Too Darn Hot

It seemed like a good time to rewatch THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE. Val Guest was on fire himself in the early sixties, providing us with one of my favourite crime films, HELL IS A CITY, and the pop satire EXPRESSO BONGO. I need to give 80,000 SUSPECTS, STOP ME BEFORE I KILL! and JIGSAW a fair try.

Guest, originally a writer of music hall influenced comedies, more or less alternated these thrillers with daffy comedies and other lighthearted stuff, which were generally less interesting. And he was also clearly concerned with getting a bit of sex into British cinema — he had continental flair, with his beret and his nudes — surprise glimpses of Janet Munro, Claire Bloom and Diane Cilento show that the British censor could sometimes be more lenient than his US counterpart, if a filmmaker was willing to take the risk.

Co-written with Wolf Mankiewicz, TDTECF presents an intelligent, stylish apocalypse drama — it largely gets around the inherent problem that the human characters are given little to do in the face of a planetary crisis, in fact it makes a suspenseful virtue of their separation from the real action — the earth is tipped towards the sun by atomic tests — maybe it can be course-corrected by further nukes? — meanwhile our protags are simply trying to live their lives, and reporting on it all from Fleet Street, care of the Daily Express (an actual tabloid whose actual recently retired editor, Arthur Christiansen, appears, more or less as himself).

The movie depends a lot on grainy stock footage of various disasters, and on paintings and photographic backdrops of London (FX by Hammer’s Les Bowie) which depict the effects of a heat wave in ways that may feel familiar to those of us currently experiencing life on earth (I assume most of my readers are experiencing life on earth — apologies if this excludes anyone). Edward Judd is an acerbic, alcoholic hack, the first in a series of somewhat unsympathetic sci-fi heroes he’d essay — he’s a fantastic jerk in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, but I can’t remember if either INVASION or ISLAND OF TERROR holds the rightful place as third film in an Obnooxious Bloke Science Fiction Trilogy.

Though Guest is European in his sexual frankness, his sensibility also skews American in his respect for genre conventions, and so this is a fast-talking reporter film in the Hollywood vein, with Judd, Christiansen and the always excellent Leo McKern barking out their dialogue as if commentating on a steeplechase. And the talk is well filmed, especially in those newspaper room scenes, with complex blocking and overlapping dialogue.

Add in the novelty of the opening and closing minutes being tinted gold, which has an authentically claustrophobic, hot, stifling quality — with b&w, you can mentally paint in your own colour, but tinting takes away that possibility. And that ending, a classic, and a very ballsy move. I think the two headlines idea — one saying EARTH SAVED and one saying EARTH DOOMED — is brilliant, and could have supplanted Judd’s final monologue, and the closing shot on a crucifix has to be a cynical sop to those Hollywood conventions, which always seemed to reference the deity in the last minutes of an sf movie — and anyway, Guest was Jewish (Valmond Maurice Grossmann). So, call it showmanship.

The whole thing’s on YouTube, but for how long?

Treasures Islands

Raoul Ruiz’s extraordinary fold-in collage film of TREASURE ISLAND would be worth devoting hours of study to, but the copy I got my hands on was so horrible that I needed to create some kind of STUNT in order to render it watchable. Not only was the pan-and-scanned image fuzzy and prone to horrendous combing whenever anything moved fast, but the soundtrack, much of it poorly dubbed, was almost drowned out by screeching INSECT MENACE, the cries locusts make when being tortured by John Boorman.* It also came with wildly inaccurate Spanish subtitles which referred to the character Israel Hands as “hands of Israel”. So I was glad I speak English pretty.

So I decided to watch Ruiz’s film at the same time as John Hough’s 1971 version, which stars Orson Welles. I watched ten minutes of one film, then ten minutes of the other. Hough’s film gave me relief from the insect whine and eliptical narrative, offering thick-eared straightforwardness (and more bad dubbing) instead. Of course, since the ’70s version goes like a train, it was finished half an hour earlier that the 1985 job, so I got to follow that one to it’s mystifying, yet strangely splendid conclusion, without further interruption.

The Hough film was produced by international man of intrigue Harry Alan Towers, the kind of scamp Welles often associated with (he’s like a British version of the Salkinds, but even cheaper), and it has a script credited to Wolf Mankowicz and O.W. Jeeves. That O.W. is a giveaway, since Welles worked on the writing himself, but chose not to take a credit. He also chose not to stick around for the post-synching, so that the voice booming from Long John Silver is someone impersonating Welles impersonating Robert Newton.

Ruiz’s film (and I’m going to jump around like this all through this article, so get used to it) was bankrolled by international buccaneers Cannon Films, in the heady days of pre-sales and the booming VHS market, when a film could be in profit before it had even been shot. Nevertheless, I imagine Golan & Globus were pretty surprised when they found out what they’d paid for, almost as much as when they bankrolled Godard’s KING LEAR (the one with Molly Ringwald).

