A treat for you! DIARY OF A MADMAN is a half-hour short directed by Morag McKinnon back in the ’90s, written by and starring Colin McLaren, based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. Morag, assisted by Travis Reeves has planted the thing on YouTube in three bite-sized morsels, to be enjoyed by all.
I edited the film! I don’t recall there being that much work involved in that — the long-take style employed meant that 90% of the work was done when I’d removed the clapperboards. But I had a good time with the sound effects, which I roughed in before Bronek Korda and Derek Livesey at BBC Scotland mixed things and thinned it down and took out all the distracting stuff I’d tried. Looking at it now the editing seems the weakest thing about it. As it goes on there are fewer match cuts and it gets better and better. My choice of when to dissolve or fade looks alarmingly random though.
The Scotsman newspaper rightly praised the film as a minimalist masterpiece and bemoaned the fact that the talents emerging from Edinburgh College of Art’s film department weren’t finding the financial support to create a new wave of Scottish cinema. That might be finally changing, with former E.C.A. students like Travis, Morag, Martin Radich and Sarah Gavron all making feature films recently. The idea that it takes the U.K. film industry ten years to spot new talent isn’t too encouraging, but at least it’s happening.
Madman McLaren, seen here in full flow, has scripted Morag’s forthcoming tragi-comic feature ROUNDING UP DONKEYS. Although almost pathologically sane, to quote Herzog, Colin has a rare handle on insanity in his writing that’s reminiscent of Spike Milligan. Here he deftly interweaves original gags with Gogol material. You can’t see the join!
I’m sorry that Colin hasn’t done more acting of late — I think Morag would like to tempt him back, but I don’t blame him from withdrawing — he did a bunch of student films, which must have been a bit tiresome at times, but he also had several theatrical triumphs, playing Hamlet, the M.C. in Cabaret and creating a theatrical version of MADMAN in which Morag appeared.
Colin’s work here is even more impressive here given that he had a cold during the three nights of filming. And swinging those shoes round his neck nearly sawed his head off.
I’m impressed all over by Kenneth Simpson’s 16mm photography. I recall we had one shot that was out of focus, which we ditched — the only out-take! I think it featured the conclusion of the Fat Patsy “sub-plot”. The rear projection worked great, and the long take at the end now seems… rather brave!
Apologies if the inter-titles are hard to read — they are on 16mm too!
The glamour of film-making — the unit assembles for ROUNDING UP DONKEYS.
Just back from the rat-infested city of Glasgow, which I plunged into in order to attend some birthday celebrations. I was also on the look-out for info that might help me land another film or TV job, though it was unlikely that anybody at this party would be able to grant me one directly, and I was also looking out for any little items of interest for the blog.
The 40th birthdays belonged to Travis and Helen Reeves, whom I know from way back. They are that rare phenomenon, non-identical twins who look alike, though not so much now. I shall explain — while not genetically identical, they have a strong facial resemblance and similar build. But not so much now, since Travis, who used to be Helen’s sister, is now her brother, which makes a fair difference.
It’s all prefigured weirdly in my film CLARIMONDE, I think, where Travis, then outwardly female, provided the voice for a male character (a ghost). The same scene featured another male ghost who was actually a woman in drag, looking like a cross between Ringo Starr and a Mexican bandit.
Along with his gender reassignment, Mr. T has also changed careers — apart from his writing and directing, he used to be a production designer, arranging objects within the three-dimensional space of a set, and is now a sound designer, arranging noises within the three-dimensional space of a cinema (or TV viewer’s lounge). This comparison between the two jobs originates with Walter Murch, and it’s the reason he invented the job title “sound montage designer”.
Helen Reeves is a “diminutive antipodean singer-songwriter” who used to duet with Travis under the unofficial heading “The Twindigo Girls”, though Travis’ deepened voice has made their harmonizing trickier, and rendered the nickname inaccurate.
I did find out a few things that might prove useful in my film-hustling, and caught up with several old friends, such as Bert Eeles, editor of CRY FOR BOBO, and John Cobban, sound designer of same. I also picked up fascinating insights into forensic archaeology from Travis’ friend Friga (sp?), with whom I also co-invented a futuristic dwelling space (the kind of thing I tend to do after a few pints). Friga was bemoaning the fact that geological drill cores, which are basically cylinders of rock, are often very beautiful, what with the interesting laminations in sedimentary stone, but if you’re a geologist you get too many of them to keep. I suggested building a house out of them. Friga initially thought this impractical, since the cores are cylindrical, not brick-shaped, until we jointly realised they could be assembled into a STONE LOG CABIN.
