Notice is given –

– that this is

JOSEPH LOSEY

WEEK –

– at Shadowplay.

In fact, it’s Joseph Losey Week all over the whole internet, though naturally we’re keeping it quiet and low-key. This is the only site that’s doing it OVERTLY.

We hope you enjoy!

Big Bad Night

Christopher Weedman is possibly the world expert on actor Donald Pleasence — he certainly has an unbeatable enthusiasm for that fine thespian’s work. For years he’s supplied me with fine quality movies from the US, until my shelving groans and warps beneath the accumulated weight.

In exchange I’ve been able to supply him with a few oddities, including a rare Pleasence TV interview, and the novelty Public Information Film LONELY WATER, narrated by the Great Pleasence, which so traumatised millions of kids around my age in the UK back in the ’70s. Warning: This Film Will Shit You Up Big Style.

Although intended as a gentle warning to schoolkids, and screened amid children’s programming, the short’s more natural home would be as support to Nic Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW… (Which would make an ideal “See Venice and Die” Fever Dream Double Feature with Schrader’s THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS.)

Anyhow, through a strange turn of events, I acquired a copy of Joseph Losey’s M (thanks, Brandon!) just as Chris was preparing to write something about Losey, and so another trade was swiftly consummated — David Ehrenstein and Dan Sallitt had both been commending THE BIG NIGHT as one of Losey’s very best US films, and Chris was able to send me a copy.

It more than lives up to the praise.

Losey’s films, to which I am only just becoming acclimatized, seem to fall into two camps: some are weird, disjointed, tonally or structurally peculiar — fascinating for their weaknesses as much of their strengths. His failures (a personal selection: BOOM!; MODESTY BLAISE; THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR; SECRET CEREMONY; THESE ARE THE DAMNED) are more fascinating than many filmmakers’ successes. The other films are maybe still strange, but so thematically and structurally tight and well-organised, that their weirdness passes by as the most natural thing in the world. The theatrical dialogue and pacing of KING AND COUNTRY, and its tiny set, and Reginald Mill’s dislocated cutting, which drops odd inserts of pre-war life into the trenches, are part of a concept so unified and well thought-through that nothing can be questioned. The Pinter-scripted films are certainly peculiar, but the strangeness feels wholly necessary. THE PROWLER unfolds with the urgency and predestined horror of a bad dream.

THE BIG NIGHT is deeply strange, in a way that’s hard to pin down but seems very forcefully present, unavoidable. John Barrymore Jnr. plays a teenager seeking to avenge his father, who has been publicly beaten and humiliated by Al Judge, crippled sports writer. The film follows the boy through a long, long night, as he tries to track down the celebrity and confront him, seemingly with no definite plan of what to do when they meet — though he’s brought a gun along.

Complicating matters is Barrymore’s emotionally distant relationship with his father — he loves him but can’t communicate with him. Who is he avenging? Is this whole scheme just an attempt to get his father’s attention? This is very much a film about dads — JB Jnr. lived very much in the shadow of his famous father, and resembles John Barrymore caught in the act of morphing into Drew Barrymore. The fact that putative villain Al Judge is a sports writer, like uncredited screenwriter Ring Lardner Jnr’s famous dad, and the fact that the actor playing him (Howard St. John, beautifully repulsive) closely resembles Losey, and therefore perhaps Losey’s father, is all pretty fascinating.

The film positively invites one of those dull Freudian readings — bad father usurps the place of good father, and son must destroy him in order to become a man. It’s very much like the arc of Lynch’s BLUE VELVET, which author JG Ballard has subjected to a rigidly psychoanalytic reading, complete with primal scene (”Mommy loves you!”), but while the reading may be valid, and in Losey’s case quite possibly intended, to reduce the film solely to this schematic is to do it a disservice. Whatever the value of dream analysis, to translate a nightmare into symbols and archetypes is to rob it of much of its resonance and terror.

