IMDB plot summary: On the mountainous frontier between British India and Afghanistan, circa 1860s, Zarak Khan kisses Salma, the youngest wife of his father, Haji Khan. Outraged, his father orders Zarak to be flogged to death but spares his life at the urging of an elderly Mullah. Zarak now leaves his village and becomes a notorious outlaw, prompting the British to assign a Major Ingram to capture him. Zarak and Ingram have several encounters, developing a grudging respect for each other.
This movie has several Bond connections. It was produced by Warwick Films, co-owned by Cubby Broccoli. It was directed by Terrance Young and written by Richard Maibaum. Bob Simmons was the main stuntman and Ted Moore was the cinematographer. Aunice Gayson who plays the wife of the main British officer was the first ever Bond girl. Anita Ekberg should have kept her mouth shut in FRWL. Patric MacGoohan was offered the part of James Bond, but turned it down on religious reasons. The leads Victor Mature and Michael Wilding are on the other hand unknown to me.
Zarak is actually based on a real man. According to a book Zarak fought the British in the Northwest Frontier in the 1920s and 30s until he was captured. He fought with the British against the Japanese in WWII. According to Wikipedia "In 1943 he was leading a patrol when its British officer was killed in an ambush. He watched another British patrol be attacked by the Japanese and sent messengers to summon a Gurkha force. To stop the Japanese from escaping with their prisoners before the Gurkhas arrived, he attacked them single-handed, and killed or wounded six soldiers before being overpowered. He refused to be beheaded and insisted on being flayed alive to buy time to enable the Gurkhas to arrive." That's commitment!
This movie probably has more in common with 1001 Nights than the real Northern Frontier and Afghanistan in the 1860s. It's colourful in every way. There are half-naked harem girls and borownface actors everywhere, but one wonders how Anita Ekberg's character managed to end up in Afghanistan. I don't think the filmmakers can be critisized for all the brownface on display considering how very few actors with the right etnicity worked in Britain at the time. It must have been brownface or no movie a tall. The House of Lords had issues with the half-naked harem girls. The original film poster was criticised by the House of Lords for "bordering on the obscene" and banned in the United Kingdom. Here it is:
I can see some of the seeds of the James Bond movies in Zarak. There is of cource the shared talent on screen and off. We can also see the interest in adventure, exotic locations (Morocco stood in for Afghanistan like it did in TLD) and a mix of violence and stunning women. But even though Zarak was made only six years before DN it looks old-fashioned compared to the first Bond movies in the way it's acted, edited and shot. But if you're looking for an old-fashioned action adventure movie you can do a lot worse than Zarak. I had fun watching it.
Fun fact: Terrance Young actually directed Ian Fleming! I'm not talking about the questionable shot of a man next to the train in FRWL, But in "Too hot to handle" (1960) directed by Young, an Australian actor named Ian Fleming plays a pawnbroker.
Last night I over indulged and watched three horrors from the seventies. I spent all afternoon writing these up. I suspect some have been reviewed before:
#1
THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971)
The Abominable Dr Phibes has one of the most astonishing beginnings I’ve ever seen for a horror film: a black garbed figure rises from the depths of his art deco mansion playing Mendelssohn’s War March of the Priests on his opulent Wurlitzer stage organ, turns to his unseen audience, dismounts and winds up a mechanical band who begin to recite a waltz, to which he dances across an enormous ballroom with an angelic white robed young woman. This bizarre romantic overture is broken a few moments later as the black-and-white twosome distribute a cage full of deadly flesh eating bats through the sky light of a soon-to-be deceased surgeon.
The film goes all camp on us after that, a series of increasingly peculiar assassinations linked by the ten plagues of Egypt – neither the right plagues nor in the correct order – and confounding a useless constabulary, led by a confused-looking Peter Jeffery. Joseph Cotton is the unsympathetic ‘hero’ of the piece, a surgeon whose team operated on and failed to save the life of Victoria Phibes. Vincent Price takes on a role odd even for him: a renowned concert musician and theologian who, having lost his wife and almost killing himself in a car crash, has brought himself back from the dead, fixing his vocal chords and repairing his seared flesh to the point he can adequately function and exact his revenge. He uses an amplifier to speak and takes sustenance through a hole in his neck. The final reveal of his tattered features beneath the prosthetic theatrical make up was chilling indeed, but unfortunately by then I’d ceased to be very interested in what was happening.
The grisly murders were delivered and then revealed in an increasingly laughable Carry On manner. I almost expected Kenneth’s Williams or Connor to play the victims it’s that hammy. Terry-Thomas was amusing as a pornography watching Doctor whose blood is drained from his body, a quite chilling method of disposal, which certainly got my interest. Yet director Robert Fuest has this slice of genuine horror accompanied by Vulnavia, the white robed woman, playing an intermezzo on a violin. This kind of auteur touch marks the film as unique, but doesn’t help the overall atmosphere of the piece, which continues to veer maniacally from terror to merriment. It’s fascinatingly watchable because of it. Price seems to inhabit a totally different platform to the rest of the cast and the constant jarring juxtapositions between horror and humour simply don’t work. I sat there engrossed, but I wasn’t sure if I kept watching because I was thrilled or because I merely wanted to see the next ridiculousness.
The very beautiful Virginia North, who of course graced On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Draco’s chess-mate, has the silent role of Vulnavia. Her motivation is never explained. Another of our alumni, Caroline Munro, is Dr Phibe’s dead wife, seen only in photographs [I don’t think it’s Munro in the coffin, I wasn’t sure]. The film is set in the mid-1920s, but the music mostly stems from the 1930s and 40s, which is another peculiarity. I kept thinking it was a seventies reworking of Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, but it lacks the epic scale. The whole murderous curiosity ends in an underground lair, on a moment of nightmarish pathos. Before the police can intervene, the nightscape black marble of Phibe’s tomb descends on his prostrate body, he rests at peace among the ravages of the final plague: darkness.