So when you find yourself spending your retirement years in an edifice constructed from little cylinders of laminated sedimentary rock, you’ll know it’s my fault.
The night was spent in Morag McKinnon’s spare room. Morag is fresh from directing her first feature, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS, but I can’t tell you much of anything about that because it’s all at a sensitive stage, rough cut and all. I’m still very much psyched to see it, but there’s a no-DVD policy in force at the moment to stop unfinished edits falling into THE WRONG HANDS, i.e. probably mine.
I can tell you about the LAWSUIT though, because that’s been in the papers. As I mentioned before, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is the second film in a trilogy, following on from Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD. While the films are supposed to deal with the lives of a common group of characters, the fact that each movie is the work of a different writer and director means that this was never likely to have the uniformity of Kieslowski’s DECALOGUE. In fact, screenwriter / mad god Colin McLaren refitted the characters to suit his dramatic purposes, giving Kate Dickie a new daughter, and having her meet Martin Compston for the first time, even though she meets him in RED ROAD. So it’s an alternate universe sequel to RED ROAD. (There should be more of those!)
Following in the same spirit, Morag recast a minor character in RED ROAD — Dickie’s dad — since he’s the major character in ROUNDING UP DONKEYS. James Cosmo, a distinguished player who also embodies a dad in TRAINSPOTTING, takes the role. This has upset the actor from RED ROAD, Andrew Armour, who apparently feels that by taking the part in film 1, he was effectively contracted to play him in all subsequent films, should the character appear. I don’t think he has a legal leg to stand on, but there’s a terrible pathos to his position: he’s said that this is his only chance at a leading role, which is tantamount to admitting nobody would ever cast him in a star part except by accident.
I like Armour in RED ROAD — he seems like a real old guy who’s kind of wandered in front of the camera, rather than like an actor, which is surely a good thing. But the character written by Colin is a new person in all but name, and requires a different sort of player to bring him to life. It’s just one of those things.
If you want a really sad casting story, consider the case of the actor originally cast as Sonny in THE GODFATHER. In order to get Paramount to agree to cast Al Pacino (an unknown who had underperformed in screen tests), Coppola had to agree to take James Caan as Sonny and let the original guy go. Not only had the guy already celebrated getting the part with his family… I can’t remember his name. Because he’s not famous. He never got another break — that was his shot.
(Maybe I’m inclined to depressing tales because I’m hungover. More cheerful stuff tomorrow!)
This little moment, from Billy Wilder’s late-period movie, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, has entered into legend amongst a few friends of mine.
When I showed the film to screenwriter Colin McLaren (ROUNDING UP DONKEYS) some years ago, he was transfixed by this moment and insisted I wind the tape back, so he could enjoy it again, his face illuminated with infantile glee.
A year or so after, I ran the movie again in the company of special effects makeup artist Stephen Murphy (SLEUTH), the EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED, and at the same moment.
The mesmerising and unique feature of this scene is the strange, mannered performance of the “actor” playing the policeman. The gag is nothing much, and acts as a slightly unwelcome hiccup in the narrative progression, but the copper’s stylised movements lift it into a new stratosphere of crumminess. It’s a “comedic” performance rather than a funny one – every step the man takes seems to be in quotation marks.
It turns out there’s a story behind this scene, and I found it in Knight Errant, the autobiography of Wilder’s Holmes, Sir Robert Stephens. Comedy actor Bob Todd was supposed to play the part. As part of Benny Hill’s troupe of clowns, and Richard Lester’s informal stock company of bit-part comedians, Todd was a logical choice. Not a terribly strong actor, he was nevertheless inherently amusing.
But due to Wilder’s exacting methods, filming overran on the previous scene of the day, so that by the time cinematographer Christopher Challis was ready to turn his camera on the Scotland Yard bobby, Bob had to leave to appear in a play he was performing in the West End. Robert Stephens volunteered his chauffeur for the part, and drilled him in the appropriate comedy movements. That accounts for the cop’s exaggerated mannerisms, which, however, lack the precision of the true clown.