One of the odd thrills of the film is the strange way Al Judge is presented. Surrounded by goons and hangers-on (including the magnificently depraved Emile Meyer (from SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS — “C’m'ere, I wanna chastise ya!”) and regarded with fear and awe by everybody from cops to stationers (yes, even the stationers fear him!), he should be rights be a gang lord, not a sports writer. The film’s vision of the sports writer as all-powerful demi-god seems strange to me, rather like regarding The Guardian’s football columnist Russell Brand as Satan. Actually, maybe not so odd.

Howard St John gives the performance of the film, and of his life-time, a seething portrait of wickedness which surprises just because it’s so unconnected to his perfectly plausible psychological motivation. Judge, whose name comes to feel symbolic, but not in a CLEAR way, is awful out of all proportion to his situation, just as he’s powerful out of all proportion to his role in society. The journey to face him is frightening and suspenseful in part because we already have an idea how bad he is, and it pays off dramatically when he proves himself even worse than we suspected.

And when the villain turns out to have a pretty strong motivation for his foul act, yet still acts like a depraved sleazoid, we’re in Lynch territory again — some people are just EVIL. While the rich and powerful turning out to be corrupt and vicious seems understandable in a film made by left-wingers, the pervading sense of cruelty and viciousness in the film lacks any obvious motivation. We first meet the Great Profile Jnr. being bullied by other kids, and the barflies in his father’s joint seem like rubberneckers at an accident during and after the beating, and the news quickly spreads to the stationer’s next door, where one weedy customer clearly regards it as a Big Joke. Cops are corrupt and the only intellectual is a weak and unreliable drunkard.

Adding to the oddness is the shoehorning of other issues into the narrative, with singer Mauri Lynn as The Tragedy of Race in America. Her role comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, but allows for a beautiful scene, and if it doesn’t really belong I can’t fault the filmmakers for wanting to raise the issue — certainly nobody was going to invite Losey and Lardner to make a whole film about the subject.

There’s Dorothy Comingore, too, soon to vanish from the screen as the McCarthy era began in earnest. Directors and writers could more easily work abroad and under pseudonyms (Losey’s included Andrea Forzano, Terence Hanbury, Joseph Walton), but film actors, whose faces were their fortunes, could be totally eradicated by blacklisting, especially if they lacked experience in theatre. Comingore’s gentle yet somewhat bitter performance here, far more modulated than her similar drunken good-time gal in CITIZEN KANE, is a sad reminder of the kind of talent the film industry squandered.

The movie isn’t your typical noir – the teen hero differentiates it at once, and Losey’s sympathy for the young man straining towards adulthood connects him to his fellow Wisconsonite Nick Ray and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE — both films are unusual 50s stories for the seriousness and sympathy they apply to the problems of the young. Losey’s own fatherly concern for Barrymore was grotesquely betrayed when JB confessed, much later, to having followed Losey around, reporting to the F.B.I. on any suspiciously commie activities.

In his leading role here, John Drew Barrymore’s not exactly charismatic — he’s not his father or even his daughter — but he starts to exert a curious counter-charismatic appeal. He’s authentically awkward and self-conscious. The performance seems to mature as the character does. He ultimately seems more affecting and honest than a more slick or handsome boy might have been. And his very unsuitability for leading man status is appropriate to a film as off-centre, unglamorous and unpredictable as this.

The “Wow!” murders

“Which magazines sell the most?”

“The ones with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.”

Dialogue from PEEPING TOM. 

COVER GIRL KILLER feels like it’s morally boundto be salacious and pervy and horrible – a serial killer is murdering the cover girls of Wow! Magazine and posing their corpses to match the glamour shots depicted — and yet, the film feels oddly chaste and benevolent.

By rights, the movie ought also to be bizarre and ludicrous: the killer wears as disguise a greasy toupee, pebble glasses, and a “dirty mac”, and he’s played by future sitcom star Harry H Corbett (years of Steptoe and Son still some years off).

And yet, the film isn’t terribly tawdry, nor particularly absurd. Corbett was, in his youth, though of as some kind of British Brando (you can still see signs of this ambition in the more tragic moments of Steptoe) and he’s quietly compelling in the role.

