“I understand you have rooms to let.”

 

I blogged earlier about how I stole a bit of Alec Guinness’ entrance in THE LADYKILLERS for my short film CLARIMONDE.

While I put my hands up and admit this without shame, I’d like to trace the influences that led to actor Alec Guinness and director Alexander “Sandy” Mackendrick achieving what they do in that scene in the first place, to the extent that I can. Partly to show that everybody steals, which makes me feel good about myself, and partly to try and illuminate the evolution of ideas in cinema, through one small example.

Mackendrick quotes below are taken from Philip Kemp’s majestic Lethal Innocence, which should nestle next to Mackendrick’s On Filmmaking on your bookshelves.

Exhibit A: THE LODGER. Hitchcock pulls of many grand effects in the expressionist manner in this, his first thriller. It’s worth noting that for both Hitch and Mackendrick were greatly influenced by Fritz Lang and the German style of the twenties and early thirties. Also, both men were graphic designers before they were filmmakers…

Matinee idol and sexual unusualist* Ivor Novello enters with a scarf concealing his lower face (like Malcolm McDowell, 40 years later in IF…). Guinness will appropriate the scarf, and the idea of revealing his lower face first, but he uses the lowering of his hat to achieve this effect:

Both Katy Johnson and the landlady in Hitch’s film are frail, older women (KJ to a markedly greater degree), afflicted with dowager’s hump, and there is an immediate sense of outrage that they might be menaced by this interloper. Both films play upon this unimaginable threat of violence being brought into a respectable home by some mysterious outsider.

The idea of showcasing Guinness’ trick teeth seems to have been present from the very beginning of the character’s conception. According to Mackendrick, Guinness at first saw the character in even more grotesque terms:

‘He sidled across my office as though he had a dislocated hip, which was quite gruesome but horrendously funny. So Seth and I had to say, “No, sorry, Balcon will never stand for it.” Alec got rather annoyed, and sulked for a little, and went and looked out of the window. And while I was talking about the script he was snipping away with a pair of scissors, and he made some paper teeth which he stuck in, then turned around and grinned at me.’

Guinness claims to have had in mind the Wolf from Red Riding Hood as his main model. But when he saw himself in makeup, he remarked to Mackendrick, “I look remarkably like an aged Ken Tynan; perhaps I’d better smoke cigarettes the way he does.”

(Guinness work emulating Tynan’s way with a ciggie raises him into the pantheon of Great Dramatic Smokers. Of course, Bacall and Bogart look great exhaling smoke, as does Valentino and, in more recent times, rather surprisingly, Helena Bonham Carter in FIGHT CLUB. But for finding weird and impressive ways of actually handlinga cancer stick, I give you my Triumvirate of Nicotine: George C. Scott, Travolta, Savalas. Telly actually adopted the Kojak lollipop in order to wean himself off the snout, and the sweet solution was suggested by none other than Mario Bava, in whose LISA AND THE DEVIL the trademark lolly makes its debut. Now you know.)

Mackendrick went further, insisting that the entire performance was a gothic exaggeration of the Tynan persona, perhaps a revenge on behalf of the acting profession upon a famous critic (more on this theme soon). I don’t know if Tynan had ever been cruel about Guinness, but he called Ralph Richardson “the glass eye in the forehead of the British public,” which, as Sir Ralph noted, is uncertain as to meaning but doesn’t sound altogether complimentary.

But there is still more behind this characterisation. In LONDON BELONGS TO ME, directed by former Hitchcock scriptwriter (THE LADY VANISHES) Sidney Gilliat, Alastair Sim (native of Edinburgh) presents himself as lodger at the home of a middle-aged spinster, in an uncannily similar way:

I’ve ALWAYS felt that Guinness’ performance had something to do with Sim’s, in fact, as a child I believe I thought that WAS Sim playing the part in THE LADYKILLERS. Professor Marcus has the same shabby-gentile, vulpine weariness as Sim’s Dickensian fake medium, Mr. Squales.

