It’s a Long Shot but it Just Might Work

Neville Smith, Anne Zelda and Charles Gormley.

Very interesting seeing LONG SHOT, an obscure — indeed, near-vanished — semi-improvized drama-doc in which a producer (real-life prod Charlie Gormley) and a writer (real-life writer Neville Smith) try to find Sam Fuller at the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival (Fuller was meant to turn up with Wim Wenders and THE AMERICAN FRIEND) in order to enlist his services. Fuller doesn’t show.

Director Maurice Hatton was a self-educated and slightly mysterious figure who had apparently acquired £19,000 and some soon-to-expire East German film stock, and so made the film on the hoof to get something on celluloid before his stock became unusable. The film actually got a TV airing in the early days of Channel 4, before dropping off the cinematic map altogether. I remember watching a bit of it before the static, long take, long-shot style bored me. I was only a kid.

Seeing it as an old, old man, I was depressed by the fact that nothing in Scotland seems to have changed, except that the Film Festival has a wider range of venues to draw upon (the marquee of the ABC Cinema — now the Odeon — can be seen in the film, with Wenders’ film on in Screen 2 but the movie version of ARE YOU BEING SERVED in Screen 1…). But it was nice to see then-festival-director Lynda Myles (co-author of The Movie Brats) in her Maria Schneider perm, and future festival director Jim Hickey, and Gormley’s little son Tommy, who is now one of Britain’s top assistant directors. Other cameos are contributed by Wenders, Stephen Frears (playing a man in the biscuit trade), Alan Bennett (in a totally different, non-naturalistic register from everybody else), John Boorman (“This is a script that’s desperate. Desperate to be a film.”) Susannah York, agent Dennis Selinger, likably satanic exec Sandy Lieberson, and Suzanne (CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE) Danielle.

Hatton’s grainy, static look is reminiscent of early Jarmusch, and his use of intertitles to set up each scene in a quirky way reinforces the resemblance. I also suspect Wenders is more of an inspiration than the movie admits. Somehow the sight of the nervous  Gormley and the defensive Smith struggling to get anything off the ground seemed like the last word in film biz floundering, illustrating the sisyphean, kafkaesque and quietly soul-destroying nature of hustling for movies, even though the film before our eyes was proof that miracles do sometimes happen. It’s a minor work, but the very fact that it exists is should give me hope.

Gormley and Smith’s movie, about the Scottish oil boom, never happened. Gormley, who was a pretty good actor, appeared in another film for Georges Sluizer, and worked with Bill Forsyth. Then he convinced himself he was a director and made a few films that way. I met him in the 90s and he was very nice, but I wasn’t convinced he’d chosen the right job. He probably thought the same about me, mind you. Neville Smith wrote another film playing in the fest this year, 1971′s GUMSHOE, which is a SUPERB script — funny and cunning and rhythmic, and all about our love affair with Hollywood movies. Almost uniquely for a British film, it leapfrogs off that love and manages to land on interesting territory of its own. Despite doing a lot of TV work, Smith hasn’t had another film made.

Frears turned up and introduced LONG SHOT, before bolting off to catch a plane so he wouldn’t have to look at it. At a panel session to discuss these vanished films, he expressed polite horror at the idea of UK 70s movies being rediscovered, and seemed content to rest on his better-known achievements from the Thatcher era. For me, the non-canonical work being celebrated in this season is a lot more interesting and enjoyable. Ken Russell’s SAVAGE MESSIAH next!

My copy of the 1978 Film Festival programme — proof that LONG SHOT does exist!

“Different countries, different customs.”

Fun and moving evening at the historic Festival Theatre, newly set up as a Film Festival venue for the big galas. Sean Connery celebrated his eightieth birthday with a screening of the restored THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, one of his finest movies. Festival producer Ginnie Atkinson is leaving us, and Connery, having retired from acting, will probably be winding down his involvement in the fest too, so it was kind of a goodbye to both of them.

A friend had asked me to report back on the condition of Connery’s co-star Saeed Jaffrey (Billy Fish in the movie), who had enjoyed himself so much at the previous night’s party, he had to be carried out. And indeed, as Connery was talking to the audience and Jaffrey waited his turn, they had to get him a chair. (Celebrities have been enjoying themselves at Edinburgh this year: Patrick Stewart was seen dancing at the ceilidh — well, he is known as “Party Hard Picard”.)

My zoom lens is busted. The spec at stage centre is Connery. The spec being propped up on the left is Saeed Jaffrey. Interestingly, while Connery’s voice is now somewhat cracked, he seems in very good shape otherwise. And while Jaffrey had to be helped to the microphone, his voice boomed out to all 1,500 seats as if it needed no such assistance.

Of course Ossie Morris’s widescreen photography looked magnificent on the big screen. Connery, Caine, Jaffrey and Christopher Plummer impressed as ever. (Plummer avoids obvious showboating in this one and underplays to form a nice bassline beneath the big star personae — although Fiona spotted him very deliberately not blinking for long periods of time during a classic “A” composition where he was stood between the two big guys.) And the film, perhaps because of the occasion, was more moving than I’d previously found it, I can’t say why.