Produced and directed by the ecclesiastical-sounding pair of Parsons and Bishop, the film is light on smut, but lucidly told, apart from the hurried climax. Somebody’s been looking at Lang’s ”M”, which means that scenes segue into each other with several deft linking devices: a question asked in Scene 1 is answered in Scene 2, and so forth. The movie also boasts the beginnings of a libertarian argument — the killer is an insane Festival of Light type anti-porn campaigner hoping to drive lustful images from our streets; the police are rather useless, the heroine is a showgirl; and the hero… here’s where it gets odd. Spencer Teakle (great leading man name!) plays John Mason, an archaeologist who’s found himself in the skin trade after inheriting Wow! Magazine from a father who believed he was too unworldly.

(Every time anybody talks about Wow!, the giggle-factor rises a wee bit.)

Teakle decides to cover the murder case in the magazine itself, a weird kind of self-reflexive sleaze-journalism. “You readers will have to learn to read,” his girlfriend advises him. The academic/pornographer not only does most of the detective work, he allows his girlfriend to lure the killer into a trap, then springs the trap himself when Scotland Yard screws up again. As he walks off arm in arm with his fishnet-stockinged paramour, one longs for a whole season of films about this character: JOHN MASON, PORNOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATOR.

(Suggested Fever Dream Double Feature with: PEEPING TOM. It seems there were TWO smut-business snuff artists stalking Soho in 1959.)

SingAlongaLang

 

Results are IN for our strange and misconceived Fritz Lang songwriting competition!

We have three terrific runners-up. Regular Shadowplayer Alex Livingston weighed in with an introduction from Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in M: THE MUSICAL:

‘I have to kill children to silence the voices,
they demand and demand and they leave me no choices.

‘So I spend all my money on balloonses and toyses.
To entice small children (girlses or boyses),

‘In their school uniforms, or best Sunday cardigans,
Down lonely dark alleys, to deserted backyard-igans.

‘The urges are boilers and the voices have stoked ‘em,
“I’d shout “run!” to the child, but I’ve already choked ‘em.’

When you see it put like that, the idea of a musical M comes to seem… worryingly plausible.

“Mammy!”

Star film-supplier Brandon (sorry, don’t know your last name) offered this short but sweet song for Edward G Robinson (and why has it taken this long for him to have one?)

‘Pursued by greedy men without inhibitions,
Hemmed in by geometric compositions,
Framed by bad paintings and women in windows,
At least my career’s better than Delroy Lindo’s.’

Funny, atmospheric, and above all TRUE.

Darryl McCarthy chimed in with an honorable entry, channelling the fugitive consciousness of Phil Spector to bring us THIS:

‘M’s so fine,
Doo-Lang, doo-Lang, doo-Lang,
M’s so fine,
Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang,
That handsome boy over there,
Doo-Lang, doo-Lang, doo-Lang,
The one with the wavy hair,
Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang,
etc etc
(sorry Chiffons, sorry everyone).

No need for apologies! The appropriateness of borrowing from a songwriter who’s actually been accused of murdering a film star seems unassailable.

Honorable mentions go to Mr. Lyrics himself, David Ehrenstein, for his many apt quotations (I especially enjoyed reading Nat King Cole’s song from THE BLUE GARDENIA — easy to forget the fever-dream collaboration of Cole and Lang!) and to the shadowy Comrade K for this evocative title: 

‘Here’s one for a musical SECRET BEHIND THE DOOR: “There’s a Room In My Heart (where your body lies bleeding)”‘

All of the above will receive a specially selected film of their dreams. How this will be done remains to be seen. But the overall winner has to be actual singing music-person Daniel Prendiville for the epic that is ~

THE BALLAD OF CHRISTOPHER CROSS

(with apologies to all concerned)

Well my name is Chris Cross
And I feel at a loss
Been a lowly book-keeper for years
And I wed sweet Adele
Who has made my life hell
And it’s driven me almost to tears