And even then, there’s more. Moving beyond the character’s first few moments (about which there’s even more to say!), we get what seems to me a direct quote from Max Schreck’s iconic performance in NOSFERATU:

To present this character in all his glory, Mackendrick and his team give him a big build up. Composer and sound designer Tristram Carey (later of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) brilliantly organises music and FX to one end, creating a sort of dark cartoon soundscape where everything builds to a hysterical crescendo as Guinness rings the doorbell. Then there’s the beauty of the delayed appearance itself, as Guinness stalks Johnson to her home, a variety of pieces of trained furniture obtruding to conceal Guinness’ face. A high angle shot following the pair of them from roughly the POV of an invisible urban giraffe, seems drawn from John Brahm’s Hollywood remake of THE LODGER, though maybe it goes further back, to Lang’s M.

And on top of all that, Graham Linehan points out: “By the way, did you ever notice how Guinness is turning into a crow in ‘The Ladykillers’? Watch the way he lifts his coat up when he’s putting his hands on his hips.”

Well, now that you mention it… Maybe this is why all the raven imagery in the depressing Coen Bros remake. I mean, I know it’s there because of Poe and the whole Southern Gothic thing, but maybe…

One moment of Sir Alec’s monstro perf seems entirely sui generis and without precedence in the annals of screen acting. On his way upstairs, forced to respond to remark by Mrs. W, he delivers his reply from under his arm.

It’s not exactly the shock of recognition, is it? But it’s grand stuff.

Anyhow, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the story of THE LADYKILLERS, like those other grisly tales FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA and DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, came to its author (American screenwriter William Rose) in a dream…

The movie has, in turn, influenced other filmmakers — Nick Park’s THE WRONG TROUSERS is probably the most famous that refers directly back to Mackendrick’s film.

*

*Novello’s penchant was to lie naked in a glass coffin, feigning death, while muscular workmen filed in and mourned him, sexually.

Cliff Richard IS Bongo Herbert

 

Yeah, I laughed too, but that is the premise of this film (EXPRESSO BONGO) and we must ACCEPT IT UNQUESTIONINGLY.

Anyway, the good news is that Sylvia Syms is still VERY MUCH ALIVE, and first became VMA on this very day, some 74 years ago, and is still working. Long may she reign.

I saw S.S. talk at the Edinburgh Film Festival many yonks ago, and I remember her forthright and robust humour. During a lull in questions she ran through her entire C.V. — “ASYLUM, in which I get dismembered: I still get fan mail about that one. THE QUARE FELLOW with the terrible Patrick McGoohan…” I like McGoohan… but then I’ve never worked with him. Reminds me of Alan Bennett on Christopher Plummer: “Christopher is his own worst enemy, but only just.”

Syms plays a burlesque artiste in Val Guest and Wolf Mankiewicz’s pop-culture spoof EXPRESSO BONGO, and shares the stage with go-go girls in pasties, mini-kilts and G-strings during an eye-poppingly bizarre “history lesson” number. No G-string for our Sylvia, though: as a highly-paid Featured Player she gets to wear Proper Human Underpants as befits a star. As a Scot, I detest all forms of Tartan pageantry, so I quite liked seeing it dragged through the sewer like this. There’s another good and weird tartan musical number in Bunuel’s first Mexican film. Nobody does Tartan like the Mexicans.

Syms played a lot of what Jean Simmons calls “poker-up-the-arse” parts, which is not an Edward II kind of thing, but a reference to the straight back required to play stiff middle-class WIVES (Syms does this very well in the commendable VICTIM), so it’s great to see her excel here as a nice working-class girl who happens to earn a living in porn.

Guest’s movie HITS THE GROUND RUNNING, with titles spelled out in neon signs, restaurant menus and sandwich boards (production designer Tony Masters is the real mega-talent on this film — he went on to 2001 while Guest went on to CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER), and within instants we spot a nubile Burt Kwouk (”No, Cato, now is not the time!”) buying a hot-dog from a Soho stand, where eleven years later he will be seen working, in Skolimowski’s DEEP END. And they say there’s no such thing as progress.

And then we meet Laurence Harvey as a very yiddisher agent on the make (such ethnic overtness in a lead character would have been impossible in a Hollywood film, even one about Jesus). He’s like Tony Curtis in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS or Richard Widmark in NIGHT AND THE CITY, except that the movie is more like THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, a brash, lurching satire about music and mammon.

