Cold Lance Comfort Farm

We watched TEMPTATION HARBOUR (1947) and DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS (1948), both directed by Lance Comfort. The fact that LC wound up making DEVILS OF DARKNESS in 1965 makes his seem like a major decline, but I’ve seen some of the films in between and as late as TOMORROW AT TEN in 1963 he was still capable of taut, engrossing work. Nevertheless, he always struck me as a minor figure, but these two might help change my mind. (David Wingrove admires BEDELIA, here, and I quite liked HATTER’S CASTLE.)

DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS first. It’s the lesser of the two, I think, but is well made and shares with its predecessor lovely night photography and dynamic fairground scenes. It’s a weird, unsettling story.

Siobhan McKenna plays Emmy, a servant working for a priest, Liam Redmond, always a haunted, sepulchral presence until he filled out and became suddenly loveable. The local women hate Emmy, and the priest, a spineless fellow, decides she must be sent away. Since in this film Magdalen laundries weren’t a thing, she winds up at a farm in Yorkshire, where everybody is terribly posh — Yorkshire has been invaded by Surrey, it seems. Here, the same dynamic recurs — the men are all drawn to the flirtatious wench, while the women sense something very wrong about her.

(Has Redmond fallen prey to the temptress? The censor would disbar any such suggestion, but blocking and framing give veiled hints.)

What makes this film memorable and haunting is that it never seems to acknowledge Emmy as a sympathetic protagonist, and yet it makes it impossible for us to resist seeing her that way. Her persecution by the women of her home village seems unreasoning and vicious. Then a travelling carny, Maxwell Reed, tries to rape her. Everything is done to make Reed loathsome, which the casting alone might have done adequately. He’s a strapping brute, with one peculiar detail: his eyebrows look drawn on, like Groucho’s, only by someone wielding a calligraphy pen and given to wild flourishes.

When Emmy is forcibly relocated we start to see how her flirtatiousness is a problem (but she didn’t lead Reed on). The rather extensive bunch of Surrey Yorkshirefolk react differently to her based on their gender. But then people start dying. One of these is Reed, whose work on the carnival circuit fatefully rotates him back into Emmy’s path. Another is future film director David Greene (I START COUNTING, GODSPELL), a randy rando who comes on to her and pays the price. Meanwhile Reed’s savage and bereaved Alsatian hound haunts the moors…

Emmy’s condition seems to anticipate that of Catherine Deneuve’s in REPULSION — a repulsion-attraction to men and sex, impelling her towards them and then urging her to kill. It’s not entirely clear if this is entirely triggered by Reed’s attack — certainly the village women had it in for her before then.

The Surrey folk are theoretically the nice people in this film, but the script stresses their insensitivity. Anne Crawford is thrust at us as leading lady, and she does a little investigating, but she’s no Nancy Drew and her screen time is pointlessly diluted with Honor Blackman, who I’d rather watch. But probably Crawford is a better choice if you don’t want your lead to be too appealing…

The ending is sheer gothic grand guignol, anticipating the crappy vampire film Comfort would end up making, but considerably more effective. It contains a blood-curdling curse, in which Crawford hopes that all Emmy’s victims will be waiting for her in the afterlife, including the hateful Reed, and then a horrible (offscreen) death.

What makes the film haunting is that one can’t decide if it’s deeply and unpleasantly conservative — the women who are unreasoningly hostile to Emmy turn out to be right all along — or slyly subversive — Emmy can’t help herself, and rather than helping, the people in both Ireland and England either have the hots for her or condemn her as a slut. Looking to Hammer again, it reminds me of how the Van Helsing types always seems very unpleasant, but the only alternative to them is vampirism.

DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS stars Morgan Le Fay; Mary, mother of Jesus; Ajax; Prof. Victor Bergman; Mr. Brady – Nora’s Father; Merlin; Pussy Galore; Sir Robert Bellinger; Ned Horton; and Mrs Hudson.

STOP PRESS: The Chiseler has reprinted two of my older pieces, Neg Sparkle #1 and Marlene Against the Wall.

The Milkman Always Rings Twice

I’ve been hoping to see a good Wolf Rilla film for ages: his work on VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is so smart, and yet everything else I’ve been able to see was a letdown. THE BLACK RIDER was the one that used to turn up on UK TV, and it’s really pathetic — a crummy motorcycle film with a Scooby Doo plot. I wasn’t looking for the amusingly bad, but the unexpectedly good. Fiona and I once bumped into the Great Man’s son, Nico, at Edinburgh Film Fest, and he suggested THE WORLD TEN TIMES OLDER was a cult item that might be worth checking out, but I couldn’t get interested. But MARILYN — know in the US as ROADHOUSE GIRL, which sets you up for all manner of disappointment — has been gathering quite a strong reputation.

I guess the setting is, technically, a roadhouse of sorts, but we’d call it a greasy spoon cafe (pronounced “caff”) or maybe a tea-room. It’s that exciting. Vamped up to project class and glamour mid-film, it acquires the name Marilyn, after its owner, an impossible development — a cafe could be called Marilyn’s, conceivably, but not Marilyn. Snack-bars with human names? What’s next, a brasserie called Derek? Perhaps this is a case of the Berlin-born Rilla not being quite familiar enough with British idioms. Certainly the dialogue in his self-penned script is strangely flat and repetitive, and his cast are not resourceful enough to repeat a line two different ways, so whenever they echo themselves it sounds like they’re practicing their lines, or like multiple takes have been spliced together by an experimentally-inclined cutter.