Visual comedy is a very delicate thing! My own brief adventures in the field have only served to show me how much I still need to learn. Wilder himself, an extremely clever visual storyteller in the Hitchcock mode when he felt like it, only dabbled in slapstick, but admired those, like Chaplin and Keaton, who excelled at it. In the ’80s, he would say that the only contemporary film-makers who could do visual gags were Richard Lester and Blake Edwards.
Colin adds:
“It’s on the ninth second. If you watch his truncheon hand, there’s many an inforced WAGGLE to that wrist, as if cranking himself up to fully register the horror of the (some way off) comic soaking. It looks like he’s working the crowd, drawing out applause. It really is terrible. The wrongness is everywhere. The lack of extras and precision of shot make if feel indoors and airless, a bit like MARNIE. And the sombre music hardly aides us in our froth. If you want funny Victorian policemen (and who doesn’t) plump for The Phantom Raspberry Blower. If you want crap, it’s all in the wrist.”
It seems appropriate to write about my trip to Glasgow while still hungover from the experience. In brief, my great good friend Morag McKinnon is directing a feature film, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS (there are no donkeys in it), written by my other great good friend Colin McLaren, and with my other other great good friend Stephen Murphy doing makeup duties. Stephen designed my clowns for CRY FOR BOBO, made my prosthetic uncle for INSIDE AN UNCLE, has worked on all the HARRY POTTERS and CHILDREN OF MEN and transformed Jude Law for SLEUTH.
I met Colin and his lovely partner Anita Vettesse at the home of producer and goddess Angela Murray. Stephen joined us. Absent were Morag, too frazzled from her shoot, and Fiona, who has a nasty cold.
I promised you gossip, but as ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is classified as a Film In Production, much must be shrouded in secrecy. I can tell you that the film stars that impressive chunk of Scottish beef, James Cosmo, whose career takes in both TRAINSPOTTING and BRAVEHEART (as well as voicing Thelonius the orang-utan in the mescaline nightmare known as BABE: PIG IN THE CITY) and Brian Pettifer, who appears in all three of Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis films. The movie is a follow-up of sorts to RED ROAD, but is half a comedy, which lifts (or lowers) it into a different category. The scheme is intended to produce three movies about the same small group of people, slightly like the concept of Kieslowski’s DECALOGUE, but although it works from the same set of character descriptions, Colin’s script might best be considered an alternative universe version — some characters have different careers and families and sometimes personalities.
Morag met Lars Von Trier, founder of the scheme, and asked him what to do if the story evolved in such a way that not all of the characters could be included. “Oh, just use the ones you want and have the rest ride by on a bus,” he advised. Buses being expensive and this being a modestly budgeted digital short, they are having to go on foot.
The shoot sounds pretty strenuous, with six-day weeks and 50% night shoots. Some scenes are being shot night-for-night purely for cost reasons — without enough funds to black out the windows of a church, the production was forced to shoot after nightfall. But — and I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true — it also sounds like it’s going really well. One to watch for.
Those who know me — happy few! — will aver that in one thing I am something of an absolutist. I absolutely don’t like depressing Scottish realist films. My producer and friend Nigel Smith is even more adamantly of this opinion, and has dubbed the genre “miserabilism”, a term which has since CAUGHT ON and been used in no less an organ than Sight & Sound. Nigel further categorises these films as the “piss in a milk bottle and sling it at yer granny” school of filmmaking, quotes the Johnny Rotten line “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery,” and suggests that the ultimate message about the Scottish people promoted by miserabilism is “we are victims and we live in a terrible place.” While perhaps being more moderate in my views, I don’t strongly disagree with any of this pithy assessment. But then, maybe my moderation is due to the fact that unlike Nigel I generally avoid seeing any of these films if I possibly can.
But no more! Since my great good friends Colin McLaren and Morag McKinnon have embarked on their feature film debut ROUNDING UP DONKEYS (Morag actually has a no-budget feature to her name already, but she’s been keeping quiet about that), and since said extravaganza is a follow-up of sorts to the award-winning RED ROAD, and since RR seems to epitomise many of the attributes associated with miserabilism (unhappy working-class characters, tragic backstories, unpleasant sex scenes) … in short, since all of that, I feel I’m going to have to bloody watch RED ROAD.
