On His Todd

 

So we attended the tale of SWEENEY TODD THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET, Tim Burton version.

On the whole I liked it. The score has a massive amount of sheer OOMPH, the lyrics are spectacular (if you want dance numbers, just watch those words leap to and fro), and I enjoyed the performances, especially Sacha Baron Cohen and Timothy Spall. I was intrigued to see that Johnny Depp’s vocals boast their own producer…a touch of digital pitch-correction going on there, Fiona suggests.

There are a few unfortunate things about the film, and I’m going to dwell on them, I’m afraid. It’s a testament to the strength of the story and score and acting that the film entertains as well as it does, because these problems could really butcher a lesser film.

1) The Look. I think it’s too murky, and this combines with the C.G. backdrops and the theatrically enclosed narrative to make it rather claustrophobic. This might be OK if it’s your kind of thing, but since films with a very C.G. look — like “300″ — tend to feel a little stifling no matter how the filmmakers try to open them out and give them sweep, I’d have awarded points to Burton for breathing some air into this.

(Very dark films sometimes look sharper on DVD than on the big screen — Darius Khondji’s most eye-straining work sometimes has this quality. So Dariusz Wolski’s smeary work here may likewise shine on home vid — the stills look much clearer than the movie did when I saw it. Perversely, Wolski’s lensing of DARK CITY was radiant by comparison.)

2) The Plot. I don’t know the play but I was sure there had been some kind of ineffectual tampering when we got to the aftermath of the climax. I looked it up on Wikipedia and, although I hadn’t guessed the exact nature of the changes, tinkering had indeed taken place and the ending of the original sounded markedly more effective. I can’t go into this without major spoilers, but it’s largely a structural thing. Burton has never had much story sense, tending to favour image over word and missing the Hitchcockian principle of telling stories with pictures. Burton’s images are often stand-alone tableaux or, at most, gags.

(MASSIVE SPOILER:

Todd spares his daughter’s life for no convincing reason, and then she disappears from the narrative altogether. In the play, the authorities arrive at the end, obviously alerted by her, so at least there’s a pay-off to her survival. The film also soft-pedals young Tobias’ madness at the end, so that his killing Sweeney isn’t quite credible.)

3) The Squeamishness. This might be an odd thing to charge an 18-Rated musical with, but it seemed to me that the makers were rather shy of the whole cannibalism thing. You wouldn’t know, from the mise-en-scene, that there was anything unusual about the pies all those extras were munching. I can sort of understand Burton wanting to hold back on the horrors of the kitchen until they are discovered by little Tobias — except that doesn’t sound like the sort of narrative concern that would even occur to Timbo. It feels like he’s been told he can have his head with the throat-slitting, but could he please hold back on the old anthropophagy? And since that’s what the whole film’s about, it strikes me as an unfortunate area to ellide. When somebody doesn’t actually want to tell the story they’re telling, it never bodes well.

4) The Momentum. The thrust of the story is maintained fairly well, and that’s something that musicals often sacrifice in order to celebrate a moment. But this film has too oppressive a milieuto really get away with that, so it needs to drive forward, from a bad situation to a worse: without shark-like constant forward motion, the audience isn’t going to want to hang about waiting for the next sordid crisis. The sequence which damages the momentum most is the song “By the Sea,” which doesn’t advance the story at all, but may be absolutely essential as the only scene to admit bright light, blue sky and fresh air into the film. It helps the sense of space even as it damages the sense of time. My theory is that the song may have been necessary on stage to show how Mrs. Lovett feels about Todd, but due to the huge amounts of emotional information conveyed by Helena Bonham-Carter in close-up, it’s redundant several times over in film terms.

5) Alan Rickman. Although he fills his trews prodigiously, Rickman has an unpleasant singing voice and is too predictable a baddie to offer much here, except when Judge Turpin has a sentimental moment. Rickman wisely makes the most of these: it’s unexpected to see how moved Turpin is by Todd’s lie that his ward has “repented” and wants to see him again.

