Pre Posterous

After reminding myself how good CASH ON DEMAND was, I wanted to see more of director Quentin Lawrence’s work, though the rest of it doesn’t have such a good rep. (COD is very highly regarded by the small number who know it.) I gave THE MAN WHO FINALLY DIED a spin. It’s from 1963 and again has Peter Cushing in, but stars Stanley Baker. The supporting cast is fantastic — Mai Zetterling, Nigel Green, Niall MacGinnis, Eric Portman, Alfred Burke. It seems like Lawrence and I must have very similar tastes in actors, because those are all favourites of mine. A shame they’re all playing Germans, because it handicaps them a bit, and actual Germans would obviously be better.

But the film, based on a TV series, isn’t very exciting. It’s like the title, it wants to be dramatic and surprising, but isn’t. Hammer regular composer Philip Green has been hired to add dramatic stabs to every scene, which always seem heavy-handed, inappropriate, and tending to emphasise that nothing very devastating has really happened. A shame, all those nice actors and it looks quite nice, though Lawrence doesn’t seem to have many ideas about what to do with the wide screen. He just isn’t very inspired by the material, and I can’t say I blame him, but a better response might be that of Sidney J. Furie on THE IPCRESS FILE (an excellent script, but Furie didn’t care for it): go nuts, stylishly.

I perked up for one early scene with Cushing, which turned out to be the source for this TV ad, part of a series which did a DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID routine to sell booze. I’d always somehow imagined THE GHOUL was the source — Peter Cushing in smoking jacket and armchair by the fire, it seemed to fit. I wondered why they’d put it into black and white. But here we are ~

THE MAN WHO FINALLY DIED stars Det. Inspector Harry Martineau; Girl Listening to Car Radio (uncredited); Doctor Van Helsing; Dr. Ilse Nordstrom; Thomas Colpeper, JP; Doctor Julian Karswell; Hercules; Professor Dippet; Detective Frank Webber; and Rand Hobart.

STOP PRESS: actually, this is a very nice widescreen shot ~

It seems like every time Portman is onscreen, everything else gets better. Also, every time Niall MacGinnis gets on a train, things don’t end well for him.

Own Ghoul

Starring Hengist Pod, the Rumpo Kid, Jill Masterson, Louis D’Ascoygne, Dr. Crippen, Emeric Belasco (pictured) and Budgie.

More Pat Jackson (if you’re nasty). I was impressed by the camera direction in WHAT A CARVE UP!, which is not, otherwise, a distinguished work. Let me explain.

The movie is kind of a remake of THE GHOUL, supposedly, later re-remade by Amicus, I believe. But the three films have little in common. In this one, cowardly proofreader Kenneth Connor is summoned to an Old Dark House in Yorkshire for the reading of an eccentric uncle’s will. Being a coward, he brings his flatmate Sid James along. Some brief intrigue is managed by bringing two Carry On film regulars into a spookshow populated by horror icons Michael Gough, Michael Gwynn (REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN, very funny here) and an unblinking Donald Pleasence. His character name is Everett Sloane, but this is not an in-joke, so far as I can see, just laziness. Murders ensue.

There are very few good jokes, but here is one. It’s so gloriously stupid it achieves a kind of glory.

The script is a pile of old tosh by Ray Cooney & Tony Hilton, who also wrote one or two serious thrillers like THE HAND around this time. Cooney, of course, is an unbelievably persistent and diabolical scourge on the British cinema: everything he touches would turn to shit except it already IS shit. He has some kind of reverse Midas touch, though, which allows him to turn shit into much, much worse shit. This is a unique gift to have, though not in any way a useful one… except in Britain, it seems, where it can get you a 58-year-and-counting screenwriting career. You also get to direct, because hey, how much worse can shit get? See NOT NOW, DARLING and find out.

I do honestly like the moose joke though. It’s the only good Cooney joke I know.

The early scenes showing Connor and James’ home life have a very Hancock feel, and I wonder if the movie were actually intended for the great Tony H.

Cooney & Hilton are, God knows, no Galton & Simpson (RIP), so I can easily imagine Hancock turning his nose up at this sub-CAT AND THE CANARY tosh. Sid James, of course, would say yes to anything, which is why we have BLESS THIS HOUSE: THE MOTION PICTURE. His eternal, dogged professionalism and scrotumnal fizzog carry us through the dross.

 

Connor is a perfectly OK supporting player but becomes irritating over the long haul of a leading role, and his vulnerability is undercut by the script, which makes everyone an asshole. The best perfs come from the straight actors — Pleasence plays it eerily still, Gough lopes crookedly, and Michael Gwynn is a delight, all pixilated stare and rigid arms, a man unable to awaken from a dream. Really eccentric, something you haven’t seen before in the world of acting. It is worth sitting through this muck for him, Esma Cannon, and the previously mentioned.

Then there’s Jackson’s choice of angles, which show an imagination and cheek not so evident in his other works. I get the feeling he’s taking the mickey, trying to liven up tired material, and he probably thought this kind of showmanship beneath him, normally. A shame, because if he’d gone all out on his other dramas, he might have built up a rep as a minor Hitchcockian.