In ST KILDA BRITAIN’S LONELIEST ISLE (1923-28) appears as an extra on the excellent BFI disc of Michael Powell’s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD. I happened to look at it as I was revisiting Powell’s follow-up film, RETURN TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (1978), in order to write an entry on it for an academic publication, Directory of World Cinema: Scotland. I don’t know if my piece strikes the correct academic tone: I have lines about octogenarian actor John Laurie’s eyes darting about in his skull like mad spies.
Still, the little travelogue/documentary on ST KILDA, the real island that inspired Powell’s movie, is a treat. I was particularly intrigued by an item at the end suggesting that the film crew projected the islanders’ first movie show — this was apparently in 1923, and is confirmed by news reports at the time which indicated that a shot of a steam train caused the audience to stampede from the hall, Lumiere-fashion. It’s always the same story: you can show them movies, by all means, but don’t show them movies of steam trains. You have to work up to that stuff.
Scottish children are baffled by the inert projector. I’m baffled too — why is it labelled “The Brunette”?
The director had hiccups. A really bad case — they lasted days. It was a real problem because he might hiccup at any point, during a take, and ruin the sound. It became a running joke — the production hiccups.
Then one day he didn’t come in to the studio. He was dead. Apparently hiccups can be a sign of an approaching heart attack. Who knew?
With Seth Holt out of the picture, the picture was finished by the talentless Michael Carreras, the man who destroyed Hammer films with his terrible ideas and equally terrible ambitions to write, direct, produce, none of which he had the slightest knowledge of or capacity for. But BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB is still a pretty interesting show.
It’s got Andrew Keir, the best film Quatermass, and James Villiers, and George “I was in CITIZEN KANE and now this” Coulouris, Aubrey Morris (Yay! P.R. Deltoid!) and Valerie Leon, known in the UK as the Hi Karate Woman. A fine actress with enormous juicy breasts.
The musique concrete is by Tristram Carey, who also scored THE LADYKILLERS, which Holt produced. He’s one of the very few filmmakers who worked at Ealing and Hammer, and he must have liked the dysfunctional family atmosphere — he might have fitted well into the BBC. Holt’s wife said that he and director Sandy Mackendrick should never have worked together, since rather than anchoring one another and compensating for their excesses, they hyped each other into a frenzy and made everything twice as crazy as it needed to be. Which is perhaps why THE LADYKILLERS is such a brilliantly extreme film. (Say, I’m writing a book about it, aren’t I?)
Kenneth Tynan wrote NOWHERE TO GO, consciously intended as the last Ealing picture (perhaps a good film to watch for this Blogathon!), a dark thriller which Holt served up with bracing savagery. TASTE OF FEAR, aka SCREAM OF FEAR, was Hammer’s best DIABOLIQUES knock-off, with the corpse sitting calmly at the bottom of the swimming pool destined to traumatize a young Tom Hanks when his mother, in a confused state, led him into the wrong cinema. Not BAMBI at all.
Holt’s best movie is surely THE NANNY, with a powerful and relatively controlled performance from Bette Davis, great work from the child actors, and a really gripping use of interior space — shot by Harry Waxman, who was always at his best in black and white (cf BRIGHTON ROCK). Davis described Holt as “a mountain of evil” or something, somewhat to the bafflement
Late Hammer films are typically portraits of the disintegration of a stolid but efficient studio organisation, derailed by monumentally clueless management. TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER is actually really good, but the powers that be cut off the whole climax, leaving Christopher Lee and Satan apparently vanquished by a small pebble hurled at the Great Man’s dome by Richard Widmark. This one manages to hold back on the nudity apart from a couple of modest, not-too-distracting instances, and balances creepiness with camp in an unusual way. The asylum scene, with the maniacal flurry of canted angles and ludicrous toy cobra, was actually helmed by Carreras and it may be the only good thing he ever did — I’m inclined to credit Holt’s shooting plan or DoP Arthur Grant, who’d begun in quota quickies with Michael Powell and had worked at Hammer throughout their glory years –
I HAD intended to see Soderbergh’s HAYWIRE after enjoying the trailer, but as you can see, it took me a while.
I liked the premise of a film based around a female action star who can really do most of the stuff the script shows her doing — it seemed that HAYWIRE was the movie that would do for kicking people in the face what THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE did for soulless sexual encounters. And that, surely, can’t be bad?
Gina Carano, Soderbergh’s discovery — “a natural beauty who beats people to a pulp in a cage” — is worth it. She can act, and indeed in the conversation scenes she seems wondrously natural, her face moving about in a way that the faces of trained thespians, with their screen technique and Botox, rarely do. When you see her in interviews, she seems heftier and more voluble — Soderbergh has slimmed down her look and her mannerisms with careful filming and direction. In the more emotional scenes, he tends to use photogenics in place of histrionics, finding killer looks that express the character’s inner state.
Confirming this as an old-fashioned bit of star-grooming, Carano has very stylish costumes by Shoshana Rubin.
The rest of the cast is fine, with Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum holding their own in the punching and smashing departments, Michael Douglas a bit miscast as a trustworthy man, and Ewan MacGregor trying hard as always. Antonio Banderas is very amusing, starting the movie with a big beard and then putting it aside for the finale, really for no discernible reason.
Lem Dobbs, who scripted KAFKA and THE LIMEY, wrote this one too. It follows the cool, Melvillean aesthetic of the latter film, with a few moments of sentiment which are more underplayed than they were in the Stamp vehicle. Soderbergh said after KAFKA that he felt he wasn’t good at cold material, which is odd to me, since his OCEAN’S films seem basically slick and heartless. But then, I only like the first one of those, and that not so much. And then again, I liked KAFKA much better than SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE, so maybe I’m weird.
Mexico is always a bit sepia-toned in Soderbergh films (see TRAFFIC), contrary to reality.
Dobbs (before taking his name from Bogart in SIERRA MADRE, he started his movie career as Lem Kitaj, acting for Michael Powell in THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW — he’s the best thing in it) provides a very simple betrayal-revenge structure which masquerades behind a cloak of sophistication, with flashbacks, lists of names, rapidly shuffled international locations and plenty of mumbled obfuscation. As with THE LIMEY, whose classic moment is a long-held exterior with sounds of mayhem raging indoors (undoubtedly influenced by the climax of THE PUBLIC ENEMY) the movie gets some of its best effects by keeping dramatic events offscreen — but nevertheless makes spectacular use of Carano’s particular talents. Nobody is likely to top the best of Jackie Chan’s fights, but HAYWIRE’s hotel havoc will live for as long as people enjoy seeing Michael Fassbender getting his neck crushed between a set of powerful thighs, and that, my friends, will be a very long time.