6) Blocking. David Bordwell has argued very coherently that the art of complex blocking in Hollywood films has almost been lost. Characters either “walk and talk” or “stand and deliver” — no longer do they stalk around each other and move from close-up to long-shot and back within a single take. Burton has a reputation as a visual stylist, but he struggles to bring the songs to dramatic life through dynamic movement: shot as if they were dialogue scenes in a very dark episode of Eastenders, the songs feel somewhat squashed. Since this musical doesn’t use dance at all, a choreographic interplay of camera and actor would have been nice — oddly, this is something Burton has often brought to action sequences in other films. He does a bit of his trademark swooping, but that’s a bit overpowering. The Minnelli touch is lacking.

7) The deplorable absence of Christopher Lee. It was announced early on that Lee would play a part, but he was later dropped (along with the other ghosts). He would have been the best singer in it. Lee has suggested that his part was cut due to time difficulties: Johnny Depp’s daughter became ill during filming and some shooting days were lost. In which case, one can only sympathise, and admire Depp’s performance even more.

Still, despite my admiration for Johnny and Helena’s work here, I can’t avoid a little thought experiment, as to who could have been cast if the film had been rushed into production in 1979, after the play’s premiere…

BLUE SKY CASTING #5:

SWEENEY TODD: the British horror version

Director: Piers Haggard. His experience with the BBC period musical Pennies From Heaven and the Tigon horror BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW makes him a fitting choice. and his lovely and talented daughter Daisy would have been just the right age to play the baby Johanna. (Daisy, who always cries at the end of KING KONG because the big gorilla reminds her of her dad.)

SWEENEY TODD: Christopher Lee.

MRS. NELLIE LOVETT: Barbara Steele.

ANTHONY HOPE: Tim Curry.

JOHANNA: Britt Ekland, dubbed by Annie Ross.

TOBIAS RAGG: Dexter Fletcher.

JUDGE TURPIN: Peter Cushing.

BEADLE BAMFORD: Donald Pleasence.

BEGGAR WOMAN: Sheila Keith.

ADOLFO PIRELLI: Vincent Price.

Hmmm, I can’t quite decide which version I’d rather see. With my usual perversity, I think I’ll plump for the one that doesn’t exist.

Euphoria #30: I trust the sight of the young people refreshes you

 

On Saturday night Fiona and I went to see SWEENEY TODD THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET with our friends Ali and David, and naturally I pumped them for suggestions for the blog here. This is Ali’s excellent proposal for a moment of cinema that warms the cockles and releases endorphins (which are stored in your cockles and released by heat).

THE WICKER MAN is still one of the few Scottish films that Scottish people like. Because it’s actually unusual, intelligent and entertaining, I suppose (there’s no accounting for taste). Those in charge of promoting Scottish cinema have, in their wisdom, chosen to concentrate on making dull, depressing and anti-cinematic films, so it’s no wonder that Robin Hardy, director of this little classic, has struggled to find funding for a WICKER MAN follow-up.

Of course, THE WICKER MAN is an English production set and filmed here, rather than an indigenous film. As such, it’s part of a small group of foreign portrayals of Scotland that Scots actually like. WHISKY GALORE and LOCAL HERO have Scottish or part-Scottish directors. The success of BRAVEHEART here testifies to our healthy population of patriotic idiots.

A lot of people have been inspired by this film over the years. Jonathan Ross credits Britt Ekland’s performance for “helping me through those difficult teenage years.” Ewen McGregor can be seen watching it in SHALLOW GRAVE, and chortling, the way all Scots instinctively do when a policeman is immolated. For those of us in the film industry, it’s a monument to the principle that the words Scottish and Cinema CAN go together.

Ali is a brilliant costume designer:

She’s dressed WICKER MAN star Christopher Lee in GREYFRIAR’S BOBBY, and was recently chatting to Robin Hardy about COWBOYS FOR CHRIST, his follow-up to TWM. She found him fun and extremely energetic — which he’ll need to be.

