I fondly recall my sister telling me about seeing David Lynch’s DUNE with her boyfriend of the time, who was the worst at following movie plots, and kept up a constant stream of “Who’s that again?” throughout. DUNE is, I guess, fairly challenging to the narratively-challenged.
No such issues when Fiona and I traipsed over to the Vue Ocean Terminal (former the Ster Century, or Monster Sanctuary as we called it) to see Denis Villeneuve’s version. Just a sigh of “That was so BORING, I thought I was going to fall asleep,” from Fiona at the end.
When DV’s BLADE RUNNER sequel came out and tanked, I think I said “I guess we won’t get to see his DUNE then.” But maybe the contracts had already been signed and couldn’t be broken? Or maybe those strange people at Legendary Films just wanted to see what he’d do with it.
For purposes of this article I will, like everyone else, pretend John Harrison’s TV miniseries doesn’t exist, even though I met JH and both his stars and they were all very nice. Haven’t seen the show.
The new DUNE suffers from Roman Epic Syndrome, where you have a very far-off culture to portray and it makes it hard to humanize the characters so we can get involved emotionally. It’s not actually a problem for the culture to be very different from ours, but it’s a problem for the characters to lack recognisable behaviour. In Old Hollywood the denaturalising of the performances was actually a deliberate policy, born of some kind of crazed belief that ancient history and/or the Bible require a particular performance style, declamatory and wooden, exemplified, indeed apotheosised, by Chuckles Heston in DeMille’s TEN COMMANDMENTS. So that when Peter Ustinov blew on his soup in, was it QUO VADIS?, he was told the gesture was too modern. “In what era, pray, did the wretched Romans stop eating their minestrone piping hot?” asked Ustinov, reasonably. On BEN-HUR, there was a lively screenwriter’s debate about which was better, “Is the food not to your liking?” or “Don’t you like your dinner?” The former won out. It is not any more genuinely ancient-world than the alternative.
Lynch’s DUNE is plagued by several problems: by taking no heed of the demands of running time when he wrote it long, and then allowed for further improvisations when shooting, lengthening it more, Lynch saved up a problem for the edit which slammed him badly. The rough cuts of ERASERHEAD and THE ELEPHANT MAN had been very long, so he thought it wouldn’t be a problem, but those movies have pretty sparse plots. DUNE has all these damn FACTIONS. If you cut one scene you have to shoehorn the exposition it once contained someplace else. Hence all those internal monologues, where even comparatively minor character like Max Von Sydow whisper their thoughts to their chums, the audience. Going hand-in-hand with this is a palpable panic and loss of confidence, so that some of these VOs are spectacularly redundant, insulting and alienating: Francesca Annis leaves the room, thinking her son will be killed; she comes back and sees him alive; looks relieved. And her voice on the soundtrack helpfully remarks: “My son — LIVES!” Which is also an unsayable line.
Villeneuve’s DUNE, like Lynch’s, begins with an info-dump, and it’s a far less charming and arresting one than Virginia Madsen’s starfield piece-to-camera in the Lynch. It throws in some battle scenes (one day we’ll see a version of Frank Herbert’s book where we don’t see Arrakis until Paul does) and I bet most audiences don’t absorb a tenth of the info dumped on them, too busy admiring the pictures. But, generally, the new film is less anxious for us to understand things, which is good. “As writer, you must deliver your story points,” said Herr Wilder, “but the elegance with which you deliver them is the measure of how good you are.” Or words to that effect. The Villeneuve doesn’t fall prey to Lynch’s clumsinesses.
On the other hand, it doesn’t have ANY of his eccentricity, which is what makes the Lynch film lively and engaging. I found myself missing Kyle MacLachlan’s bluff heartiness. I really felt, even though it was oversold, that his Paul Atreides really LIKES his buddies in House Atreides. With Timotei Shalamar, I’m not even sure he likes his mom.
Lynch’s gallery of grotesques pop out of the screen: only the Emperor is a stiff. Kenneth McMillan (who we recently enjoyed in Salem’s Lot), Paul L. Smith, Freddie Jones, Brad Dourif, Alicia Witt… When Sting, who was quite prepared to play his shower scene nude, was asked to wear a golden eagle codpiece, he refused. They wore him down, but he eventually agreed to paste the bird to his junk only if he could play the part as the kind of guy who WOULD wear a crotch-accipitrid in the shower. And they LET him. Patrick Stewart, one of the less lurid performers, nevertheless goes into battle clutching a tiny pug. Freddie Jones has a scene, only included in the various unsigned extended cuts, has a scene at the end that’s heart-breaking and bizarre. Nothing in the new film stirs the empathy.
