Lockdown

I forget who it was who suggested that STRONGROOM would make a good double bill with CASH ON DEMAND. Duly noted, and though we didn’t pair them up (this time), we did finally get around to Vernon Sewell’s claustrophobic thriller.

Sewell, a former associate of Michael Powell, seems to have had a natural inclination towards restrictive environments. True, it’s a natural way of controlling costs, but there are other ways to do that — filming on location to avoid the need to hire studios and build sets, for instance. Sewell made several films on his boat, and a decent haunted house film, but STRONGROOM may well be his best.

The concept is simple: three bank robbers are compelled to lock two staff members in the vault where their plan goes awry. Realising that the prisoners will suffocate over the long weekend, they resolve to alert the authorities, but circumstances conspire against them. Weirdly, the tension relating to whether the poor bank employees will asphyxiate is less than that concerning whether the bastards who caused it will face a murder rap.

The double-bill we went for was this and SPLIT SECOND, the Dick Powell-directed nuclear thriller, which has an interesting cast and a high concept — criminals take a bunch of hostages at a nuclear test site — but weirdly is far less tense, until the very impressive final blast. Nobody in SS seems to be taking the nuke seriously enough. Every single moment in S is about the threat of death, of finding yourself a murderer.

Sewell’s direction isn’t so much — logic says the shots ought to build in intensity, but they barely do — but the script knows what to concentrate on. It’s shameless but effective in its constant amping up of anxiety. Writer Max Marquis wrote mainly TV drivel (Crossroads!) but Richard Harris (not that one) concentrated on thrillers, including great stuff like I START COUNTING, THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN (English dialogue), and a bunch of obscurities like THE MAIN CHANCE which I now feel eager to try. It’s a perfect low-budget movie, exploiting not only small, cheap sets, but slow pace. Watching oblivious minor characters padding about while death is on the line is extremely suspenseful.

While the imprisoned (Colin Gordon & Ann Lynn) are rather drab characterisations which the actors can only do so much with, the thieves include the great Derren Nesbitt, who has a strange plastic Auton quality that always makes him uncanny and watchable (he’s magnificent as the oily blackmailer in VICTIM). Sewell would cast him again in BURKE AND HARE (NOT a distinguished film — but one I kind of want to watch properly).

Nesbitt, tragicomically, blew his savings on his dream project, sex comedy THE AMOROUS MILKMAN, a contender for worst British film ever, and also appears in two more of the worst British sex farces you could ever hope to unsee, NOT NOW DARLING and OOH, YOU ARE AWFUL. He even cameos in RUN FOR YOUR WIFE, for old times’ sake. But he should never have been put in a comedy. His thick-lipped wax mask of a face stifles the laugh response. (Producer Art Linson, mulling over a casting idea with his wife: “Do you think Willem Dafoe could make you laugh?” Mrs. L: “I don’t know, but I saw him smile once and I had nightmares for a week.”)

When Nesbitt puts a stocking over his head for the robbery, it’s too much — he already looks like he has a stocking over his head, somehow.

The ending is a magnificently timed kick in the teeth for both characters and audience.

So, yes: a double bill of STRONGROOM and CASH ON DEMAND would be an excellent idea. Run them near Christmas, ideally, and have this one first: it isn’t remotely Christmassy.

Ready…Steady…

Jenny Agutter, as 15-yr-old Wynne Kinch (great name!), starts to suspect that her foster brother, with whom she’s in love, may be the local serial killer.

“Is this bringing your childhood back in a sudden Proustian rush?” I asked Fiona after five minutes of I START COUNTING. It was. Maybe the most personally evocative seventies childhood movie I’ve seen, (although it’s from 1969, when I was two) apart from things I actually saw during my own seventies childhood, which evoke feelings of nostalgia and terror due to their precise connection to my memory of seeing them then. This was my first time watching START COUNTING, as my badly cropped copy seems to be called (starring “Jenny Agutt”), so the resonance was more with the precise details of design, social behaviour, and evocation of early-mid teenagerhood.