I was left completely dumb and, hours on, still have no idea whether I enjoyed the film or not.
The penultimate Hammer production, 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter isn’t considered any great shakes by most critics. That’s a trifle unfair. It follows on the newly trodden path of the possession terror, as exemplified by The Exorcist. It’s often compared unfavourably with that other London-centric but American-starred shocker The Omen. It predates that classic by several months and is based on a much older novel, Dennis Wheatley’s from 1953.
It also features an excellent Hammer swansong from Christopher Lee as the obsessed and possessed defrocked priest Father Michael Rayner, whose life has been given over to serving the Lord of Chaos, Astaroth. Lee rarely gives a bad performance in anything, but he’s especially effectively cold-hearted in this one, never better than in two scenes where he responds to death in a completely ambivalent fashion. Firstly, a woman gives birth to the swollen, deformed foetus of Astaroth, the monster scratching and biting its way through her womb; Rayner’s companions are aghast at the horror, Lee’s expression suggests blissful admiration and devotion; this is a man completely enthral to his heretical compose. Latterly, one of the same companions, bleeds herself to death so her blood can be used to form a sacred boundary to the final satanic baptism. Rayner is unmoved. There is no sympathy for her husband, only a terse understanding of her sacrifice.
Director Peter Sykes had a chequered career. He ended up working in T.V. land, filming the popular Peter Bowles comedy-drama The Irish R.M. Here, he’s very constrained, but stokes the fire aplenty with those curious camera angles and scenes delivered in long shots. For instance, the initial confrontation between the cowardly Henry Beddows [Denholm Eliot] and Richard Widmark’s upright occult writer John Verney is played out in silence and watched through the people and wine glasses present at a book launch. Peter Sykes cleverly shoots Lee consistently from below or in close up, so he appears huge and menacing in every shot. The scene where he petrifies the luckless Beddows while speaking to him on the phone and twisting a chord around the handle – the poor man visualises a serpent slithering about his wrist – identifies Rayner’s power and his devil-incarnate nature.
Widmark’s the films Achilles heel. He’s not dynamic enough, preferring to play Verney as a solitary, resigned, bookish man. He doesn’t even want to be at his own launch party, and only takes on Beddows’ request out of blithe curiosity. Beddows is part of a satanic cult, the Children of the Lord. The cult have raised his daughter Catherine. She’s played by a young and prettily delicate Nastassja Kinski, whose rather good as the confused, enchanted and captivating teenager, displaying just the right amount of graciousness, while clearly offering a glint of seething adolescent trauma. She’s been raised in isolation at a Bavarian monastery awaiting her sixteenth birthday when she will be baptised in Astaroth’s new-born blood, allowing her to take on the power of the demon. For some obscure reason, this must be carried out at a deconsecrated mausoleum just outside Guildford. That handily transposes the action to London. To be brutal, the plot is all hocus pocus and doesn’t bear close examination. Sadly, Widmark simply isn’t au fait with Hammer Pictures and he’s ill-suited to the summary killings and witchery, looking mostly perplexed. He seems decidedly out of breath when forced to do any violent action.
The role seems to deserve a younger man, I feel. Anthony Valentine, who plays one of Rayner’s victims might have made a better stab at it, what with all that burgeoning anger he flourishes. Additionally he’s got youth on his side. When Verney travels to Heathrow to pick up Beddows’ daughter, you can’t understand why she travels with this crinkly old man so docilly. A younger version of Verney would have introduced the frisson of physical attraction, which doesn’t exist in the slightly creepy guardian-protector to naïve-virgin relationship we do have. It’s no wonder Catherine decides to escape.
In fact, increasing that sexual element would not have been out of place in a film which clearly introduced it as a means to sensationalise, yet also as a measure of the control Michael Rayner exerts over his flock. Rayner is surrounded by devoted nuns, conducts orgiastic love-rites, uses love and lust as a mystical weapon of fear, and derives untold pleasure from watching the women around him die; through this it’s clear he’s a masochistic trope of devil worshipper, utilising a powerful sexual magnetism to beguile and seduce his followers. However, while the narrative does involve these scenes – including some extremely youthful full-frontal nudity of Ms Kinski – in another the ugly blood-soaked Astaroth foetus appears to administer oral sex to the stupefied teen – their insertion seems somewhat arbitrary and the notion of sex as power is never driven home.
There are better sequences: a juxtaposition of scenes where a nun, Margaret, bores Astaroth while Catherine writhes in agony, experiencing for herself the demon’s birthing torment; the murder of Honor Blackman’s kittenish literary editor Anna; the confrontation with a sensuous evil spirit in an abandoned church; Catherine’s breathless escape; her longing, coquettish glances; all these seem to suggest the rapacious power of Michael Rayner and his devils far better than any nude orgy. Interestingly, the moral page is written in quite an old-fashioned way, for Verney, a single, solitary, studious man resists all efforts of satanic seduction, while all those around him are victims to the thrall of sexual awakenings.
There are some bloody murders, some spooky stuff with pentagrams and some spontaneous combustion. Paul Glass provides atmospheric, chiming music. David Watkin, who always did excellent cinematography for Richard Lester, comes up trumps again, giving the scenes urgency and a slanting eerie placement. The script is passable. The movie climaxes [😁] in a windy, gloomy, rather simplistic one-to-one between Lee and Widmark and you wonder how much better this might have been with Lee and Peter Cushing, sparring like the good old days, Hammer’s two stalwarts at it hammer and tongs, as it were. There was some criticism of the truncated end from contemporary audiences, but I rather like it. Less, sometimes is more.