But her reason for picking this moment is the perfect encapsulation of the Cinema Euphoria Credo — it makes her happy.

Now we know…

More on Cronenberg and bodily fluids. 

Thanks to regular reader and pal Chris Bourton for this screen grab from Cronenberg’s EASTERN PROMISES. I wondered awhile back about whose name was chiseled into the gravestone that gets pissed on partway through the film. Does the fact that I care about this trivial point so much mean that I really liked the film, or that I didn’t really like the film?

One theory I entertained was that this might be Mr. Cronenberg’s way of getting back at a critic. But there might be legal repercussions in using somebody’s name this way, and also, it would be distracting to many if the gravestone read “R.I.P. Robin Wood”… so I would expect some kind of code to be used. It wouldn’t matter if nobody ever decoded this, it would just give a quiet satisfaction to whoever placed the name. Can we unmask Hastings?

Hmm, Elliot Hastings is an anagram of “hostile slating”… also “Ealing shot list”, which is nice and filmic, “genital slosh it” (fairly appropriate), “still not geisha” (a gnomic plot synopsis of Cronenberg’s M. BUTTERFLY?), and the very apt “slashing toilet”.

Apart from all that, the only film-related reference I can find to an Elliot Hastings is a character name in the 1956 jungle romp BEYOND MOMBASA. The role is taken by Ron Randell, in a cast also including Cornel Wilde and Cronenberg’s future fellow horror stalwart Christopher Lee.

Hmm, better put this one down as “unsolved”…for now.

Euphoria #21

The Euphoria shows no sign of subsiding here at Shadowplay. We are always OVER THE MOON here from watching these great clips, even when we go to the bathroom.

Duncan Aitchison, my film quiz running-mate (and uncrowned TEAM LEADER) suggested a bunch of great stuff, including this mighty scene of a young Oliver Reed DANCING from Edmond T. Greville’s seminal sixties juvie melodrama BEAT GIRL, which will also provide our Quote of the Day (a Shadowplay first!).

Fiona says Ollie Reed dances like I do, which I take to refer to his lack of co-ordination, weirdness of movement, and marked tendency to respond to unknown music in his own head rather than to the soundtrack provided for us mortals by John Barry and his Seven.

This is right before Barry started scoring Bond films, and his style has evolved from the rather random imitations of different commercial pop styles, and the annoying pizzicato noodlings of his earlier work. What we have here is just a hair away from the full-on Bondian torch-song brassy blast, and I FIND IT MAGNIFICENT.

Oliver Reed’s dancing makes me feel PROUD TO BE BRITISH. I think his only other connection to the medium of dance is his tiny cameo as a camp ballet dancer in Basil Dearden and Bryan Forbes’ marvellous crime caper THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN. Nobody’s idea of a gay prancer, Ollie stepped into that role at the last minute and made it his own.

“Do you want Moody 1, Moody 2 or Moody 3?” Ollie would ask Michael Winner, and it’s that lowering Heathcliffian menace that he’s been hired for here, not his terpsichorean dexterity. I like how he manages to preserve his essential Rugged Solemnity even while capering like a loon.

BEAT GIRL stars Gillian Hills, a sort of Brit-brat-Bardot, as the daughter of awful architect David Farrar (best known for riding a TINY DONKEY in BLACK NARCISSUS: his feet touch the ground when he straddles it, so he can make it go just by walking above it) who falls in with beatniks and strippers and Adam Faith (who exudes Proletarian Adenoidal Suavity — a STAR).

Sleaze is trowelled on by a nubile Christopher Lee and the reliably button-eyed psychosis of Nigel Green, both of whom I love more than oxygen. Plus there’s those strippers. Most of the onstage undressing is very mild and half-hearted, certainly less impressive than the same year’s EXPRESSO BONGO, but one number, by “Pascaline”, is a sizzler. Perhaps thinking that the dancer’s dusky complexion would render her gyrations safely asexual, in the way that naked National Geographic “savages” were the only kind of photographic nude permissable for years, the filmmakers let this former Crazy Horse artiste unleash her pelvis like a randy bronco, all over our screen. Alas, the censors fairly fell over themselves to truncate Pascaline’s masturbatory movements, but in these permissive naughty naughties, the film has been restored with all this previously unseen frottage.

