Slop

Arthur Lucan is the ne plus ultra of Awful British Comedians, or I hope he is. As Old Mother Riley, a shrieking, gesticulating Irish char lady, he appeared in a series of poverty row productions, generally with his wife, Kitty O’Shea, playing his daughter. The sex lives of British comedians are best left unimagined — the little we know of them is repulsive — but the coition of Mr And Mrs Lucan reaches a level of gruesomeness unrivalled until the appearance of the Krankies (don’t Google — if you are in ignorance, best remain so). This may be why young Ken Russell regarded them with such abhorrence, but he doesn’t really need an excuse beyond what’s onscreen.

Kitty does not appear in MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE, but Bela Lugosi does. He made this the same year as BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA, and it’s a wonder he survived, even if not for long. It’s hard to say which cinematic encounter depleted him more, but one thing you can say about Bela, he never phones it in. One might wish he had, from across the Atlantic, saving himself the trip and indignity.

Lucan doesn’t exactly spare us anything either, shrieking every line and waving his bony arms about in a pugilistic mania. Aware that his is a quickly overplayed hand and an entire film of this grisly schtick would turn the strongest stomach, the filmmakers provide a few less rabid actors for us to gaze upon, and two of these, the excellent and resourceful Dora Bryan and the ineffectual Richard Wattis, get what laughs are to be had.

But there are such things as anti-laughs, and when you tot everything up it’s clear that MRMTV has a net total of minus a thousand or so laughs. Despite feature a nice clanky robot, and some good weird sidekicks for Bela, including Judith Furse — the mannish Sister Briony from BLACK NARCISSUS and the ubermannish Doctor Crow from CARRY ON SPYING, assisted by bespectacled homunculus Ian Wilson. Some men are small. Some are very small. Wilson is unpleasantly small, he’s able to turn his stature into a creep factor, an impressive trick unequalled until Ronnie Corbett’s clockwork Nazi in CASINO ROYALE.

“Directing” the show is John Gilling, his Hammer films still ahead of him but with one Todd Slaughter script (THE GREED OF WILLIAM HART) to his name. Most of the men handed megaphones on Awful British Comedian movies have an anti-talent for comedy, but few compare with Gilling, who racks up the anti-laughs until whatever the opposite of hysteria is sets in. He has a way of suddenly cutting to a chiaroscuro closeup of his gurning lead clown that’s more authentically blood-curdling than anything he managed with reptile women, zombies, or pharaonic revenants. A full critical reckoning with Gilling has yet to occur, I feel. His Hammer films feel better than some of their rivals, but they’re funny, not scary. And his comedies are alarming, not funny. This being a horror comedy, it gets to be unfunny at all times, and the music-hall low-jinks are more alarming than the horror spoofery.

If you feel that you might be getting to be too happy, I can highly recommend this film. Image by image, it has a certain misguided verve, the mock-horror framing shows some ability. But put together, it’s absolutely lethal.

Verdict: Arthur Lucan and Old Mother Riley are both Awful. Lucan clearly has some kind of talent, but it could probably have been better applied to a career in enhanced interrogation techniques.

Critical Drubbing

“On the very night of the film’s premiere, Russell followed the example of his film’s inquisitors in expelling the devils and, live on BBC TV (in the accidental but bemused presence of another interviewee, a former Minister of Defence), he drubbed a film critic over the head with a rolled-up copy of the newspaper in which the movie had been condemned that very afternoon. If viewers relished a critic being on the receiving end, their response turned instantly to displeasure, even to protest, when Russell suited the word to the action — the word being the same four-letter one that Kenneth Tynan had been the first to use publically on television in the Sixties. The calls that jammed the BBC switchboard proved that the expletive had lost none of its primal power to give offence.”

This is from Alexander Walker’s National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties. I was happy to pick up a couple of Walker’s books at a reasonable price from different charity shops within the same week. Taken together — I still need to grab the last volume — they provide a pretty good history of British cinema in the last half of the twentieth century.

What Walker fails to mention in the above account is that the critic getting the rolled-up Evening Standard across the occiput was himself. A strange thing to leave out. If Walker didn’t want to acknowledge his own role in the drama, he could have dropped the whole incident, which is amusing but largely because of the specific people involved. Alexander Walker being lightly and symbolically thwacked like a housefly is much funnier than the same thing happening to, say, Penelope Gilliatt or C.A. Lejeune.

In airbrushing himself from the picture, Walker is also able to dodge the thing that made Russell so furious in the first place — though no doubt a bad review would have irked the rosy-face enfant terrible, Ken was particularly cross that Walker had described the film inaccurately, alleging that we saw somebody’s testicles crushed, or anyhow that the film somehow implies the crushing of somebody’s testicles. We don’t, it doesn’t. No filmmaker can expect uniformly favourable write-ups, or even sensitive ones, but we’re entitled to accurate ones. Walker’s allowing his imagination to run away with him opens him to a charge of not paying much attention to the film he was reviewing. Russell stated afterwards that what infuriated him was Walker’s refusal to address this point when he raised it, repeatedly, on television. “So I whacked him on the head with his own newspaper. Should have had an iron bar wrapped inside it.”

