Dramatic Ironmongery

Get your self a snack from the fridge or I’ll punch your chin out!

There, I’ve done it. Since movies always begin with threats these days, and nobody seems to mind, I thought I’d begin a blog post the same way and see if it works. But I’m a good-hearted fellow, so I threaten you into doing something enjoyable. Which means it’s not a crime, right?

The kind of threats I mean are the ones that warn you against video-recording a movie at the cinema, promising terrible legal repercussions if you should walk out of the theatre with some lasting evidence of your experience. IRON MAN is the latest attempt to scupper the movie pirates, as it’s a movie that literally erases itself from your brain as you watch it. I want to write something about it but I have to be quick or there’ll be nothing left — it was pneumatically blasted into my skull through my eye and ear sockets, but now it’s just leaking out my back-brain like a lactulose O.D. My spine is wet with bits of Terrence Howard.

Not that it’s a bad film, it is actually very entertaining, and has a far better set-up than most summer blockbusters/buckblowers. And main dude Jon Favreau did a beautiful thing by casting Robert Downey Jnr., who’s “riddled with charisma” as Fiona puts it. All that chemistry Downey has poured into his bloodstream over the years is still evaporating from his skin and appearing onscreen — he has great chemistry with everybody: Gwyneth Paltry, who CAN be something of a no-joy zone but here is rather fun: a large mammal called Jeff Bridges, who brings the world’s largest private collection of affability to bear on the bad guy role; Shaun Toub, who’s a very nice actor indeed — I ducked out of seeing the Haggis CRASH and THE KITE RUNNER so this was my first exposure. Downey even has great chemistry with a robot arm carrying a fire extinguisher which, through deft writing and the personality lent it by Downey, acquires the best character arc of anyone in the film. 

(Downey can’t do as much with Terrence Howard, who’s stuck in a thankless, sexless, meaningless best friend role. As a thought experiment, try cutting him out of the film in your mind, and watch in awe as NOTHING HAPPENS.)

Enjoyable as the film is, it crucially lacks resonance, which is why I’m struggling to recall most of it, one hour after the screening. I do remember enjoying it. There are good lines (RD Jnr: “Give me a whiskey, I’m starving”) and a very nice initial flying sequence, but the film’s reluctance to carry through the themes it set up (loud and clear, with big tags on them saying “THEME”) in the first section robs it of any mental staying-power. It comes down to a conflict between all-out capitalism – Stark Industries sell arms to the highest bidder, because that’s what they’re in business for — and, what? Enlightened capitalism? Or just fantasy super-heroics? Downey’s hero tries to stop his company making weapons, but never explains how he’s going to keep his business afloat and his staff employed.

Contrast this with ROBOCOP, which this movie evokes frequently (Verhoeven’s festival of irony and guts pre-empted so many comic book adaptations, from Batman to Judge Dredd, it’s unbelievable). While the Verhoeven was a rock ‘n’ roll speedball of dark wit and graphic bodily mayhem, it also set up numerous dialectics. Paul Weller’s cyborg policeman is a real public servant (the words on the side of his car, “To protect and serve” are given strong emphasis) in conflict both with social chaos and rampant capitalism, which are shown to be hand in glove.

Bridges, as “Obadiah Stane”, at one point rides on of those wheelie things that George W Bush fell off — you know, the things you’re not supposed to be able to fall off? — but isn’t set up to embody neo-con evil or hawkish militarism or anything but basic greed, and by the end of the movie he doesn’t even have a masterplan. Corporate bad guys don’t smush secret agents and punch superheroes through walls with their big metal fists, even metaphorically. Where’s the profit in that? He’s not an evocative bad guy because he’s mutated from a character into a bare plot function. As soon as he suits up and starts walloping, he’s a fugitive from justice who isn’t going to be selling arms to anyone, so it doesn’t much matter if he’s defeated by Gwyneth pulling levers to make Something Happen That Will Work.

BUT, the film, as I say, is entertaining, and does have one good stick-in-the-mind moment, when Paltrow inserts her hand into her leading man’s body. The scene is queasily funny, frightening, and perversely romantic, and I award extra points because it isn’t the kind of scene you’d automatically think necessary in a comic book action adventure. I hope she does it again in the sequel. Use both hands next time, Gwyneth!