Teen pop idol Cliff Richard (real name Harry Webb) plays teen pop idol Bongo Herbert (real name Bert Rudge) with his customary adequacy, but with a surprising Elvis sneer that was soon honed from his act as he went safe and mum-friendly. B.H. is Harvey’s discovery/creation, and we follows the ambitious fifty-per-center as he exploits the hapless naif through the London media world of 1960.

This is where the film works as a time machine: first, by transporting us back to a bygone age when Soho was the only spot where a cup of espresso could be obtained. We get real T.V. presenters and a checklist of then-current entertainers and location shots of an all-but vanished habitat. There are also topical film quirks, like a split-screen phone conversation between a semi-dressed Harvey and Syms, mirroring PILLOW TALK from the year before (Guest had a long-standing aim to get sex into British cinema, it seems).

But the film (Prophetic Cinema Alert!) also projects forward into the future, our present: in his desperation to leave no aspect of human life unexploited, Harvey yolks his prodigy to the cash-cow of RELIGION, having him sing a maudlin number about shrines and Madonnas: Mankiewicz and Guest obviously view this melding of pop and church as grotesque, vulgar and tittersome (and are laughing at how Jewish moguls churn out cynical Christian propaganda),  but it’s the exact path followed by Sir Cliff in subsequent years, and the results are just as awful, though more degrading to music than to faith.

(Cliff today is a still-virginal, botoxed crooner, who would surprise nobody if he came out of the closet, though I hasten to add that he’s not in the closet so far as I legally know and if he was he’d no doubt be sprinkling Holy Water in it and generally doing Good Works.)

Cliff went on to a film career of feelgood musical pablum (under the directorial aegis of Sidney J. Furie, among others) and thence to playing a plastic puppet in THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO, which is really typecasting when you think about it.

My favourite line in EXPRESSO BONGO: “And now, straight from New York, Hollywood and Las Vegas, we are very happy to be able to afford the fantabulous, the fantastico, DIXIE COLLINS!!!”

Sexual Ealing

It was just after four when I got out the cinema, why was it NIGHT-TIME?

Anyhow, multiplexes are a bit like hell, the version that’s a giant building with a thousand rooms and a thousand tortures in each room, and my local was understaffed so that although I was only slightly late, by the time I’d reached the front of the queue the flick had started, which put me in a bad mood.

Why was I seeing this thing?Because I’d blogged about it, and because Ben Halligan recommended it (maybe he just likes public school movies, though?) and mainly because it got universally lousy reviews and I’ve been working on the theory that whenever that happens there’s something interesting going on. I decided on this after quite enjoying GOYA’S GHOSTS, which got a royal kicking from the broadsheet hacks.

Ealing Studios, if they want to live up to their glorious name, have got to stop remaking Oscar Wilde plays and old British comedies: that’s not what Ealing did. They may have had a conservative side, but at least they were original.

Having said that, the new ST TRINIAN’S is nothing to be ashamed of and certainly doesn’t merit the savagery the press has meted out. There are a few good laughs and lots of loud smiles, and an attempt is made to cram every kind of joke into it, from whoopee cushions to sly demolitions of every film in co-star Colin Firth’s CV. Unlike the earlier films, this one actually takes a bit of time to characterise the obstreperous kids. Like the earlier films, the new girl can’t quite decide if she wants to appeal to her peers or to the Dirty Mac Brigade. There’s some uncomfortable stuff early on as a newcomer is subjected to hazing and humiliation (being broadcast nude on the Internet) and the film looks like turning into sado-erotic faux-child porn. Then an anti-bullying message is produced from somewhere and we’re supposed to forget what we’ve seen.

As the hapless newbie, Talulah Riley shows some comic flair, particularly in a sloping walk alongside her father’s car as she tries to wheedle out of being sentenced to this “Hogwarts for Pikeys“. This almost stands comparison with Joyce Grenfell’s physical comedy work in the original BELLES OF. Gemma Arterton is a rather terrifying sex-bomb as the head girl. Comedian Russell Brand is fairly good as Flash Harry, but doesn’t really get much to do. But really, Rupert Everett is the whole show.

