Bunker Mentality

I was in the mood to see some more of Rudolph Cartier’s work — I’ve decided to insert him into my next novel — the director of the first three Quatermass serials and Nigel Kneale’s 1984 adaptation — also the producer of the remarkable CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS. Pushing the boat out ever so gently I looked for more of his science fiction work, and found the surviving episode of two he made for Out of the Unknown, a classy sf anthology show. (Huge amounts of Cartier’s work is either lost or unavailable due to the BBC’s formerly feckless preservation policies — a lot of his work went out live with no recording made, or the recordings were junked.)

Level 7 (1966) is adapted from a Mordecai Roshwald story by J.B. Priestly, of all people, and is set almost entirely in a bunker thousands of miles deep, designed to withstand nuclear attack, and it’s simultaneously an attack on police states and on the idea of the survivable nuclear war. Cartier does a little “It’s me!” wave to us by using Mars from Holst’s Planets Suite on the soundtrack.

Nice, stark design makes this dystopia oppressively claustrophobic, and avoids the sillier elements of TV-sf. The fuzzy kinoscope look suits the grimness.

The acting is… variable. We have a lot of characters with speaking roles, and numerous of them go for an overly fervid approach. Even when they don’t, the acting often has quotation marks around it, or feels like it’s happening in the past tense, or you feel the actor’s self-consciousness. Stand-out player is the mighty Michelle Dotrice, famous mainly as sitcom imbecile Frank Spencer’s hapless Betty in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, which may give the viewer dramaturgical whiplash, but I’ve already seen her officiate at a satanic rape rite in BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW so I feel nothing she does will surprise me in a distracting way. She’s just persistently true, in her jumpsuit and beehive.

I was waiting for a big plot-twist ending whereby the whole troglodytic society would prove to be a test of endurance, but such cop-out fake-outs are avoided, even though Priestley, we know, love twists. Instead we just have this awful, inhuman society gradually destroyed by radiation sickness. The reality of what that would be like is simply too unpleasant for TV at this time (The War Game would get banned for going anywhere near it) so our characters gradually go blind and freeze like statues, which is disturbing as hell but slightly absurd too. “He’s gone completely rigid!” a bit player exclaims.

I think that, when your excuse for being depressing is that you’re following the truth, you need to signal clearly whether it’s a poetic or a documentary truth. I guess the whole Level 7 setting is science-fictional enough to allow some latitude.

I’ve just discovered the existence of The Fanatics, a Cartier-directed teleplay starring Leonard Rossiter as Voltaire and Alan Badel as a torturer and I am delighted to be watching that RIGHT NOW.

Cargill’s Gargles

Chaplin really likes his buzzer gag. And I admit, the nth repetition of it provoked a snort from me that was not wholly derisive. This time it’s the captain’s turn to react in panic, and I think what made it funny was not just the actor’s extravagant “take” — though that is quite fine — but the fact that the captain has no reason at all to be nervous or startled by the buzzer. Apparently everyone is — they should uninstall that thing before the ship ends up another Marie Celeste.

The captain is played by an actor with the very papal name of John Paul, who I see played Dr. Spencer Quist in the original Doomwatch TV show and spin-off movie. Never saw the show, quite like the film. Acromegaliacs in argyll sweaters — unmissable stuff.

Since Ogden/Marlon’s wife (a very special guest star) is joining the ship at Honolulu, it’s decided that Natascha/Sophia should get married, an alibi which should also help her enter the States (though her lack of paper may be an issue, I’d have thought). Patrick Cargill, as Ogden’s valet, is chosen as the beard, and if you want an actor who can look quietly mortified at the idea of marrying Sophia Loren, you could do worse.

A surprisingly shoddy bit of blocking, where Sophia literally blocks Marlon. A retake was, it seems, too much to ask.

Cargill faints, which is pretty funny. Good comedian.

And then, a little later, the buzzer goes (again) causing Natascha to burst in on Cargill as he’s… what, exactly? Trying to understand pyjamas?

Some NICE blocking when Natascha advances to camera and sits, though the very frontal staging does feel somewhat, well, stagey. But that’s Chaplin’s whole thing.

Sophia is startled by Cargill’s gargling from the bathroom. Chaplin seems very delighted by gargling in this movie, since Ogden has previously done it.

There then follows an actual extended bit of physical comedy, which is welcome, but it’s quite odd. An unexpectedly sitting (drunk?) Cargill makes a huge show of going to bed. It is apparent that he’s gotten over his shock at the sudden marriage and is feeling… connubial.

