Return to Dunsinane

Fiona wanted to do a direct comparison between Joel Coen’s and Roman Polanski’s THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, so we ran the Criterion Blu of the latter, and my opinion of it rose considerably. (The picture upgrade on that disc, over the DVD my frame-grabs are from, is massive: Gilbert Taylor, who had previously shot REPULSION, was one of Polanski’s finest collaborators.)

The Coen film is a rather compelling blend of film and theatre — everything it does with its visual approach seems to me just right, building on Olivier’s Shakespeare films and Welles and Kurosawa. It does take some textual hints from Polanski and Tynan’s adaptation, building on the idea of Ross as a schemer and traitor to both sides, something not specified in Shakespeare but which makes sense and allows him to grow from a Basil Exposition kind of attendant lord into a proper dimensional character.

Polanski does something very literal, very blunt — he decides to make Dark Age Scotland as visceral and real as he can. Olivier had considered doing this for HENRY V but worried that the audience would say, “Okay, so that’s a tree and that’s a house and that’s a horse… why is everyone talking so funny?” Polanski’s Horrible Histories visualisation begs that question very urgently indeed, and also creates unnecessary problems out of the asides and soliloquies. Can Macbeth talk to the camera/audience, and if not, what does he do instead.

In fact, we see in ALFIE that an actor can do asides in an otherwise naturalistic film, and it’s a device I’d like to see tried more. (It would have been an absolutely natural thing to try in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, frinstance) Polanski has Jon Finch sometimes do quite long internal monologues, making faces to try to match his dubbed-on thoughts, something I never find satisfying or engaging. More successful, because more playful, are the segues from this device into spoken monologue, the character talking to himself like John McClane in DIE HARD (another besieged warrior with marital troubles). Polanski is always keen to credit Olivier as an influence, so I suspect this is borrowed from the similar tricks in HAMLET. But why Polanski didn’t consider using some of that film’s stripped-down theatricality I don’t know. I guess he’s just more of a realist, and not a man of the theatre like Sir Larry.

But rewatching a film is great for seeing past the things that bother you on a first viewing. Polanski’s whole aesthetic may be sort of counter-productive to doing Shakespeare, but he goes at it very enthusiastically indeed, and if the grit and sharpness are an odd fit for the iambic pentameters, they’re surprisingly close to the sharp focus of outright hallucination — Polanski seems to be using his 60s experience of LSD to give us freak-out visions that render Macbeth’s experiences, particularly with the witches, horrifyingly up-close and alarming.

And the casting of young actors, which was absurdly controversial at the time, seems like a no-brainer now. Older actors have more experience of both life and acting and can often do more than the photogenic youngsters. But what they can’t do is BE YOUNG. I think a middle-aged Macbeth could work if you play him as desperately grabbing what seems like his last chance at success, but the whole question of his wanting an heir becomes academic, an anaemic character motivation, if he has a menopausal wife.

I found myself liking Jon Finch’s performance, bad wig aside, more than before. He’s a star who should have been huge, but his biggest roles, this and FRENZY, didn’t do him the most justice, I always felt. His perf in THE FINAL PROGRAMME, on the other hand, MY GOD that is a star turn. But now I think I was too harsh on his Macbeth: there didn’t seem a single point where he didn’t have exactly the right take on the text.

Francesca Annis is also terrific: she seems readily able to seduce Macbeth into his crimes, as opposed to Frances McDormand’s Lady M who essentially bullies her husband forward. The text tells us she has nursed a baby but has no children now, but there seems no reason why she couldn’t be expected to have more kids and so Macbeth can realistically desire to see his children inherit the throne from him.

Annis looks not much like Sharon Tate but I found myself reminded of her a good deal, maybe because I recently saw Tate standing on a castle tower in EYE OF THE DEVIL.

What everyone used to talk about is the violence, which there is a lot of. It’s very matter-of-fact. The men barely react to someone being hanged or bludgeoned to death in front of them, and for the women and kids there’s always bear-baiting. The play is certainly full of mayhem but Shakespeare’s attitude to it is probably a little different — in Shakespearean tragedy, the normal order of things typically goes awry, and you get fathers against sons, eye-gougings, and so on. At the end, typically order is restored and everyone left alive is happy. A bit sad about all the mayhem but happy it’s over. Shakespeare’s politics are roughly speaking conservative — well, he had a monarch to please. Macbeth seems to have been intended to appeal to King James, who was a big believer in witches — a bunch of women in Scotland had just been tortured and killed for supposedly cursing him. Fortunately, there’s a lot more to Shakespeare than his politics.

