Anomalous

I was quite glad when ANONYMOUS got an Oscar nomination for Best Costumes — I saw it with my costume designer friend Ali Mitchell, whose expert eye gave it the once over and declared that it was the best Elizabethan stuff she’d ever seen. And designer Lisy Christl had never done such a big film before (though her matching tennis duds and white gloves for the killers in FUNNY GAMES are one memorable contribution to cinematic dress — I hate the film, but it’s an arresting look).

Though I didn’t like the film quite as much as Ali and her husband, producer David Brown, did, I was pretty astonished that such a handsome, unusual, well-structured and basically non-sucky movie could come from Roland Emmerich, the mind behind INDEPENDENCE DAY (credit where it’s due: that movie did cause me to go see a lot fewer blockbusters in the following years). While it’s true that every good point of the movie has some accompanying bad points, the overall experience does NOT leave you feeling ripped off and insulted, which is maybe a first for the director.

The look: apart from the beautiful costumes, which are simultaneously original and convincing, the movie benefits from good mucky sets, planks strewn through muddy streets, and impressive CGI overviews — the next step on from Olivier’s vast model shot of Shakespeare’s London which opens his HENRY V, and a lot more handsome and convincing than the comparable stuff in the ELIZABETH duology. This is a big film, but not a HUGE film, so it’s an impressive achievement.

On the minus side, Anna Foerster’s cinematography (or the digital grading thereof) is in thrall to the current fad for orange and teal colour schemes. There are a few welcome bits that depart from this, but generally in favour of monochromatic effects, so the spectrum isn’t exactly original. BUT on the other hand, it all looks genuinely pretty, and candlelight and firelight do at least provide motivation for the warm flesh tones. I think the fact that this look is currently over-used is the only objection — at least here it’s used well.

Performances: we get a new side to Rhys Ifans in this, where he has to emerge as something approximating a leading man. We also get some fresh faces in meaty roles, which is unusual and refreshing — it can be assumed that Edward Hogg in particular, whose cold villainy enlivens many a scene, is going to be very big. And Rafe Spall gets his best role yet as Shakespeare — you know, the guy who didn’t write Shakespeare.

The only down side to this is the potential for confusion in the  large cast, some of whom inhabit more than one time frame, and some of whom are consequently played by more than one actor. But when was the last time you felt you had to work to keep up with an Emmerich movie?

The story: the notion of the Earl of Oxford being the author of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets may or may not be nonsense (but I highly recommend John Michell’s fascinating Who Wrote Shakespeare? for a broadminded summation of the various theories), and the political subtexts attributed to the plays in John Orloff’s ambitious script ARE complete fantasy, but the story moves, intrigues, surprises and ultimately delivers.

Dialogue: only Rafe Spall really sounds like a person, but the others, working in a more stylised mode, get away with the formal speech, and somehow the obvious question — Why does everybody speak in such an antiquated way in the plays, while never using a single obsolete expression in their offstage speech — never really jumps out at you.

Shakespeare may not have written any plays, but he totally invented the stage-dive.

Art/life: the movie’s take on the purpose of Shakespeare’s plays — political propaganda to influence the mob — is kind of dumb, and does the work a disservice. But the evocation of HENRY V’s debut is striking and exciting. Elsewhere, there are gigantic, and quite deliberate, factual errors (like the Globe burning down ten years early), which is all acceptable for dramatic purposes. But the final device, whereby Oxford, the true author, tries to mobilize public opinion against hunchbacked politico Robert Cecil, by staging Richard III. Leaving aside the fact that the play staged at this historical moment was actually Richard II, this makes about as much sense as the computer virus that takes down the aliens in ID4. The Globe-mob become immediately enraged at the sight of the Cecil-lookalike, before he’s even gotten as far as “…determined to prove a villain.” I wanted to actually hear the following dialogue:

“Hey, he looks like that other guy!”

“The play’s right! He IS a hunchback!”

“Yeah, I hate him!”

“Let’s riot!”

Had the movie been a little less impatient, it could certainly have made this scene play a bit more convincingly, and since it cues the film’s climax (an attempted coup: basically VALKYRIE with ruffs), it’s important to try and get it right. But it doesn’t wreck things altogether.

It’s a bitter irony that Emmerich’s first non-travesty has underperformed compared to the ghastly trash he’s pumped onto our screens in the past. I can’t feel altogether sorry for him, since really the director of GODZILLA deserves some grief. But it’s a shame for everyone who suffered through the big lizard but missed out on the court intrigue.

I wrote two lines of a limerick about this, so inspired was I by the bard’s poetic vision. Then I couldn’t think of an ending, so Hilary Barta of Limerwrecks stepped in –

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUBIOUS

Is Shakespeare a bard or a boor?

It appears that it’s hard to make sure!

Was it really an earl

What coined ev’ry pearl?

Is it all a canard of manure?

Buy John Michell’s terrific book: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My favourite Shakespearian authorship theories –

The great Ken Campbell came up with the audacious, balls-out insane notion that the plays were “improvised by the actors.” To prove it was possible to improvise in iambic pentameter, he organized marathon improv sessions for actors, demonstrating that “the iambs only kick in after the twelfth hour.” But after twelve hours of it, you may find it easier to continue than to stop.

And in Bob Burden’s comic, The Flaming Carrot, our hero “the world’s strangest man” travels back in time to meet the swan of Avon, only to discover a drooling bumpkin. The true author, a shadowy caped figure, is eventually tracked down, and in a surprise revelation, proves to be Buddy Hackett.

