Dr. Wells: “An empty sleeve is revolting to most people.”
From DOCTOR X. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Screenplay by Robert Tasker & Earl Baldwin, from the play by Howard W. Comstock & Allen C. Miller. Photographed in gorgeous deathlike two-strip Technicolor by Ray Rennahan.
Something needs to be said about Lionel Atwill and the enantiodromic approach…
One fun thing about this joint — from MY point of view anyhow — is that I can see in my Blog Stats exactly what kind of web searches people use to find the site. Yes, I am looking into your dark hearts as you navigate the murky waters of the web and come into dock in my cyber-harbour.
As a result, I have become aware that two of the personages I’ve mentioned in passing have attracted quite a lot of notice. They are ’60s British character star Murray Melvin, and Greek mythological character Medusa.
So, whopping great whore that I am, I thought I’d prepare a special blog posting about Murray Melvin and Medusa. Oh, and I’ll throw in this random mention of ST TRINIAN’S head girl Gemma Arterton too, since so many of you seem to find her so damn interesting.*
Medusa was head girl of the Gorgons. She had snakes for hair.
Murray Melvin has hair for hair. He starred in A TASTE OF HONEY and pops up in Ken Russell’s epic film maudit THE DEVILS, and Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (the litmus test film that hardcore Kubrickians admire most, and that nobody else likes all that much).
Medusa had a petrifying gaze.
Murray Melvin is a petrifying gay.
Actually, I have no private information about Mr. Melvin’s sexuality at all, so I take that back. He was cast as gay in A TASTE OF HONEY and it kind of stuck. He played highly repressed characters in THE DEVILS and BARRY LYNDON, and is a sort of Poster Boy for British Sexual Ambivalence (B.S.A.). I find it interesting (and definitely regrettable) that British cinema has made so little use of him since the swinging ’sixties and ’seventies. My theory is that Melvin’s camp quality is out of fashion in a world that either wishes to ignore homosexuality, or is eager to present images of gay men that don’t fit the camp stereotype. But some gay men ARE camp, if you want to use that word, and Melvin is an excellent actor, so where’s the problem?
It reminds me of the way Hollywood discovered racial sensitivity in the ‘forties and slowly phased out most most of the actors who’d made a living playing “comedy negroes” and servants. Replacing them with…virtually nothing. There’s an argument that flawed representation is better than NO representation.
The possibility also arises that M.M. was acting camp in films because the roles demanded it, and could just as easily play Dead Butch. It would be slightly surprising to me, but it’s still possible. In which case his recent disuse by our national cinema is even sillier.
The last time I saw M.M. at the cinema was way back in Scots director Bill Douglas’ COMRADES, which also featured Barbara Windsor and Robert Stephens, who likewise should have been in far more movies.
When Harry Hamlin Perseus lopped off Medusa’s serpentine head, her stare maintained its terrible power after death. Still going strong in his seventies, Murray Melvin likewise maintains his momentous powers of dramaturgical dazzlement.
*”Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” ~ Johnny Rotten.
Regular Shadowplayer and acclaimed Mick Travis impersonator Alex Livingston suggests the scene of Spike Milligan’s arrest from Richard Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973).
“before i think about it too much and sink into a tarpit of indecision, i am going to nominate a scene from richard lester’s the three musketeers. christopher lee and his guards drag raquel welch from her bedroom whilst spike milligan fumbles to reload his flintlock pistol, utterly blind to the possibility that he may not have the upper hand. i think it is basically the muttering that does it for me here”
I’ve thrown in the following sequence because I like the sedan chair gag, and an appearance from Frank “Captain Peacock” of Are You Being Served? is always a bonus.
Raquel Welch phoned Richard Lester up in the middle of the night to complain about the boob jokes in the film.
“This bit where a hand reaches from a heap of melons and grabs my wrist — I don’t think it’s funny.”
“Well I do.”
At which point she called the producers and threatened to quit. Colossal panic — the funding was contingent on her involvement. They sweet-talked her back on-board, but she still pulled stunts like wearing costumes modelled on Lana Turner’s in the ‘forties version, rather than on historical fact like everybody else.
