Freaking Cronenberg
The scene which terrified David Cronenberg.
The sailor is drunk. “You haven’t got an arm / and you haven’t got a leg,” he sings.
A skull, left behind by someone who no longer required it, starts to rise into the air. Unbenownst to the sailor, there is a snake, inserting its little noggin into the discarded cranium, causing it to elevate in this eerie fashion.
His vision and mind blurred by drink, the sailor flees in terror and falls to his death.
Cronenberg notes that Frank Launder’s THE BLUE LAGOON was not a film anybody thought children should be protected from, but it scared every last heebie-jeebie from his childish frame. Thus we see the difficulty, bordering on futility, of the censor’s job. I do think a ratings system, however fatuous, is probably a useful thing to help parents avoid taking their kids to see DEBBIE DOES DALEKS or whatever by mistake, although such advisory labels as the X Certificate are by their nature blunt instruments, of limited application.
As far as protecting kids from disturbing imagery — Cronenberg doesn’t seem to regret seeing THE BLUE LAGOON. I don’t think any of us regret seeing the stuff that freaked us out as kids. It’s part of our development, and it remains in our memories, not as a scar, but as, I don’t know, a merit badge or something. “I saw that and it terrified me,” we think, warmly.
Or is that just me?
Incidentally, my suspicion is that Launder’s LAGOON, a passable but not very distinguished part of his oeuvre, is unavailable on DVD due to censorious panic over the little girl running around without a shirt. I hope I’m wrong — I hope nobody’s terrified of that image, which seems to me harmless.
The film fades out shortly after this sequence, and rejoins the kids several years later, when they have transformed into Donald Houston and Jean Simmons, and we learn that Jean has only just stopped running around topless the previous week. Why couldn’t we have faded up a week earlier?
November 6, 2008 at 1:42 pm
My personal opinion has always been that kids will be scarred one way or another. The important thing is that they survive and live with them and of course learn from them. And besides it’s not fairy tales are any-the-less scary. Like Brothers Grimm stories are quite scary, you know. And ”Fantasia” by Disney creeps everyone out.
I recently saw Launder and Gilliat’s ”Green For Danger”, pretty good and original thriller with some scary moments there too.
Of course it doesn’t make sense to show kids something like ”Last Tango in Paris”, not because the sex will scare them(although it very well might, it scares adults) but because they won’t be able to understand the film.
And in any case kids have a very irreverent attitude to violence largely because of their innocence. Like in Bunuel’s ”Viridiana”, there’s that scene where the girl plays with the same skipping rope Fernando Rey used to hang himself by. On one hand it’s a nice surrealist gag but it’s also quite true to a general reality. Or in Hitchcock’s ”The Birds”, where you have the hero’s sister talking about her brother defending his current client who shot “his wife six times in the face with a shotgun”.
”The Night of the Hunter” is specifically about the horror that’s part of childhood. Like that song the kids sing about hanging when they pass by the two kids and then Pearl, the girl starts singing it too. It’s quite disturbing but it’s true.
November 6, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Green For Danger is probably my favourite Launder & Gilliat film. Love Alastair Sim in it, and the murder has a giallo-like high style, although “without any of the concomitant vulgarity”.
Yes, since kids are basically FROM SPACE, it’s impossible to predict what will upset them. When I saw Return of the Jedi, one little kid in the cinema started screaming in terror at the sight of an alien, quite late in the film. Now, this alien was one of the good guys, and everybody treated him as a friend, nobody in the movie was afraid of him, so the kid wasn’t taking any cues from the narrative. Just didn’t like his face! And it’s easy to imagine how the fact that nobody in the film is freaked out by this alien actually makes it MORE disturbing…
Alexander Mackendrick is the great man for capturing the strangeness of childhood — A High Wind In Jamaica is almost a masterpiece (blame studio interference), and Richard Hughes’ book is even better. “Actually communicating with a baby’s mind would be like encountering a sea monster.”
November 6, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I’d support your point about the futility of trying to protect kids from disturbing imagery.
On the last day of term in primary 3, my class was allowed to watch a (probably pirated, now I think about it) video of Dragonslayer. I didn’t pay too much attention to the early scenes, but settled down to watch it properly once the story got going, and remember being impressed at the scene in which the hero’s sidekick, a young lad, goes for a swim in a magical pool and is transformed into a naked lady. That was intriguing enough, obviously. However, what struck me, even at that age, as particularly liberated of the filmmakers was that the hero and his newly female best buddy then became lovers. Remarkable, I thought, and then got on with watching people fight the dragon, which was way cooler than all that irrelevant gender-confusion stuff.