Overall, however, I think both Sykes and Hammer missed a trick here and really ought to have created a more perceptive genre piece, instead they rather sensationalised all the sexual aspects without knowing where to take them. To the Devil a Daughter feels unlike any other Hammer Picture, a much more modern project, and this should be applauded, but the writers ought to have assembled something better than what we ended up with. The good performances from the support players and especially Christopher Lee try to save it, but the whole project teeters close to the moribund whenever Richard Widmark’s weary frame appears. The closing quote from Dennis Wheatley is rather a thumb up the author’s nose. He hated the film.
Blood on Satan’s Claw begins scrolling its titles through a frame of blackthorns. The world of the early eighteenth century is already crawling with barbs and thickets. A young man plough’s the furrows of a dilapidated field. Ravens and crows, the blackest of black creatures, peck at the detritus. His pauper’s lunch remains abandoned, half-eaten, a blood sausage and an apple. He turns up parts of a corpse, manked with fur and a still-staring eye. Into what fresh hell has director Piers Haggard launched us?
Part of the short-lived ‘folk horror’ cycle, which began as early as Hammer’s The Reptile and proceeded to reach highs in Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw was crammed in between those two seminal works and doesn’t quite reach the same summits. It inhabits the typical gloomy, overcast, mud soaked, superstitious surrounds of Witchfinder… and purports to the similar moral certainty of The Wicker Man’s protagonist Neil Howie, that sin, specifically carnal sin, breeds evil.
Here, a visiting Judge, played astutely by Patrick Wymark, investigates the ‘corpse’, only to find it missing. Unknown to the Judge and the farmer, Ralph Gower, it’s been stolen by a local hussy, the brazen Angel Blake and she’s unleashed its demonic power. First, Peter Edmonton brings his fiancé Rosalind to meet his aunt. He wants to spend the night with her, and she with him, but he’s forced to wait, politely drinking port with the Judge, who tacitly admits he knows the young man’s intentions, explaining that he once loved Peter’s aunt. This admission in the puritanical times is highlighted when he toasts King Charles III, the Young Pretender, a man he considers of the enlightenment, who will banish the superstitions of the peasant folk. Yet it is exactly the two men’s intentions of desire which fuel the resurgent satanic demon.
Forced by convention to spend the night in the eerie attic of the lodge, Rosalind aroused by the prospect of Peter’s arrival, is suddenly driven insane, attacking the petrified aunt with what appears to be a claw-hand. Later, Peter imagines a beast creeping from under the floorboards and attacks the creature with a knife, only to awake from the nightmare to find he’s hacked off his own hand. The local doctor too prefers to believe in legends: “Why should I help you?” he scolds Ralph, “It wasn’t me who ploughed the field.”
Meanwhile, the children are behaving strangely, teasing and insulting the local pastor, Angel Blake at their helm. Two cheeky adolescents entice Mark Vespers into becoming a blood sacrifice. To deflect blame, Angel attempts to seduce the pastor, accusing him of being both perpetrator and predator. The rape and murder of Mark’s sister Cathy [Wendy Padbury, looking even younger than she did in Dr Who] eventually persuades the foolish, pompous and supercilious Squire that only the learned Judge can save them from an impending contagion.
The children are a scheming, euphoric brood. Aroused by pain, they see the act of playing games as a prelude to sin, ultimately sex and sacrificial death. Constantly photographed in close up, their lost, swollen eyes and still mouths elicit thoughts of abuse victims. The more rabid among them are callous, silent heavy breathers. All are afflicted by a strange growth of fur, which they flay from their bodies to help reconstitute the demon they call Behemoth. They recite ritual verse as meaninglessly as they do the Lord’s Prayer. Amongst the coven is Margaret, who villagers try to drown, thinking her a witch. Ralph misguidedly saves her, hoping the removal of the fur will redeem her soul. Instead she tries to convert him to the satanic cause, promising the delights of fornication. The Judge returns, interrogates Margaret, and leads an attack on the demon’s lair, a ruined church in the blackthorn woods.
The film is remarkably rich in its interpretation of religious uncertainty. The Pastor believes the way to convert and educate is through repetition and rote. The Judge sees religion as a battle of learned science against unwitting fantasy. Angel considers it to be malevolent desire. When overlaid with the unsettling images of youths engaged in carnal behaviour, watched over by two aged crones, who grin and snigger and sing as the deeds unfold in more graphic detail – bonfires, bondage, naked dancing, insinuated masturbation and sexual initiations – at one point Angel is clearly delivering oral sex to the mighty Behemoth – the experience of viewing Blood on Satan’s Claw is rather like becoming one of those anxious, haunted, confused teenagers, wondering how they got embroiled in this sickly ritual, yet unable to escape from it, so enthralled are they to the Behemoth’s fleshly practices.
The film doesn’t quite have the courage of its conviction. It has to remain fairly sly on the sexual content, although a young Linda Hayden’s marvellous creeping performance as the wanton seductress Angel doesn’t pull back, becoming more intensely feral as the moment of manifestation nears, a spitting viper of evil. She’s matched by the more desperate, almost simpering impertinence of Michele Dotrice’s Margaret [a million miles from Frank Spencer’s missus] who even after betraying her master retains an air of contempt for the uninitiated. “You can lay with me,” she pleads to Ralph, “You can lay with Angel” as if sex will cure all ill. The confusion is not apparent to the Judge, who leaves her tied to a stake, a meal for his slavering hunter dogs.
The film struggles with its depiction of evil because we actually see this beast, although only in a glimmering half-light. One of the delights is cinematographer Dick Bush’s use of natural light, giving every scene a breathy, slightly overcast look, but you can’t do much with a hairy creature costume, even in shadow. It appears to have a goat’s head, but the revelation scene is just deceptive enough. To not show the satanic creature at all might have heightened the notion of latent evil, which is clearly the intent, suggesting the power of the truly supernatural. Here it’s just a horny old goat. The original ending was meant to show the Judge and his outriders laying waste the village, killing good, evil and indifferent alike. I rather prefer that, but it was considered an ending too bleak.
