Mills and Boom

Anthony Quayle are you trying to seduce me?

So, HOBSON’S CHOICE launched us into a mini John Mills Film Festival. This included TUNES OF GLORY and ICE COLD IN ALEX, which might be crudely termed “trembling upper lip” films, where the certainties of the wartime propaganda films (which are actually far more complex and intelligent than you might expect) are replaced with PTSD, alcoholism and moral doubt.

ICE COLD IN ALEX balances all this with its other role, which is to be a rip-roaring suspenser, a kind of British answer to THE WAGES OF FEAR, without that movie’s bracing misanthropy but with a relentless series of tense situations. Our heroes, separated from the retreating British army, have to drive an ambulance through the North African desert, trying to reach a friendly city while Rommel’s army continually overtakes them. The balance isn’t perfect, but this may still be director J. Lee Thompson’s best film, with very strong performances — Mills is very fine, Sylvia Sims and Harry Andrews are reliable support, and Anthony Quayle is unusually interesting — and nail-gnawing sequences of slow-mounting peril.

The movie’s celebrated for its closing sequence, which is impossible to discuss without spoilers. Here goes.

Mills’ character, a traumatised soldier fuelled by alcohol, keeps himself going with the promise of a drink in Alexandria. At the end, the foursome make it (very surprisingly, the film largely does without a body count, with only two speaking parts slain) and Thompson slows the pace right down. Everybody is doing terrific work. Since Mills has to down a pint in one, Thompson seems to have set up two cameras for tightly-framed groupings. The sound mixer is doing great work too — distant traffic comes to the fore, emphasising the stillness of the scene. The one thing the film doesn’t have is a great score (it’s okay… with a nod to Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War) but fortunately it’s not needed here. The camaraderie and respect of the characters is palpable.

Hardly surprising that decades later, the scene became an ad for Carlsberg, the lager so prominently featured (and before product placement, unless it was done on the QT).

And the movie isn’t even finished with us yet — it delivers another unexpected moment of teeth-grinding tension immediately after this.

Film Directors with their Trousers Off

LES SCANDALE CLOUZOT is a pretty damn good documentary by Pierre-Henri Gibert, who has assembled an amazing array of archive material (above, Clouzot presents a trailer, Hitchcock-fashion, for his uncompleted documentary BRASIL) and some good talking heads. Maybe not as amazing as the line-up assembled for the earlier L’ENFER D’HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT, but substantial, and substantially different.

If I have a quibble it’s that we don’t learn exactly what scandal the title refers to, and the film doesn’t make an overall point or tell a real story. But there are interesting insights and anecdotes along the way.

Plus we get valuable photographs of Clouzot directing THE WAGES OF FEAR with his trousers off. In fact, going on the impressive visual evidence assembled, he seems to have helmed his masterpiece entirely without any trousers whatsoever, a possibly unique achievement for a male filmmaker.

Not that his legs are particularly beautiful specimens. Sturdy, yes, but not elegant. His brilliance as a director was not matched by a corresponding length of limb. Maybe, like Napoleon, he made up for his short extremities by being a great commander. There are a lot of great directors who are short, after all.

Below is a scene from LA VERITE, playing in London next week. I’m going to be down in the metropolis and had hoped to see it, but I don’t think the timing will work out. Still, I will have some cinematic adventures to report, I hope!

An Odyssey in Bits: The Fantasy Department

A spacecraft floats/falls through frame and at the exact moment we realise were going to lose it from view, the big blue balloon of Planet World drifts into view to replace it.

A series of different satellites and vehicles are picked up, as Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube begins, not without controversy, to play. Here’s Quincy Jones:

“But you can’t get too cute with that sort of thing. I was really bugged by the over use of Strauss waltzes in 2001. That would have been OK as a one-liner, but it bugged me when it developed into the main theme. I knew that Frank Cordell had written Mahler variations for a year and a half for that picture, and they threw it all out. Then Alex North came in and wrote about six reels, and everything he did was thrown out too. I’m sure that between them, those two composers came up with something a lot hipper and a lot more appropriate for a picture that important than what we finally saw. Kubrick had already made that kind of musical point in Dr. Strangelove with “Try a Little Tenderness.” I personally think 2001 is too important a film for this kind of cute musical self-indulgence.” 