I’m treating this as a kind of scientific experiment. Each day for a week I’m going to run a bit of the movie but if, after a bit, I can no longer stand the skull-crushing depression, I’ll stop it, watch something cheerful, and resume the next day. Now, I might actually become HOOKED and forget my aversion to this kind of entertainment and watch the whole thing at once — if so, I solemnly vow to let you know how it went down. On the other hand, the sheer Scottishness might be too much for me almost at once, but I figure that even if I can only manage fifteen minutes at a time I’ll have the thing well and truly watched inside of a week. And I can send despatches from the front line along the way.
If I do end up fragmenting the film thusly, I’d have to admit that’s not an ideal viewing experience of the kind the makers had in mind, so you can make allowances accordingly. On the other hand, I HAVE screened some films I respect and, in a sense, enjoy, in just that way. I found Bob Fosse’s STAR 80 so horrific, and Eric Roberts’ performance in it so skin-crawlingly unpleasant, that I had to keep stopping the tape every ten minutes so I could prance around the room clawing the imaginary ants from my body. Despite this, my admiration for the film is enormous, and not just because it’s the only film, to my knowledge, photographed by Sven Nykvist to begin with a close-up on a portrait of Telly Savalas.
So — I will begin my assault on the north face of RED ROAD immediately, and will be posting regular updates on my progress to its rugged and inaccessible summit.
“Production has begun on Morag McKinnon’s ROUNDING UP DONKEYS featuring James Cosmo (BRAVEHEART, TROY), Brian Pettifer (AMADEUS, IF), Kate Dickie (RED ROAD) and Martin Compston (SWEET SIXTEEN).”
This is the second film in Lars Von Trier and Zentropa’s ‘Advance Party’ project, three films using the same group of characters. I thought it was a dumb idea at first, but any excuse to make a film is a good excuse, if the film itself is good, and I have hopes for this one. The writer is gifted word-engineer Colin McLaren and the director is Morag McKinnon, both friends of mine and long overdue for a feature gig.
The scheme was intended for writer-directors (schemers are fond of limiting their options in this way, in hopes of whittling out as many promising candidates as possible), and Morag signed on as such, then found herself a bit stumped and got Colin in to help.
“Is it OK if Colin helps?” she asked.
Then, a little later: “I think we’ll have to give Colin a credit, he’s really collaborating quite actively on it.”
Then: “Colin’s writing it.”
“A bittersweet, tragicomic tale of making amends, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS centres on Alfred Patterson (James Cosmo), who learns of his impending death and decides it’s time to make amends with his estranged daughter and her precocious 12-year-old.”
The first film in the ‘Advance Party’ scheme was RED ROAD, which won some awards and which I suppose I’ll watch at some point, but which seems, form its reputation, to embody exactly the kind of miserabilist mindset I generally can’t stand in British cinema. But I have to give it a chance.
The exciting difference with ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is the addition of humour, including an opening inspired by Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME and a lot of tragi-comic black comedy around the feckless central character and his numpty pal. (I’ve discussed the project with Colin and Morag a few times during its looong gestation.)
The same two collaborated on several previous shorts, including BAFTA-winner HOME, available on the Cinema 16 DVD, the film which introduced their lucky donkey motif, and both have collaborated with myself in the past: I produced Morag’s first ever short, THE END, back when we were babies, and edited DIARY OF A MADMAN, starring Colin, who adapted it brilliantly from Gogol’s short story. Colin then starred in two of my films, HOW TO GET UP and CLARIMONDE, proving himself the leading exponent of the Scottish Expressionism school of performance. We wrote a bunch of unmade films together, including such misterpieces as ENTITY BLOUSE AND THE SPY FROM FFABRIC and INSIDE A DOG, and then co-hatched CRY FOR BOBO after an evening spent getting outside of some wine and watching three hours of mind-palpatingly depressing Scottish short films.
So there’s history there, and so I’m no doubt biased, but wouldn’t it be nice to think somebody was making a British film that might be worth seeing? Join me in my world and believe.
This is CLARIMONDE, a short film I directed mumblety years ago.
I thought it might be fun to ‘fess up to the various things I stole in making it. Whether this is instructive or interesting to anybody else, I have no idea. It might serve as a useful insight into the creative process, or that part of it that’s not so much creative as felonious.
First stolen item: the story, THE SPIDER by Hanns Heinz Ewers, also author of THE ALRAUNE, filmed with Brigitte Helm. Ewers was a queer sort of fellow: an early member of the Nazi Party, he also believed that Jews made the best Germans. He fell out of favour, unsurprisingly, and died as an un-person. So I figured there was no copyright to worry about… apologies if I was wrong!