Blood on Satan’s Claw is an intriguing film which delivers some expected thrills and tremors without ever quite fulfilling its promising intentions.
I watched this movie because the star, Monica Vitti died this week. We also get Terrence Stamp as Willie Garvin and Dirk Bogarde as Gabriel.
This is a very strange movie! If you don't know who Modesty Blaise, she's an ex-criminal who starts working for MI6. If the character was given better movies Modesty Blaise had the potential to rival The Bond series, I think.
But they do so many strange things in this movie. Why is Modesty blonde in most of the movie? Why does Modesty behave like a giddy schoolgirl much of the time? Why are the fight scenes sh*t? Why does Modesty seem incompetent much of the time? Why is a copy of the Modesty Blaise comic book next to Modesty on the sofa? Why is Lob replaced by an Arab? What's the facination with wigs? Why does Modesty look and dress like Modesty Blaise for about two minutes? And why .... oh WHY do Modesty and Garvin break out in (out of tune) song during the big final action scene, singing about getting married????? 🤣
But the movie isn't all bad. The locations are really good. Stamp and Bogarde are often good. I like the stylish and often trippy sets. The score is fun. I enjoy the bizarre tone of the movie, it's even somewhat in tone with the comics. Most of all I was never bored and I often had fun watching it.
I totally agree that Lee is good in this (when isn't he?) and that Widmark is dreadful. Apparently, that extended to offscreen as well with him being rude and disdainful to the crew. Casting him was a big mistake, one dating back to Hammer's early days when they felt they had to have an American star to sell their films in the USA. Surely by now Christopher Lee in a horror film was enough?
The ending was a major problem, and was cobbled together from what they had shot, what they were allowed to show, and what was actually intended. IMHO, it doesn't work.
There were censorship problems as well, with the then 14-year old Nastassja Kinski being full-frontal naked.
Dennis Wheatley was horrified (in the wrong way) and refused permission for more films of his work- after being very pleased with The Devil Rides Out some years earlier.
An almost always pleasing film to rewatch. This time, my 93-year-old Dad joined me and kept awake for this showing that began on telly at 9pm. I'd encouraged Mum and Dad to see it back when it was released - we saw it at the Ewell cinema I was telling you about a few posts ago, now defunct. But there were loads of local teenagers making a noise and going 'gross!' when there was blood, of which there was a lot.
In truth, some of the sniping they made, while disrespectful, sometimes made sense. Costner as Ness going into his friend's apartment and seeing blood everywhere - but then being suddenly shocked to see his body (I'm keeping it vague because some haven't seen the film, perhaps.) Some I still don't quite understand http://[spoiler] If he gets the Attorney General to switch the juries at the end by telling him his name is on the ledger when it isn't, how is that leverage? The judge will just say, no it isn't, get lost! http://[/spoiler]
In view of party gate in the UK, I don't understand how no political commenters have failed to point out the similarity between Sir Keir 'Elliot Ness' Starmer and Boris 'Al Capone' Johnson, in view of the Prohibition themes during Lockdown and the contrasting personalities of the men. That said, it only occurred to me tonight!
Guess I haven't figured out how to do spoiler alerts! 😣
@Number24 Yes, Modesty Blaise is an odd one. It's hopelessly miscast all-round and director Joseph Losey seems completely ill at ease among spies and spying. I recall a very good sequence where Garvin (and Modesty? I forget) go skin diving underneath a yacht and perform a jewel heist or something - it was the best bit in the whole thing. Monica Vitti is gorgeous, but she's no fan's idea of Modesty Blaise, brunette wig or not. To best appreciate Miss Vitti's talents you really need to watch L'Avventura - which also stars our own Gabriele Ferzetti.
I spent the last couple of evenings watching two war films. These are long reviews, so hold tight:
#1
IS PARIS BURNING? (1966)
Rene Clement’s huge, almost forgotten, war epic about the resistance and the eventual breaching of Paris in August 1944 is worth a look if you can stomach almost three hours of longwinded distinctly amorphic action.
Ah, the film isn’t so bad and garnered decent reviews on release, but Clement doesn’t seem to understand what sort of film he wants to make. The first half revolves around the political infighting between the various French factions in Paris. Not being familiar with the exact history, I had no idea who was who and who represented who, and there is no subtitle to aid clarity [as there was for instance in The Longest Day, which trod a similar semi-documentary path]. Putting that to one side, some of the scenes proceed with vim and vigour.
Gert Frobe commands attention in his every scene as the sympathetic General Von Choltitz, ordered by Hitler to burn Paris to the ground if necessary. His turn of allegiance is delicately played; when he discovers two SS officers in his quarters he prepares to shoot them, before realising they have orders to steal the Bayeux Tapestry for Himmler, which provokes his giggling disdain. Frobe reveals how good and subtle an actor he is, not just a gratuitous Bond villain. Orson Welles crops up as the Swedish ambassador, Nordling, mediating for political prisoners and, later, for a cease fire. He’s rather understated for a change. The roster of stars ploughs on: Jean Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Alain Delon, Glenn Ford, Yves Montand, Robert Stack, Simone Signoret, Jean Pierre Cassel, Michel Piccoli, etc. Kirk Douglas crops up unexpectedly as General Patton and you wonder if he’d have made a decent stab at it had he been cast in that man’s biopic. A great cast generally not doing a lot. I’d have preferred the film not to be dubbed.
Action wise, the film never gets going. There’s a splendid early scene at a railway station which evokes all the dread of the concentration camp as prisoners are forced screaming onto transports. The one man Nordling wants to save is slaughtered on the platform and Clement organises a magnificent backwards tracking shot past the bleeding corpse as the train disappears in the opposite direction. Maurice Jarre’s overzealous score is memorably muted. Later on Anthony Perkins’ doomed G.I. dreamer has an affective death scene in a Parisian café. Some moments of bizarre comedy feel so unusual they must be based on real incidents. There’s decent monochrome photography from Marcel Grignon which blends well with the documentary footage. I spent much time wondering why Clement’s wartime Paris was so deserted, but then you see the guerrilla movie shots and realise that’s exactly how it was.