The Ruiz movie is modern dress, and takes place in a world where some but not all of the characters have read Stevenson’s book and use it as a kind of game-plan. Most of his disparate cast, including Melvil Poupaud, Martin Landau and Anna Karina, represent characters from the source novel, but not always consistently — sometimes they change character, and sometimes their part doesn’t seem to have any equivalent in the source text. Jean-Pierre Leaud turns up to write things down as they happen, making him a sort of Stevenson/Ruiz figure, but he later turns out to be another Jim Hawkins. Furthermore, Vic Tayback’s Long John Silver is introduced as a cobbler, and the Hispanola is no longer a ship but a Lebanese restaurant. So it’s fair to say it’s not a very literal adaptation.

Since Ruiz’s treasure in this version is African diamonds, it’s tempted to see the narrative as the refractions of Stevenson’s text in a precious stone, and this effect easily encompassed the Hough film as well, since I was watching it at the same time. Some brutal cutting of the text made minor characters in the Hough almost non-existent, their names dropped only after they themselves had already dropped dead, but Ruiz would then helpfully take up their cause, giving them meaty scenes in his film, although often without any proper introduction (Ben Gunn’s just abruptly there). Soon, the Hough film felt like it had been annexed by the Ruiz.

Everybody’s got something to hide ‘cept for O.W. Jeeves and his monkey (which was immortalised in the screenplay of THE BIG BRASS RING).

Stylistic elements carried over from one film to the next. The deep blue day-for-night photography of Hough’s flick became the spectrum of tinted filters Ruiz likes to shoot through — he’s probably the best user of filters in cinema, since he never pretends they’re other than what they appear to be: pretty illusions. Ruiz’s crazy angles and diopter lens effects, influenced by the comic books of Milt Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), have their equivalent in Hough’s attempts at Wellesian low angles and deep focus. I don’t think Hough ever recovered from the Welles influence.

Extreme perspectives in Hough and Ruiz.

While Hough (best film: THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE — Pamela Franklin mercy-fucks a ghost) isn’t quite good enough to use his cartoony extremes in the right places, Ruiz doesn’t even try, preferring to drop in a giant foreground seagull, crab, or gaping human mouth, as a kind of random punctuation. There’s certainly no attempt at making a dramatic point. While the Hough rattles through a familiar story without quite enough focus to bring it alive, Ruiz fractally explodes the story and sifts the fragments, holding them up to the light in search of ideas, images, jokes. As a result, it takes an hour before his buccaneers even set sail. Some of the stuff at “the hotel Ballantrae” (or “Valentry”, if you believe the subtitles) is among the best in the film though, especially in the fever-dream sequence when the walls starts sliding aside, creating a kind of positronic labyrinth.

Hough, like Ruiz, is struggling with a multi-national cast, and a script that insists on everybody being English. Walter Slezak as Squire Trelawney is particularly problematic in this regard. When Blind Pew claims British citizenship it’s actually quite funny, since he has a strong German accent. But none of this would register at all in the Ruiz film, where a French sea captain holds conversations with English-speakers, and both sides understand the other perfectly. He’s like Chewbacca in that regard. And while Poupaud, Leaud and Karina have their performances effectively erased by unsympathetic re-voicing, the looping of Jeffrey Kime (I think he’s playing the Squire) actually gives him a light-comedy insouciance that revitalises all his scene. He sounds like Hugh Grant.

The real star turns in both films are by the actors playing Billy Bones: Lionel Stander and Martin Landau. Gravel-voiced, gravel-faced Stander (basically Ben Grimm, the Thing from the Fantastic Four comics) should sound out of place here, with his Bronx accent, but somehow he doesn’t, probably because he’s a pirate at heart. Landau doesn’t have quite the same rape-and-plunder esprit, but he’s got star quality. Ruiz’s film would benefit from more actors who talk with their own voice, and more actors with the kind of gravitas that it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. Ruiz’s English dialogue is often rather inelegant, whereas Mankiewicz and Welles mainly use Stevenson’s original, flamboyant language.

“I couldn’t see why we even needed the treasure,” says the narrator, who isn’t Melvil Poupaud, who isn’t Jim Hawkins, although they’re all associated in some way. “I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t just get along without it.” A gag line like this, which did strike me as hilarious, is really a drama-killer, since it successfully debunks the MacGuffin Stevenson’s story is entirely predicated upon. But Ruiz has never been interested in conventional structures, central conflicts, or dramatic tension as it is usually understood. He IS interested in blurred identities, which he’s able to explore here by grafting game theory and role-playing games onto Stevenson’s story.

The result is that Hough’s film, even when it’s bodged (the relationship between Jim and Silver is thrown away, and it should be the heart of the story: even Ruiz sees the tale as a boy’s search for his father, which he addresses by having pretty much every male character claim paternity) has a forward pull that makes it fly past, and Ruiz’s film requires more wading to get through (but the buzzing locusts don’t help). But once the journey is competed, it’s Ruiz’s film that haunts the memory like a voice echoing in a cave.