The title sequence. The text is kind of illegible, which I regret. But I liked the idea of using SPACE: 1999 type lettering seemingly for no reason. It broadens out the confusion about when the hell this story is set.
The way each title appears below the one before is lifted from a couple of Richard Lester films: he does it in PETULIA and JUGGERNAUT and I always thought it looked really nice. (I’m always telling my students, “That’s NOT a good enough reason!”)
The artwork which we slowly zoom into is sort of influenced by VERTIGO’s titles. I happened to know a really gifted cartoonist, Garry Marshall, now an award-winning animator, so I drafted him in. (Filmmakers’ rule #1: exploit your acquaintances!)
The opening shot. Hitchcock again, I was wowed by the massive amount of information gathered by the camera exploring Jimmy Stewart’s apartment at the start of REAR WINDOW, so this is my poor man’s version. The iris-out was achieved in-camera, with a borrowed lighting iris gaffer-taped to the matte box (Gaffer Tape, and not The Force, is what binds the universe together, at least in film and TV). We had no tracks so the camera pulls back on a wheeled tripod as the guy on the floor making the curtains billow backwards-somersaults out the way and cinematographer/operator/grip has to step gingerly over one tripod leg while maintaining a steady movement and panning 180º so the track away from the window becomes a track in on the door handle.
I read an interview with George Cukor where he said something like ”I’m not one of those directors who tracks in on door handles,” and I thought, “Well *I* *AM*!”)
The door handle in the film is now on my front door.
Just as the shot was ending the film ran out! I liked the way that looked, so I kept it in. Scorsese did the same at the end of LAST TEMPTATION, but I wasn’t consciously emulating him on this shot, I just got lucky.
When our protag, psychic detective Anthony Flear, enters, the way his face is revealed by his lowering hat is a direct steal from Alec Guinness’ first appearance in THE LADYKILLERS, a film I should write more about later. Flear is played by Colin McLaren, a genius writer who later won a BAFTA and now, like your friend and humble narrator, spends most of his time writing screenplays that don’t get made. It’s important work.
(Actually, it looks like one of Colin’s is finally happening, and it’s the follow-up to RED ROAD. But his version will be funnier.)
Colin had just made a short film with Sarah Gavron, for which he’d been paid in coal. I paid him in spurious money, since he owed me some but we couldn’t agree how much, so it seemed the best policy to make that his fee rather than let it get in the way of a beautiful friendship.
Colin wears my old National Health specs a la Harry Palmer.
The floorboards of this room are actually made of BROWN PAPER.
The use of diary entries: TAXI DRIVER, I guess.
The camera’s tracking and zip-panning about: GOODFELLAS, I think.
The three victims pictured: a film student, the composer’s sister (in drag as Ringo Starr) and a harmonica-playing cartoonist. The theme of gender-swapping is oddly Prophetic since the production designer is a man now, but at the time we made this, I could have sworn he was a woman.
Our makeup artist has since worked on all the HARRY POTTER films, and transformed Jude Law in the recent SLEUTH. His work here was mostly done with tissue paper and liquid latex. The corpses wore ping pong ball eyes with pinholes in. The transvestite corpse wore only one eye because the tunnel-vision made her claustrophobic.
All this tracking around — I just got into it! On my previous films it had been too much work to move the camera, and we’d been habitually behind schedule struggling to finish. here, because it’s a studio film, suddenly there was time to make things more interesting. In all the previous movies, the shots I achieved were compromised versions of the storyboard — on this one, they were enhanced versions.
Peter Greenaway once said, “I don’t move the camera much because that would tend to increase audience involvement,” and I thought, “Well *I* *WILL*!”
Some things were just spontaneous, wild choices, like the camera gradually tilting diagonally, or pulling out of focus on the phone (influenced by an ad for Cadbury’s Flake, I think). I would say to Kenneth Simpson, who was shooting it, “This shot seems a bit normal. What can we do to weird it up?” If you have Just Enough time, you can pause for a nanosecond when a shot is ready and think about whether there’s anything you can do to improve it. The falling leaves at the end of THE THIRD MAN came about that way: two men up ladders with sacks of dead leaves they’d gathered a minute before.
The first clip ends with my fake time-lapse, which required the help of the entire crew. One person was turning the clock hands from behind while another dimmed the lights and another pair physically lowered a biggish light outside the window to simulate a setting sun.