When Johnny hit Kitty
I felt full of pity
So much so I laid him out flat
Then I ran to the cops
Cause I’d busted his chops
But dear Kitty was knocked out at that

I told her I painted
And she nearly fainted
As dollar signs flashed in her eyes
While I fell besotted
With Johnny she plotted
I was too naive to realise

So I got her a flat
With some finances that
I embezzled at night from my boss
There my paintings I stored
Cause Adele had abhorred
My artwork as frivolous dross

Then a dealer came round
And thought he had found
In Kitty an artist supreme
And Adele’s ex appeared
Hadn’t died as she’d feared
It had all been a Dallas-like dream

But then Johnny and Kitty
Behaved intimitty
I saw them and became deranged
So I acted impulsive
Did something repulsive
Now my life will forever be changed…

(c) 2008 Daniel Prendiville

Daniel also wins the film of his dreams. And I look forward to hearing this on his next album. Reward him for this free entertainment by going HERE and buying his music! YOU will be the true winner.

Footnote: both the first MABUSE and METROPOLIS feature erotic dances in elaborate production numbers, where the design is incredibly lavish, but no actual choreography has been worked out. So the girls just kind of SPAZZ OUT, to use a politically incorrect but undeniably evocative phrase. It’s a little odd, since Lang notoriously charted out his actors’ movements in their regular scenes with all the precision of dance numbers.

Babelsberg Psychos Go America

 

A Fever Dream Double Feature.

Following in the mighty footsteps of Christoph Hubert, whose Fever Dream pairings were published hereabouts recently, I present for your delectation and sweaty perusal another brain-bending duo of movies that go together all wrong. I have selected two films, and I call them Film One and Film Two.

(Note the flag attached to David Wayne’s lamp to keep his face in shadow.)

Film One is “M”. Not the celebrated Fritz Lang-Thea Von Harbou 1931 classic, but the generally denigrated Joseph Losey remake from twenty years later. As films maudit go, the don’t come much mauditer than this. While Losey is much admired, mainly for his British films of the ’60s (the blacklist having driven him from Hollywood), his U.S. work is a mixed bunch, much of it rarely screened. The excellent noir THE PROWLER (many noirs tackle the theme of “wrong values,” but none so starkly as this) rubs shoulders with the curio that is THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR, a jejeune anti-war parable that passes the time acceptably just by being very very odd. In this company, the M remake is just one more mis-step in Losey’s shaky Hollywood career arc, but fortunately it’s a bit closer to the intensity of PROWLER than the fey loopiness of GREEN HAIR.

The perennially prissy David Wayne essays the Lorre role, doing well with the hysteria but entirely missing Lorre’s uncanny, bug-eyed froth. The script pads out the predestined devil with some unconvincing dollar book Freud cod psychology.

Losey scores a little better with his cops and crooks — one detective is a virtual fascist, with less respect for the rule of law than the “punks and tinhorns” he yearns to subject to the rubber hose treatment. Luther Adler plays an alcoholic mob lawyer (called Langley in presumed homage, though old Fritz didn’t appreciate the gesture, turning up to single-handedly picket the premiere). This figure’s presence helps set up the kangaroo court more plausibly, but he’s an annoying character wrapped around an annoying performance (dialogue scribe Waldo Salt may have to shoulder some blame here. Salt, later blacklisted himself, made a glorious comeback as writer of MIDNIGHT COWBOY in the ’70s, but his work here is mostly on a Dick Tracy level, with a few corny left-wing pretensions). The rogues’ gallery gets livelier around the intense, ferret-eyed Martin Gabel (also director of one movie, the terrific THE LOST MOMENT, a labyrinth of sinuous camera moves with a centenarian Agnes Moorehead at its heart) and his henchmen: Raymond Burr, more hench than man, doing a gravelly voice like Putney Swope; Glenn Anders, not as soapy as in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (”Just doing a little taaaaarrrget practice,”) but sort of CHUNKIER; and Norman Lloyd, always always always a reliably sneaky face to fill out a frame.