Villeneuve likes underplaying, and casts good underplayers, and attains a consistency Lynch doesn’t even seem to value as a goal. With the result that, though we get a Paul who’s convincingly teenage (he’s around the same age MacLachlan was, but slighter), we don’t meet anyone we’d like to eat dinner with. Rebecca Ferguson gets some actual emotion into it, and Javier Bardem shows actual star intensity, briefly waking things up. Stellan Skarsgård, a sort of grudging, inward-aiming actor, is a very dull substitute for the illustrious McMillan, who made intergalactic scheming while unplugging the hearts of twinks look like THE BEST FUN.
“I was so bored by those dream sequences…” Fiona complained. And they are boring, in the Villeneuve, even though they’re full of ACTION. But it’s action that doesn’t mean anything to us yet. I wouldn’t have thought prophecy could be as tedious than backstory, but apparently it can amount to the same thing. The Lynch film’s prophecies were shot by Frederick Elmes, his ERASERHEAD and future BLUE VELVET DoP. “We had one of those crisis meetings and I told them,” said Freddie Francis, DUNE’s veteran cinematographer, “that if Freddie Elmes shoots another frame of film I’m quitting. They didn’t fire him, though, they kept him around shooting drops of water.” But, with all respect to FF, who was old-school experienced and super-talented, Elmes’ epic drips are among the film’s most memorable images.
Villeneuve’s future dreams ultimately cheat the audience by NOT coming true, not really. It’s a bigger swindle than the time-shift of ARRIVAL, which works emotionally but is dirty pool, playing with the audience for no reason except to kick us in the heart.
Villeneuve’s big advantage over Lynch is that he gets a longer runtime to tell half the story, so he’s not forced into the damaging compressions that occluded his predecessor’s vision. He doesn’t always use his time sensibly, though. The character of Shadout Mapes appears in both films, and her entire role is to get nearly killed by a flying needle, then genuinely killed by a big knife. Oh, and in this version she gives Paul’s mom another knife. Why is this cleaning woman included? I sort of like the democratic instinct that would make a cleaning woman a character in a space epic, but you might as well also feature an Arrakis dogcatcher, the House Harkonnen’s PR guy, a Fremen dishwasher, and I’ll commend you for it IF you find anything for them to do.
Lynch’s DUNE, like most of his movies, looks awfully white, and Villeneuve corrects that in multiple ways, though most of the POC are dead by the time we’re told “This is just the beginning.” His film has scale (although the ornithopters can’t help but look tiny), great design (though tending to the monochromatic), it’s beautiful to look at. But I find I prefer most of Lynch’s faults to most of Villeneuve’s virtues.
GOOD use of intertitles, though — the movie is a twenties pastiche, fine, but they’ve worked out a specific way of using intertitles in a talkie — they use them as thought bubbles. So Millie (Julie Andrews) will look to the camera at a key moment and the intertitle will pop up, giving us her take on whatever’s just happened. And they don’t overuse the gimmick.
When Jim Dale shows up at the local police station with a stray finger, we felt that maybe CARRY ON SCREAMING! had influenced BLUE VELVET. When Harry H. Corbett discovers an ear in the woods, we were MORALLY CERTAIN. (Lynch always portrays himself as someone not particularly influenced by other moviemakers, but 
We watched SCREAMING! and CLEO as a double feature with our friend Marvelous Mary to see if we could decide which is best. I don’t think there are any other realistic candidates in the series. CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER is disqualified not so much for racism as for having Roy Castle in it. The early, more solid films (SERGEANT and NURSE) aren’t typical enough to count — they’re still trying to be proper films. But SCREAMING and CLEO are very enjoyable IMproper films.
Double-bill this with DEATH LINE, because both Corbett and Donald Pleasence nail an aspect of the British copper in a really bang-to-rights way: the sarcasm, the one-upmanship, the desire to infuriate and humiliate the suspect/witness/have-a-go-hero. I’m not saying this is what all Brit cops do. But doing a job in which you have to deal with criminal idiots much of the time clearly takes a toll.
James in CLEO plays one of his rare out-and-out villains, though the movie regards him warmly and gives him an ahistorical happy ending, splashing into a milk bath with Cleo. It’s also a relatively rare case of him not playing a character called Sid, perhaps a legacy of his Hancock TV fame, where the leads used their own names and cemented their comic personae. So that Sid is always a loveable cockney (from South Africa) even when he’s playing a scheming, murderous traitor. (The funniest thing about that is the way Williams, whenever he hears Marc Antony is coming, cries, “Oh, my friend!”) Plus, Sid in Roman attire is just an amusing sight. I don’t think the real Marc A. would have been much like Sid, but there must have been plenty of Roman soldiers who were.