BTW, the building seen across the street is a quarter-scale model in long shots. In Clarimonde’s closer shots it’s actually the same window Colin is at, dressed differently. So the actors are never actually looking at each other at all.
The second clip begins with some out-of-focus stuff that I should have retaken, but I couldn’t afford to. It would’ve been nice if it had gone into focus when he puts his specs on though. I’m not too keen on the dream sequence. The words which the corpses mouth, out-of-synch, are the same words divined by Flear earlier, and they sort of make a warning, but it’s not very clear or well-done. Should have just cut this scene.
Somebody once said they thought the way Clarimonde slides her finger along the window sill was “erotic”, which pleased me. “I can do erotic!”
When she catches the fly I used both takes, so we get a nice flurry of action. I like that it’s not too obvious that she catches it TWICE. When Flear opens his hand to show her, we pull back through the window without breaking it (because, duh, there’s no glass in it), a swipe from CITIZEN KANE.
During the dance, we used a simple matte to block out the top of Clarimonde’s window, since I was worried the studio lighting rig might show up. Just a black piece of tape in front of the lens. So when C raises her hand to mime a toast, her hand kind of disappears…
I’m pleased with the theatrical lighting change on Flear’s face. Had I seen DETOUR at this point? Or A CANTERBURY TALE?
The curtains billowing open is played in reverse: we weighted the curtain ends and THREW them at poor Althea, who caught them.
The spider shadow puppet was designed by my flatmate, who later went schizo and started stalking the critic and documentarist Mark Cousins.
The vertical mouth is a straight Freudian vagina dentata. A lot of horror films play with this image and I thought it would be fun to do it fairly blatantly. Poor Althea had her mouth glued shut and couldn’t help but inhale the fumes through her nose. She communicated in Post-It notes, which were apparently quite obscene, and mostly detailing how she’d like to avenge herself upon me.
The policeman on the phone is voiced by awesome genius Ken Campbell, who recorded his role in the green room at the Traverse Theatre during a break in a six-hour performance he was giving of his legendary “bald” Trilogy. Diamond geezer.
I like the idea that when Flear tries to resist, we get the only handheld shot, but revert back to “tracking” when Clarimonde takes control again.
Believe it or not, the visual rhyme of the doorknob and Flear’s hand wasn’t planned at all. Fortune favours the prepared mind.
The next two shots don’t show Colin’s face because he was late that morning.
Colin sat in the corner hemmed in by alarm clocks was one of the first images I got reading the short story. Vaguely inspired by the guy in prison in CALIGARI.
Clarimonde gets the old-style movie lighting, a patch of light that just hits her eyes. Selective Moonlight.
Colin at the window with his hand raised is pure NOSFERATU. We decided right then to make it rain and rigged up some tubing… we’d seen the clip from IN COLD BLOOD which they excerpt in the documentary VISIONS OF LIGHT, where the light filters through the rainfall onto Robert Blake’s face… this may have come about through me asking the cameraman, “What have you always wanted to do?”
The fast Psychological Track-Ins on the victims and Flear: this comes from a combination of MILLER’S CROSSING and Sam Raimi. I was interested by the sense of violence the moving camera can have. Now I say that for violence in camera movement the real king is Andrei Zulawski.
The spinning wheel shot was done at the end of the shoot, after we’d taken the set apart but I didn’t want to stop filming, I was enjoying it too much… I figured I could use the shot somewhere…
Craning up (actually raising the camera on the tripod’s pneumatic riser) to reveal the noose: some of you may have spotted where I pinched this from. Thanks to Maestro Leone for a really terrific, funny shot.
Colin rides towards his death on the tripod itself, a foot atop each wheel, discretely hanging onto its neck. Inspired by Cocteau, probably:
The POV track thru the noose was another idea that came to me as I read the story for the first time.
Clarimonde’s voice-over comes from a different short story altogether, another fictional CLARIMONDE from Theophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoreuse, translated by the great Lafcadio Hearn.
The kiss: REAR WINDOW again. The zoom into the eye doesn’t really work. But the repeat of the opening shot is something I’m fond of. My heads of department all did a great job on this movie, considering we had no money and the heads of department generally were the departments.
