Ingsoc Puppets

The 1956 CIA-backed production of 1984, directed by Michael DAMBUSTERS Anderson has been on my radar for the longest time. Getting the excellent BFI Blu-ray of Rudolph Cartier and Nigel Kneale’s TV version reminded me to do something about it. But I did nothing — until now.

Good people worked on this — it’s not without merit. But of course it’s a stealthy betrayal of George Orwell’s vision, as the equally spook-funded animated ANIMAL FARM is also.

We begin with atomic blasts — Orwell didn’t think it would take an atomic war to induce totalitarianism, and, after thinking about it and observing Britain under Thatcher, Alan Moore came to believe that he’d erred in featuring a limited nuclear war as motivating factor in V for Vendetta.

Terrific aerial shots of Airstrip One — the vast ministries are more convincing than the painted pyramid of the TV version, with its outsize portals which immediately become titchy when we cut to Peter Cushing inside.

As in Orwell, the device of Winston Smith’s diary is underused — it would have been a perfectly satisfactory narrative device, with a little tinkering. The highly cinematic scene of Winston Smith’s trip to the cinema is omitted entirely in all versions, isn’t it? But we’re ignoring the elephant in the room, which is Edmond O’Brien. Elephantine Ed (maybe more like a hippo?) should really have been cast as O’Brien, it’d be easy for him to remember. His being an American isn’t a problem — we’re all Oceanians now. Both he and Jan Sterling as Julia are quite unsympathetically photographed, but what could C.M. Pennington-Richards (FIRES WERE STARTED) have done with them? He’s a big pudding and she’s all massive face-bones. This works well for the film. Any American leading man was going to try to play Smith as a proper hero. O’Brien tries, and fails, and thus a bit of Orwell’s intent gets smuggled in.

We also get Donald Pleasence, lucky us, promoted from the hapless Syme in the TV version to Parsons here (and he still has THX-1138 to look forward to). Michael Redgrave makes a fine, nervous O’Brien (rechristened O’Connor for incomprehensible reasons — I suppose to avoid confusion with the star). If there’s a reason I finally ran this film, it’s probably seeing Richard Burton, the O’Brien of the 1984 1984, playing a torturer in MASSACRE IN ROME.

In the Ministry of Truth cafeteria, they play a constant moronic jingle version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the Glorious Ninth — that was good. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE anticipated. Anthony Burgess could have seen this, six years before writing his own dystopia… but he was in Malaya at the time. But all the talk of “curing” is reminiscent.

The design is great — while most sci-fi seeks out modernist architecture, Terence Verity follows the lead of the TV play in featuring the WWII bombsites still visible all over London. Babs Gray’s stormtrooper costumes reminded me so strongly of the robomen in DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. and the firemen in FAHRENHEIT 451 that I suspected recycling, but this appears not to be the case.

This glass painting would have worked better if not for the London fog.

During the real 1984, the year not the book or the film of the book, I got a creepy feeling. Breakfast television had just been introduced to the UK, and suddenly exercise classes led by someone called The Green Goddess were on TV, just as on Winston Smith’s two-way set, and a puppet called Roland Rat turned up as co-presenter. Patrick Allen would later narrate Roland’s own series, and he’s also a TV voice in this film. Perhaps science fiction does not predict the future, but instead induce it. We absorb it like a sleep-learning tape.

Hard to see now how a film warning against “forever wars” would make effective CIA propaganda, but I note that the term seems to original in Joe Haldeman’s science-fiction novel The Forever War.

Anderson and his team don’t establish with sufficient skill the geography that enables Winston to write his journal unseen by the television eye, an early portent of a certain clumsiness. 16-year-old Carol Woolveridge is an effective spy kid, but not casting a real juvenile robs the role of some of its Midwich creep factor. Julia has no reason to fall in love with Winston — not that Orwell gave her much motivation. Cushing and Hurt sold it better, because they project underdog appeal.

The drawing of Big Brother — he should be a photograph, or maybe a kind of photo-sit — looks uncannily like Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edwards.

Despite writing in 1948 (the title is a numeric anagram), Orwell wasn’t able to imagine the Bomb making a difference to society, so he ignores it. By dragging it in, Anderson and co create questions they’re not prepared to answer.

Orwell said his book wouldn’t have been so depressing if he hadn’t been ill while writing it (dying, really). We don’t get the kind of grim humour from the characters one might expect from an oppressed people — the kind evident in Soviet Russia. (I should collect Soviet jokes — the one I know is REALLY GOOD*. And the best joke I know is from a dissident comedian in Nazi Germany**.)

Anderson, a former AD, isn’t known particularly as an expressive filmmaker but he comes into his own after Winston’s arrest, with striking use of POV shots. This is useful, because although Eddie O’Brien does a great broken voice, the only way they can suggest his physical decline, so pitiful in the novel and so readily evoked by Cushing and Hurt, is by glueing progressive quantities of yak fur to his chin, until he resembles a hobo clown. But the subjective camera effects are disturbing and intimidating.