Well, Polanski seems to see the order of things as continuous violence and chaos, which, given his life experiences is understandable (everyone thinks of the Manson killings here, but the Holocaust is at least as important, and though RP has denied that the film was his direct response to his wife’s death, he’s admitted that the behaviour of Macbeth’s henchman when entering the Macduff family home was based on that of an SS officer he witnessed in occupied Poland. So Duncan’s reign is unspeakably violent and horrible, Macbeth’s is maybe slightly worse, then he’s killed and it looks like the witches are going to recruit another patsy so the cycle of carnage can continue. Joel Coen steals that idea outright for his new film. It’s very modern and very unshakespearean, but like I say, Shakespeare’s politics are kind of his least appealing aspect.

(The biggest exception may be KING LEAR, where the few survivors are so shattered by what they’ve been through (The biggest exception may be KING LEAR, where the few survivors are so shattered by what they’ve been through and seen, none of them have the heart to really take stock of the situation, which seems somehow apocalyptic.)

I’ve written elsewhere about how Polanski films have a tendency to arc back to their own beginnings, swallowing their tails — from TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE through REPULSION, CUL DE SAC, FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, PIRATES. Even if they don’t literally end in the spot they began at, or near it, often the ending is a call-back in some way — CHINATOWN begins with its main title, and ends in Chinatown. It’s a rather despairing vision of the world, where we always end up back where we started only substantially the worse for wear.

Polanski and his co-adaptor, Kenneth Tynan, have not only moved Macbeth’s decapitation from discretely offstage to graphically onscreen, an almost essential change which nearly every filmmaker has followed, varying only in their explicitness, he’s chopped all the summing-up by the survivors which reassures the play’s audience that the line of kings will now continue in a legitimate way. Most other movie adaptations follow the same pattern, based on a reading of the play’s TRUE subject as Macbeth himself, not the crown of Scotland. When he’s dead, it’s mostly over.

One of Polanski’s most brilliant and alarming touches is the aftermath of Finch’s lopping, with his head whooshing about on the end of a pike, and handheld shots that COULD be his point of view, as if consciousness has not quite fled and he has a chance to take in, in a wobbly sort of way, the scene of his death.

At times, the film’s visual ideas clash with the playscript — when the witches say “Hover through the fog and filthy air, before they exeunt, it’s pretty clear Shakespeare’s suggesting they’re flying, as witches are said to do. Here, they just say it, and don’t even waddle off: it seems to be just something witches like saying. (The Coen film has no broomsticks, but strongly implies that the witch/es can turn into crows.) And the fights are terrifically staged by the great Bill Hobbs, but I don’t quite get why Banquo’s injuries should be so different from what the murderers’ describe in their report to Macbeth. Interestingly, when he sees visions of Banquo, some of them accurately show the axe in the back which he has no way of knowing about. But witchcraft can do that.

Deft little additions make Lady M’s swift descent into madness almost TOO gradual. I chatted with Angela Allen, the film’s script supervisor, who spoke somewhat sceptically about Polanski’s temper tantrums and karate chops (he’d had lessons from Bruce Lee and could snap great beams with the edge of his little hand), and while she was full of praise for Annis, she felt Finch knew the performance he WANTED to give, but perhaps couldn’t quite reach. But he’s physical, brooding, handsome, and he can speak the verse. And he probably gets over more of the character’s slow corruption than the other big movie Macs. “Macbeth is a play about the slow decay of the moral sense,” says Ltnt Kinderman in EXORCIST III. But he practically starts off with regicide, regarded as the worst crime possible in Shakespeare’s day. Say rather it’s about guilt, which destroys Lady Macbeth’s sanity and turns her husband, progressively, into a monster. Because one way of dealing with guilt is to deny it, to keep doing the stuff that makes you feel guilty, trying to prove that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not a GOOD way of dealing with it, but it’s quite popular.