*Perhaps an explanation is required. According to The Making of Exorcist II: The Heretic, Boorman had unexpected trouble getting his locusts to swarm — they won’t do it for just anyone — and resorted to snipping the legs off on with his nail-clippers to try and force it to take to the air, perhaps encouraging its comrades to follow suit. But the recalcitrant bug just kind of flopped around on the ground, legless. Boorman’s attempts to get performances out of a bored Linda Blair and a drink-sodden Richard Burton met with similar failure. Burton doesn’t actually flop around on the ground, legless, but always manages to look as if he’s about to.

Cliff Richard IS Bongo Herbert

 

Yeah, I laughed too, but that is the premise of this film (EXPRESSO BONGO) and we must ACCEPT IT UNQUESTIONINGLY.

Anyway, the good news is that Sylvia Syms is still VERY MUCH ALIVE, and first became VMA on this very day, some 74 years ago, and is still working. Long may she reign.

I saw S.S. talk at the Edinburgh Film Festival many yonks ago, and I remember her forthright and robust humour. During a lull in questions she ran through her entire C.V. — “ASYLUM, in which I get dismembered: I still get fan mail about that one. THE QUARE FELLOW with the terrible Patrick McGoohan…” I like McGoohan… but then I’ve never worked with him. Reminds me of Alan Bennett on Christopher Plummer: “Christopher is his own worst enemy, but only just.”

Syms plays a burlesque artiste in Val Guest and Wolf Mankiewicz’s pop-culture spoof EXPRESSO BONGO, and shares the stage with go-go girls in pasties, mini-kilts and G-strings during an eye-poppingly bizarre “history lesson” number. No G-string for our Sylvia, though: as a highly-paid Featured Player she gets to wear Proper Human Underpants as befits a star. As a Scot, I detest all forms of Tartan pageantry, so I quite liked seeing it dragged through the sewer like this. There’s another good and weird tartan musical number in Bunuel’s first Mexican film. Nobody does Tartan like the Mexicans.

Syms played a lot of what Jean Simmons calls “poker-up-the-arse” parts, which is not an Edward II kind of thing, but a reference to the straight back required to play stiff middle-class WIVES (Syms does this very well in the commendable VICTIM), so it’s great to see her excel here as a nice working-class girl who happens to earn a living in porn.

Guest’s movie HITS THE GROUND RUNNING, with titles spelled out in neon signs, restaurant menus and sandwich boards (production designer Tony Masters is the real mega-talent on this film — he went on to 2001 while Guest went on to CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER), and within instants we spot a nubile Burt Kwouk (“No, Cato, now is not the time!”) buying a hot-dog from a Soho stand, where eleven years later he will be seen working, in Skolimowski’s DEEP END. And they say there’s no such thing as progress.

And then we meet Laurence Harvey as a very yiddisher agent on the make (such ethnic overtness in a lead character would have been impossible in a Hollywood film, even one about Jesus). He’s like Tony Curtis in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS or Richard Widmark in NIGHT AND THE CITY, except that the movie is more like THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT, a brash, lurching satire about music and mammon.

Teen pop idol Cliff Richard (real name Harry Webb) plays teen pop idol Bongo Herbert (real name Bert Rudge) with his customary adequacy, but with a surprising Elvis sneer that was soon honed from his act as he went safe and mum-friendly. B.H. is Harvey’s discovery/creation, and we follows the ambitious fifty-per-center as he exploits the hapless naif through the London media world of 1960.

This is where the film works as a time machine: first, by transporting us back to a bygone age when Soho was the only spot where a cup of espresso could be obtained. We get real T.V. presenters and a checklist of then-current entertainers and location shots of an all-but vanished habitat. There are also topical film quirks, like a split-screen phone conversation between a semi-dressed Harvey and Syms, mirroring PILLOW TALK from the year before (Guest had a long-standing aim to get sex into British cinema, it seems).

But the film (Prophetic Cinema Alert!) also projects forward into the future, our present: in his desperation to leave no aspect of human life unexploited, Harvey yolks his prodigy to the cash-cow of RELIGION, having him sing a maudlin number about shrines and Madonnas: Mankiewicz and Guest obviously view this melding of pop and church as grotesque, vulgar and tittersome (and are laughing at how Jewish moguls churn out cynical Christian propaganda),  but it’s the exact path followed by Sir Cliff in subsequent years, and the results are just as awful, though more degrading to music than to faith.

(Cliff today is a still-virginal, botoxed crooner, who would surprise nobody if he came out of the closet, though I hasten to add that he’s not in the closet so far as I legally know and if he was he’d no doubt be sprinkling Holy Water in it and generally doing Good Works.)

Cliff went on to a film career of feelgood musical pablum (under the directorial aegis of Sidney J. Furie, among others) and thence to playing a plastic puppet in THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO, which is really typecasting when you think about it.

My favourite line in EXPRESSO BONGO: “And now, straight from New York, Hollywood and Las Vegas, we are very happy to be able to afford the fantabulous, the fantastico, DIXIE COLLINS!!!”