A distinction — we see Redgrave popping pills to help him through the torture, but he also suggests a hint of sexual sadism. André Morell’s TV O’Brien was all-in, his matey true believer a party man to the core. And Richard Burton played the part as a living dead man (“We are the dead”) — which he nearly was. In close shots, his semi-paralysed arms were supported out of frame by assistants, so that his performance is part puppetry, a kind of manual galvanism.

Room 101 is shamefully underplayed here, so that Smith’s betrayal of Julia is shockingly easy.

Sterling rediscovering her femininity in a dress with a built-in apron of ruffles is cringe, but her final scene is haunting — she uses those starchild orbs well.

I’d long heard that this film traduced Orwell with a tacked-on “defiant ending” (Leslie Halliwell’s words) — not in the print I saw, though the voice-over man comes in to warn us of the dangers of “failing to preserve” our children’s “heritage of freedom,” which is to inject hope into a scenario Orwell seems to have designed as hopeless — but I presume he intends hope to be found OUTSIDE the book, and in a sense this non-diegetic announcer is outside the film. His thought crime is to make obvious an implication intended as subliminal.

1984 stars Dutton Peabody; Doctor B. N. Wallis, C.B.E., F.R.S.; Lorraine Minosa; Doctor Alfred Kokintz; Blofeld; Screaming Child; Air Vice-Marshal The Hon. Ralph Cochrane (now Air Chief Marshal) G.B.E., K.C.B., A.F.C.; Macro; Lt. Tojoko; The President – Schnipps – Number Two; General Gogol; Klove; and Dean Vernon Wormer (uncredited***).

* Soviet Joke: Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev are on a train which unexpectedly stops. Stalin says, “Leave this to me,” gets up and goes to investigate. “I have executed those responsible,” he says upon his return. But the train still doesn’t move. Kruschev says “Leave this to me,” gets up, goes, and returns. “I have rehabilitated those responsible,” he says. But still the train does not move. “Leave this to me,” says Brezhnev. But he doesn’t get up. “What are you going to do?” ask the others. “I’m going to draw the curtain and pretend the train is moving.”

**Nazi Joke. A comedian (forget his name, alas) had been making jokes about the regime, and was ordered to report to Gestapo headquarters. At the front desk he was asked, “Do you have any offensive weapons?” “Why, will I need them?”

***Though the Inaccurate Movie DataBase claims that John Vernon plays Big Brother, I see no trace of him. But weirdly, in the final scene just as Julia vanishes, we see an off-model Big Brother poster in which he no longer looks like Ukelele Ike. He’s put on a ton of weight, and looks more like Edmond O’Brien wearing a face mask too small for him. What does this mean?

;

Catalogue of Cruelty

I picked up secondhand Blu-rays of THE SHINING and PSYCHO and decided to look at the extra features, even though I think they’re basically the same as the unwatched ones I had on my DVDs. Well, I’d watched Vivian Kubrick’s The Making of The Shining. But not with her commentary.

I blame Tom Cruise for getting Vivian “Squirt” Kubrick into Scientology, and I blame Scientology for her now getting into crazy rightwing memes including antisemitic shit. If you want to have The Great Stanley K’s most misanthropic views confirmed, just look at how short a span it took for the progeny of JEW SUSS director Veit Harlan to get back into Nazism — two generations. With a Jewish son/dad in between. [CORRECTION – Stanley married Veit’s niece.]

In her commentary, VK sounds incredibly young, which she was when she made the doc — just finished school — but couldn’t have been when she recorded the VO. So maybe she’s just preternaturally and eternally young and naive. Whatever, she’s gone down a very nasty rabbithole (or into a sinister maze) since then. Her commentary is fairly informative.

Steadicam inventor/operator Garrett Brown’s commentary on the main feature is super-informative — it really illuminates SK’s process, in a sympathetic way. Kubrick (and everyone else) biography John Baxter’s part of it is less so. He starts off by asserting that the rolling credits are an oft-used Kubrick trope — I struggle to think of any mature Kubrick film outside of THE SHINING that uses them.

I *think* Brown may be mistaken when he explains the impossible high-angle shot of Wendy and Danny in the maze. I’d long puzzled over this, and found the explanation in a later SHINING doc not on this disc — Kubrick moved the entire full-scale maze to a plaza in front of a nearby tower block. Brown claims instead that he only moved the centre of the maze, and optically inserted it into a shot of the miniature. This is what a reasonable person might do, but I don’t see strong evidence that Kubrick was entirely reasonable.

Firstly, the model maze Jack’s looking at does not resemble the maze in the aerial shot. Apart from the fact that it’s clearly been rotated 90 degrees, it’s just a different maze. Totally different layout. Which ties in with the geographic tricksiness of the Overlook sets and lends weight to those who see the “bad continuity” as part of a deliberate scheme, its origins and purpose still a total mystery. (It would not have been more work to ensure the model of the maze matched the full-scale one. The map of the maze is completely different also.)