Polanski faithfully stages the spectre at the banquet just as the text suggests (Macbeth doesn’t sit because there’s somebody in his chair, but nobody else can see this person…), only adding some weird special effects so that the ghost is differently horrible each time we see it. And our view of it is tied to Macbeth’s — it’s only seen in his POV shots.

(Important to keep things straight — Banquo’s ghost is a manifestation of Macbeth’s guilt, which he’s not emotionally smart enough to process. In the Coen film, the ghost is associated with crows, and this with the witches. This is quite, QUITE wrong.)

Best of all, perhaps, is the witches’ sabbat, a Goyaesque bad trip. The mirrors within mirrors, a giddy fast-motion rush of shots spliced together with artful opticals, perfectly visualises Macbeth’s cry of “Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”

I’m glad I got over my feeling that Polanski went at this the wrong way. I still think he did, but he went at it so aggressively he basically made it work.

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH stars Jerry Cornelius; Lady Jessica; Judge John Deed; The Bloody Barron; Keats; Adolph Bolm; King Vishtaspa; Engywook; Mr. Tupper; Book Person: Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ (uncredited); and Robin Hood Junior.

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM (and only Bergman holds the key)

Our first guest Shadowplayer, filmmaker Matthew Wilder, looks at a late-ish Bergman — Bergman spent more of his career making late movies than anyone before or since — I think he first announced his retirement with FANNY AND ALEXANDER but then kept writing and directing up until his death, and has authored several post-mortem works.

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In a moment fraught with resonances at once Freudian and Kafkaesque, Ingmar Bergman was arrested at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in the midst of a rehearsal of August Strindberg’s DANCE OF DEATH for income tax evasion. The subsequent stress—though all charges were dropped against Bergman and he was entirely exonerated—drove him to a nervous breakdown and hospitalization. There is an irony here that no doubt Bergman appreciated most of all: the great auteur, known for woman problems in his own life, attempts to “exorcise” them through staging the notorious misogynist Strindberg’s folie a deux on the subject of marriage…and in the process gets pinched by two plainclothes Superego Cops, putting the cuffs on him for a crime he didn’t commit…but perhaps he did commit it: the crime of being Ingmar Bergman.

Let’s remember that this act—the act of being put under arrest—caused Bergman to crack. And let’s view this crack-up as the bridge between Bergman’s two superb crack-up movies, FACE TO FACE (1976), where ill-treated-by-Ingmar Liv Ullmann is the cracker-upper; and FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES (1980), where Peter, a male who may or may not be an Ingmar stand-in, is he-who-cracks.

The subject of FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is inexplicable trauma. And as analysts of the traumatic event that is FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES, we must, like the dislikable, Simon Oakland in PSYCHO style shrink in MARIONETTES itself, look at the facts. Yes, Bergman was arrested for tax evasion; yes, he “broke down” and went into a mental asylum; and yes, he transformed that crack-up into the coolly objective (feeling) “dossier on a crack-up” FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES. However, Bergman had no problem finding money for projects outside of Sweden (AUTUMN SONATA and MARIONETTES were British/German coproductions); he easily re-routed himself to Munich; and his problems were solved in the homeland in time for him to slide into home and create FANNY AND ALEXANDER, perhaps the most cannily devised farewell-tour, wasn’t-I-great-folks? Swan song in the history of cinema.

I would venture to say that what was traumatic to Bergman had nothing to do with his finances, or his auditors’ view of them. It was the sheer trauma of that act of arrest. Its concomitant air of persecution and its presumption of guilt were what snapped the string in Bergman’s head. Hitchcock spoke of his lifelong fair of getting pinched by the cops; and to be sure, we read that into that traffic cop with mirrored sunglasses knocking on the window of the sleeping Marion Crane’s car in PSYCHO. Bergman (like Fritz Lang, who saw the actual inside of a Gestapo questioning room) actually experienced it.

The effect of this trauma was transfiguring. From it came one of Bergman’s strangest but most mature works. There are earlier Bergman films that seem entirely carved out of self-pity born out of some jarring events in Bergman’s life. The almost unbelievably preposterous NOW ABOUT ALL THESE WOMEN (1964) derives from Bergman’s agony at the hands of critics, and of the many women in his life; THE RITE (1969) is a free-floating fantasia of persecution, staged in the manner of a Living Theatre bacchanal merged with a movie—it’s about every kind of Establishment force cracking down on a troupe of sensitive artistes.