Years later, I watched the film with my little brother and realised that the hero’s sidekick is shown quite clearly in an early scene to be a woman who is in disguise as a young lad so she won’t be sacrificed to the dragon (the potential fate of every young woman in her village). No actual magical gender-switching had ever been so much as hinted at in the screenplay, so no intriguing sexual questions were meant to have been raised by the later snogging. Of course, if any of that had been in the script, the thing wouldn’t have been made — certainly not by Walt Disney — because such notions would inevitably corrupt any child who saw the movie, and bring western civilisation to its knees.
You simply can’t control what nonsense a kid’s going to make up, whether they’re disturbed by it or not, even given the most innocent input. Like Arthur S says in the first comment on this post, kids just seem to accept a lot of imagery without getting themselves all caught up with implications.
[Incidentally, I won't be at the film quiz this Sunday, as I'll be in Oxford at a Bat Mitzvah (or, I suppose, a Bar Mitzvah, if the young lady dives in a magical sex change pool between now and the weekend), so you shouldn't bring along the DVDs I loaned you (I'm in no rush for them, anyway).]
November 6, 2008 at 2:43 pm
The Night of the Hunter is a filmthat deals uncompormisingly with what childhood is actually about. Therefore it scares the bejesus out of adults.
Never seen the original Blue Lagoon. What say you of Randal Kleiser’s remake with Brooke Shields?
November 6, 2008 at 2:56 pm
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Green For Danger is probably my favourite Launder & Gilliat film. Love Alastair Sim in it, and the murder has a giallo-like high style, although “without any of the concomitant vulgarity”.
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Yes. “My presence cast a pall on the surroundings…I found it all rather enjoyable.” I also liked how he narrates the story and a good quarter of the film passes and then he says, “It was at this point that I came into this story,” full of the irreverence I like about British cinema at it’s best.
Are Launder and Gilliat like Powell-Pressburger? I noticed in some of their films one or the other has director credit. I’m especially interested in this film “I See A Dark Stranger” which apparently has Deborah Kerr playing a would-be IRA operative. Sounds too interesting not to pass up. I love Kerr especially in her British phase(she was good in America too but none of them gave us the tough lassie of the third section of ”Colonel Blimp”).
”Green For Danger” is rather like ”The Small Back Room” in that it shows the darker side of the Home Front, them being a mess of sexual anxiety and repressed envy. And that bit where the messenger dies on his operating table ranting about Churchill lying and the like is quite daring I thought. And the final scenes were quite beautiful and certainly going against conventions(then and now). Certainly one of the best British thrillers and genuinely suspenseful.
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And it’s easy to imagine how the fact that nobody in the film is freaked out by this alien actually makes it MORE disturbing…
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I guess so. I never liked ”Star Wars” as a kid. I detested those robots the golden-coloured one and the one that looks like a trash-can. And I didn’t care for Darth Vader either.
I grew up watching animated shows and cartoons. I remember being scared by Tom and Jerry often. One bit that scared me as a kid was the Looney Tunes short, “Racketeer Rabbit” where Termite Terrace homaged the 30s gangster films. One scene has one of the gangsters taking Bugs out on a ride presumably to kill him at some point. But instead Bugs comes back in one piece and we don’t know what happened to the other guy. I felt as a kid that Bugs killed him and that scared me. Now I am not so sure that Bugs had it in him to kil a man.
November 6, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Tom and Jerry could upset me with the physical distortions, although Laurel & Hardy doing the same kind of gag was much worse. And then there’s one toon when Tom SPEAKS, with an echoing, booming voice, the sentence “Don’t–you–believe-it!” Since Tom wasn’t supposed to speak, that upset me.
Oh, Bugs could kill.
There’s a Chuck Jones toon called either The Hypochindri-cat or The Scredy Cat, which is just two mice being mean to a totally harmless cat. In the middle of the film they “operate” on him to “cure” his fearfulness. At this point (I’m a child of the 70s) there was a power cut, causing me to imagine a terrible “Your Life in Their Hands” type bloodbath, and when the picture came back, the cat was apparently DEAD. That REALLY upset me. I saw the cartoon again recently and the cat wasn’t REALLY dead. I don’t think Warner Bros type toons can really use death, because the worst kinds of violence are inflicted but without consequence. It’s kind of OK when somebody goes to Heaven or Hell, because that just emphasises how indestructible they really are.
November 6, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Launder & Gilliat really did alternate as directors (I think the Boultings did too), whereas Powell directed everything and Pressburger stayed off the set.
