Gas-s-s-s

What is Peter Van Eyck doing under your floorboards? See THE SNORKEL, the film that dares to ask that question.

Directed by former David Lean cameraman (GREAT EXPECTATIONS) Guy Green for Hammer films, this is a bit like one of their psychological thrillers — think of TASTE OF FEAR or PARANOIAC — but it’s less of a knock-off of LES DIABOLIQUES. Intriguingly, it does something fresh with the locked-room mystery, starting with a complete revelation of how the trick is played, and following a suspenseful investigation, like an episode of Columbo, in which the dramatic tension is generated largely by the question of how the killer will be caught.

The first stand-out scene is the very beginning. No credits. Van Eyck moves around an opulent apartment, taping up the doors and windows, turning on the gas lamps, and then attaching the titular snorkel to his bulging Dutch head and hiding in a trap door. Rubber tubes connect his snorkel to the fresh air via a drainage pipe. Meanwhile his wife suffocates in the locked room, an apparent suicide.

Titles.

And then a great suspense sequence as the body is discovered, the police called, an investigation made, and Van Eyck’s stepdaughter (Mandy Miller) informed of her mother’s death. All with Van Eyck still snug beneath the boards, sweating and listening. I was seriously thinking that the entire movie would play out like this, with characters coming and going, trying to figure out the motiveless suicide, while PVE awaits his chance to escape.

But the movie dispenses with this promising idea, then recovers smartly with enough intrigue and decent work from the players. The story is by Antonio Margheriti, interestingly enough — the worlds of British Hammer horror and Italian gialli rarely intersected — and the script is by the reliably leaden Jimmy Sangster, assisted by Peter Myers. So the dialogue isn’t too smart, but the structure is nice.

A word on Mandy Miller. This is the last feature film of a great child actress. She has a brief, memorable scene in THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, and a leading role in MANDY, both for Ealing Studios and Alexander Mackendrick. Ealing films are revered in Britain but only seem to gradually becoming known outside. Mackendrick’s THE LADYKILLERS was arguably boosted by the Coen brothers’ wretched remake. Criterion have released Robert Hamer’s KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, which is also a favourite film of Bertrand Tavernier. So the situation seems to be changing.

Filmmaker Greg Pak once asked me what else Alexander Mackendrick had done, since he admired SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS so much. Well, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT features arguably Alec Guinness’s best performance, and is a devastatingly wicked satire on all forms of human political thought, enlivened by Mackendrick’s shooting style, heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s German work. MANDY is an emotional pile-driver about a deaf-mute girl which is striking for its time (1952) in the way it challenges patriarchal attitudes — quite a radical thing for a boy’s club like Ealing. Seven-year-old Miller is astonishing in it.

She’s a bit less natural as a teen in THE SNORKEL, but so is everybody (co-star Betta St John is another former child actor, having popped up in LYDIA), and this kind of genre material, and Sangster’s dialogue, are not made for total realism. But she’s charming and has a few brilliant moments, as when she torments her mother’s murderer on the beach by singing an extemporised song about snorkeling (she’s just figured out his secret).

The other smashing scene is when Miller returns to the death villa to look for clues at night, a little visual concerto of shadows and gliding tracking shots, point-of-views and reactions. It’s beautifully shot by Hammer regular Jack Asher, more often confined to slightly lurid Eastmancolor imagery — ex-cinematographer Green no doubt had strong ideas about what he wanted visually.

Overall an enjoyable yarn, and a cute insight into the days when snorkels were pretty new stuff, and therefore subject to suspicion — could this innocent-seeming tube-and-mask arrangement be an instrument of death?

Festival Burnout

More Edinburgh goodies.

Some of the movies showing here are eligible for an audience award — you tear a special cardboard tab to register your vote. The lowest category is “Not My Kind of Thing.”

UNMADE BEDS — a youth film about London squatters and little else. Tempting to nickname it “UNMADE FILM” but it’s beautifully shot, and has the most madly photogenic cast of any recent Brit flick. In theory it should be very watchable, but alas it has no reason to exist, no dramatic tension, no structure, and not really any distinct point of view. Not My kind of Thing.

FISH TANK – Andrea Arnold’s slice of social realism builds on the critical success of RED ROAD and is more convincing but no better structured. It pads solemnly on for two hours without delivering a single surprise, but there are compensations in the fine photography and superb performances. Not My kind of Thing.

ANTICHRIST — Lars Von Trier’s marital horror movie is weird, which is fine, but incoherent, which is not so good. I asked the cinematographer if it was deliberately funny, and he said it wasn’t, strongly hinting that there’s something the matter with me if I find it so. Not My Kind of Thing. More later.

Regular Shadowplayer Chris B, wearing the face of Peter Greenaway upon his abdomen, stands athwart the great Joe Dante.

By contrast, Joe Dante and Roger Corman’s public appearances have been a joy, and I’ll write more on them later too.

Interviewed Bruce MacDonald, director of the excellent PONTYPOOL, for the Auteurs’ Notebook, and hopefully you’ll be able to read that soon.

LITTLE RED HOODIE — my friend Joern Utkilen’s jet-black comedy about the sexualisation of little girls in modern society covers much of the same territory as FISH TANK, but in 15 minutes. It’s sick, funny, compelling and makes a serious point. I’m not sure the point is enough to justify the very dark territory it gets into (via a modern-dress recounting of the Little Red Riding Hood story), but the film earns the right to be considered seriously.

THE ST VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE — a Corman I’d only seen a few moments of before, and hadn’t fancied, but it proved to be a dry, factual, brutal, amoral and compelling little history lesson in capitalism and homicide. Especially pleasing to get faces like Bruce Dern, Dick Miller and Joe Turkel popping up, and the essentially gentle Jason Robards and George Segal make the most of their psychopathic scenery-chewing roles. Jack Nicholson has one line, and delivers it in a comedy gangster voice.

Quote of the day came from a friend of a friend of a friend of the late David Tomlinson, who is said to have said, “Sodomy’s overrated. I mean, I’m not knocking it. It got me work at Disney.”

Antony Dod’s Mantel

Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (THE HOURS) is interviewing colleague Anthony Dod Mantle tomorrow at Edinburgh Film Festival. I already have a question worked out.

As reported in this very organ, McGarvey has Nicole Kidman’s nose on his mantelpiece. She gave him the prosthetic proboscis at the end of THE HOURS, since the thing was such a nightmare for him to light.

My question, for Mr Mantle: who’s got Charlotte Gainsbourg’s clitoris?

Please don’t tell me it was swept up with the cigarette butts at the end of the day.

Incidentally, I don’t mind if anybody else puts their hand up first and asks this. It just means that when/if they come round to me, I’d say “That was my question too,” which might also raise a chuckle. And we need to laugh, in these troublous times, what with films like ANTICHRIST out there.