To zoom in on an optically combined model and life-sized maze, Kubrick would have had to optically enlarge the film, with resulting increase of grain (which would already have been amplified by the necessary duping) which I don’t see. The matching of the shadows is perfect — well, Kubrick would certainly have gone to that trouble. But since he had built a full-size maze out of wooden frames and chicken wire and real leaves, moving it to another location would not be hugely expensive or difficult, so I can easily imagine him doing it. Sure, it’s an insane amount of work for one shot, but Stanley’s not the one doing the work. And the shot is worth it.

Seeing Wendy Carlos and her cats was fun, and hearing unused tracks from THE SHINING and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was illuminating — one piece, “Boulderado”, written in advance of the shoot, intended to convey the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, has a Miklos Rozsa BEN-HUR feel (only on the Moog) wholly out step with the finished film. Delightful.

But my favourite extra was the documentary View from the Overlook — costume designer Milena Canonero says something that genuinely made me see the film anew. Kubrick didn’t want a lot of wear and tear on the costumes, which good designers usually apply to make them look used. She got the sense that he wanted a sort of catalogue model look.

Somehow it’s there. You can’t unsee it. THE SHINING takes place in a leisurewear universe. This mainly feels true of the early scenes, before the Torrences take up residence.

Oh, Vivian Kubrick points out the nasty seventies carpets in the Gold Room (along with her own presence as extra, the girl in black to the left of Jack’s butt, below). Which raises a point. The carpet is still there when Nicholson strolls into a party from the 1920s. And when Wendy sees the party comprised of skeletons. So the room hasn’t reverted to the past, which would be one possible interpretation of what’s going on. THE SHINING projects a kind of time-warp vibe, all but confirmed in the closing shot (top). But here we see the room populated by celebrants of a bygone era, but the room itself is anachronistically late-70s. It ties in with Kubrick staging Alex’s biblical fantasies in CLOCKWORK ORANGE in cheesy Hollywood manner, down to Alex’s centurion speaking in an American accent, “because I thought that’s how he’d imagine it.” So the Midnight and the Stars and You party imports a whole crowd scene of bygone guests and staff, but doesn’t remember to redesign the carpet, because Jack wouldn’t think of that detail.

Or, you know, you can consider it an oversight. At the Overlook.

I might have something to say about PSYCHO’s extras too…

Blind Tuesday: Rilla Thrilla

It’s been a VERY long time since I last blogged about a blind person thriller on a Tuesday, which I used to do quite often. Never quite got around to WAIT UNTIL DARK for some reason.

This one’s way more obscure — the copy of WITNESS IN THE DARK I obtained had evidently been recorded off ITV on VHS, with the commercial breaks splinked out, not too precisely.

It’s a great little quota quickie — Wolf Rilla, whose best film by 100 miles is the original VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, laboured for years in the realm of no-star, no-budget one-week-schedule crime films. He manages to shoot effectively, with lots of expressive camera movement, maybe even utilising the cheapness of the sets to his advantage, flying the walls out to reposition his camera in impossible places, like looking past the mantelpiece as if through the wallpaper.

Scottish actress Patricia Dainton — with a cut-glass English accent — is very effective as the sightless switchboard operator who has a close run-in with the man who murders her elderly neighbour, and then becomes his target, not because she knows too much (although that would have worked for the story) but because she’s fallen heir to the valuable jewelry that motivated the crime. It’s straight out of GASLIGHT. Dainton’s very dark eyes help her play blind with an unblinking straightahead stare.

Conrad Phillips is the detective on the case, rather unsympathetic in manner, which helps, even with the shoehorned romance — it gives him a steeper character arc to pull off in the film’s modest 60 min runtime; there’s a young Richard O’Sullivan, years before Man About the House. (Both Dainton and Sullivan are still with us.) A nosy neighbour is played by Madge Ryan, who turns up later as a state brainwasher in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE — “You’re getting better. This time next week, you’ll be better still.” Possible to detect moments in her line readings that anticipate that steely delivery.

And best of all, there’s Nigel Green as the killer. Wearing loafers instead of shiny shoes and woolly gloves instead of sexy strangler gloves. Bloody rationing. Also doing a fine northern accent, considering he was South African. He comes across like a hulking, murderous Alan Bennett. There’s no reason for it, he’s just making the job, and the film, more interesting, for himself and us.

WITNESS IN THE DARK isn’t earth-shattering but it restored my faith in quota quickies (films made purely to fulfill the UK government’s demand for a percentage of films in cinemas to be British). It’s modest but inventively made. So many of these films are just dull. Need to see more Rilla.

Producer Sydney Box had the reputation for mucking up scripts — this one must have been too cheap for him to have bothered.