Blackout

Appropriately enough, alcoholism forms part of the subject matter of Gregory La Cava’s UNFINISHED BUSINESS — a topic the filmmaker knew something about.

And UNFINISHED BUSINESS forms the subject matter of this week’s edition of The Forgotten.

Dracula Schmacula

SON OF DRACULA, “starring” Harry Nilsson, “directed” by Freddie Francis and “produced” by Ringo Starr, seems to have been brought into being solely to disabuse me, decades after its creation, of several of my most long-cherished beliefs. These are ~

(1) The 1970s were cool (THE GODFATHER and PULP can be seen advertised in the background of a couple of shots, but they can’t compete with the awful guff going on in the foreground).

(2) The presence of Dennis Price in a vampire film is always a good sign (VAMPYROS LESBOS).

(3) Ringo Starr is a fundamentally well-meaning man who wants me to have a good time (HELP!, CANDY).

(4) Rock musicals with Frankenstein elements are the key to human happiness  (ROCKY HORROR, LISZTOMANIA)

(5) Keith Moon was exclusively in very great films (TOMMY, SEXTETTE)

(6) T Rex had alchemical powers which transmuted everything they touched into gold.

(7) Jenny Runacre can make anything cool (THE FINAL PROGRAMME).

(8) Dracula films with motorbikes are cool (THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA).

(9) Freddie Jones is the kind of guy you can depend on to learn his lines.

(10)  Shakira Caine was only ever in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING and never made any films where she turned into a housecat.

All of these self-evident truths, previously held to be inviolate, are thrown into question by this shambling travesty — how shall I go on in a world where NOTHING is certain?

Harry Nilsson is a new kind of Dracula — quiet, authoritative, ginger. He plays the whole thing straight, which might have worked if everybody had gone along with it. After all, the script, by actress Jennifer Jayne working under a pseudonym (wisely), doesn’t actually provide any gags — apart from Dracula Jnr being called Count Down, for no reason. Ringo, as Merlin (what’s Merlin doing in this???), is Ringo. The rest of the rock stars just play music, which is a bit of a waste. The way to redeem this farrago would have been to play it absolutely straight, cutting all the “comedy” which would have taken about three minutes of script revision, and casting inappropriate musicians in all roles. THEN it might have been funny. Freddie Jones as Baron Frankenstein tries, apart from the aforementioned difficulty with the lines (which are often unspeakable sci-fi gibberish, to be fair), but think what Keith Moon could have done! Seized the role by the throat and worried it to death, I should think. And Dennis Price as Van Helsing? Sure, he seems to have sobered up for the day’s work, and Francis shoots him as if he was actually there, in the scene with the other players, which must have been a bewildering change for Price, who was usually filmed to  look as much like stock footage as possible (see HORROR HOSPITAL if you don’t believe me), but this has the effect of depriving Peter Frampton of the opportunity to wear a goatee and operate lab equipment. It’s a missed opportunity.

I was slightly surprised that this seriously obscure film, lost in the mists of time and hard drugs, features songs I recognized — that echoing yelling number (Jump into the Fire) that plays during Ray Liotta’s last day as a goodfella in GOODFELLAS, and this –

Extra points for recognizing the space footage swiped from A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. At least Freddie Francis worked on AMOLAD. Did David Niven feel raped? Probably not — he was too busy making VAMPIRA.

Francis apparently had a horrible time on this film — not the world’s greatest director (but one of the greatest cinematographers, as THE INNOCENTS and THE ELEPHANT MAN testify), he found himself employed on a rock folly tax dodge, where the professionalism which was his main attribute as director was not respected or required. He says it led him to give up directing, although one notes that he had not hit bottom yet — he made CRAZE the same year, with Satanist Jack Palance trolling for sacrificial victims in the Raymond Revuebar. The following year’s THE GHOUL and LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF are shoddy, but mark a slight step up.

The Revuebar is glimpsed here too, in a Swinging London travelogue which actually contains the film’s only moments of visual felicity — a girl walks past and a neon light flicks on offscreen just as she catches the vampire’s eye, causing her to flare red — and the Coke sign’s red wave lights up from top to bottom EXACTLY like a pool of blood flowing downhill.

One odd thing among many — SON OF DRACULA is actually set in the future. An opening title gives the date of Dracula’s staking as “the 1880s” — which is strangely vague, as if the writer is unsure of her facts — and Count Down’s coronation, which takes up most of the plot, is set “a hundred years later” — also, he gets from Transylvania to London via the Channel Tunnel, which did not yet exist in 1974 (it’s represented by an underground car park — this is, after all, a film which boasts of being made “entirely on location”). Yet despite all this, Piccadilly Circus still boasts ads for THE GODFATHER.

Francis would show this blithe disregard for setting again in THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS, Dylan Thomas’ Burke and Hare script, belatedly filmed in 1985. Relocating the story to London would have been a perfectly reasonable action, since the characters are all re-named anyway, but Francis inexplicably keeps the Edinburgh locale (with a single location shot of Arthur’s Seat) but has everybody talk in cockney accents. I can understand him not wanting to give himself a migraine by reading the SON OF DRACULA script too closely, but when Dylan Thomas is involved, I think a little more care would be welcome.

I am indebted to Shadowplay informant Danny Carr for reminding me that S.O.D. (“an Apple Production”) existed, thus prompting me to obtain a copy. Remind me to stab him in the forehead next time I see him.