Even though it’s made of cardboard and string, I like this film best of all my stuff apart from CRY FOR BOBO. If I can defend the plundering at all, it would be by saying that while I lifted general style and atmospherics from German Expressionism and noir, the specific things were often swiped from more unexpected sources, like comedies and spaghetti westerns, so that they hopefully get transformed somewhat in the process — stealing becomes an imaginative act.
With the new ST TRINIANS movie due in British cinemas on the 21st, and an article on British writer-producer-directors Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat due from me immanently, I decided to watch three of the original films last night. Having seen the original BELLES OF ST TRINIANS a few years back, I decided to jump straight into the sequels, omitting only the last, WILDCATS OF ST TRINIANS, because it is a dreadful thing and anyway I don’t have a copy.
British comedy series are an odd lot, often functioning on inertia and raw acting talent rather than anything resembling good material, and yet they inspire tremendous warmth and attachment in the public here. Take the CARRY ON films — arguably three of them are consistently entertaining, out of a total of twenty-nine. Twenty-nine.
Twenty-nine films on the theme of sexual frustration, filled with closeted gay men, hefty spinsters, and sex-obsessed nitwits apparently suffering from what Schrader and Scorsese (who, presumably, know all about it) call D.S.B. (Deadly Sperm Back-up, where the unused sperm backs up to the brain and induces idiocy).
Then there are the lesser-known DOCTOR films, which made a star of Dirk Bogarde and thus prepared the way for DEATH IN VENICE and THE NIGHT PORTER, and managed to carry on for several entries even after their star had graduated to working with Basil Dearden and Joseph Losey. That’s a common trait of these series, they outlive their stars, their creators, their reasons for existing in the first place…
Such as the CONFESSIONS movies, inaugurated by British film legend Val Guest, who had been working since the thirties and earlier brought us the excellent Hammer cop thriller HELL IS A CITY. Here he took the saucy comedy format into the seventies, where suddenly you could actually SHOW full nudity and intercourse, so he did. He complained later that if these films had been subtitled they’d have been acclaimed as arthouse smashes… but aside from Verhoeven’s TURKISH DELIGHT I can’t think of any “art film” they resemble. Actually, CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER is like the Verhoeven movie with all the serious bits removed, and yet it still manages to be more ugly and depressing.
The fact that that film’s star, Robin Askwith, was cast in BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (and he’s very good in it) probably accounts for a decent percentage of the rotten reviews BH garnered on release: sheer guilt-by-association.
Anyhow, back to our rampaging schoolgirls. The first St Trins film is based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle, which are in turn derived from stories Searle heard about the real St Trinnean’s, a “progressive” boarding school right here in Edinburgh where the girls were allowed to run wild as nature intended. (Hey, listen, another Edinburgh girls’ school inspired the source material of William Wyler’s THESE THREE and THE CHILDREN’S HOUR!)
Edinburgh connection 2: that superb eccentric actor Alastair Sim stars in the first film and cameos in the second, dragging up to play Miss Fitton, the dithering, corruptible headmistress, as well as her ne’er-do-well brother. Here we see the British love of drag combined with that fondness for multiple role-playing later developed in DR. STRANGELOVE and O LUCKY MAN!
(Sim’s very best work for Launder and Gilliat is in the marvellous GREEN FOR DANGER, available now from Criterion).
Sim declined to be confined to a film series, and so the later films import a succession of star comedians in a vain attempt to replace him. First into the breach is Terry-Thomas, who obviously I’m a fan of, and if BLUE MURDER AT ST TRINIANS used him more thoroughly, things might have gone better. But all the sequels seem to divide their energies and plotlines to damaging effect, and the rot sets in right here. Although hearing T-T say things like “That’s a bit adjacent, isn’t it?” is never less that a pleasure, there isn’t enough rigour in integrating him into a storyline that needs him.
Stars from the first film are back, notably Joyce Grenfell, whose entrance in the first film had established her as a brilliant film comedian and a sympathetic presence. Curiously, Launder and Gilliat seem to have fixed on the idea of mistreating her character, goody-two-shoes Police Constable Ruby Gates, as their main approach to her character. In the first film the abuse all comes from the rampaging schoolkids, which makes sense, but her two sequels tend to separate her off into unproductive sidetracks.
