Getting the emotion.

 

THE TERMINAL MAN, scripted and directed by Mike Hodges, is by some distance the most interesting and successful film of a Michael Crichton novel. While Crichton is not even remotely interested in people, giving his books a slick, diagrammatic quality as they move through intricately worked-out plot mechanics in order to illustrate some predetermined thesis, Hodges cares passionately about the humans in his stories. Yet a Hodges film can have a glacial, smooth surface that as first glance seems to deny us easy access to characters’ thoughts and emotions.

In TTM, George Segal has a tiny computer implanted in his brain to control his epilepsy. It doesn’t work out. While Crichton in his novel is very concerned with making explicit the esact nature of the foul-up, the better to prove a point about the dangers of mechanizing the organic, Hodges is more concerned with the very human consequences.

Halfway through the film, Segal, a robotics engineers, trashes his lab and slumps in despair, repeating a mechanical gesture endlessly, and Hodges slowly pulls away from the tiny figure of flesh amidst the metallic debris. “It’s too painful to watch. We want to give the man his privacy. The American producers didn’t understand why I was zooming away, they wanted to zoom IN.”

Hodges, in his first Hollywood movie, had stumbled across perhaps a key difference between American and European approaches to capturing emotion on the screen.

Mike Hodges, photographed by Fiona Watson.

The “Wow!” murders

“Which magazines sell the most?”

“The ones with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.”

Dialogue from PEEPING TOM. 

COVER GIRL KILLER feels like it’s morally boundto be salacious and pervy and horrible – a serial killer is murdering the cover girls of Wow! Magazine and posing their corpses to match the glamour shots depicted — and yet, the film feels oddly chaste and benevolent.

By rights, the movie ought also to be bizarre and ludicrous: the killer wears as disguise a greasy toupee, pebble glasses, and a “dirty mac”, and he’s played by future sitcom star Harry H Corbett (years of Steptoe and Son still some years off).

And yet, the film isn’t terribly tawdry, nor particularly absurd. Corbett was, in his youth, though of as some kind of British Brando (you can still see signs of this ambition in the more tragic moments of Steptoe) and he’s quietly compelling in the role.

Produced and directed by the ecclesiastical-sounding pair of Parsons and Bishop, the film is light on smut, but lucidly told, apart from the hurried climax. Somebody’s been looking at Lang’s ”M”, which means that scenes segue into each other with several deft linking devices: a question asked in Scene 1 is answered in Scene 2, and so forth. The movie also boasts the beginnings of a libertarian argument — the killer is an insane Festival of Light type anti-porn campaigner hoping to drive lustful images from our streets; the police are rather useless, the heroine is a showgirl; and the hero… here’s where it gets odd. Spencer Teakle (great leading man name!) plays John Mason, an archaeologist who’s found himself in the skin trade after inheriting Wow! Magazine from a father who believed he was too unworldly.

(Every time anybody talks about Wow!, the giggle-factor rises a wee bit.)

Teakle decides to cover the murder case in the magazine itself, a weird kind of self-reflexive sleaze-journalism. “You readers will have to learn to read,” his girlfriend advises him. The academic/pornographer not only does most of the detective work, he allows his girlfriend to lure the killer into a trap, then springs the trap himself when Scotland Yard screws up again. As he walks off arm in arm with his fishnet-stockinged paramour, one longs for a whole season of films about this character: JOHN MASON, PORNOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATOR.

(Suggested Fever Dream Double Feature with: PEEPING TOM. It seems there were TWO smut-business snuff artists stalking Soho in 1959.)

Quote of the Day: The Dead

 

More words of wisdom from Edinburgh’s own Alastair Sim:

“We’re all governed by dead ideas, but when it comes to party programmes, an idea has not merely to be dead, but to have lost all meaning, before it has any chance of being adopted with real enthusiasm. Remember that, my boy… It will get you absolutely nowhere.”

From Sidney Gilliat’s LEFT, RIGHT AND CENTRE.