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES, on the contrary, does not depict its melting-down protagonist as a righteous character violated by an unjust society. Its attempts to decrypt an abominable act of violence are entirely equivocal.

The genre MARIONETTES belongs to, I would insist, is the giallo. This Italian pulp form features many narrative shapes: some are Agatha Christie-like whodunits, some are cop sagas, others are in the vein of Gothic dark-old-house yarns. But what yokes them all together is fetishized images of highly sexualized, then highly vandalized, female bodies.

To break it down: they all feature a bare-breasted hooker, strangled with her eyes bugged out, or perhaps slashed, a bloody gout zigzagging her torso, also with her eyes bugged out.

Sometimes (more often than not) this image is eroticized; other times it is sheerly horror-ized; in all cases it is wildly fetishized.

FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES does not quite give us that precise form of visual satisfaction. The protagonist, Peter, kills a prostitute at the outset. In the seconds counting down to that murder, we are very much on the side of the hooker, Ka, as the runs about a tiny, windowless, foul-smelling strip joint and tries to find a place to hide before Peter can kill her. And, unlike the equally sober Bob Fosse film STAR 80, MARIONETTES tells us that Peter anally rapes the corpse, but does not show us the goods.

What I would suggest is that FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is a deconstruction of the giallo. (Is the giallo really derived from Hitchcock’s FRENZY? If so, there is an interesting family tree revealed here. MARIONETTES seems in many ways an oblique commentary on, or at least wink at, PSYCHO; FRENZY was Hitch’s attempt to steroid up, to make a contemporary, R-rated PSYCHO, and it would seem the giallo form was in large part spun off from FRENZY—with the most famous topless, strangled-tongued, bulgy-eyed victim in the history of cinema.) Where the conventional giallo gives us garish, lurid repetitions of the primal scene of bulgy-eyed-hooker, MARIONETTES takes that eroticized image away and gives us a geyser of potential explanation, psychologizing, motivation. And Bergman never lands on one satisfying “Rosebud” password that opens the door to Peter’s psyche.

Before killing Ka (Rita Russek), Peter (Robert Atzorn) fights with his sexy, proud, self-possessed wife (Christine Buchegger), with whom he has a relationship that is described as more sibling-y than conjugal. “We have good sex,” he says, “we do it without emotions.” He has a seemingly dismal job in business—in one virtuoso sequence, Bergman has him dictate a business letter in its entirety, its bean-counting prose a dazzling feat of imaginative writing—but he seems quite happy with it, and with the status it affords him. His mother (Lola Muthel) is a one-time big-shot actress who still thinks a great deal of herself though the spotlight has moved on; we see how this could be destructive, though it doesn’t seem to land with Peter very strongly. The strangest element, the one likeliest to contribute to his psychopathology, is his relationship with the rather sinister shrink, Professor Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath). This character is reminiscent of all those cold-blooded, quietly sadistic men of science in Bergman movies who go by the name of “Vergerus.” Peter visits him and tells him of the thoughts that dog him about killing his wife. Jensen callously tells him to “take a long walk, then have a coffee and some cognacs,” and is generally smugly dismissive of the younger, more attractive man. Peter pretends to leave, but hides near one of Jensen’s bookshelves. A moment later, his wife arrives…kisses Jensen…and they talk about Peter. Jensen wants to bed her at last; she says no, she is too devoted to her husband, as irritating as he may be. They are, she says, permanently joined. We see Peter hearing this—seeing her step away from infidelity with the doctor—and it would seem this moment of loyalty saves her life.

Or is the whole scene a fantasy? It is one thing for Scorsese to stage Travis Bickle’s final encounter with dream girl Betsy in TAXI DRIVER; or Rupert Pupkin’s triumphant return to late-night TV at the end of THE KING OF COMEDY, as maybe-it’s-all-a-dream-or-maybe-not. Those are the closers to the movie…and the movie has said its piece, made its points, longer before that INCEPTION-like pivot of ambiguity arrives in the last inning. Here, Bergman plants this crucial scene—maybe the one that comes the closest to “explaining this whole thing”—somewhere around the one-third point. All the other possible reasons ping off this critical moment…and we don’t even know if it’s real.