But my other favourite favourite thing in this film — no, not a FILM exactly, more a PAGEANT OF ASSORTED MATERIÉLS, is David Farrar’s CITY 2000 — of which more anon.

Footnote: Duncan has chosen this scene because of his nostalgic-patriotic love of a particular British sleaze/romance, as embodied by his favourite line in David Cronenberg’s SPIDER: Gabriel Byrne’s silky come-on: “You wanna go down the allotments?”

Euphoria #19

Regular Shadowplayer and acclaimed Mick Travis impersonator Alex Livingston suggests the scene of Spike Milligan’s arrest from Richard Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973).

“before i think about it too much and sink into a tarpit of indecision, i am going to nominate a scene from richard lester’s the three musketeers. christopher lee and his guards drag raquel welch from her bedroom whilst spike milligan fumbles to reload his flintlock pistol, utterly blind to the possibility that he may not have the upper hand. i think it is basically the muttering that does it for me here”

I’ve thrown in the following sequence because I like the sedan chair gag, and an appearance from Frank “Captain Peacock” of Are You Being Served? is always a bonus.

Raquel Welch phoned Richard Lester up in the middle of the night to complain about the boob jokes in the film.

“This bit where a hand reaches from a heap of melons and grabs my wrist — I don’t think it’s funny.”

“Well I do.”

At which point she called the producers and threatened to quit. Colossal panic — the funding was contingent on her involvement. They sweet-talked her back on-board, but she still pulled stunts like wearing costumes modelled on Lana Turner’s in the ‘forties version, rather than on historical fact like everybody else.

Christopher Lee bored everyone rigid with his endless anecdotage, except producer Pierre Spengler, who found him fascinating. Lee can pick up an anecdote, if interrupted, and continue it MONTHS LATER, if required. But my costume designer friend Ali, who worked with him on GREYFRIAR’S BOBBY, got on very well with the Great Man. As Sidney Greenstreet says, “I’ll tell you right out, I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”

Spike Milligan stared at the historical recreations in complete awe: “People really lived like this,” he would say, with tears in his eyes. 

The movie has one of the most disparate casts ever assembled. Charlton Heston shares a scene with Milligan, finding him “very funny but not over-the-top”. OF COURSE he’s over-the-top! He’s in a completely different comedy register from everybody else in the film! But Lester excels at uniting different styles of acting / muttering.

Alex adds:

“out of maybe five films that i considered taking my euphoric moment from, three featured faye dunaway. isn’t that funny?”

Not funny, Alex, JUST SENSIBLE.

Footnote: any Americans unfamiliar with Milligan’s brand of surreal TV can educate themselves using the University of Youtube. Maybe start HERE.

Dra-cu-la!

 

James Bernard’s theme music tends to play out the title as if it were a song lyric. So the score for DRACULA goes “Dra-cu-la!” and the score for TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA goes “Taste - the - Blood - of  - Dra-cu-la!” etc. And that’s just fine with me.

Christopher Lee’s entrance as the Count is the best ever. I do like the Lugosi (the first half of that movie is really good, creepy and dreamlike and nonsensically populated with armadillos and a tiny coffin with a bug in it and MAN!) and the Spanish language version filmed at night while they were shooting Bela by day has a great shot that swoops up the stairs to meet the vamp coming down, and Gary Oldman in the Coppola version looks like Glenn Close in DANGEROUS LIAISONS and Barbra Streisand in FUNNY LADY at the same time and of course the Nosferatus are brilliant BUT!!!