And Cargill is an effective, clear channel for Chaplin’s direction — at times you can really believe you’re seeing Chaplin do all this, while wearing Cargill’s fleshly form. But it’s not, to me, quite clear what has brought all this on. I don’t entirely like this carrying-on here, but if the film had delivered something like it every ten minutes, it would be a better film, I’ll say that much.

Fifteen minutes of this to go. Will I make it through the rest in one go? not a chance.

Replican or Replicant?

“Will he live?”

“No… but he’s going to. As long as science can make him!” Sample dialogue from THE BRAIN EATERS

This is a really interesting bad film directed by Bruno VeSoto, who had a hand or some other body part in the interesting DEMENTIA or CHILD OF HORROR. This one isn’t a bizarre art movie based on a secretary’s dream, but a bizarre scifi movie based, unofficially with no money changing hands, on Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.

Lots of strange, ineffective and uneconomic filming choices, with lots of scenes covered from many un-useful angles while other bits of important action aren’t shown at all. This actually adds to the feeling of it being a Maisles Bros documentary photographed inside somebody’s nightmare.

After a brief, enigmatic and truncated teaser, involving a skirmish between a random old guy and a weird beatnik carrying a glowing orb — always a sure attention grabber — and the typical abstract greyscale hospital art title sequence seen on so many 50s AIP films — we get our heroes discovering a weird metallic cone and some dead dogs, the whole sequence underscored with what I would characterise as a LUSH REPHRASING of ‘Sweet Mystery of Life.’

Back in Washington, interested bigshots are shown film of the mystery cone including mute footage of wildly gesticulating eyewitnesses. A voiceover translates their semaphore into B-movie language:

“One report cited the appearance of a fiery horse-drawn chariot in the sky.” But apparently quite a small one…

The fiery horse-drawn chariot never appears and is never mentioned again, just a bit of Fortean mystification or an oneiric tease.

I’d say the actors in this are quite good, but possibly they’re all space aliens — none of them have any idea how human beings behave, or at least they don’t feel empowered to bring whatever human experiences they have to bear on the performances. The script is full of strange statements, inexplicable deductions based on nothing, which always turn out to be correct, and peculiar figures of speech. Gordon Urquhart (good Scottish name) is seemingly responsible. His only writing credit, and the good bits are plagiarised.

One odd idea, not I think from Heinlein — when a long-lost scientist with a wrinkly neck falls out of the cone, he utters one word before expiring from a badly dissolved brain: “Carboniferous!” From which our heroes deduce that the parasitic creatures emanating from the cone, being carried around in glowing circular beakers, and attaching themselves to people’s spines to control them, are survivors from the carboniferous era — the time of massive dragonflies and stuff. And they’ve come from “Down below” — anticipating the entirely unproductive wrinkled added to Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS.

A genuinely eerie effect — when we’re shown people who, unknown to our heroes, have been possessed by carboniferous bugs, side views reveal their backs to be slowly inflating and deflating, like Inspector Clouseau’s hunchback costume in THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN. Since nobody ever notices this telltale detail, you want to grab the heroes, shake them, and yell “LOOK!” This makes for an involving experience, of course.

Apart from everybody acting like an alien — here is how one of our no-name leads drives a car —

— there are a couple of persons of interest. Per the IMDb, one of the mute ‘zombies’ is played by Hampton Fancher, later co-writer of BLADE RUNNER (he did the initial draft). I think this is him —

He has a great face — maybe those cheekbones are what won the heart, for a time anyway, of Sue Lyon…

And the final boss turns out to be somebody erroneously credited as ‘Leonard Nemoy’ — giving that actor’s career a pleasing triptych — human being possessed by emotionless parasite here, emotionless or semiemotionless alien in Star Trek, and human being replaced by emotionless pod in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. I’m sure Nimoy wished he could have spent more time playing people with regular emotions, but the fact is that playing eerily unemotional characters who are still fun to watch is a definite skill.

Invisible in a sauna set with fake whiskers and cowl — druid drag — AND they get his name wrong. Jeez.

THE BRAIN EATERS don’t eat people’s brains, although IN A WAY they do because, when attacked, they release an acid — anticipating ALIEN — which dissolves their host’s brains. So the title is more poetic than you’d expect, as is the film. Poetic does not mean good, you understand, but it lifts it out of the rut (you know the rut I mean) and hey, it’s only an hour long.