I See a Dark Stranger is wonderful. Amazing how light it is, and then it’ll go dark for a bit. Crazily unpredictable. Big fight in a bathroom at the end. Marvellous.
There’s a London retrospective of L&G at the moment, so I’m off a mind to write more on them. I already did this: http://www.britmovie.co.uk/features/cairns/launder_gilliat_01.html
November 6, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I haven’t seen the Randall Kleiser. I guess we do get the nude teen action in that one. Both films are somewhat predicated upon waiting for the characters to hit puberty so the “action” can start. It’s kind of a weird premise, when you come right down to it.
November 6, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I just watched the Racketeer Rabbit cartoon ( http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-HHe0Ni9E ), and I reckon it’s pretty clear that the young Arthur S was right: Bugs killed the Peter Lorre character. Not only does he not appear in the cartoon after Bugs returns on his own, but Bugs talks about him in the past tense. That’s one cold bunny.
November 6, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Yep, Bugs Bunny, Brooklyn tough guy, occassional drag queen is not above slitting throats after all. The Termite Terrace gang liked slipping in subversive stuff surrealists that they were. They modelled Daffy Duck on their producer Leon Schlesinger after all.
They also killed Bugs Bunny in ”What’s Opera Doc” finally having Elmer Fudd kill him(and thereby realizing in typical romantic fashion that Elmer loves Bugs Bunny more than anything in the world).
November 6, 2008 at 3:46 pm
“What were you expecting, a HAPPY ending?”
November 6, 2008 at 4:15 pm
The piece on Launder and Gilliat is excellent. You really nailed what’s interesting about ”Green For Danger”. Martin Scorsese is also interested in the two of them and wrote entries for ”Green For Danger” and ”Millions Like Us” for DIRECTV magazine.
You didn’t say anything about ”The Rake’s Progress”(which Truffaut liked), have you seen that? It’s interesting that you say that Truffaut was put off by ”Green For Danger” subverting genre cliches and the like. Truffaut would do the same thing with ”Shoot the Piano Player” and he loved it when American cinema did it like in ”Johnny Guitar”.
Truffaut’s comment about British cinema wasn’t his finest moment. But he liked British actors as did Godard(who was the world’s biggest fan of Richard Burton at one point). Godard also liked what Sacha Guitry called “the charming city which the British insist on calling London”. Godard also disliked British cinema by and large pointing out that great actors like Charles Laughton only do good in Hollywood. A little cruel but true.
One thing about British culture that doesn’t necessarilly encourage British film-makers maybe it’s still caught up in the literary tradition and the like. British culture has always been profoundly literary in a way. Of course there’s a strong tradition of visual arts as well with Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, the Pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley and in the 20th Century – Francis Bacon. But those seem to be exceptions.
November 6, 2008 at 5:55 pm
The Rake’s Progress keeps eluding me. Can’t even download it at present. Should be excellent, by all accounts.
Laughton of course won Britain’s first acting Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII, so he did OK in Britain.
The literary tradition is undoubtedly a burden, perhaps only because it’s allowed to be. Either the filmmakers lack visual skills to match their linguistic ones, or the industry pursues “quality” based on purely literary standards, or the critics promote a literary model of cinema. All 3 problems are present most of the time.
WWII energized the Brits in a way that produced our best cinema, and Gilliat complained that this burst of creativity was strangled by red tape from 1948 on. Certainly that year feels like the climax for nearly everyone — Lean, Powell, L&G. Afterwards it got harder and harder, with unsuitable stars foisted on directors, and finally the indepenant units at Rank were swallowed up. This all comes from a recent Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/31/piffle-film-industry
Interesting that I see 1948 as a climx, Gilliat saw it as the beginning of the end. Both assessments are true, I think.
The kind of cinema being made then was all about rendering the psychological visible (and audible). A kind of expressionism that exemplifies what I think film is FOR. It got slowly crushed, and didn’t emerge again until the 60s, where a demand for social change took the place of the sense of urgency promoted by war. A kind of critical mass was created in both cases, so that even weaker filmmakers got stronger by being surrounded by good examples, in a climate of creativity and competition.
Michel Ciment talks about the tradition of radical eccentrics in Britain, locating Boorman and Powell in a line stretching back to Lewis Carroll and William Blake. He bemoans the lack of eccentricty in our current filmmakers — which also has to do with climate: the cultural landscape is not willing to support eccentricity.