Christopher Lee bored everyone rigid with his endless anecdotage, except producer Pierre Spengler, who found him fascinating. Lee can pick up an anecdote, if interrupted, and continue it MONTHS LATER, if required. But my costume designer friend Ali, who worked with him on GREYFRIAR’S BOBBY, got on very well with the Great Man. As Sidney Greenstreet says, “I’ll tell you right out, I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”
Spike Milligan stared at the historical recreations in complete awe: “People really lived like this,” he would say, with tears in his eyes.
The movie has one of the most disparate casts ever assembled. Charlton Heston shares a scene with Milligan, finding him “very funny but not over-the-top”. OF COURSE he’s over-the-top! He’s in a completely different comedy register from everybody else in the film! But Lester excels at uniting different styles of acting / muttering.
Alex adds:
“out of maybe five films that i considered taking my euphoric moment from, three featured faye dunaway. isn’t that funny?”
Not funny, Alex, JUST SENSIBLE.
Footnote: any Americans unfamiliar with Milligan’s brand of surreal TV can educate themselves using the University of Youtube. Maybe start HERE.
I collect movie stories in my brain. Some of them may just be stories. But sometimes two stories link up, and we have CORROBORATION.
ONE:
A chap I know once worked on a commercial for Kwik-Fit, a garage company notorious for their cheesy musical T.V. ads. The cinematographer, bizarrely, was the great Douglas Slocombe, slumming it rather. My friend got a few stories out of the great man:
“I never use a light meter. I used to have one, but I was on a boat and I threw it at the director. It went over the side and I haven’t had one since.”
Now Slocombe measured the light just by looking at the shadow of his thumb on the palm of his hand.
When somebody asked Freddie Francis (Slocombe’s near-contemporary) about light meters, he said it was impossible to work without one. “You’ve got to bear in mind not just the difference in the light between 8am and 8pm, but the difference in your eyes.”
Anyhow, in Philip Kemp’s study of Alexander Mackendrick, Lethal Innocence, we hear about Mackendrick arguing with Slocombe about the lighting of a ship’s figurehead during the fraught shooting of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA. Slocombe hurled his light meter at his intransigent director. “I think it missed him.”
TWO:
My late friend Lawrie Knight worked in commercials after his career as an assistant director in British films such as THE RED SHOES. He recalled with awe his one glimpse of Orson Welles, emerging from a taxi in a foggy London street, swathed in cape.
Later that day he was in a recording studio and mentioned the dramatic scene. “Oh yes, Mr. Welles was in here today, doing a voice-over for fish fingers.”
Yet Lawrie was unaware, until I told him, of this famous set of outtakes:
(Incidentally, this clip has some of the smarter comments I’ve ever seen on Youtube: voice-over artists and directors supporting Welles against the ad people!)
THREE
The elusive Mr. Welles again. Many of you will have heard about how, while shooting OTHELLO, Welles ran up against various cash difficulties. The film was made “on the installment plan,” whenever Welles was able to raise enough cash by acting in other movies.
At one point, although the costumes had been made, they could not be delivered, due to a little matter of unpaid bills, so Welles brilliantly improvised the murder attempt on Cassio, staging it in a bath-house so that most of the characters would not require costumes, only towels or undies.
Flicking through the pages of Charles Drazin’s In Search of The Third Man, we learn that Welles, engaged by Alexander Korda to act in THE THIRD MAN, was charging his OTHELLO costume bills to the budget of THE THIRD MAN. (Some Welles fans would like to deny the confidence trickster side of his personality, I prefer to revel in it.) Knowing the importance of keeping your star happy, Korda shrewdly allowed this fraud to continue — until Welles had completed his scenes in Korda’s movie. Then he swiftly stopped payment.
The result would seem to be: a masterful piece of cinema flung together by Welles in a fit of inspiration to get himself out of a purely practical difficulty.
Drazin’s book is highly recommended, but Michael McLiammoir’s account of filming OTHELLO, Put Money in thy Purse, is even better. And then there’s Welles’ own documentary, FILMING OTHELLO. In some future Utopia where Welles’ heirs actually speak to each other, we shall have all the various edits of Welles’ OTHELLO together in a box set, with FILMING OTHELLO as the main extra. If we eat well and get some exercise, we may live to see this.
