of Harmony and commits his first kill. Slue then hatches a new scheme to invade the art world using Harmony as their base: “We drive across the state line into California. We got Bel-Air, Beverly Hills. We have a kid who can eat his way right through their golden gates and we have this town to protect us.”

Sleu (Paul L. Smith) claims ownership of a kidnapped child in Soony Boy (1989)

[Spoiler alert] Of course, Things don’t go as planned. Sonny becomes infatuated with a blonde girl from the town named Rose (Alexandra Powers) and goes on the lam. Meanwhile, the Harmony townspeople rise up against Slue’s tyranny. It all ends in a Sam Peckinpah-like shoot-out in which Slue and Pearl go down with guns blazing in slo-mo glory. But for Sonny Boy, there’s a happy ending. The local doctor/surgeon (Conrad Janis) restores his severed tongue and Sonny might even end up with Rose.

Promotional tag for the film Sonny Boy

Sonny Boy is open to multiple interpretations and is certainly not a routine or formulaic exploitation film. It could be seen as a cruel, contemporary fairy tale similar to the macabre and violent stories of the Grimm Brothers in their original German form. Or it could be perceived as an allegory about child abuse or maybe an attack on normalcy and conformity. For a film about a self-made “family” of psychotic misfits, it could easily have gone the route of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes but instead of settling for a more horrific approach, director Robert Martin Carroll creates a dream-like atmosphere that is closer to the cinema of David Lynch. The desert setting, the muted colors and soft focus cinematography (by Roberto D’Ettorre Piazzoli) have an almost hallucinatory beauty about them.

The performances, as expected, are exceedingly eccentric but that is completely appropriate for the characters and storyline. Paul L. Smith made a career out of playing heavies based on his physical appearance alone and he isn’t required to do much more here than glower, stomp and bulldoze his way through every scene. He also has a swagger in his walk that shares similarities with James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano but even if his acting range is narrow, he commands the screen as a monstrous brute of a father figure.

Paul L. Smith (left) and David Carradine play an odd couple in Sonny Boy (1989)

Like Smith, Brad Dourif is either a victim of typecasting or naturally attracted to extreme characters and his performance as Weasel doesn’t deviate much from other weirdos he has played before but his manic intensity and demented sense of humor blends in perfectly with his amoral cohorts. In a Psychotronic Magazine interview, Dourif stated, “I thought it was the first real heavy-metal fable. It was just wild…didn’t really quite understand it but I was drawn to it.”

In contrast, Sydney Lassick as Charlie functions more as low-key comic relief than a genuinely threatening character but he too is a complete sociopath. He just happens to have slightly better social skills than the rest of the gang. The true wild card in the group, however, is Pearl played by David Carradine in a hilariously bizarre change of pace role. He definitely rises to the challenge and delivers a performance that is both sweetly endearing and creepy.  In his autobiography Endless Highway, Carradine described Sonny Boy as a mixture of Bonnie and Clyde, Bringing Up Baby and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don’t think anyone else will agree with that assessment but his take on Pearl is dead-on: ”I wore a dress throughout the movie, not like a drag queen but more like a midwestern housewife – dressed in a slip and a polka-dot housecoat with sensible shoes…in the sixties, I wear a Joan Crawford wig; in the seventies, a Jane Wyman flip; and in the eighties, a Mammy Yokum gray bun at the back. I took out my teeth for the old lady. I made the ugliest woman imaginable, except for the old broad, to whom I lent a certain venerable, statuesque beauty.”

David Carradine in one of his most offbeat roles as Pearl in Sonny Boy (1989)

As for the title role, Michael Griffin (now known as Michael Boston) is no more than adequate in his screen debut and isn’t required to do much more than grovel around on all fours and serve as a purely physical presence. He spends most of the movie barefoot and shirtless with his torso caked with sweat, grime and blood. Considering the lifetime of abuse he has endured, he should be hideous in appearance instead of looking like a buff model who was rolled in the dirt. According to Graeme Whifler, who wrote the original screenplay and wanted to direct the film (but was denied the opportunity by producer Ovidio G. Assonitis), Sonny Boy was supposed to be a disfigured monster. He also said the character was inspired by a story he heard from a biker gang in San Francisco that related a true tale about a kidnapped child from Indiana who was raised by a car thief to be a murderer.