There is something a little subjective in my fascination with MARIONETTES: there is a certain way of speaking, of being, that I think of as signifying “Bergman’s people.” The pinnacle of it is in the 1974 SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, to which MARIONETTES is supposedly a sequel or an offshoot. (Peter and his wife are meant to be doubles of the unhappy couple who visit Johan and Marianne in SCENES.) There is a certain kind of dialogue Bergman wrote in that largely noble string of movies extending from PERSONA to MARIONETTES, which sometimes cries out in terror and pain, and oftentimes lacerates another character in language so acid and indelibly cruel, the scenes are almost intolerable to watch. The characters in MARIONETTES…they are not really these people. They are not as self-assured, self-regarding, self-aware. They seem harbingers of a newer, post-self-conscious society…closer to today’s society of people who constantly speak and tweet of themselves, yet seem to have no particular deep awareness of themselves. Katarina, Peter’s wife, stages fashion runway shows; Peter works in some form of sales that is opaque. The characters know they have feelings but don’t seem to know where they come from—possibly a first for Bergman.

There is a shock to some of these scenes that recalls opening Andy Warhol’s Diaries for the first time and discovering that his telling of “Cab Ride–$13” and “Drugstore Pickups–$23” were entirely unironic. Bergman seems to be trying to speak in the voice of, and perhaps analyze, a new, different kind of person. (This is certainly borne out by his ending the movie with a blast of disco music from the strip joint—as if he thought that were what we, like the strip-joint habitués, wanted.) It has always struck me, from my first viewing of MARIONETTES, that Bergman was, for the one time in his career, influenced by the work of someone working at the same time as he: in this case, making MARIONETTES at Munich’s Bavaria Film Studios, it is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was just down the hallway making BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ at the same time. The film seems an attempt to step up to what Bergman considers Fassbinder’s level of coolness or indifference—there is even a character who screams in German of her terrible “fear of fear”: the title (Angst vor der angst) of a particularly baroquely cruel late Fassbinder movie.

Though the vignettes are laid out in cool, objective, pseudo-journalistic fashion, MARIONETTES is as nakedly the artist’s attempt to put himself on the examining table as any late work by Lars Von Trier. For instance, Bergman reveals more about himself than the character in a strange vignette in which Katarina hangs out with a co-worker, an aging homosexual who is almost literally an encyclopedia of all the clichéd traits associated with “aging homosexual.” At one point, half preening, half self-loathing, he delivers an entire speech with his face smooshed against a mirror. Childless, afraid of aging, pathetically vain, he confesses to Peter’s now rather cop-like shrink that he planned to weasel his way into Katarina’s marriage and steal hot young Peter away from her. One wonders whether this toxic portrait is a legitimate snapshot of Bergman’s own loathsome homophobia, or a deliberately jacked-up grotesque character that Bergman plunked down in this story to thumb his nose at the PC types in the audience—or, perhaps, in Munich. (Could it be a va fongu to the BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ guy down the hall?)

If nothing else, FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is a giallo with all the misogynistic pleasure taken out. The hero’s dreams, that swirl around violence toward his wife, are more empathetic and cringe-inducing than sadistic and aestheticizing a la set pieces of DePalma. Even the black and white seems superegoic punitive. For all intents and purposes, FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES spelled the end of “Ingmar Bergman” the filmmaker. The work that followed—FANNY AND ALEXANDER, AFTER THE REHEARSAL, SARABAND, and other odds and ends—were more part of Valedictory Tour, Inc., than part of the main body of Bergman’s work. No, this trauma finished him—and he ended in a far-off land, the land of Vergerus, the Nazi doctor in THE SERPENT’S EGG, doing an eighties take on something like Oskar Kokoschka’s MURDERER HOPE OF WOMEN: a German Expressionist saga of Liebestod with many a grimacing dead hooker’s face. MARIONETTES is as complete a testament to the unknowability of human evil as David Fincher’s ZODIAC. It is a truly terminal work, like Pasolini’s SALO, an edge past which there is nowhere to go.