Design — this was by the brilliant Brian Eatwell, whose biggest job in the 70s was Richard Lester’s THE THREE MUSKETEERS and sequel (attach wooden scaffolding to ruins, make them look like they’re under constrcution!), but he also designed several of Greene’s films: MADAME SIN, a failed TV pilot with Bette Davis as a sort of female Fu Manchu — if only this had been picked up!) THE STRANGE AFFAIR, which I have a ratty copy of, unwatched, and GODSPELL. Here he makes a church look like a space station, but still keeps it believable. He also did those amazing art-deco sets for the DR PHIBES films —

— which leads us to jazz genius Basil Kirchin, who scored this with its haunting theme song, and also wrote the music played by Dr. Phibes’ clockwork orchestra. Kirchin’s stuff always makes me think of drifting downstream in a punt, trailing my fingers in the water, probably in soft focus. But in a good way.

Social observation — START COUNTING was filmed in the same Berkshire new town where Sidney Lumet made THE OFFENCE. Greene, a Canadian, and Lumet, an Unistater, find cinematic values in these drab UK surroundings that seem to elude most of out homegrown filmmakers: it’s striking how many of the great images of Britain were directed by outsiders. A bit more recently, I was struck by the epic sweep Atom Egoyan brought to our motorways in FELICIA’S JOURNEY. The film’s flawed, but he really got a look going in it, using precisely the kind of places we Brits might dismiss as unphotogenic, or else use only for their grimness.

Apart from the very particular sense of suburban-village-sprawl nowhere, there’s the dialogue, which is peppered with teenage fantasy and blunt period tastelessness: reflecting on the recent spate of murders, Agutter’s brother muses, “He might at least rape them, it seems such a waste.” Whereas in an Italiasn giallo this unbelievably crass remark might be part of an overall seediness and misogyny, here it just seems the kind of thing an insensitive young man in that environment might say, with a slight “Tsk,” from his mum the only rebuttal.

Jenny Agutter: astonishing. I mean, astonishing.

There is an ever-present risk of exploitation and tackiness, since this is about  burgeoning teen sexuality and all, and Greene does originate that shot where the camera follows Agutter’s knickers as she pulls them up her legs, but he doesn’t linger on the action as Nic Roeg would in WALKABOUT, two years later: nothing to see here. On the whole, I thought the film managed to be interested in its subject without leering at it. And some of the teen girlspeak is very funny, especially when Agutter and her best friend exchange confidences in church by speaking their lines with the same rhythm and stress as the catholic liturgy being recited by the rest of the congregation: “What’s he like?” “Tasty.”

Elsewhere in the cast, lovely old Fay Compton from Welles’ OTHELLO and Wise’s THE HAUNTING, unrecognisable in an old bag role, played to the hilt, and by contrast, Simon Ward as a randy bus conductor, who’s very very young indeed. He’s practically an ante-natal Ward, in fact. And Jenny Agutter, who makes everything work. She gets a drunk scene, she gets to behave in slightly random ways, she’s an authentic teen to the hilt, but a very specific, English, Jenny Agutterized teen. We will not see a performance like this again. Makes me realise what an underexploited national resource she is. Remember how there was a Jenny Agutter film or two every year, in which she would be duly nude, and then suddenly she did a clothed cameo in DARKMAN and disappeared? And now you only see her in bit parts on TV? Shocking.

Ou sont les Jenny Agutters d’antan?

Adventures in Babysitting

Not exactly babysitting… he’s fifteen. I shall explain.

Fiona and I get to play at being grown-ups this week, looking after Louis, the son of friends. We’ll be zooming back and forth between our home, to tend to our cat, and the more upscale climes of Stockbridge, to tend to Louis. Not that he needs much looking after. I think mainly we’re supposed to stare at him to check that he hasn’t died.

So it’s possible that this week, things will be more family-friendly here on Shadowplay. Like, tonight, Fiona and Louis are watching a feelgood sports movie. I think it’s called THE WRESTLER.

I imagine you’ll hardly notice any difference though, especially as I already have a few pieces written for this week. Meanwhile, here is a rabbit:

From David Greene’s beautiful film I START COUNTING.