Better use is made of George Cole, a younger actor mentored by Sim, who appears in four of the films as Flash Harry, an archetypal fifties “spiv” character (basically, a Cockney black marketeer, a sort of Teddy Boy version of Harry Lime) who for some reason became the series’ only essential figure (he’s back in the new version, portrayed by comedian and sex god Russell Brand). Cole is very zestful, firing off malapropisms at speed (’I don’t want to appear inhospital,’ and ‘Greek Archie-pelly-logo’) but the best thing about the character is his theme tune, a pub piano leitmotif which strikes up with mechanical regularity whenever Harry takes more than a couple of steps, like a proletarian James Bond theme. This, and the jaunty St Trinians theme itself, are the work of Sir Malcolm Arnold, best-known for arranging the Colonel Bogey March for BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI.
BLUE MURDER takes the girls to Rome, where the sixth form all aim to marry an Italian prince, and the filmmakers blagged permission to shoot in the Forum and Colisseum on the grounds that they were making a “cultural documentary”.
PURE HELL AT ST TRINIANS does not take place at the school at all, it having been arsoned to oblivion, and again transports the riotous kids abroad, with the sixth form abducted into a Sheikh’s harem. One of the very strange things about the series, and about British culture generally, is the mainstream media’s use of school uniforms as fetishwear, while our moral guardians shriek about pedophiles hiding in the shrubbery. The St Trinians films mine this imagery while serving up slapstick comedy for little kids — it’s quite disturbing, or almost.
This movie includes Cecil Parker as guest star, but for some reason he’s insufficiently larger-than-life to really hold it all together. He’s perfectly good, but to see him really shine it’s better to check out his work in Gilliat’s THE CONSTANT HUSBAND, where he’s a sports-obsessed psychiatrist treating an amnesiac bigamist… The other strongest element in PURE HELL is Irene Handl, an adored character actor who can be seen to great effect in MORGAN and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Here she’s a teacher with a background in lunatic asylums. “Soon I may be the only one around here with a certificate proving my sanity!”
With THE GREAT ST TRINIANS TRAIN ROBBERY in 1966 the series shunted into Technicolor and adopted comic Frankie Howerd as a hairdresser-turned-trainrobber. It’s a very very colourful film indeed, which proves to be a Bad Thing, and Howerd is again underused. Really Howerd isn’t a team player: he mugs and scene-steals atrociously, but the best response to this is to encourage it, since he’s so good, yet Launder seems determined to integrate Howerd into an unpromising ensemble.
Howerd’s best film scenes are usually his big public speeches: he got a great one at the start of CARRY ON DOCTOR, but there’s nothing like that here, so he mainly entertains just by presenting his impossibly large, pendulous face to the camera and squinting evilly.
TRAIN ROBBERY features a few half-hearted nods to sixties fashions, music, crime, and film-making: the speeded-up chase sequence maybe owes something to Richard Lester, but as it’s conducted back and forth over the same hundred feet of track about fifty times, it doesn’t really generate any pace and the gags are unimaginative. There’s no Joyce Grenfell in this one and the series still neglects to develop any of the schoolgirls themselves as proper characters, which is odd, really.
But there was worse to come. Described by my screenwriting friend Colin McLaren as the “you-can-see-it-going-in, hard porn version”, WILDCATS OF ST TRINIANS ups the raunch factor enough to make it a queasy experience, although Colin does exaggerate the penetrative aspect considerably. But there’s a line in the sand, or should be, between the mild seaside postcard comedy of the first films and the naked schoolgirls served up in this travesty, which actually came out in 1980, after British smut had basically rolled over and died at the box office anyway. It’s the equivalent of CARRY ON EMMANUELLE, a depressing extension of a fundamentally innocent series into more explicit territory.
I need to wash that memory away with some good old-fashioned British toilet humour:
The great Dudley Sutton (who was in my first short film).
This is a short I co-wrote, with the esteemed Colin McLaren, and directed in 2001. Won some awards and briefly lead to some employment. It was an attempt at making a film with a message while mercilessly debunking the message as much as possible. A plea for tolerance that champions the cause of clowns everywhere, while simultaneously managing to suggest that every stereotype about them is completely true.
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FILM, Theatre, literature | Tagged: BBC Scotland, Bronek Korda, Cabaret, Colin McLaren, David Cairns, Diary of a Madman, Gogol, Hamlet, Kenneth Simpson, Kenneth Williams, Martin Radich, Morag McKinnon, Rounding Up Donkeys, Sarah Gavron, Spike Milligan, The Viy, Travis Reeves, Werner Herzog | 
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