November 6, 2008 at 6:37 pm
What you say about British culture not encoiuraging British filmmakers is quite true, Arthur S. Powell is a prime example. I’d also cite Ken Russell and Derek Jarman. Terence Davies is getting his props from the critics, but he ought to be granted a solid sum on a regular basis to make all the films he wants.
November 6, 2008 at 7:24 pm
The 40′s was certainly the peak, I’m no fan of Churchill but he was on to something when he said that it was it’s finest hour. Cinematically that was the best.
I often wondered how Powell, one of cinema’s best poets(as much a poet as the great Humphrey Jennings was) never got to be knighted. He was still alive into the early 90′s and his reputation certainly came back in the 80′s yet he didn’t get to be knighted. And this was a man who is the only major film-maker of his generation who never made a film with Hollywood money. Powell maintained his independence in Britain and certainly was rare in his time. Later on Carol Reed and David Lean went international(not that I hold that against them) while Powell remained steadfastly independent and yet both he and Pressburger got no glory. Certainly sends a wrong message to independently minded film-makers.
And Powell I will argue was a better film-maker than Lean and Reed. And his British films are better overall than Hitchcock’s British output(leaving aside the American ones which level the field). That means that Michael Powell is England’s greatest film-maker.
Another fine film-maker of that time was Thorold Dickinson. Along with Alec Guinness, he was the real discoverer of Audrey Hepburn(in the excellent ”Secret People”) and he gave Anton Walbrook one of his best roles in ”The Queen of Spades”, intense and dark in a manner that already foresees DeNiro.
Humphrey Jennings is also tremendously underrated nowadays. A great film-maker, he anticipated(and I believe influenced) the mix of fiction with non-fiction that Chris Marker would do and his films are filled with some of the most energetic uses of sound in film history. Even further back, Rex Ingram is also almost vanished from memory. Stroheim, great egotist and a better director called him “the best”.
November 6, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Powell had his apprenticeship from Ingram, who joins the likes of Sjostrom and Maurice Tourneur in being forgotten by most modern film-lovers.
Dickinson also directed Audrey Hepburn’s screen test, which you can find part of on this blog. I love Queen of Spades and plan on catching up with his other, very varied work.
Jennings has a small but secure cult following. He seems much more lively and modern than Grierson.
P&P recieved many honours in their twilight years, but it’s true that the big gong eluded them. They did however work with Selznick, so the idea that they shunned American money is not quite true. The experience on Gone to Earth was so bad, it may have put Powell off working in Hollywood.
Hitchcock’s British work looks like sketches for his Hollywood films (although it’s possible to admire the rough and vigorous sketches more than the finished work, I guess), and Lean made only a few really great British films before going epic and international, so I guess that puts Powell at the very pinnacle. Reed made too many weak films, and a few unbelievably great ones.
If we go purely by birthplace, discounting where the films got made, Chaplin might still make it to the top of the list. But, as Melville said, “You don’t put Chaplin on lists.”
November 6, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Any cultural body like the BBC, BFI or Film Council (spits) should automatically give Davies and Russell regular money to make small projects, without denying them the right to apply for larger sums to make big ones, of course.
Britain is so bad at this, a Europe-wide body to support them, along with Godard etc, would be a nice idea.
November 6, 2008 at 8:10 pm
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But, as Melville said, “You don’t put Chaplin on lists.”
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You sure don’t. Chaplin was really a citizen of the world. He belongs to every country. Thoroughly international. A great man, not a perfect man but a great man.
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and Lean made only a few really great British films before going epic and international
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Yeah. And I have to say I prefer the epics or rather two of the epics – ”Lawrence of Arabia” and ”Ryan’s Daughter” over most of the British stuff. I find it odd that ”Brief Encounter” represented 40′s British Cinema in the US at least when it was totally not representative of the films made at that time. It’s very literary unlike the Dickens films which Lean made. On the other hand I very much like his ”Hobson’s Choice” a lot. (which someone should show Godard and make him weep vis-a-vis Laughton). That’s still in the same mold but it’s more in keeping with the tone of British cinema at that time.
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They did however work with Selznick, so the idea that they shunned American money is not quite true.
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Yeah but Selznick was in his international art-phase at that time and was an independent producer. So was Sam Spiegel I guess. Incidentally, Powell’s first masterpiece ”The Edge of the World” was also funded by an American but he wasn’t a big producer either. In any case ”Gone to Earth” with it’s location shooting and largely British cast(save for Jennifer Jones) is different from Reed’s ”Trapeze” or that appaling film about Michalangelo and of course ”Bridge on the River Kwai”. Most of Powell’s best were independent productions and his best certainly was.