Like Alastair Sim in the first film, he plays dual roles, as headmistress Miss Fritton (try saying that three times quickly) and her no-good brother. Both roles are stylishly rendered cartoons, though neither has enough screen time to hold the fraying strands of the story together (the old ST TRINS sequels are likewise all over the shop, narrative-wise). While the rest of the film is scattershot and sometimes funny, Everett nails his every moment with grace and comic invention. The script seems to improve when he’s around, which suggests that either he’s shoring it up with ad-libs or he’s doing the even harder job of turning weak-ish material into gold by sheer force of magnetism and comedy chops. The film is actually worth seeing for him — there, I’ve said it! The moment where he swings through frame on a rope, in slow-motion, grinning at the camera, shows just the kind of CHEEK I’m meaning to blog about sometime.

It’s a shame the makers couldn’t sustain the quality throughout, or decide whether they wanted to be nasty and Ortonesque, mildly anarchic and silly, or preach an alternative educational lifestyle choice. And guys, you CAN’T do all three. But for the benefit of critics who have said things like “It is as funny as the worried frown on the face of an oncologist,” here is a short list of things to admire in this film (Everett is too obviously good to need including).

1) The girls. There are a hell of a lot of them, and they can all act. Some of the short ones are funny just standing there with their unformed faces.

2) The in-jokes. Markedly better than many of the out-jokes, admittedly. The reference to ANOTHER COUNTRY goes so far over the heads of the tweeny audience that they can’t even see the vapour trail behind it.

3) Russell Brand. This isn’t the quite vehicle he needs, but enough of his demented charisma pops out to merit him being given another chance.

Footnote: And YES, it IS appalling that The Film Council is backing this muck and not supporting Terence Davies. They should be making quality cinema art AND commercial nonsense — preferably GOOD commercial nonsense — but this one film doesn’t deserve to be the whipping boy for the TFC’s numerous failings.

Footfootnote: actually, Terence Davies could have directed the hell out of this movie.

Arrr!

This is a short I wrote and directed for Fox Searchlab, reuniting many of the team from CRY FOR BOBO, but at one-seventh the cost.

As with CRY FOR BOBO, I realised afterwards the autobiographical subtext: Bobo the clown is a silly entertainer trapped in a world of serious people, analogous to my place in the Scottish film industry; Pete the Pirate here theoretically has a set of unique skills, but they do not fit into the conventional modern job market. Try going into the Job Centre and telling them you make films and you’ll know how he feels.

Funniest incident during shooting: a chap walked up to our eye-patched pirate, popped out a glass eye, and offered it to him.

Actually no, that was disgusting.

Blue Sky Casting #1

Towards a Jerry Lewis KING LEAR:

King Lear – Jerry Lewis

Gloucester – Peter Falk

Goneril – Sandra Bernhardt

Regan – Catherine O’Hara

Cordelia – Janeane Garofalo

The Fool – Gene Wilder

Albany – Ben Stiller

Cornwall – Steve Martin

Kent – Seth Rogan

Edgar/Poor Tom – Jim Carrey

Edmund the Bastard – Eddie Izzard

Oswald – Pee Wee Herman

Old Man – Mel Brooks

Directed by Blake Edwards

Come on, people! We need to make this happen!

D. Cairns & B. Kite

Terry-Thomas IS Cinema.

 

There’s a very entertaining and extraordinarily unrevealing autobiography by this man, which I once held in my hands. He’s Terry-Thomas, the archetypal English silly ass in scores of British and international comedies. his book was written late in his life, when he suffered very much from Parkinson’s Disease, which afflicted him with a debilitating tremor and a peculiar inability to walk through doorways, although he found that he could sometimes DANCE through them. 

Anyway, one chapter of the book is simply a collection of TT’s favourite jokes, which he offers to the reader for free since he reckons he has no further need of them. They are all very long and absolutely terrible.