“…I shall think that insubstantial death is amorous…”

I’ve given up commemorating birthdays here on Shadowplay because whenever I do it, the subject promptly keels over in a state of rigor mortis. I homaged Richard Widmark and Jules Dassin in my first month and look what happened to them. I thought about mentioning Hazel Court, missed the date, and she STILL died. So, no more birthday celebrations here.

Obituaries, however, are fair game — I can’t see what harm I can do there. And Friday’s Guardian obits page was fairly thronging with film talent: Tristram Cary and Julie Ege have both crossed the river to the Western Lands. The link between them is Hammer films.

Cary scored THE LADYKILLERS, which is enough to make him a Shadowplay hero in itself. That film is one of the most perfect feats of stylisation in British cinema, and the score plays a big part: Cary not only wrote the music, but also arranged the sound effects, to create the kind of unified effect often rendered impossible by the compartmentalisation of film production. The big bass drum that sounds as characters topple from a great height into a freight train is an example of music crossing over and BECOMING sound. The build-up to Alec Guinness’ entrance is a symphony of music and sound in perfect harmony, with Peter Sellers impersonating a parrot and a ringing doorbell as seamless parts of the mix.

The producer of THE LADYKILLERS, Seth Holt, used Cary again for the little-known but rather fine BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB, but it’s his work in electronic music, at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and elsewhere, that is Cary’s other great claim to fame. Apart from scary electronica for Dr. Who, Cary crafted many of those oddly neutral-but-bleak themes used in BBC educational programmes in the ’70s. They create quite a strange mood, like lying in a flotation tank and thinking about the relentless march of time, destroying all things.

A different sort of mood is associated with Norwegian model-turned actress Julie Ege. A genuinely guilty pleasure, Ege’s career touches on greatness with ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (the best Bond film, the best Bond!) and Robert Fuest’s THE FINAL PROGRAMME, but is more customarily found amid the depths of NOT NOW DARLING, THE AMOROUS MILKMAN, UP POMPEII, etc. A film festival gathering of her comedy output could easily induce mass suicide, but that’s not her fault. The simple fact is that prior to the late ’60s, the British low-brow sex comedy was about sexual failure — grotesque, cheerfully depraved working-class halfwits failing to get their end away. The moment anybody actually scored the laughter died in your throat, because nobody wants to picture Sid James engaged in the physical act of love. Not even with Julie Ege.

Ege’s scream queen career ought to have offered more quality, since there were some decent horror films made in the ’70s in the UK, but her roles were in LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (standing decorously by as Hammer films jump on the Kung-Fu bandwagon), CRAZE (getting picked up by Jack Palance at the Raymond Revuebar) and CREATURES THE WORLD FORGOT (the third of Hammer’s dinosaur movies — the one where they left out the dinosaurs, story, and the tops halves of the fur bikinis), films that seem to compete with the sex farces for sheer depression and poverty of imagination. These are all important works for the true student of dreadfulness. Julie Ege’s beauty and casual approach to clothing makes them perhaps slightly less unwatchable than they might have been, but her greatest contribution to society was becoming a nurse, something which we really should value more highly than a willingness to appear onscreen without knickers.

My fondest memory of Ege is a parody of this archetype in The Making of the Goodies’ Disaster Movie, a spin-off book from the legendary TV comedy The Goodies. Ege appears in the book’s copious illustrations, playing a starlet who is outraged at the film-makers’ suggestion that she keep her clothes on for a part, even if it IS essential to the plot.

Julie’s movies, while nearly all terrible, provided sex-starved Brits with cheap thrills during the years when America was getting its rocks off to DEEP THROAT and the like, and by contrast the British films are quaint and sort-of innocent, if sexist. That’s really the reason I can’t celebrate Ege’s contribution to film more wholeheartedly — she made many of us happy by baring her bits, but she did so in films that were dismal celebrations of bimbosity, often portraying women not as objects, as feminist criticism usually argues, but as mentally deficient obligatrons, autonomous, apparently sentient beings whose desires and behaviour just happen to conform to the densest fantasies of the average Razzle-reader.

NOT NOW DARLING is available to rent or buy.