So, I was walking along the first floor of the Ocean Terminal mall (not a huge, DAWN OF THE DEAD type mall, but a British mini-mall, or mall-ette, if you will) which looks like so:
You can just see the sort-of-bridge that crosses the central expanse at the back, right? Well, as I walked under that, I looked up and saw three identical boys, about nine, identically dressed, resting their arms on the hand rail. They looked a bit like the banjo-boy in DELIVERANCE who appears on a bridge as a portentous warning of the carnage and anal malfeasance to come. They also looked like the three wise monkeys, just after the picture was taken.
WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN???
If they had appeared before we went to see FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL we could have taken it as a warning and spent the afternoon doing something else. It’s not a terrible film, but there seems to reason to see it on a screen larger than the smallest person in it.
It’s sort of like having somebody riffle a flickbook of Hawaiian postcards at you while playing nice tunes (Dot Allison!) and telling you a few decent jokes. Enjoyable, but not exactly CINEMA.
Here is a more interesting bit of Edinburgh:
That’s the beauty of this city, you get old and new nestling alongside each other, like ebony and ivory on the keyboard of some colossal stone piano full of drunks. Yet despite all this, the city is desperately under-represented on film.
That’s what Dundee is REALLY LIKE, even today. Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about –
Joseph McGrath’s THE GREAT MCGONAGALL, starring and co-written with Spike Milligan, is out on DVD, complete with its original censor’s certificate, signed by Lord Harlech and the ill-fated Stephen Murphy, whose stint as secretary did not long survive his passing of STRAW DOGS, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, THE DEVILS, CLOCKWORK ORANGE…
That’s what I call a DVD extra! Which is good, since it’s all you get on this disc.
I remember discussing this movie online with David Ehrenstein, a fan of the film, and complaining that the revolutionary multi-camera system used by McGrath, MultiVista*, rendered the image muddy and unreadable. He said it didn’t.
He’s right! The DVD clears up the old VHS’ image problems somewhat, giving us a pin-sharp picture of what proves to be the real problem: a very underlit film.
The guy on the right is in black-face (a favourite, rather queasy, comic device of Milligan’s) but it really just looks like he’s in heavy shadow, because he IS in heavy shadow. During one musical number, it takes ages to realise that the singer is blacked up, and then we assume his chorus girls (including, I think, ROCKY HORROR’s Little Nell) are likewise daubed, since they’re the same hue. Only when they crowd into the spotlight do we realise they aren’t. Sometimes entire scenes look like minstrel shows. A genuine black actor (Clifton Jones, a militant leader in Godard’s ONE PLUS ONE) strains to make any impression on the emulsion, except when whited up as an Edinburgh Gentleman. Despite the low budget and numerous deliberate anachronisms, the film has a curiously strong Victorian feel, and maybe the engulfing shadows help slightly…
Quite a lot of Milligan’s performance is lost to the world due to strange lighting decisions that cause his eyes and lower face to disappear into the gloom. Being a product of Britain in the ’70s, TGM is shot not only in MultiVista but also in Brownoscope, the miracle of colour processing that aimed to fully exploit the varied properties of the colour brown. Indeed, Brownoscopy sought to elevate brown from a mere colour to being a full-fledged artistic medium in its own right. Had the pioneers involved succeeded in taking their invention to its highest level, celluloid itself would have been displaced as a recording device, and films as we know them today would have been rendered wholly from brownness itself. This film is perhaps the closest Brownoscope’s creators came to realising their awful, beautiful dream.
The presence of white on the set just confuses the cinematographer — he stops way down to avoid any risk of glare. Never mind if most of the leading man’s head disappears into the wall. When a film is devoid of colour, the lighting must separate out the planes of action to allow us to read the image. John Mackey’s work… doesn’t really do that. In a short career, he also shot micro-budget domestic horror film THE CORPSE with Michael Gough, which shares with this film a muddy texture and a creeping low-affect tone of despair. Which is WHAT I LIKE TO SEE, especially in a comedy.
This shot’s just RIDICULOUS — the visible source light behind the characters isn’t giving off even a strong backlight and the faces are lit by damn-all. What light there is hits the backs of their heads.