The film is a story told by winners. While Gert Frobe’s character may be stereotypically sympathetic, Clement and his writer’s present an overarched, bleached view of the war. There’s no suggestion of collaborators or spies, or even the Vichy government, and, other than one occasion, no suggestion of atrocities. The antisemitic element of Nazism isn’t mentioned at all. It’s as if all Parisians were all for the resistance and that too represents all of France. Co-writer Francis Ford Coppola blamed French President Charles de Gaulle, who reportedly interfered in the production, particularly insisting the role of the Communists – who launched the initial resurgence in Paris and seized most of the municipal buildings – was downplayed. Coppola considered de Gaulle’s actions to be political censorship.
Mad Magazine satirised the movie as Is Paris Boring? A trifle unfair, although I did have to wait three hours for Maurice Jarre’s splendid accordion based theme tune to finally materialise while aerial views of Paris germinate from black and white to technicolour as the end titles roll. Is Paris Burning? fits into that slew of sixties war films, like Anzio or Battle of Britain, which attempted to tell true stories at length and in depth. It’s long, but lacks depth because it doesn’t present its characters clearly enough to provoke our interest, excepting the ones who perhaps shouldn’t matter to us so much: the Swede and the German.
Good, but not great.
#2
THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1968 / 1971)
This monumental documentary work is a film which deserves inclusion on any list of great war films, though accepting some newsreel footage, it doesn’t feature any scenes of fighting through its entire four hour and ten minute length.
Made less than twenty five years after the cessation of hostilities, when memories and wounds were still raw, Marcel Ophuls’ masterpiece attempts to explain the Occupation and the Vichy administration through the words of the people who experienced it, soldiers, politicians, farmers, chemists, aristocrats, cinema owners, spies, Germans, Jews and French alike. Ophuls takes as his fulcrum the town of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, close to Vichy where the government sat, in what was known as the Free Zone. Conditions in the Clermont of 1968 don’t look much better than those of 1940. You can understand why these farmers refused to be subdued. They really had nothing to lose except their soil and during the war over 50% of their toil was being exported to Germany in aid, which was part of the Armistice agreement, but resulted in increased poverty.
The film opens with the pharmacist, Marcel Verdier, discussing the Occupation with his many children. He’s asked what people thought at the time and replies: “…the two emotions I experienced the most were sorrow and pity.” The film neatly divides itself in half following his statement. The Collapse is the sorrow and The Choice is the pity. The nature of the French army’s capitulation, its unpreparedness for war is underlined in several of the early interviews. There is certainly sorrow at being occupied, matched by bitterness towards the British after the unprovoked sinking of the French navy at Mers-el-Kepis. Former British P.M. Anthony Eden explains how the French Admirals were offered the opportunity to sail to the UK and join the Allied forces, but they refused. Even the merchant ships in Britain preferred to skulk. They had, he implies, completely surrendered, physically and mentally. Eden considered Marshal Petain, who assumed power after Paul Reynard was ousted, to be a defeatist and a reactionary. “They were not an elected government in exile, like the Belgians and the Dutch,” he regrets, suggesting the ultimate tragedy for France was this de facto dictatorship.
Petain’s government was a fascist one in all but name, authoritarian, xenophobic, antisemitic, violently traditionalist and steeped in Catholicism. The Vichy regime’s leading slogan was Work, Family, Nation, uncomfortably similar to the Nazi Work and Bread or One People, One Empire, One Leader. Petain’s personal history of antisemitism and Anglophobia does not however prevent him from having admirers, even in 1968. The film does not shirk from discussing the uncomfortable issues of torture, imprisonment, deportation, concentration camps and, eventually, military collaboration, issue which had rarely spoken of in the previous decades.
“Some tendencies in human behaviour will grow like weeds unless we tend to our youth,” continues a conciliatory Verdier. Some observers saw France’s capitulation as an inevitable consequence of divisive French politics, which had seen a far-left government attempting to remove a stifling complacency. They shrug their shoulders with resigned acceptance. One aristocrat, Christian de la Maizière, discusses the combustible atmosphere in schools and colleges, how in-fighting became more important than the greater good of the nation. Even more surprising is the organic nature of French resistance. While Charles De Gaulle made much of his famous ‘call to arms’, it hardly registered in France. Most of the interviewees never heard it and had no idea who he was in 1940. Soldiers who returned from the short war were gaoled as undesirables, fuelling anti-Vichy resentment. A future Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes, goes at some length to explain his show trail, imprisonment, escape and eventual reunion with De Gaulle. As a Jew, the racist nature of the establishment became all too clear to him, and he’s remarkably stoic about it. Another interviewee attempts to use statistics to wriggle an explanation for summary deportations; when they are thrown back at him as incorrect, he holds his head in shameful silence. The defining story of Petain’s and President Pierre Laval’s complicity is the enforced deportation of over 4000 Jewish children to Auschwitz, an order unusually not requested by the German command. None of the children survived the war.
The resistance itself is described as classless and dignified. “The problems of everyday life ceased. We were all outcasts of society, free from social structure,” admits Emanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, the upper-class leader of one of the resistance groups in Clermont. “Most of us were failures with Quixotic ideas.” His attitude, as an outsider of the elite, was completely different to the bourgeoisie, who had much more to lose, and used the circumstances of occupation to profit from it. The ordinary man or woman gained nothing from Vichy and instead took to arms. One leader, known affectionately as Gaspar, explains how the war propelled him to local prominence, a place he would never have attained otherwise. He admits to having been raised on crime, yet also has a striking ability to sense the unsettling nature of the contemporary times, comparing it to the attitudes of the Vichy regime: “A type of neo-Nazism is slowly rearing its ugly head. This is why we need these discussions.”