But this “M” has its greatest success in the use of locations. Losey makes fine use of Bunker Hill and outstanding use of the Bradbury Building. Best known now as the site of BLADE RUNNER’s climax, this striking construction came to its architect in a dream, and Losey captures both the sharpness and the illogic of nightmare in the clamorous conflict he stages there. Each angle provides a bizarre and startling new perspective to affront the eyes and make giddy the mind.

And Losey’s eerie mannequin warehouse is better than Kubrick’s eerie mannequin warehouse in KILLER’S KISS. In moments like this one can feel that Lang’s cautionary horror tale has found a new home in the city of angels.

Film Two is DR. CALIGARI, another U.S. remake of a German classic, this one directed by Stephen Sayadian, (A.K.A. Rinse Dream / François Délia / Sidney Falco / F.X. Pope / Ladi von Jansky) maker of the cult sci-fi porno CAFE FLESH, which I’d previously seen and failed to admire.

This struck me as much better! Sayadian, whose speciality is production design, crafts a low-budget expressionist world and stages a sort of Cartoon Network VIDEODROME ballet in it. Everything is over-stylised to the point of panic-attack claustrophobia, the movements are choreographed and the blocking avoids standard continuity and settles for a snappy succession of ruthlessly composed tableaux, shuffled like smutty playing cards in the hands of a stoned dealer. Imagery tends to the nauseating (weeping sores) and peculiar (a wall with a giant mouth) rather than the sexy, but most effective porn is totally boring as art anyway. Sayadian is probably more interested in arousing the pineal gland or something weird like that.

See this thing! It’ll make you feel weird, which you ought to enjoy if you like reading this stuff. In addition to the purely visual pleasures (and the retro fun of the ’80s synth-score), Sayadian makes the best use of porno-style acting I’ve ever seen, creating an expressionistically oneiric B-movie vibe out of his performers’ limitations, reminiscent in its delirium of Ed Wood’s avant-garde trash aesthetic.

Madeleine Reynal, with clipped Mittel-European delivery, essays the role of Caligari’s grand-daughter, following in her “grrandvasser’s vootschteps,” as the late Kenneth Mars might put it, while Laura Albert brings agreeably mannered body language, and an agreeably mannered body, to the role of science project Mrs. Van Outen. Albert slices through the film, nipples primed to at any instant pierce some unsuspecting fellow thespian and pump them full of silicone. It’s not surprising to learn that when she’s not playing characters with “names” like “Bambi” and “Strip Joint Girl” and “Whipped Cream Girl” (in the TV show Dream On — some may remember this) L.A. is a stunt artist: she has a robust physicality to her and in a way this whole performance — nay, this whole film — is a death-defying piece of stunt art.

If you see Losey’s “M”, I hope it’s the same copy I have — a glitchy AVI file of a fuzzy DVD of a chewed-up VHS of a ropey telecine of a speckly print — because you get the surreal impression that the ’50s remake is older than the ’30s original.

If you see DR. CALIGARI… say hi.

I’m quite staggeringly indebted to Shadowplayer Brandon  for providing these movies, after I mentioned having never seen the J-Lo “M”. I should mention right now that I am in no way averse to FREE STUFF. If you stay alert you may catch me dropping the occasional hint, such as “I’ve never seen this film,” which you may all take as your cue to offer me complimentary bootlegs. I promise I won’t mind.

For Auld Lang Syne

A film so obscure, THIS is the best image I could find: 

 

My old chum Christopher Weedman just reminded me about Joseph Losey’s remake of Fritz Lang’s “M”, a film maudit (cursed film) if there ever was one. Since we all love a film maudit here at Shadowplay, I have to say I’d be fascinated to see it sometime.

It’s easy to see why the film’s reputation is not high – right-thinking people were aghast at the idea of Hollywood tampering with a classic film. Also, Lang himself denounced the remake as theft — he claimed papers had been lost which proved that the original film was still in copyright, so that an unauthorized version should be illegal. In addition, David Wayne, a perfectly good actor, seems in principle an inadequate substitute for the truly extraordinary Peter Lorre. But Joe Losey was a major talent, whose reputation had not yet risen to the level of his abilities, and I think there’s a strong chance that if one could lay aside all comparisons, the Losey film might stand up as an interesting work in its own right. The IDEA of a remake was cheesy, but the film itself need not be.

