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.

Primitive London Taxi Driver

Thanks to film academic and author Benjamin Halligan for sending me the British “Mondo” movie PRIMITIVE LONDON. Made in 1965, what’s jaw-dropping about this film, “directed” by Arnold L. Miller (SEX FARM) and produced by Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, is how decidedly un-shocking it is. From childbirth to chicken-packing, the grab-bag of sinsational subjects is lame, tame and bewilderingly scatter-shot. SEE — the mods! SEE — the kendo school! SEE — The hatter’s head-measuring instrument!

Shocking.

But some of the desperate measures deployed to liven it up / tie it together are pretty interesting. Here’s the best example of postmodern deconstruction you’re likely to find in a British film of the era:

And what about that music? Esteemed Jazz-man Basil (DR PHIBES) Kirchin and John A. Coleman (apparently still working today, on KUNG FU PANDA no less, if the IMDb hasn’t gene-spliced him with a namesake) seem to have hit upon the main theme of TAXI DRIVER eleven years early. Here’s another, clearer instance:

Can’t you just feel all hope and life ebbing from your body as that sequence goes on? It’s the PRIMITIVE LONDON effect. All British “sex” films were really part of a secret government plan to combat overpopulation by mentally sterilising the populace with desultory erotica. The pornography of despair. And it worked. Anyone who saw THE AMOROUS MILKMAN would be unable to have a sexual thought for months without wanting to run out for a free N.H.S. penectomy. 

Operation Prole-Wipe was so successful that by the 1980s, British cinema was producing non-sex films actively designed to promote a desire for early, childless death. How else to explain REVOLUTION?

Meanwhile, here’s the moral of the story from PRIMITIVE LONDON:

It’s easy to see what happened. Bernard Herrmann was living in England at the time he was approached to do TAXI DRIVER, and must have encountered the P.L. theme during an elicit trip to a Soho sex cinema, or possibly the Eros in Leicester Square (immortalised in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON). As the great composer of CITIZEN KANE and PSYCHO, hidden in the darkest recesses of the smoky auditorium, reached a shivering climax at his own hands, the music oozing from the cinema speakers crept into the similarly shady recesses of his mind, forming an unconscious association, just as it does to Alex in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. When Herrmann was asked, eleven years later, to score a film about a character who frequents porno houses, it all clicked into place.

Dirty Bernard!