Leaving aside the inaccuracies — there’s only one Strauss waltz in the movie and it isn’t the main theme, except of the two sequences it’s used for — does Jones have a point? I doubt anybody today has a problem with the use of library music here. Jones seems concerned that it’s too cheap-sounding for an “important” film.Kubrick’s treatment of his two composers was awful: Cordell was put to work with practically no instructions, whereas North only found out his score had been cast aside in favour of the temp track when he attended the premiere. Imagine sitting there and hearing Also Sprach coming up instead of your close-but-no-cigar title theme. And then thinking, “Oh well, he’ll have used the rest of it.” And then along comes Ligeti. And then The Blue fucking Danube. And on and on until, only after three hours can you be sure that your entire score has been binned. Ouch.

However, I think Kubrick was correct to prefer the Strauss and quite right to say those who had a problem with it were being affected by the associations the piece had for them: ball gowns and tuxedos and waltzing. Whereas he was merely trying to evoke “grace in turning,” which is what the music seems to do. Certainly putting it up over shots of the actual Danube, as Duvivier does in THE GREAT WALTZ, isn’t nearly so effective. Did Jones also object to Clouzot’s use of it in THE WAGES OF FEAR, where it partly accompanies a dance, and partly a truck lumbering homewards?The first spacecraft we see are a bit 2D: they move like photographic cut-outs. But then the big wheel space station hoves into shot and its rotary motion, and the shadows cast over itself by its spokes and ring give it a majestic sense of solidity.

The Pan American spaceliner reminds us that corporations will always let us down: like the neon Atari ads in BLADE RUNNER, they date the thing, although modern audiences probably haven’t even heard of PanAm so they won’t care. The bestest shot in the whole space ballet is when we, out of nothing more than sheer joie de vivre, we fly BETWEEN the rings of the space station. It’s not any of the five normally accepted motivations for camera movement, it’s just WHEE! And maybe making the camera behave like a spaceship. It never flies into position and stops in this sequence. Sometimes it observes from a sort of geostationary point, sometimes it sails past or towards or around the action. It’s a proper zero-gravity camera.This docking bay is VERY Death Star, isn’t it? About the only design trait Lucas’s film shares with Kubrick’s. Love the little windows, all showing, Escher-fashion, different gravities (because the station creates gravity by centrifugal force, and the docking bay is in the hub, gravity is pulling outwards in all directions.

Meet Dr. Heywood Floyd! He’s asleep at the moment but you might as well meet him now as he doesn’t get much more interesting when he’s awake. “I like to work with the best actors in the world,” Kubrick told Michel Ciment, so naturally he got the guy from GORGO and DEVIL DOLL. An American who happened to be a UK resident. But I’m OK with him. W.S. always seems both matter-of-fact and chummy, which suits the character of a space spook, a government guy and scientist. One of the bureaucrats ultimately responsible for HAL’s nervous breakdown, though the movie doesn’t make that clear.The floating pen is such a neat effect: it’s stuck to a big rotating pane of glass in front of the camera, and the stewardess gives it a very slight twist to detach it.

I don’t so much dig how the lines of seats are sunken either side of the central aisle, like a slave galley. Makes me fear that stewardess Edwina Carroll Heather Downham might step on his drifting hand with her grip shoe. Or trip over him and go literally flying.

But I guess the seats being in trenches is an excuse for the low angle showing off the grip shoes.Edwina Heather is very attractive: a flashback to those days when all airline stewardesses were young and pretty, to distract the anxious hetero male passenger, via her pulchritude, from his fear of a fiery death. As one lot of pretty girls retired to get married, the airline could replace them with new, younger models. No more.

TV screens. In-flight movies, shot specially for this movie, and computer read-outs, all running on 16mm. Here’s an extract from John Baxter’s Kubrick bio ~

‘He called me and Ivor Powell into his office one day on 2001,” recalls Andrew Birkin. “He had all these international model directories, and he’d gone through them, marking up all these girls.’

“‘We could get them in,’ he said, ‘for an audition.’

Birkin and Powell looked blank. ‘For what?’

‘We could always say we have to shoot one of those 16mm docking sequences,’ Kubrick mused. (The films of sports and news that appeared on TV screens in the PanAm shuttle sequences were all back-projected 16mm.)

‘But it was all a fantasy,’ Birkin says, ‘He never did it. He also had an obsession about meeting Julie Christie. He was always trying to work out some sort of scheme whereby he could audition her. I knew her a little, and I said, “I’m sure she’d come up if you just called her.” But he didn’t want to do that. It all had to go through the Fantasy Department.’

That’s kind of sweet, or as sweet as casting couch ambitions can be said to get. We could guess from EYES WIDE SHUT that fantasies of adultery were a part of Stanley’s very successful second marriage.The auditions for CLOCKWORK ORANGE don’t sound so sweet.