The Sunday Intertitle: Wolfdunnit?

Today, for the Hammer & AMicus Blogathon, I’m looking at THE BEAST MUST DIE. No, not this one —

I haven’t seen the 1952 version of Nicholas Blake’s novel, but I have read the novel. Blake was the pen-name of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, father of Daniel, who moonlighted as a crime novelist. This his only book to have been adapted for the cinema, but his The Smiler With the Knife NEARLY became Orson Welles’ first film.

Not this one either ~

Claude Chabrol’s version of the same book is pretty good. Going by the cast list of the Argentinian version, it shares with Chabrol the unusual feature of eliminating the character of the detective. Blake/Day-Lewis created such a compelling pair of opposing characters in this story that his usual toff detective, Nigel Strangeways, just gets in the way. And in Smiler, he’s almost completely sidelined, his adventurous wife taking centre stage (Welles hoped to cast Lucille Ball, with himself as homegrown fascist villain).

But no, Amicus head Milton Subotsky chose to adapt a short story by Star Trek writer James Blish and give it Blake’s title (a biblical quotation) — but it’s STILL a country house detective story, with a slight twist. There will be spoilers ahead.

Taking this challenge seriously, I’m basically live-blogging this so you can see if I’m able to ID the skin-changer. Who’s hairy on the inside at this weekend party?

In my experience, seventies werewolves tend to wear plaid shirts, like lumberjacks (perhaps harking back to WOLFBLOOD, the silent movie combining lycanthropy and lumberjacking which I wrote about here. The first lumberthrope movie? So I’ll be watching this one waiting for someone to turn up in an ugly shirt, My money’s on Michael Gambon as the cast member likeliest to display hideous fashion sense. But I am aware of a complicating factor: the movie was also released, in an attempt to cash in on the blacksploitation craze, as BLACK WEREWOLF, which would seem to narrow the choices down to Calvin Lockhart and Marlene Clark. And is, quite frankly, a terrible title for a whodunnit.

We begin with a freeze-fame of our werewolf — ALSO a terrible spoiler — and the insinuating tones of Valentine Dyall, purring a redundant VO which is also spelled out in superimposed titles.

Helicopter shot over what looks like Scottish heather, but may in fact be the grounds of Shepperton, and Calvin Coolidge Lockhart is being hunted by a private army and a helicopter, through a wood wired for sound by Anton Diffring who sits aloof in a control room with a video wall.

This movie is THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND avant la lettre, isn’t it? Which is to say, Ten Little Indians with a video wall. I wonder if Robert Ludlum saw it and thought, “Needs a better title!”

The cast contains Dumbledore II, Ernst Stavros Blofeld (again), Ganja Meda, Irving Amadeus, the Grand Moff Tarkin and Reinhard Heydrich, so it’s quite a house party.

Two cast members lack iconic signature roles — but Ciaran Madden would reunite with Dumbledore Michael Gambon in 1992 when she played Mm. Maigret to his titular sleuth, and Tom Chadbon has a memorable bit part in JUGGERNAUT (“I’d spent it, hadn’t I?”) though of course I find all the bit parts memorable in that one.

Chadbon, whose voice here fluctuates between early Malcolm McDowell and anorak on the bus man, is an absolute joy in his puffy shirts.

The dialogue is a hoot — “One of our guests is a werewolf: I know it,” intones Lockhart. “Then why did you INVITE them?” asks his wife, quite reasonably. What adds to the strangeness is that most of the cast are either playing the wrong nationality — Anton Diffring is being Polish, Peter Cushing German — or are dubbed — Marlene Clark has been revoiced by Scottish jazz singer and actress Annie Ross, who performed the same service for Britt Ekland in THE WICKER MAN — or just have naturally amusing voices, like Chadbon and Gray (whose voice we’re used to hearing come out of Jack Hawkins’ mouth).

Anton sips his Bailey’s and gazes at his video wall like a kind of Thomas Jerome Teuton.

Director Paul Annett was an experienced second unit man for TV, shooting the location action sequences on film for British shows that would revert to video as soon as the characters moved indoors. For his sins, he does provide an endless car chase between Lockhart and Gambon that saps my will to live whenever I try to watch this movie. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember who the werewolf is — the car chase always defeats me. Well, this time, I’m as obsessed as Lockhart to get to the bottom of this, lacking only the attractive high cheekbones (with Lockhart and Cushing and Diffring and even Gray, this film sports perhaps the finest assemblage of cheekbones ever captured on celluloid — a thespic Himalayan range of facial promontories).

“Lost in time… and lost in space… and meaning…”

When the movie isn’t doing helicopter chases and such, Annett and ace cameraman Jack Hildyard (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI) manage a lot of stylish and dynamic shooting, prone to zoom abuse, it’s true, but it’s 1973 after all… it’s fair to say the movie does resemble a glossy TV thriller of the period (e.g. The Persuaders) more than a horror movie. Well Subotsky liked monsters but not gore or sex or violence or anything too disturbing…

Much of the film consists of Lockhart and Diffring spying on the guest bedrooms, searching for signs of incipient werewolfism in the invitees. As Anton watches Chadbon strip to the waist, he muses, “Lots of men have hair on their chests,” projecting the suave confidence of a man who knows whereof he speaks. “And on the backs of their hands?” objects Lockhart, as if this were the unlikeliest thing on earth. He’s never met Len Deighton.

The eyes, quite apart from being the windows of the soul, are the tasty bit.

After the first killing — offscreen, but leaving a gory aftermath — we see all their guests in their PJs — Charles Gray sports a vivid paisley dressing gown, and Gambon once again goes for a subtle but distinct check. The rules of fashion dictate he MUST be the wolfman in their midst!

But at dinner, he wears a brown velvet smoking jacket and a shirt with a collar of startling wingspan. Not a check in sight.

Gambon is definitely soft on werewolves, though — his first act as Dumbledore was to hire a lycan schoolmaster.

I bloody hate day for night photography, personally.

Like THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, this movie shares cast members with the almighty INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED, two of them this time (Lockhart & Cushing).

The Sunday Intertitle this week is from The Werewolf Break, where Valentine Dyall — The Man in Black — returns on the soundtrack to invite us to guess who the shaggy killer is.

 

It’s twenty past werewolf.

And in fact the ending pulls off quite a few cunning twists — I wasn’t emotionally engaged enough to really care who’s wolfie, but the reversals and revelations pile on top of one another turn it into quite a nice conclusion. Here comes the spoilers — first hairy hand is spotted on Marlene Clark, so that her hubbie has to administer the silver bullet, and then it turns out she’s been cross-infected by a golden retriever who’d been gored by the ORIGINAL werewolf —

— an Alsatian in a woolly waistcoat, finally revealed as —

 
 

BLOODY MICHAEL GAMBON! I KNEW IT!

This has been an entry in the Hammer Amicus Blogathon run by Cinematic Catharsis and  Real Weegie Midget Reviews.