But the filming anecdotes are superb, and two in particular, about Rod Steiger, stayed in my mind. They are funny, odd, and intensely cinematic: one can’t help but imagine them in terms of shots, or I can’t, anyway. Here’s one:

TT and RS were co-starring in some unimaginable Italian war epic/comedy, and Rod had a big death scene to do. This being Rod, we’re talking about a seriously BIG death scene. Terry-T watched in mild astonishment as Steiger, peppered with machine-gun fire, staggered about for a full minute, clasped his bosom, fell to one knee, turned his face to the sky, mouthed a silent prayer, winced, fell over, spasmed, reached out impotently to the heavens, then fell still.

At which point, before the awe-struck director could whisper “Cut,” Terry-Thomas wandered into shot with a mildly solicitous expression on his face. “I say, are you absolutely all right?”

I think we can all agree that if this fragmentary out-take survives, by some miracle, then it is worth more, in artistic terms, than the entire oevre of, say, Roberto Rossellini.

“I was appalled by that gap in his front teeth. This man seductive? But what he lacked physically he made up for in charm.” — Frank Tashlin, interviewed by Robert Benayoun.

I seem to recall that in one of Nancy Friday’s collections of women’s sexual fantasies, there’s one woman who had a particular erotic fascination with that toothy gap. So there you go.

More on Frank Tashlin soon!

Here’s One We Made Earlier

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.

The Knack…and how to get it

Woodfall Films, 1965.

Okay it came out in 1965 but watching it now, November-December, there’s a definite Autumnal Pleasure that comes from the exact time of it’s filming, late ‘64. There’s a Christmas tree visible in the fancy shop, and Guy Fawkes fireworks in a closing crane shot on the foggy London Embankment. Dead leaves carpet the park. Director Richard Lester had just come off A Hard Day’s Night and must have been feeling a sense of possibility in the fall air.

The “real London” of that November season bleeds into the film’s Dreaming London. Lester’s London is almost akin to Rivette’s Paris, a place of magical transformations and surprises, the mundane brushing up against the crazy, as in a dream. “This is all a fantasy,” chimes a chorus of disembodied schoolboys on the soundtrack, but it’s a fantasy where milk is delivered to the doorstep in glass bottles.

It begins: John Barry jazz stylings as we move in on a  little comic book panel which contains the house and the film. We spiral down a staircase lined with mannequin-like beauties, identically dressed, all queuing to see sex-god Tolen, dressed in black in his black bedroom. “The guestbook: please restrict your comments to one word.” 

Halfway up the stairs lives Colin, lusting insipidly for the parade of dollybirds in their glowing white jumpers and pencil skirts.

SPACE 1999 sci-fi lettering zips in and out, listing the creators as we plunge in ever an faster helix down the stairs past the blur of lovelies arrayed like a TV commercial for impersonal sex, then wrench ourselves free, with screeching brakes, from Colin’s mind’s eye and into “reality”.

Colin (Michael Crawford), “I am a schoolteacher and I have to concentrate,” lives with Tolen (Ray Brooks), “I have no first name, I never use my first name,” in this tall, narrow, odd-but-real house. Driven to frustrated discombobulation by the onslaught of glamour calling on Tolen, Colin conceives the idea to let the spare room to a “steadying influence,” possibly a monk. “There must be monks!”

And there are, a busload, bound for Lovely London, but as the coach’s headlights go full beam, Colin’s bedroom is illuminated by a brilliant idea awakening him from his narrow bachelor bed: “Or some young lady…”

And next to the monks is Nancy (Rita Tushingham), flicking through the pages of Honey.

But Tolen has other ideas. He suggests letting the room to his friend, Rory McBride, offscreen Lothario and Tolen’s near-equal in the bedroom stakes. “Share our women.”

Rendering discussion moot, Tom, a stray Irish plot function, (”small, vigorous, balanced, sensitive in his movements” — a line of dialogue taken straight from the character description in Ann Jellicoe’s original play) moves in and procedes to paint the entire front room white, including windows.

Now Tolen (black), Colin (grey grey grey) and Tom (white) will compete over Nancy, until she rebels and asserts her autonomy with a cry of “Rape!”

This turns out to be the abracadabra that disassembles all male authority, causing the boys to recede into the distance in a series of jumpcuts, or cavort off in reverse motion, while a middle-aged ZOO AUDIENCE admires their antics politely. (Best line reading in history, from one random matron: “They do look so funny.”)