What’s not apparent from the frame-grabs here is the dubious quality of the sound recording. Shot in an old Music Hall in Whitechapel, the flick must have presented challenges to the recordist — so we get muffled and reverberant dialogue that kills comedy precision at birth and strangles any impression of lightness. At times it feels exactly like a YouTube home video of a school play.
Nevertheless, I think Mr. Ehrenstein is right, this is in fact a LOST COMEDY MASTERPIECE. The editing is very strange but often rather fine and sensitive to performance, and often gives things an added element of surrealism. So many shots and eyelines are mismatched in the opening sequence that the editor works up a sweat with constant cross-cutting in a vain attempt to convince us that all these closeups belong to the same film. He doesn’t quite succeed, but he creates a giddy, concussed mosaic of blinks and stutters.
I put the disc on to confirm my earlier prejudices, and the first 36 minutes slipped by before I could think to pause it — no small feat considering the lack of structured plotting, characterisation, scenic variety, and the often impenetrable sound and picture. The technical shabbiness sometimes helps — many of the jokes misfire, only to ricochet around and hit you from an unexpected angle. There are a lot more laughs of surprise than the cheap jokes comprising the script would lead you to expect. Maybe a bad joke can be funnier if you don’t quite hear it at first, then figure it out after everybody’s moved on and is in the middle of some fresh inanity. This is pretty near the opposite of how good comedy is supposed to work, but it works here (unless I’ve just lost my mind, always a possibility).
The movie fits squarely into a weird and despised tradition of British cinema, where ambitious projects are shoehorned into a theatrical format at a tiny budget — Tony Richardson’s HAMLET, filmed entirely in the London Roundhouse, nearly fits the pattern, but isn’t quite open enough at being set in a theatre. Ken Russell’s SALOME’S LAST DANCE and Jim Sharman and Richard O’Brien’s SHOCK TREATMENT embody the tradition. In a fit of madness, Richard Attenborough’s OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR inflates the concept to Mr. Creosote proportions.
This… thing constantly delivers memorable hallucinatory frames like these. Peter Sellers plays Queen Victoria, kneeling down. Milligan composes a bovine poem, with accompanying imagery. (Whenever Milligan recites, an ineffably beautiful and mournful theme — Tigon films always had gorgeous scores — plays as if automatically, smothering any comedy beneath a plush cushion of melancholia.)
“The chicken is a noble beast
But the cow is much forlorner
Standing in the pouring rain
With a leg at every corner.”
We’re told that all the poetry is genuine stuff, composed by the real William McG, poet and tragedian, who is buried here in the fair city of Edinburgh. Since W.C. Fields passed through this town, pausing to take his first drink of whiskey, it is likely that he heard of McGonagall’s fame and borrowed the name, which phonetically translated becomes The Great McGonigle, protagonist of THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY.
*Briefly, the MultiVista system allowed McGrath to shoot with several cameras at once and edit scenes live, as he filmed them, like a live TV director/vision mixer. The system is also used on that glorious nadir of British “cinema”, NOT NOW DARLING. Watching that one is like swimming in cement with a migraine. And Ray Cooney**.
**After I made him watch a Cooney film, my chum andy Gonzalez said, “I am now physically angry that this man has had a career.”
It’s like being in a bloody war. No, wait, we ARE in a bloody war.
But I meant the way the prominent figures of British films have been keeling over this week. Paul Scofield is the latest one I’m aware of, and I feel like putting on LONDON or ROBINSON IN SPACE to hear his majestic voice again, and because those beautiful Patrick Keillor film-essays are the kind of thing I can drift through in a dreamy cloud of pleasure, bewildered when the film ends and I wake into sluggish reality.
Also today we heard of the decease of Brian Wilde, a fine character actor and comic turn, with a long long track record. Back in in 1957 he played Rand Hobart (no relation to Rose), the crazed devil-worshipping farmer in NIGHT OF THE DEMON for Jacques Tourneur, uttering the classic line “It’s in the trees — it’s coming!” before his memorable self-defenestration (the line is repeated in Kate Bush’s song The Hounds of Love, but revoiced by another actor).