But then Powell once said of “Colonel Blimp”…”It is a thoroughly British film but it’s cameraman was a Frenchman(Georges Perinal), the screenwriter and producers were Hungarian(Pressburger and Korda), the art director was German(Alfred Junge) and one of the actors was Austrian(Walbrook of course).” So he’d probably see this as silly.
He’d also take his absence of knighthood with a shrug of shoulders. In his last film ”Return to the Edge of the World”(really good) there is this scene where he says, “I have a confession to make. I am a poet. And a poet is never honoured in his own country.” Little cheeky but it’s true.
November 6, 2008 at 9:16 pm
When Fiona and I met our late friend Lawrie, who had been a 3rd AD to Powell, she said “He was a poet, he was a romantic…”
“He was a bastard,” chuckled Lawrie.
All of which is true.
Movies are inherently international, especially in Britain, since they need to succeed abroad in order to make a profit. But Powell’s films had great British personality. Part of that came from Pressburger’s love of his adopted land, too.
Powell characterised himself as a worrier, hence his bad temper when directing. He went to Africa and observed witch doctors preparing ceremonies. Some set things in motion and then relaxed to watch the show. Others fussed constantly. “That’s me!” said Powell.
November 6, 2008 at 11:54 pm
A Glorious Bastard!
After Peeping Tom a knighthood wasn’t exactly in the cards.
Cheers,
David E.
November 7, 2008 at 12:11 am
The system moves very slowly — Powell & Pressburger were properly recognised late in their lives, and started to receive honors. If they had lived another ten years, the big prize would have been offered. Powell had a strange relationship with the establishment, but he’d probably have accepted. I don’t think Peeping Tom was the problem, except in the sense that Powell’s years of neglect halted the process of honouring him for a long time. By the time of his rediscovery, PT was a respected classic.
November 7, 2008 at 12:30 am
I acquired Green for Danger back about the beginning of the year. While I enjoyed the film overall there was a particular segment that I found astonishing in that it seemed like something out of a Val Lewton film. And those strange bombs that arrive and fall in slow-motion, I’d never before seen anything like that in a film.
Cartoons never frightened me as a child. I could never get enough of them, and while I love the Warners catalogue my particular favorite was by an alumnus of Termite Terrace, Bob Clampett. Beany and Cecil were a little boy and sea serpent, respectively, and the wordplay was especially delightful to my young mind (So What and the Seven What-Nots, No Bikini Atoll, The Wild Man from Wildsville [a beatnik caveman who painted like Jackson Pollock and swung limb to limb on a vine], Tear-along the Dotted Lion, etc.). Clampett created these characters not long after he left Warner Bros. and initially presented them as hand puppets on television in the late Forties/ early Fifties. In the late Fifties they were modified into color cartoons and I would say next to Bugs, Daffy, and the others the kid and the serpent represent some of the fondest memories of my childhood.
November 7, 2008 at 1:08 am
I’ve heard a tiny bit about Beany and Cecil – nothing with the kind of detail you’re giving. That sounds like a fantastic show! Now I feel deprived. We had to make do with Fingerbobs (don’t ask).
Actually, I’m glad we had Oliver Postgate’s stuff, which was very poetic and gentle and lulling. But I dig Clampett and want to track down B&C now.
I suspect the bit in Green for Danger that reminded you of Lewton is the bit that reminded me of Argento. It’s somewhere in between. Too restrained to be giallo, too operatic to be Lewton.
November 7, 2008 at 3:17 am
I’ll re-watch the film to pinpoint the exact scene, but it had to do with people moving through shadows and trees. By the way, I heard from Ginette Vincendeau this evening, she wants to use one of my prints for the cover of a French book on film. I’m happy, and I’ll be even happier if it transpires. And yes, Beany & Cecil was fantastic. John Kricfalusi (Ren & Stimpy) was a big fan, he tried updating the characters, but it didn’t quite take. Have you ever seen Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs? VERY politically incorrect, but still an amazing cartoon Clampett did for Warner back in the mid-Forties. Look for it on YouTube. I have a DVD on the career of Bob Clampett, which has about a dozen B&C cartoons on it among other things. Again, if you want a copy let me know.
November 7, 2008 at 3:43 am
Here you go…
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uYTWETp2srE
November 7, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Thanks! Unbelievably hip stuff for 50s TV!
Congrats on the commish, hope it comes off too! I’ll post the cover when it’s done if you like.
Coal Black is gobsmacking, completely unacceptable yet completely breathtakingly terrific. TOO BIG to make up one’s mind about.
November 7, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Exactly.