Gaspar grasps the political situation far more earnestly than the television executives and governmental ministers who banned the documentary. In fact, it’s fair to say his comment still holds much resonance today. This film ought to be required viewing for schools, to help students understand the implications of surrender and the ease with which a minority of sympathisers can exert powerful control and extreme policy over a massed population. The passivity of the general French public is frequently put on trial here. The victims of denouncements are and were many. “He was denounced by bad French people. That’s the only reason he went to prison,” bemoans a shrewish wife when her husband shrugs his shoulders and utters: “Revenge isn’t worth it.” The men around the table all know who the perpetrator was and is. Their own silence on the matter seems sentence enough. This really is being ‘sent to Coventry.’
The British attitude to the resistance was that it had a split personality: De Gaulle organising from afar, a reluctant, nervous right-wing and the proactive communists. While De Gaulle might have been glad of the Communists at the time, he had no love for them. British spy Dennis Rake considered the Communists the better end of the organisation. You sense the antagonism between the factions still festering years after the events. The idea of a unified resistance is a celebrated lie. The version of it presented in Rene Clement’s Is Paris Burning? is quite obviously a convenient narrative fallacy.
Rake himself provides an interesting story. As a homosexual, he found being a spy allowed him to hide his true identity. Ultimately, his pretence didn’t last and he risked exposure by building a relationship with a German officer. Rake doesn’t mention if he obtained any military secrets from his lover, but his situation and personality as a homosexual appears to have been accepted by his contacts in the resistance more than it would had he remained in London.
Latterly, the interviewer returns to the ornate mansion owned by Christian de la Maizière, once the seat of the Vichy administration. He was barred from his own home as an embarrassment to the regime having been enrolled in the Charlemagne Division, a branch of the Waffen SS. French soldiers were forced to join because it was part of the armistice agreement, part of Vichy policy and “a full sign of collaboration and integration.” Yet Petain and Laval couldn’t admit it. The role of the Charlemagne Division is still rarely spoken of by historians. They fought in the retreat from Russia and the last three hundred of them, including Maizière, took part in the siege of Berlin. He saw his allegiance as a political one: he couldn’t be a communist, his privileged background virtually forbade it, and as an adolescent it was easier to side with the people you were surrounded with, who were mostly antisemites. It wasn’t a religious or a political ideology, he suggests, it was more a rebellion against, yet adhering to the rules of, his upbringing. For his sins he won a two Iron Crosses, but seems remarkably repentant and liberal in the footage. By all accounts, his personal views did change dramatically.
Not so the Germans who are interviewed, one of whom sits resplendent with his SS insignia on his lapel, smoking cigars at his daughter’s wedding. They seem to tacitly agree with the old propaganda. They never saw anything. They never heard anything. They committed no crime. Everyone was very nice to us. The other side of the coin tells it very differently. Just occasionally you sense the curtain start to be pulled from their eyes, but something makes them yank it shut again. It makes for uncomfortable viewing. You wonder how the residents of Clermont might react to the Germans’ interpretation of events. Near the end of the film, Marcel Verdier relates a story of how as liberation approached he almost shot a defenceless German guard, but refused to do so as the man’s plea for clemency was so pathetic. We had the sorrow; that was pity of a sort, I suppose.
What makes The Sorrow and the Pity so powerful is the film maker’s intent not to make any judgement. He carefully interviews collaborators, resistance fighters, opponents and allies alike with a detached, scholarly bent. He allows the answers and stories and justifications to stand without responsive comment. There is not even a narration; a few minor title cards remind us where we are and who we are listening to. Audience reaction becomes entirely individual and uninfluenced. It is this more than anything which frightened those in power in 1968, that to allow people to draw their own conclusions without editorial input might just be a step to anarchy. The events on Parisian streets in 1968 might suggest anarchy was upper most in their minds, and Ophuls’ film does nothing to dispel the myth that the hierarchy of France in the 1940s were collaborators and neo-fascists: the people who lived through it openly admit it.
I urge anyone with an interest in the Second World War and its impact on communities and individuals to watch this film which is an essential document of a past still familiar to many living today.
After a decade of Hollywood making important pictures which were small in stature, Michael Mann chose to go epic in scale and reintroduce audiences to Fenimore Cooper’s hoary old story of the Indian woodsman Hawkeye. Along with Kevin Costner ‘s Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans reinvented interpretations of the western for a modern audience, although this is more of an Eastern and pre-dates the period of the ‘wild west’ by some one hundred years. The executives sat up, took notice and remembered, for a short while at least, that movies should be big and broad and beautiful, even if the action is brutal.
There’s not a lot of character development in this film. You need to take a lot on trust and Trevor Jones & Randy Edelman’s piercing music score helps place your emotions better than the acting. When the romance – or the lust – kicks in, they recreate the same pulsing beat as the violence: this is a wild romance driven by desperate times. Mann’s not over bothered about the emotional side of things, to be fair, nor is he inventive with conversations, which tend to take place face to face, flat on, side on, with little cinematic imagination. He saves all that for the tough action scenes, of which there are many: fighting, stabbing, running, shooting, scalping, etc.
Daniel Day Lewis confirmed his star status, but his accent is all over the place. He’s given terrific support from Wes Studi as the villainous, vengeful Mohawk, Magua, and Russell Means as the thoughtful, Chingachgook, the last Mohican of the title. Madeleine Stowe and Jodhi May are helplessly one-dimensional, but lovely to look at.
The film improves as it progresses and the final confrontation between Magua’s Huron rebels and the three sympathetic Mohicans is suitably satisfying and heart breakingly intense , all the more successful for being conducted in virtual silence. There are no long speeches to tell the audience what the characters are experiencing, Mann is showing us and his perseverance pays off with one of the bleakest heroic battles in film history, for the fight of the Mohicans is already lost by the time the last axe descends.