It’s interesting to me that Huston celebrates such a disreputable pair of heroes — my take on Huston is that he was similarly amoral and out for a good time. These soldiers of fortune set out to loot what is basically Afghanistan, and come to grief due to a lack of exit strategy. (All the ’70s films here seem incredibly timely in a way that few of the modern ones do.) And the other great Huston moment is the laughter, where Connery and Caine face certain death in the icy mountains of the  Hundu Kush, and their laughter in the face of this causes an avalanche which enables them to proceed. The fatalistic laugh can be traced through THE MALTESE FALCON, TREASURE OF THE SIERRE MADRE and BEAT THE DEVIL, and Huston experienced it first hand in real life. It’s the vast, echoing laughter of the universe, and it’s highly infectious: once you get in tune with it, you may find it hard to stop.

The Near Future

My friend Niall Greig Fulton’s retrospective season at Edinburgh Film Festival has already produced some fascinating and little-seen works from Britain in and around the seventies. While Peter Watkins’ PRIVILEGE is often dismissed as a misfire, it’s a very interesting one, and I haven’t ever read anything which really pins down its virtues and vices in a way I recognise.

Paul Jones and Jean Shrimpton get a lot of stick for their flat, depressive delivery, but the non-actors actually work quite well with Watkins’ faux-documentary approach. It’s the more experienced cast members, playing in a slightly comedic manner, who clash with the verité trappings. And indeed, those stylistic choices seem a little unhelpful. This is meant to be a near future world where a pop star is used as a means of controlling and subduing dissent. But no BBC documentarist would ever be allowed to document such a process in a real totalitarian state, so the film might have been more convincing as fiction. Or, if Watkins was determined to employ the style he’d successfully used on CULLODEN and THE WAR GAME, he ought to have had the grotesque establishment figures played in a more subdued manner — inventing the low-key comedy of something like The Office, perhaps.

Watkins seems a reclusive sort, but Kevin Billington was on hand to introduce his 1970 film THE RISE AND RISE OF MICHAEL RIMMER, which he co-scripted with Peter Cook, John Cleese and Graham Chapman (who all appear). While PRIVILEGE is set in a sixties vision of the near future, the Billington is resolutely contemporary, yet seems far more prophetic. It was nice to learn that the drones of Watkins’ dystopia are watched over by a coalition government, “since there is no longer any difference in policy between Labour and Conservative,” but RIMMER’s idea that party politics are rendered redundant by the overwhelming power of the PR department is more sinister yet.

In PRIVILEGE, the church harnesses the power of a youth icon to make the masses conform — “By 1990 the only people going to church will be the clergy,” and to boost attendance (but the film is oddly tone deaf about pop culture, and we’re never convinced a move this bald-faced would work), but the bishop played by the great Graham Crowden in RIMMER has progressed beyond this. “We’ve tried everything, you know:  pop groups, bingo, hallucinogenic drugs in the wafers, son et lumiere in the graveyards…” Rimmer, played by Peter Cook with sinister smiling emptiness, a thin void in smart duds, tells him the problem is God, and they had best get rid of Him.

Like all the films so far, the movies are both thronging with familiar acting talent — the lovely James Cossins is in both. And Harold Pinter appears as a current affairs show host — I laughed at the name of his show, Steven Hench is Talking To You. Here’s Billington on meeting Pinter ~

Billington: “It all seemed to be I was in, as I discovered later, this Pinter world, when you were with him. [...] Whenever you were alone with him, wherever you were, the world became the way he wrote. It’s the most extraordinary thing. With just one or two marvelous writers, in a funny way, this is how the world is with them.”

Billington very sweetly apologized to the ladies in the audience for the film’s prevalent sexism — a near-pornographic advert for sweeties produced by Rimmer is acceptable as satire (and anybody who’s seen a ’70s Cadbury’s Flake ad know how close to reality it is) but starlet Vanessa Howard is served up in a gratuitous nude scene which cheapens the movie. She doesn’t have much of a role, and it’s sad when you see how amazing she is in Freddie Francis’s nearly-lost weirdfest GIRLY.

Meanwhile, we have creeping dictatorship, covert invasion of a non-threatening country, bogus weapons of mass destruction, and the evidence of a generous budget from Warners, making this an unusually lavish and ambitious British comedy for any era (produced by David Frost of FROST/NIXON fame).

Me: “There must have been times in the last several years when you’d be watching the news and experience deja vu. Was there a particular moment when you thought, ‘This might not be satire anymore?’”

Billington: “Absolutely. I do have to say that the whole New Labour thing smacked so much… of how you ask the people… this whole thing is the people, they’re going to decide. Which has obviously strong links back to socialism in the early days. That’s not the way it’s used here. [...] I could see the way politicians wanted to use television, and what they were actually thinking was ‘How do we come across?’ [...] So when Blair suddenly was there, and his youth, ‘a New Tomorrow’ etc etc… I shouldn’t go on about Blair because at the moment we have a chap called Cameron who has a certain amount of PR about him. So I’m not being party political at all now, it just happened that that’s the way it came.”

It certainly did.