So it makes sense that Bergman would, as Pauline Kael so succinctly put it, “go sprinting back to Victorian health” with the widely beloved FANNY AND ALEXANDER. Like many other film artists who hit a wall at the end of the seventies, Bergman gave the people what they wanted in the eighties. And he had a long string of no-really-this-is-it finales. But as a last gasp of the monster he was, FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES is Ingmar Bergman’s real testament movie.

Paranormal Inactivity

I reported the slightly ungenerous opinion of my late friend Lawrie Knight, regarding filmmaker Vernon Sewell (“As far as I could tell, Vernon never had a brain in his head”) and then I heard from Sewell’s godson, advising me to look deeper. So I did.

It’s unfortunate that the three films I watched descended in quality from one to the next, but there was quality, and to correct that negative impression, I’m reversing the order and starting with the worst first.

GHOST SHIP (1952), starring Hazel Court and her husband Dermot Walsh, is a supernatural thriller — as were the other two films sampled. All three films use parapsychological explanations to fold their ghostly happenings into a scientific worldview, and all three feature cosy ladies who act as mediums (or should that be “media”?), as well as making substantial, and somewhat unconventional, use of flashbacks. This one was of particular interest to me because Lawrie had mentioned it — “He bought a boat, to use as studio. And I think he did make a couple of films on that boat.”

Unfortunately, Sewell hadn’t cracked a system for filming in the cramped quarters of his steam yacht: the result is lots of empty frames, into which characters protrude from the sides, before having discussions in lifeless flat two-shots, before exiting and leaving us with an empty frame again. Contrast this with Polanski’s dynamic use of even tighter environments in KNIFE IN THE WATER.

His story also takes ages to get going, with early manifestations limited to disembodied cigar smoke. Eventually a murder mystery is explicated via the medium’s intervention, and the middle-class couple can get back to yachting in peace. Best fun is the no-nonsense psychic investigator with his tuning forks, who realizes that the heat from the engine room acts as a trigger for spooky appearances ~

“The greater the heat, the more these vibrations are evident. Has it ever struck you how so many apparently inexplicable things only ever happen in hot countries? I mean, nobody’s seen the rope trick outside India. Voodoo’s only practiced in South/Central America. Firewalkers, fakirs, witch doctors: all in tropical climates. It’s like developing a photographic negative: the hotter the solution, the quicker the picture appears.”

Delightful. And all conducted with the aide of a set of tuning forks, too.

We also get a very young Ian Carmichael as a comedy drunk, holding up the action just as it gets promising, and a painfully young Joss Ackland. Having Danny Glover drop a packing case on his head in LETHAL WEAPON II was all in the future for young Joss.

A good bit better is LATIN QUARTER, also known as FRENZY, a tale of a murderous sculptor whose crime haunts his studio, necessitating the intervention of another pukkah psychic investigator and another mumsy medium. This movie integrates its flashbacks better, and it has Frederick Valk (the shrink from DEAD OF NIGHT) as the investigator, Joan Greenwood as a murdered model, Valentine Dyall (THE HAUNTING) as a prefect of police — lots of enjoyable players. The bad guy actor rejoices in the name of Beresford Egan, so we had to like him. Derrick deMarney is the hero, but you can’t have everything. Lots of Germans in this studio Paris, I guess because it was 1945.

Best of all was the modest HOUSE OF MYSTERY (1961), which reprises most of the plot of GHOST SHIP with a better, more involved flashback structure, more like THE LOCKET or The 1001 Nights. And the filming is MUCH better, with a mobile camera and slightly fogged style. The haunted cottage carries a genuinely intriguing mystery story which mixes ghosts, straightforward murder, and science fiction of the Nigel Kneale variety — lots of talk about buildings acting as recording instruments for the emotions enacted within them. Oh, and a really nice twist at the end. The cast here is very low-key, with Nanette Newman the best-known face, but the lack of star-power works with the film’s quiet, unfussed approach to the eerie. No wonder Sewell didn’t really thrive in the later world of British horror — his gaudy BLOOD BEAST TERROR, CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR and BURKE AND HARE aren’t a patch on these mild-mannered chillers.