This chorus of the middle-aged/classed is a constant feature of the film, as if the chattering classes have flocked into the dubbing studio and voiced their incoherent disapproval all over the soundtrack: “A bed’s place is definitely in the home, definitely,” and “I’m bound,” and “Mods and Rockers!” and “She’ll regret she didn’t wear a safety device,” a grumbling barrage of non sequiteurs and double entendres, “the heartbeat of a great nation.” This vox populi accompaniment is screenwriter Charles Wood’s finest contribution of the many he made in “exploding” the original play and gaffer-taping it together again.

These actors!

Michael Crawford, half agonized repressive, half comedy turn. His character is just a couple of year’s enforced celibacy away from becoming a gurning Carry On lecher, but he’s so shy he prefers to enter his home by the window rather than say “Excuse me,” to the flash bird in the doorway, even though he’s armed with an axe at the time.

Ray Brooks is amazing here. Posed and composed and quietly nailing every line, he could have come across as mannered if he weren’t so true underneath. There’s a real sensitivity in everything he does. He’s not obvious casting as a loverboy, but he embodies confidence and success and total self-belief, until the sexual edifice crumbles and he’s yesterday’s man, joining the grumblers as he looks on enviously at those with actual relationships. Brooks should have been bigger than Brando, but hey, it’s not too late.

Donal Donnelly brings charm and a sort of relaxed crispness to Tom, a character who was always basically the playwright talking to her audience, but none the worse for it.

Rita Tushingham is the amazing extraterrestrial presence at the heart of the film, incapable of a false note, and utterly fascinating to watch. Her face pulls a fast one on you from every angle, alternately beautiful and just weird. Her eyes dazzle, her teeth have been frozen in the act of fleeing in all directions. She is just utterly, marvellously alive at all times, and brings a uniquely feminine brand of behavioural comedy to what could be a slightly laddish film. Lester and ace cinematographer David Watkin design some astonishing shots around her freakish beauty. Reflected light supposedly isn’t flattering, but Watkin caught the most beautiful ever images of Tushingham, here, and Faye Dunaway in Lester’s MUSKETEER films.

Lester was still tracking in those days — he ditched the travelling shot later, using it less than anyone bar Bresson, but this is like his RASHOMON, and we glide with him through reality-shifts, into ambiguous POVs, and down grey and grainy London streets, where a fashion photographer plies his trade, getting in shape for BLOW UP. (Antonioni borrowed production designer Assheton Gorton, and quite a lot of Lester’s Pop-Art London, for his later epic of Swinging Existentialism).

Impossible to describe how dreamlike this film is…

…as Crawford walks down a school corridor, we see through a window an array of camp beds on a lawn — the sleeping children. “Kip, milk and biscuits, is it any wonder they’re screaming out for roughage?” complains the ghost of Dandy Nichols on the soundtrack.

…Colin and Tom chase Tolen and Nancy into a street composed only of doors. Most open onto an abstracted backyard space, but one leads to a narrow working class home, concealed entirely behind the single entrance.

…attempting to turbocharge his sex life with an enlarged bed, Colin buys a cast-iron sleep-armature from a scrapyard and wheels it through Unconscious London with Tom and Nancy, teleporting from street to street to Usher Hall (a recurring reference, this film’s answer to the Chinatown of Polanski), eventually sailing it down the Thames like Bohemian Huck Finns.

Lindsay Anderson was once mooted to direct this film, and comparing it to THE WHITE BUS, say, it’s easy to see how he could have brought his own, more sombre, brand of absurdism to bear on it. He thought the Lester version embodied the shift from sixties idealism to seventies cynicism, which seems a bit early and a bit harsh. The movie is affectionate, cruel, smart, silly, insistently specific about its time and place, and universal and otherworldly all at once. There’s a tight theatrical structure bound round a loose assortment of gags and blackout sketches, and if we enter this Film London (through that little comic book panel/window at the start) and walk about in it for a bit, we can emerge with some Strange Thoughts about the unexplored possibilities of film storytelling.