Lang actually had quite a lot to do with remakes — two of his Hollywood flicks, SCARLET STREET and HUMAN DESIRE, derive from Renoir originals, LA CHIENNE and LA BETE HUMAINE. In addition to the “M” retread, several of Lang’s German classics have been remade, and Lang himself directed a sound-and-colour version of the two-part INDIAN TOMB epic which he had originally hoped to direct in the ’20s before Joe May took over the project.

During this second German period at the end of Lang’s career, producer Arthur Brauner mooted remakes of METROPOLIS and DER MUDE TOD, the latter as a musical (!) but Lang resisted.

But after Lang resurrected the Dr. Mabuse franchise with THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE in 1960, his second Mabuse, THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE was remade by Brauner, using Lang’s cast from 1000 EYES. These Mabuse sequels and remakes have an enjoyable pop-art B-movie zing to them, but totally lose out on the darker, allegorical and political aspects of Lang’s crime-conspiracy-espionage sagas.

Also proposed to Lang at this time was a remake of DIE NIBELUNGEN. But the director saw insurmountable difficulties with such a project — the money wasn’t available to make the film as gigantic as the silent version, and then there was the issue of TALK.

“The first difficulty was: How to make the Nibelungs speak? You can’t say, ‘Hello, Kriemhild.’ Neither can you say, ‘O, noble knight,’” complained the maestro.

It’s very much the same objection as Howard Hawks’ famous, “I don’t know how a Pharaoh speaks.” Writers tend to struggle to find an idiom which can be neutral enough to work in an ancient period, without becoming completely colourless and flat.

Nevertheless, DIE NIBELUNGEN was remade by Brauner, with Harald Reinl directing. Reinl had already helmed several Mabuse sequels, and had shown himself to be pacy and able, though hardly a Fritz. The remakes sound rather intriguing: future spaghetti western hero Mario Girotti/Terence Hill turns up, as does Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru (Herbert Lom to you) as Attila the Hun, and Reinl’s wife, Bond girl Karin Dor, adds fresh sexiness to the role of Brunhild. Hanna Ralph in the original is impressively feisty, but she doesn’t have Dor’s exotic glamour.*

I’m sure Reinl’s NIBELUNGEN films are ludicrous (the DVD packaging suggests as much) but I bet they’re fun. Probably best to see the Langs first… those hover right on the brink of ludicrosity, but if you can keep your sense of humour in check, they’re a toboggan-ride into the abyss, which is quite a thing to experience.

 

This period of German cinema is only just starting to get some attention. Popular in their day with German audiences, the remakes of old German classics and the Edgar Wallace-adapted krimi films have long been dismissed as kitsch und klatsch, and the New German Cinema auteurs presented themselves as the first filmmakers since pre-war days to make authentic films with meaning and a connection to the world.

Which is a sort-of justifiable claim. I wouldn’t hold up Harald Reinl as being equal to the best of Fassbinder or Wenders or Herzog or whoever. His work is in a different register altogether. But I don’t think it’s without value.

*Gee, maybe Reinl shouldn’t have divorced K.D. His next wife SHOT HIM DEAD.

X and M

The daily NIBELUNGEN.

In Lang’s SIEGFRIED, Kriemhild is tricked into revealing the location of the one vulnerable spot on her husband’s body, his shoulder. She even marks the spot with an X sewn into his top.

This “mark of Cain” leads directly to Siegfried’s downfall.

Seven years later, and the mark is back, only now it’s an M.

Same shoulder!

Both films written by Germany’s top screenwriter, Mrs. Lang, Thea Von Harbou. So the central gimmick of “M” must have occurred to her after her work adapting the German myth cycle.

More on this crazy bitch later.

“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.

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