Previous to that, Arthur C Clarke shuffled off, and my blog received about fifty hits from people typing in variations of the query “Arthur C Clarke pederast” due to a casual statement I made in an old Euphoria post. Oops.
The big shock was Anthony Minghella’s too-early death. He wasn’t a filmmaker whose work affected me particularly, but it was tragic to lose him so suddenly and so young. His latest film, THE NO 1. LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY, from a novel by Edinburgh writer Alexander McCall Smith, and photographed by Edinburgh-based ace cameraman Seamus McGarvey (the man with Nicole Kidman’s nose on his mantelpiece, grisly souvenir from THE HOURS) airs on the BBC very shortly.
These are the WRONG PEOPLE. I’m basically opposed to the whole idea of death, though I admit it has its uses: it’s important to know there’s something out there worse than THE COTTAGE, for instance. But if we have to have a bunch of film industry deaths, why can’t it be the people ahead of me in the queue for film funding? Not that I wish them any harm, but if SOMEBODY’S got to go…
(Explanatory note on the title of this post: in Scots vernacular, for some reason, “dead” means the same as “very” — one might say, “That was dead good,” or “He’s dead nice-looking.” Or, presumably, “He’s dead dead.”)
My stairwell is dimly lit by a big skylight, its surface encrusted with aeons of birdshit and whatever garbage the people in the tower block opposite have chucked onto our roof. Seagulls alight on this opaque screen and walk about on it, visible from below only as disembodied sets of webbed feet.
It’s rather like a Disney version of Hitchcock’s THE LODGER.
GARANCE (dreamily): Do you remember, my dear friend, that young Scotsman you provoked to a duel in Edinburgh?
COUNT: Yes, I remember very well — why?
GARANCE: That young man was not nearly as good a shot as you, was he?
COUNT: Of course not! And everybody knew it.
GARANCE: But you killed him all the same.
COUNT: An affair of honour, Garance!
GARANCE: All that, because I smiled at him.
COUNT: Yes, in public, several times.
GARANCE: But I told you that when I was smiling at him I was thinking of someone else.
Screenplay by Jacques Prevert. Directed by Marcel Carné.
I remembered an almost exact repeat of this exchange in Ophüls’ LOLA MONTES, but when I went to look, it WASN’T THERE!
Anybody else have any vanishing movie scenes?
*
Somebody could make a little movie about the Young Scotsman, and then it could be slotted in between the two halves of LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS and played as a sort of entr’acte. It’s the kind of thing David Thomson could write if he wasn’t so TIRED.
Yesterday one of my students, Alex, approached, back from the hols, a scarf wound around his lower face, like Malcolm McDowell in IF… unwrapping it at last to reveal: a New Moustache, like Malcolm McDowell in IF…
As cinematic homages go, this might actually give Todd Haynes a run for his money. I think Alex has effectively already passed the year for that. As long as he doesn’t follow it up by savagely machine-gunning me to death, like Malcolm McDowell in IF…
My head is an incredible jumble! I feel like I have been melted down by the Button Moulder.
I start lecturing again tomorrow (and we’ll see how I keep this blog going once THAT happens) so I started preparing my first lecture, on Jack Clayton. I love THE INNOCENTS especially and THE PUMPKIN EATER and am pretty wild about most of the others, and I’ve never done a talk about him so it seemed like fun. I was looking at THE GREAT GATSBY (featuring the infant Absolute Beginner Patsy Kensit) again, trying to choose extracts, and I got sucked into it and suddenly realised I’d better stop and go and see I’M NOT THERE, as had been my plan for the day.
Off to the Cameo!* This is a legendary Edinburgh art-house/fleapit. My parents saw THE RUNNING JUMPING STANDING STILL FILM along with THE SEVEN SAMURAI here (an unlikely pairing). It used to be run by a wild entrepreneur and showman called Jim Poole, who would turn the heating up for desert films, and other feats of William Castle-style Sensurround legerdemain. Yet I can’t see any obvious reason why, for this film, the auditorium was freezing cold and smelled of wee. These sensations disappeared as the film began though, returning with renewed intensity as the end credits rolled (to the sound of “Like a Rolling Stone”) and I realised I’d been in a state of sensory suspension for the whole film, absorbing only what the film’s makers delivered to me through my ears and eyes.