Sonny (Michael Griffin) is smitten with Rose (Alexandra Powers) in the oddball psychodrama, Sonny Boy (1989)

The fact that a movie like Sonny Boy ever got made is certainly stranger than fiction and if you want to know more about its strange production history, you should definitely check out the Shout! Factory Blu-Ray of the film (released in January 2016) which includes audio commentaries by screenwriter Whifler and director Carroll on separate tracks. Here are just a few of the behind-the-scene tidbits you’ll learn:

The folksy theme song “Maybe It Ain’t” is written and performed by David Carradine

The Pearl character was originally outfitted with prosthetic black mammaries which were mostly censored out of prints.

Smith and Carradine were allegedly offered the roles of either Slue or Pearl and Smith opted for the former (Can you image him as Pearl?). During production the two actors did NOT get along well which generated considerable tension on the daily set.

Sonny Boy was filmed in Columbus and Denning, New Mexico.

An alternative film poster for the international market

The film was poorly distributed and few people saw it on its initial release after it sat on the shelf for more than a year. With one or two exceptions, the scant critical response was completely negative. Director Carroll later admitted, “Sonny Boy essentially stopped my career. While a few people loved it such as Dennis Dermody of Paper Magazine in NY who voted it the Best Film of the Decade in a Village Voice critics poll, many were just disgusted. My agent actually let me go because a famous producer she worked with said she hated it so much that she wouldn’t work with her again if she represented me. Wow, that hurt.”

Over the years, however, Sonny Boy’s reputation has improved thanks to VHS and DVD bootlegs of the film as well as TCM airings in their late night Underground franchise on more than one occasion. But the Shout! Factory Blu-Ray is the optimum way to experience it. It’s definitely not for everyone but here are some sample reviews that demonstrate the wide range of viewer reactions.

Young Sonny Boy is raised as a wild animal by his demented surrogate parents in Robert Martin Carroll’s cult film

“Repulsive, socially unredeemable waste of celluloid… Filmed for no apparent reason except to offend and appall.”
Leonard Maltin Movie and Video Guide

“An oddly compelling study of family pathology with blackly comic undertones…Carradine and Smith make an unexpectedly engaging couple, and the supporting work is all strong. Sonny Boy is a heady, offbeat mix of myth, social drama, and psychological thriller that is added testimony to the creative vitality to be found in the B-movie fringe.”
TV Guide

“There are some moments where Sonny Boy shines, but the film is tedious and dull for the most part, hampered by poor direction, a pretentious script and acting which wildly misses the mark.”
George Pacheco, Rock! Shock! Pop!

“A demented lo-fi tumble into dark surrealism… Perhaps best described as a dark fairy tale, Sonny Boy‘s skewed approach to its frequently unpleasant subject matter keeps viewers off-balance.”
Twitch

“There are certain films in the annals of home video which continue to maintain an aura of supreme weirdness, and among American productions, this oddity stands out for being criticized as tasteless, depraved, cruel, and patently wrong, but it’s also one of those films where the legend may have exaggerated the actual work….Carroll’s film isn’t a cinema turd nor work of bankrupt morality, but its main flaws lie in the frequent wavering between black comedy and earnest drama.”
Mark R. Hasan, KQEK

“This obscure little movie, surfacing without advance notice after two years on the shelf, proves darkly amusing and surprisingly touching….Sonny Boy just might end up a cult film.”
Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times, Oct. 1990

“All of the actors are excellent. Not just a sick exploitation movie, Sonny Boy has many inspired, funny, and surprising moments. Even the simple desert set is great and could have been inspired by old Krazy Kat comics.”
Psychotronic Magazine

“For the last hour, this is like a white-trash version of Frankenstein. But your jaw will be slack for the first half an hour wondering what the hell is going on.”
Zev Toledo, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

Other website links of interest:

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/90884/Sonny-Boy/articles.html

http://www.the-unknown-movies.com/unknownmovies/reviews/rev215.html

http://www.ioncinema.com/news/disc-reviews/sonny-boy-blu-ray-review