The irony is that Walker could easily have said, or later written, that OK, he made a mistake about the assaulted nuts, but the film features many equally outrageous and offensive moments and so the fact that it lacks testicular mayhem makes no overall difference. (“Scene after scene resembles nothing more than the masturbatory fantasies of a Catholic boyhood,” he wrote, or something like it. Though Ken was a Catholic convert in adulthood so such a resemblance could only be coincidental.) I would accept that argument and mea culpa, though I don’t agree with him that the film is bad. I don’t even think that, by concentrating on what he finds offensive, dismissing its political points, and ignoring the artistry with which it’s made, Walker really grappled with the film at all. Alas, his description of it in National Heroes is again a laundry list of gross images, as if such material was incapable of having any purpose and merely recounting it is enough to prove its gratuity and offensiveness. In fact, though Walker’s litany of abuses lacks the visceral impact of Russell’s visualisation, it is Russell who has put the nasty stuff into some kind of context that goes some way to making a meaningful point.

Walker isn’t quite right to say that Russell used the same four-letter word, the F word, fuck, as Kenneth Tynan. Russell in fact used a seven-letter word — no, not upstart — another F word, fucking. When Russell declared that he made films for the public, not for critics, Walker replied, I think rather snidely, “The public doesn’t seem that grateful, especially in America,” referencing the poor stateside box-office. “Then go to America and write for the fucking Americans!” yelled Russell. WHACK!

Neither man was being very logical. But which side are you on?

Pa.

LA RICOTTA, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s tragicomic episode of ROGOPAG, is a substantial piece of work. It’s good enough to place at the start or finish of the film, but perhaps its downbeat conclusion argued against renaming the film either PAGOROG or GROGOPA,

During the filming of the crucifixion, a lowly extra or bit-part player, Mario Cipriani, troubled with hiccups, struggles to get something to eat on location after giving his lunch to his starving family. Orson Welles plays the film’s director. Although we’re on location in familiar-looking extra-Roman scenery (maybe on the road to Ostia, where PPP placed Fellini’s CABIRIA, and where he would meet his own death twelve years later), the scenes from the film within the film are shot on a stage at Cinecitta in ravishing colour.

Here’s a funny thing: did PPP have a bigger budget than his fellows? Rossellini is unable to afford foreign locations; Godard shoots on the streets, has no production design save a newspaper. Pasolini has colour, period costumes, a large supporting cast, Laura Betti, and Orson Welles as the film’s director. A clue may come from an exchange reported when JLG interviewed RR: “Is it necessary to spend the whole budget on the film?” asked Godard. “You spend what you have to,” replied Rossellini, “the rest is for you and your family.”

Pasolini, a decent actor and striking presence, should really be playing the director himself, who quotes Pasolini, but I guess casting Welles allows him to satirise Hollywood, even of OW is hardly a typical embodiment of that town/attitude. Also, Welles is funnier than Pasolini could have been. The repeated shot of a morose Welles alone in his chair is extremely amusing. And I haven’t generally been a fan of PPP’s comic stylings. I’ll never forget the ghastly Chaplin pastiche in THE CANTERBURY TALES, an example of a totally mismatched talent failing to grasp the aesthetic he’s aiming at. (Ken Russell, who one would have thought equally distant from CC, manages slightly better in LISZTOMANIA.)

We do get undercranked footage with shrill fast-forward music, but it’s used really as interstitial material and is not actively unfunny. And applying the comic touch a tad heavily works, I think, since this is all headed for tragedy, so you get more of a tonal clash this way. I feel, in a way, that Pasolini’s sensibility and whole outlook is anti-comic: the joking in this film is mostly cruel sport made of the bit-player, mockery by the rest of the cast and crew, and the film only joins in this comedy as a distancing device, not because it finds him funny.

Equating comedy with bullying is reductive, but there is some element of truth to the accusation. Bullies always try to use humour, though the resulting laughter is tinged with fear — people laugh along because they don’t want to be the next victim.

I like the idea of directors nodding to one another in their own work: Gregoretti will include a Pasolini gibe in his concluding chapter here, but PPP’s tribute to Fellini is more ambivalent. “He dances,” says Welles, thoughtfully, when asked his opinion by an annoying reporter. A questioning look. “yes. He dances,” repeats the scowling Buddha.

PPP starts the piece with an onscreen text and narration by himself in which he affirms the significance of the Bible and the passion of Christ, lest anyone think he’s mocking it. Which would be an easy conclusion to jump to — (really fun) Italian pop music playing while extras dance, the accident of a real fatality interrupting the Calvary tableau, the grumpiness of actors and crew undercutting the solemnity of the scene being shot, Christ’s deposition being interrupted when the body is dropped — this is all aimed at the faux-seriousness of religiose movie-making, I guess, but it has blasphemous side-effects. Surprisingly, this movie proceeds THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST MATTHEW in release, but PPP must already have been at least planning his own big Jesus picture.

Pasolini wasn’t above mistreating extras himself, according to my spy on the set of CANTERBURY TALES, whose veracity I cannot confirm. Reportedly, when the money ran out and the background artists could not be paid, the director insisted “You do it for the art,” provoking derisive laughter. When my spy heard that PPP was leaving his AD to shoot the movie while he filmed hardcore porn in a nearby castle, the spy volunteered for what is known as a meaty role, but was unable to, er, perform, and, in fleeing an enraged Pasolini, tumbled down the castle stairs and broke his arm. I think this story SHOULD be true, but I can’t vouch for it.

I’m always sensitive to the uses Welles is put to in films, but I didn’t find anything to get upset about here. PPP makes him a villain, the representative of capitalism, but also a sensitive artist (the film he’s making looks nice!). You could imagine him getting on well with Lang’s character from LE MEPRIS, and he gets the film’s summative line, the moral lesson. Films shouldn’t have moral lessons delivered in summative lines, but the Welles character’s complicated, compromised position in the movie undercuts his sympathy for our deceased hero, which (mostly) takes the curse off it.