Fittingly, like a great poem, Mann draws the audience back to the fabulous opening landscapes of New York state [actually the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina] allowing us to remember that life will still continue, despite the deaths which surrounds us. Fabulous entertainment. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I almost hesitate to say, they don’t make films like this much these days.
Not-bad thrilller with FRWL's Robert Shaw and semi-Bond regular Walter Gotell in the cast.
Members of the Black September group plot a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl; Shaw plays a Mossad agent who aligns with US intelligence and law enforcement agencies to thwart the attack.
Who spends their Saturday night watching a movie from 1930 on Youtube? My friend and I, that's who! 😀
We didn't regret it at all. It's about two brothers Monte and Ray join the Royal Flying Corps in WWI, Ray falls in love with the Faithless Helen (Jean Harlow who at 19 had only had uncredited parts earlier). In fact several of the main cast are morally dubious, but brave in combat. The movie was know as the Titanic of its day: huge spectacle, huge budget, huge production problems and finally huge boxoffice. We were surprised by how modern the movie seemed compared to other movies of the age. Most of the acting wasn't overly theatrical, the main characters seem modern and the action is very good. The action scenes are still spectacular! There are at least thirthy fighter scenes in a single shot in some scenes and the zeppelin sequence is great: Howard Hughes Hells Angels - The Zeppelin Part - YouTube
I also noticed the movie used real German speakers to play Germans. Hollywood still hire people of the wrong nationailty to play and speak as foreigners, even as recently as last year's Black Widow. I also found it facinating to see how bombing (both from airships and bomber planes) was done in WWI, something I haven't seen anywhere before. It's rare to watch a big budget action movie that's ninty years old for enjoyment, but that's what we did.
I too watched Modesty Blaise (1966) over the weekend and filed a full report over in the Modesty Blaise thread.
its better than I remembered, you just have to forget everything you know about Peter O'Donnell's characters, and soak up the lush visuals. I accidentally typed the malaplopism "spychedelic" as I was writing, which ought to be a thing. This is better spy-chedelia than Casino Royale at any rate.
Kaya Scudelario is a Brazilian-British actress. She was in the TV-series Skins, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the Maze Runner series, she was the lead in Crawl and her next movie is "The king's daughter" with Pierce Brosnan. I think she's the best candidate today.
Directed by James Whale, after his success with both Frankenstein (1931) and The Old Dark House (1932) his third horror outing mixes slapstick with genuine suspense. A stranger rents a room at an inn in an English village, he is swathed in bandages and dark goggles. After defaulting on his rent he assaults the landlord and then disrobes, this is when we find out he is invisible, he plays pranks on the villagers in a slapstick manner which is out of step with the rest of the film, the landlady puts a particularly irritating performance. We find out that the invisible man is a scientist and he returns to his colleague with plans to dominate the world through invisibility. The special effects must have been very effective at the time and although perfunctory today, they still look decent enough to be enjoyable. A mistake towards the end of the movie shows the invisible man making footprints in the snow, but instead of naked feet they are footprints of shoes!
I love the Universal Monsters movies and this is a short (70 minutes) entry that delivers what it promises, although I think that the slapstick scenes work against the movie and as such it isn’t as good as it could have been.
When I was a kid in the 60’s I used to collect the Aurora monster model kits and I had the idea of producing a British version of The Invisible Man with an empty box 😁
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I caught this on telly last night, it's a comedy thriller set in 1977 about two 'mismatched' cops played by La La Land's Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, it's from a few years back now.
I found it highly entertaining - though as a movie you might wonder what the hell was going on. Essentially it's a pastiche of all things 70s, an affectionate send-up of the styles. There's one scene where the two cops - actually they're private investigators pairing up for the same case - attend a really cool, flash and decadent party that looks like the best thing ever. Only today do I wonder who they managed to gain entry to such a swanky event, but that's movies for ya. It's not clear how one of the PIs can even afford to rent his lovely pad with his daughter but you don't really care to be honest.
Being a pastiche, you do not get quite involved or taken in with the main plot, similar with other such recent films as Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Licorice Pizza. The tone is all, wow, isn't this funny, the stuff they did back then? The film, like many of its day, has the porn industry as a theme and like the 'Book Covers' thread on this forum, it's unclear sometimes if we are meant to enjoy or abhor various aspects of it - the film opens with a lingering shot of a naked porn star, her lithe, supple breasts on show, but I think she might be dead so I switched over for that and then back. (I always feel when I'm writing this stuff these days that I have Barbel breathing down my neck...) There's also a mention of 'anal' - not sure that was even a thing in porn land back then, still what do I know.
Gosling's young teenage daughter tags along, she's a funny character but signposts that nothing too terrible is going to happen to her. It's an odd film really, not always as funny as it should be, not outright send up. The 70s did do this kind of thing better, except they really did become watered down nonsense, it took the late 80s to kill them off. I know technically Lethal Weapon and Die Hard are comedy thrillers, but not in that sense, you are invested in the outcome and you are pumped up, believing it is really happening, the jokes are there to heighten that, not reduce it. In this, when someone really dies it is a nasty shock, though in shoot outs so you see passers-by get offed and never referenced again so it's tonally uneven.
Compare with the better Indiana Jones films. Raiders is obv set in wartime or thereabouts, you have Nazis and cars with sideboards ffs! But rarely does it jar, rare is there anything to make you think, wow, things were different then! You don't see Indy enter a movie theatre where a black and white film is showing. Ford doesn't sport a pencil thin moustache like film stars of the day. Much of the look is classic - characters wear timeless suits or army uniforms or the leather jacket and chinos look. No music from the era is played. So you are kept in the moment and go along with it. Crystal Skulls had too many nods to the 50s and I don't hold out hope for the next one, if rumours of Indy in Carnaby Street are true, it could all get a bit Austin Powers. The difference being, the film makers didn't grow up in wartime but with the belated sequels they are revisiting the sets of their youth. Skulls also tried to do something with the idea that Indy, like your Dad, was a cool guy one time but like many of us grow up irritable, I can see what they were doing here but I didn't enjoy it.