Chris Lee’s entrance is tops and here’s why: ‘There’s nothing like the introduction of Dracula in that picture, in which Christopher Lee just walked down the stairs, sort of bounced down, and said “Hello, I’m Dracula.” Having been reared on Bela Lugosi, with whom you knew you were in trouble, Lee just seemed like a very sensible, sophisticated gentleman.’ — Martin Scorsese.

Lee is really scary here as he advances into huge close-up with a fairly wide-angle lens, fairly low: the shot is telling us to run for cover but there’s nothing in the performance to clue in the other guy in the scene, so for once the poignancy works without Harker looking like an idiot.

Scorsese’s other remarks are fun. On CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN: ‘The audience loved it, and there was a graphic quality to it that was… totally uncalled for! And was extremely endearing to us at about the age of fifteen.’

And more on Lee: ‘…he was a very likeable Dracula — we enjoyed his company, we could imagine socializing with him. We also liked Peter Cushing a great deal as Van Helsing, because he had such insight, and he was very precise in his movements within the frame.’

I kind of wonder if Scorsese’s teenage friends all admired the precision of Cushing’s movements… but Cushing certainly moves well, and often. An admirer of Laurence Olivier, he brings a comparable dashing physical gusto to his work, but as Scorsese observes, he’s more camera-wise.

The third horror star in this film is often overlooked: Michael Gough. His work in later horror films has attracted favourable attention, and Tim Burton made good use of him in his BATMEN and SLEEP HOLLOW films, carrying on where Vincent Price left off in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, but it seems almost to be forgotten that he’s even in DRACULA.

Everyone who ever works with Gough remarks on how extremely clever he is, and so, with all respect to director Terence Fisher and writer Jimmy Sangster*, I tend to attribute this next bit of clever business to Gough:

Van Helsing brands Gough’s sweetheart on the brow with a crucifix, and as she screams, Gough clutches his own temples in sudden sympathetic pain.

A moment later, Cushing’s V-H dispatches the vampire gal with a businesslike stake to the heart, and Gough pulls the same stunt a second time, this time clutching his ticker.

Fine fine work from the Goughster.

*Sangster is amusingly modest about his writing abilities, but has written some fine films, a favourite of mine being THE NANNY. But at times he does live up to his reputation for rubbishness: his autobiography actually ends with the line “I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it.” On CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Lee was sulking about not having any lines, and Cushing told him “Think yourself lucky, have you READ the script?”

Roddy, Prince of Darkness

 

In the SECONDS it’s taken me to cross the room from the window, a Savage Hail Storm has metamorphosed into Endless Descending Curtains of Soft Snow! I truly suspect the dire hand of Ming the Merciless is behind this.

Be that as it may, I mentioned way back that my partner’s brother was staying with us and a trip to see the reissue of Hammer Films’ DRACULA was planned. I’d like to explain how that turned out.

Roddy, who has learning difficulties, loves old horror movies, and his particular obsession is with Christopher Lee’s Dracula, so upon learning that the film happened to be screening during his visit, we made haste to tell him of this happy coincidence.

The circumstances that led him to take a massive overdose of laxatives in order to avoid seeing his favourite movie will require some background explanation.

The particular thing Roddy has is called Williams Syndrome, and we’ve often called him the Poster Boy for that particular non-inherited genetic condition. So many of the things about him that one assumes are personal quirks, turn out to be basic symptoms (in spite of this, it took forty years for him to be officially diagnosed with the condition, not that it made much difference really). Among the symptoms — phobias. Roddy has always been uncomfortable with stairs and especially escalators, but what we didn’t realise was how markedly this had increased since his last visit.

We’d heard some of the stories: Roddy had wandered in front of an oncoming bus and been yelled at by the driver, and he’d had a fall, but we hadn’t grasped how this had affected his behaviour.

On the day of the DRACULA trip, Roddy suddenly came down with galloping diarrhoea, which was particularly problematic since he has trouble getting around. Put simply, he’s seriously overweight (when you can’t read and you’re phobic about going out, you entertain yourself by sitting on the couch and feeding your face). He couldn’t make it to the bathroom (just at the end of the hall) in time and he was getting “the squits” every FIVE MINUTES.