I really like this rodental snarl Joan fleetingly produces, almost like she’s going to make a SILENCE OF THE LAMBS sucking noise. The extremely small, cheap set — we see two walls with oppressive wallpaper, no window, and a corner of stair through the door — adds to the sense of an inescapable domestic hell. Nearly all Joan’s scenes prior to the ending show her in bed, so the claustrophobia becomes part of her characterisation.
Jim Dale plays a well-meaning berk in SCREAMING! with some good physical comedy, but is something of a swashbuckling hero in CLEO. At one point he slays four or five Roman assassins in true Errol Flynn manner and manages to make us forget he’s dressed a a vestal virgin. So SCREAMING! is a more rewarding part for his skills, but CLEO shows some more range. He’s the only actor who appears in both films and is still alive, though as he says, “At my age, don’t buy any green bananas.”
The late Fenella Fielding as Valeria Watt in SCREAMING! is pretty evenly matched with Amanda Barrie as Cleo in CLEO. Each made only one other CARRY ON. Fiona covets Fenella’s red velvet dress, which she had to be sewn into. Barrie is funnier, perhaps, playing Cleo with the manner of a suburban hairdresser, and acting dumb to disguise a brain as functional as any are ever allowed to be in one of these movies. There’s a great bit where she’s reciting dialogue we’ve already heard in a prophetic vision, and she does it kind of by rote, as if she knows she’s already said it. That’s an AMAZING choice.
Barrie is also much, much sexier than Liz Taylor.
Kenneth Williams is one of the genuinely uncanny elements in SCREAMING! Chalk-white face and nostrils dilated like nacelles, vowels equally dilated. He was never required to exercise his natural ghoulishness elsewhere, except maybe the unpleasant surgical stuff in DOCTOR. In CLEO he’s just his usual twerp, maybe more benign than usual. He does get the greatest line (there aren’t many GOOD ones…) in a CARRY ON, the endlessly quoted “Infamy, infamy! They’ve all got in fa me!” I tell you what’s less funny: his last words in the film are, “Oh what’s the use?” which were also the last words in his diary before he committed suicide.
Peter Butterworth as Slobottom, the Watson to Bung’s Holmes, is magnificent. He nearly always played background types, and stole what moments he could (Richard Lester used him similarly: check out his textbook faffing as he struggles to removed an arrow from Richard Harris in ROBIN AND MARIAN). The only similar subordinate in CLEO is Victor Maddern, a believable and useful type, but not someone I ever feel like laughing in the presence of.
Kenneth Connor in CLEO gets one of his better roles. Writer Talbot Rothwell appears to have appropriated his story arc not from any telling of the Cleopatra story, but from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, with Connor acquiring a heroic reputation based on another man’s accomplishment. I’m wondering if somebody had the idea that Connor could be a second Dudley Moore. But that job was taken. Connor is never less cute than when he thinks he’s cute, but he is certainly an enthusiastic farceur.
Bernard Bresslaw makes a great zombie butler in SCREAMING! but is unaccountably absent from CLEO. Worth mentioning again that he was up for the role of the Creature in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Would that have led to him playing Dracula, then Fu Manchu, then Scaramanga, then Saruman?
Jon Pertwee gets two showy roles in these films, as a daffy Scottish police scientist and an Egyptian soothsayer. I’ll leave you to decide which film each character turns up in. He does a lot of face-pulling, tongue-protruding and random whistling and is very enjoyable, but somehow never seems quite in the same genre as the other actors.
The only actor in the regrettable CARRY ON COLUMBUS who seemed to get it was Rick Mayall, who said that director Gerald Thomas told him to be the most exaggerated version of who he was as a comedian. And that’s exactly what you want from a Carry On performer. Pertwee was a man of many voices from the radio, and he’s in that mode here, but when he had to play a role that was his own persona, it turned out to be in Doctor Who as a Victorian space fop.
Charles Hawtrey, like Kenneth Williams, is a total special effect, a freak of cinema. He attempts to make Dan Dann, the lavatory man quite a dashing figure. It’s a one-scene cameo with no real jokes except TOILETS. Which is a good half the humour of Carry On. His more substantial part as Caesar’s smutty father-in–law Senecca (!) in CLEO lets him do more and be more strange (the classic Carry On panto of gay men playing dirty-minded straight men while still furiously signalling their queerness).
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