The actors include Maxwell Reed (Mr. Joan Collins), who’s tall, and Sandra Dorne, who’s blonde (they were made for each other!), and Leslie Dwyer, the Punch and Judy man from TV’s Hi-De-Hi! It’s basically James M. Cain at a garage in the Home Counties. Also featuring Count Von Krolock and Hengist Pod. But the movie belongs to Ealing stalwart Vida Hope.

Reed gets a job as garage hand and spends time posing erotically under a sign reading LUBRICATION SERVICE. Dorne falls for him, they bump off the jealous husband more or less by accident, and then she starts pursuing more promising romantic prospects in the form of suave Ferdy Mayne, who must have played suave in a hundred quote quickies of this kind, filmed in a week or two and released to deafening silence in possibly-empty auditoria. Hope plays the waitress/confidante who’s obviously in love with Marilyn, the only daring aspect of a movie that bowdlerizes Cain’s “love rack” narrative at every turn. Even at the end, when the cops turn up, I was racking my brains to figure out if anything seriously criminal has actually been done. It would be a good Cain-style narrative if they ended up being done for murder, when WE saw it was an accident, and insurance fraud when it was basically on the level. But the movie ends, or runs out, before that can be dealt with.

But Rilla directs with admirable intensity — his angles are good, and he cuts to juicy close-ups at the most effective moments. And, As Matthew Sweet has argued, there’s something appealing about the sheer drabness of it all. Even the romantic music is lugubrious, despondent, like the rubber band’s gone on the gramophone. The actors are all road-company versions of the bare archetypes they’re attempting to evoke. The whole affair has a real post-war misery. This is to IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY as DETOUR is to THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. To quote Errol Morris’s best line, “Despair enacted on cheap sets.”

Inventive and lively direction keeps us engaged with a production that’s totally “from poverty,” and the script engages with the lack of glamour. Best line is when Dwyer rants about how his wife should show more gratitude: “I work my fingers to the bone so you can have all the comforts. Look around you: a gas fire in every room. Electric light!”

Wow. This is living.

Notorious

Really enjoyed Richard Quine’s THE NOTORIOUS LANDLADY, a mystery romance set in Hollywood England. Kim Novak starts off with the worst cockney accent on record — I think she may have been Dick Van Dyke’s dialect coach — but it turns out to be a phony anyway so that’s alright.  There are other compensations.

Basically Kim is the titular landlady who’s suspected of murder, Jack Lemmon is a junior diplomat who moves in, falls in love, and gets embroiled, and Fred Astaire is his boss. Quine is respectful of Fred’s very particular qualities, so that he grants him an entrance framed head-to-toe, as you would frame a great dancer, a shot he repeats twice with variations as the plot unfolds. Coppola couldn’t even manage that framing for ACTUAL DANCES in FINIAN’S RAINBOW…

What’s very nice about this casting is it’s all off-the-nose, if I can create that expression for my purpose. Lemmon is written as a pushy, self-confident American male loverboy, as if someone was thinking of Tony Curtis. Lemmon’s lightness and diffidence makes the character MUCH more likable and surprising, and his efforts to seduce Novak are more fraught with suspense and sentiment as he’s inherently a more vulnerable and off-centre performer. Plus he has a way of twisting apologetically through a doorway, not even opening it wide enough for a direct approach, inserting a leg sideways like a bandy ballerina…

Novak could well be playing a role written for Monroe — played with wide-eyed innocence, her character would have been an obvious naif and we’d have known she was victim of a frame-up. When two male characters become convinced of her innocence because she’s so charming, we’d have agreed wholeheartedly. But because the husky Novak has more of an edge, perhaps because nobody with Groucho Marx eyebrows can be wholly trustworthy, we laugh at them for being persuaded by feminine charms. Yet Novak has vulnerability aplenty and can be liked at the same time as suspected.

Fred is playing Lemmon’s hard-ass boss. While the elder Fred’s more deeply-lined face has suggestions of harshness, it’s also softly saggy, and as an actor he’s still the embodiment of the lighter-than-air. That steel we know he had as a dancer, pushing himself and his co-stars on to painful perfectionism, is rarely glimpsed in his performances. So again, the actor brings wafting gracefulness to a role that’s written as bolshy and probably fat.

Honorable mention: Lionel Jeffries as Inspector Oliphant.

The movie is co-written by Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart, and with some of Edwards’ characteristic visual gags: a BLUE VELVET moment with a suspicious Lemmon hiding in Novak’s closet is topped with a nice moment when she unknowingly hooks a coat hanger onto his ear.

A surprisingly menacing bit revolves around Maxwell Reed, Joan Collins’ unpleasant first husband, who proves much more effective as bad guy than he ever was as a leading man. He’s something of a precursor to Ross Martin’s psycho in Blake Edwards’ own EXPERIMENT IN TERROR, only here he’s arguably too dark and vicious for the movie. It has an interesting effect — not quite digestible into the overall tone, but certainly adding grit.

Oh, the visual style — really exquisite camerawork. It’s zoomtastic, but the aggressive zoom-bar-yanking is combined with machine-tooled crane movements and a lot of “relay shots,” where the camera attaches itself to one character, then another, drawn in a series of smoothly-oiled tugs through a space by the unfolding story. Lots of really intricate work, and it again resembles a musical in its highly choreographed, elegant showiness.