We called emergency helplines and got him a hospital appointment, since this was pretty extreme and unmanageable. At this point we were secretly praying they’d take him off our hands, stick him in a bed with a big nappy on, and keep him until Christmas Day.

Anyhow they didn’t, but Roddy quite enjoyed his trip to the hospital. (Imagine how much he’d have enjoyed the movie!) The doc thought he probably had a virus — we didn’t discover the half-drained bottle of Lactulose until the day of his departure (four days later). Needless to say, a trip to the cinema was out of the question, even in diapers.

It was all kind of depressing. I sympathise with Roddy’s phobias (my partner/his sister has suffered acute agoraphobia), especially as Williams Syndrome carries as another symptom a loss of depth perception. Since Roddy is too bulbous to see his own feet, looking down from his eye sockets all one would see is a slow-moving circumference with the ground some incalculable distance below: no wonder stairs are difficult.

And there’s a horrible pathos in Roddy’s Dracula obsession: he wants to be the tall dark and handsome stranger who has a mysterious power over buxom blondes. My desire to be Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn or James Coburn is pretty pathetic too (I’d be lucky to attain the condition of, say, Paul Giamatti), but it doesn’t haunt me to the same degree, and it isn’t as cruelly WRONG. Only a very sick author would invent a character who wants to be a 6′4′ hypnotic vampire when he is a 5′ 0′ obese man with learning difficulties. Apart from anything else, Dracula is a character who rather famously makes his entrance by gliding down a flight of stairs!

Chuck Jones said that he dreamt of being Bugs Bunny but always awoke as Daffy Duck. Roddy, concordantly, dreams of being Dracula but awakens as the Frankenstein Monster: but with one pleasing difference. Williams Syndrome is sometimes called “cocktail-party syndrome”, and its “suffererers” are blessed with very good social skills — Roddy can really Work The Room. Is his Syndrome perhaps named after ROBIN Williams?

 Anyhow, that was our Christmas.

Upside: we are full of hope that he’s going to lose weight and conquer his phobias, at least somewhat, this year.

More on the Hammer DRACULA soon.

More on Roddy and Williams Syndrome HERE.

The Great Stone Face

 

My partner’s brother Roddy is a movie buff too. He has learning difficulties, which partly means he’s even more certain about what he likes than most of us, and what he likes is Hammer Horror. As he’s with us for Christmas, we’re going en famille to the digitally restored DRACULA tomorrow, but this afternoon we ran Terence Fisher’s lesser-known THE GORGON, also with Cushing and Lee.

It’s a slow-paced bit of thick-ear, with a Greek gorgon rather oddly transplanted to Germany, and an unusual restraint shown in revealing the monster, perhaps due to the makeup and special effects departments’ inability to muster a convincing headful of serpents for the titular mythological beast-woman. They really needed Ray Harryhausen to pull this one off.

Then there’s a distinctly Scooby Doo shortage of suspects — there is precisely one. Essentially all we have to see us through to the climax is atmosphere (dry ice and lighting, sets, Peter Cushing and what Scorsese calls “the precision of his movements within the frame”, James Bernard’s yowling score) and a few petrifications, though at the end there’s a rather lovely effect as we are startled by the decapitated gorgon Megaera’s transmutation into — the only other woman in the film!

THINGS SAID BY RODDY DURING “THE GORGON”

“Is this black and white?”

“Where’s he going?”

“Who’s this?”

“What’s he doing?”

“Where’s he going?”

“I don’t think it’s her.”

“I can’t see a thing.”

“Where’s Christopher Lee going now?”

“Uh oh.”

“That did the trick.”

Harryhausen can’t help but make monsters more monstrous than they’re supposed to be! His cyclops has goat legs, his troglodyte has a horn on his head, and Medusa is kitted out with scales and a serpent’s body. Generosity, that’s what I call it.