I don’t feel equal to delivering any kind of useful thoughts on this film just yet, which is a Phantasmagoric Cavort through various aspects of Bob Dylan’s life and art, because a) it’s pretty complex and b) I don’t know much about Dylan and c) I have managed to amplify the rather weird state the film induced in me by way of artistic overload:
On the bus home, I had the gated drums of Siouxie and the Banshee’s Peekaboo and the lovely Charlotte Gainsbourg singing to me on my Nano, while I read a little memoir by Ralph Richardson (favourite role: Peer Gynt) and the illuminations of the Balmoral Hotel and Edinburgh Castle glowed, and I thanked my lucky stars again for living in the city where W.C. Fields first tasted whiskey.
Then home, lighting a fire and finishing off THE GREAT GATSBY, which has marvellous people and moments, even if it doesn’t entirely grip. Fitzgerald is referenced in Haynes’ film, but I thought on the whole that SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, a marvellous film made by Clayton and partially unmade by the suits at Disneycorps, is closer to Haynes’ film, which has a definite flavour of the Fellini-esque about it. EIGHT AND A HALF is the big stylistic cue for the Cate Blanchett scenes, but then this circus flavour invades the Richard Gere sequence, supplanting most traces of Peckinpah (though the presence of Kris Kristofferson as narrator provides another reminder of PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID). I guess the blend of Americana and the carnivalesque is what brought Clayton’s film to mind.
You can probably expect more on the neglected Clayton, and hopefully some more ordered thoughts on Haynes’ film, which I kind of loved, soon. Or soon-ish.
ONE thought: Cate Blanchett has rightly had much favourable attention for her work here, but I think she has an advantage over her co-stars because drag is pretty well always interesting. Not that she isn’t remarkable. But I want to say that Marcus Carl Franklin as “Woodie Guthrie” is also a true Star — when he’s on it’s like someone pierced the celluloid and let a VERY BRIGHT LIGHT shine through.
*One very nice thing about this picture house is that there’s generally one of my students or ex-students working there. This time it was Clair. Hello, if you’re reading this!
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.
My partner Fiona and I were extremely lucky, a few weeks back, to have a pint with John Harrison, who was gearing up to direct an adaptation of Clive Barker’s THE BOOKS OF BLOOD (or one story from that collection, anyway) here in my native Edinburgh.
Putting aside all thoughts of “The SWINE! It should have been ME!” I settled down to my Guinness Extra Cold and found J.H. to be a very affable and interesting sort of chap indeed. I haven’t heard yet if his film has the final go-ahead, but I wish it the best.
Interesting stuff: John talked about his mentor, the literally towering George A. Romero, and how funding had been secured for G.A.R.’s latest zombiefest, DIARY OF THE DEAD, from an unusual source, the private fortunes of a sneaker heir. I think it was Reebok. The training shoe descendant asked how much a film would cost, they told him $20 million, he hemmed and hawed and said he didn’t think he could afford that, so they resourcefully suggested $2 million, and he consented. Fiona asked John if they’d had to product place sneakers on their zombie.
“We didn’t have to, but if we’d had to, WE WOULD HAVE.”
John, it turns out, in addition to scoring DAY OF THE DEAD and directing CREEPSHOW II, played the part of the zombie in DAWN OF who gets a screwdriver embedded in his lughole (censored in the U.K.). Fiona shook his hand. I texted my friend Sam Dale:
i just had a drink w the zombie who gets screwdrivered in dawn ot dead
He texted back:
r u at some kind of horror convention or r u just THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD?
I guess it’s the latter.
John directed the TV miniseries of DUNE a few years back, and by strange chance I was at one point planning to work with both the stars of that. Alec Newman, a fellow Scot, who played Paul Atreides, had a nice story about working with Vittorio Storaro (pictured).
‘He asked me, “Can you walka downa thees corridor diagonal to the light, so a-halfa you face ees een shadow, a-halfa een the light?”
‘I said, “I dunno, Vittorio, it doesn’t seem very natural.”
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).
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FILM, Mythology | Tagged: Dawn of the Dead, Deliverance, Edinburgh, Forgetting Sarah Marshall | 
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Posted by dcairns