Another reason for the failure of Temple of Doom and Skulls is simpler - imo the comedy didn't work in either. Raiders I enjoy for the female lead's performance, she is a great foil for Indy, likewise Connery in Crusade. The love interest and the kid in Temple are painful, and there is never much comedy had between Indy and his kid in Skulls, not the return of Marianne imo. As with Bond, I personally find if the jokes don't work or aren't there, it quickly becomes a case of 'Why am I watching this? I don't actually believe it...'
Anyway, I recommend The Nice Guys which has a couple of Bond moments in it, one involving a pool, you'd enjoy and it looks good, some nice songs on the soundtrack latterly. Shame there wasn't a sequel.
I watched The Nice Guys in the cinema and thought it was rubbish. However, in my defence, I didn't realise it was a comedy. Subsequently, I spent most of the film wondering why the characters were such dolts.
Still, I don't need to misinterpret a film to believe it's a failure:
THE ODESSA FILE (1974)
I expect many of you have watched The Odessa File. Based on Frederick Forsyth’s doorstep thriller, Jon Voigt is miscast as a Berlin journalist who stumbles across an elaborate plan by ex-Nazis to assist Nasser’s Egypt during their long campaign against Israel. In doing so he uncovers a frightening labyrinthine network of ex-Nazis living and working in 1960s Germany. I won’t go into detail as it takes some unravelling. Suffice to say there’s not enough tension, Voight’s character is something of a blinkered idiot and I didn’t believe it for a second. I was impressed with Mary Tamm as Voight’s girlfriend, but that’s got less to do with the movie and more to do with a youthful Dr Who fantasy [Miss Tamm played one of the Doctor’s assistants.] I digress. There’s not a lot of action, which sets it apart from some thrillers of the day. The acting’s fairly wooden all-round until Maximillian Schell enters the fray as the villain of the piece Eduard Roschmann, the ‘Butcher of Riga’.
Roschmann was a real person and the novel and film forced him into the open – he was hiding in plain sight in Argentina and eventually turned up dead in Paraguay in 1977, in unclear circumstances. However, there are tremendous fictional liberties taken with not only Roschmann’s story but that of the Nazi Ratlines. For instance the role of the Catholic church, in particular the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, is glossed over, as is the complicity of the American, British and Soviet governments in adopting ex-Nazis as spies, informants and scientists in return for clemency. The history of pro-fascist South American regimes and their open-door policy is well-documented, but hardly touched on here. The Odessa organisation never officially existed except as an overarching US administrator’s codeword for the various different ratlines.
Ronald Neame was a classy British director and he’d just had his biggest hit with the effects laden The Poseidon Adventure, but he becomes all-a-stuck here. I applaud his effort to play down the thrills, but he’s made the movie so dull one begins to pick problems with it. There’s a whole sequence where Voigt’s character agrees to infiltrate Odessa and to support his cover has to learn all aspects of the Waffen SS. This was tosh. I didn’t expect it to succeed. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
In a break between blockbuster rock operas, Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the anodyne score. They managed to get Perry Como to sing the theme. However, one decent song, one good fight scene and one decent five-minute cameo does not a decent thriller make.
I'd read Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File and it is a brilliant book, of course not surprising as it's the same era as The Day of the Jackal. Not an easy read however due to its portrayal of what went on in the death camps, so avoid if you're feeling a bit down. The character's infiltration of the covert SS is laboured over, not rushed as in the film, as if it's done in a month or so. Latterly, the film just diverges from the book to cut corners, it's a Boys from Brazil bit of nonsense, it lacks authenticity. The book would work better as a TV series, along the lines of Le Carre's The Night Manager TV adaptation.
Robin Hood (Sean Connery) and Little John has been fighting for king Richard (Richard Harris) in the crusades and now in France. By the time the king dies Robin has lost a lot of illusions about his Richard. Robin and John return to England and the Sherwood forest where they find Will Scarlett and Friar Tuck who seems to be played by Hodor in GoT. To Robin's shock Marian (Audrey Hepburn) has become a nun. The sheriff (Robert Shaw) still resides in Nothingham. Robin quickly rekindles his love for Marian and his hate for the sheriff.
It's an interesting idea to imagine what happened to Robin Hood and the people around him twenty years later. Everyone moves slower and are more wise to the world. It's great to see Connery and Shaw as enemies thirteen years after FRWL. Shaw plays the sheriff with a been-there-done-that cynicism. Connery's Robin is a mix of romanticism, a sense of adventure and lost illusions.
You can't deny the star power of the two leads. I also like the humor, dialoge and one last adventure mood of "Robin and Marion". We also get a John Barry score. Barry is always good, but I think this one is one of his least memorable. The fight scenes are often too bloodless. Tricks like getting someone in a headlock, turning away from the camera and only then "cutting their throath" get too obvious. We also see modern ships in the background during the sheriff's men's choir practise. On several occations it's obvious Robin Hood isn't wearing any undergarments. Connery is a Scotsman after all! 😁
I think they get the mix of adventure, nostalgia and two impressive leads largely right and I enjoyed the movie.
Reading the cast of "Robin And Marian" I came across Ian Holm and was reminded- several years ago, my son and I watched a batch of movies over a weekend. If memory serves, they were "Alien", "Brazil", Kenneth Branagh's version of "Frankenstein", one of "The Lord Of The Rings" series, and "From Hell". A pretty varied bunch, picked by both of us. Towards the end, he turned to me and said "Dad, is Ian Holm in every movie ever made?" 😁
Edit: You'll be familiar with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? It actually works better as Six Degrees of Christopher Lee, but it's too late to change the name of that game now (and it works better phonetically with Six Degrees Of Seperation).
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Zarak (1956)
IMDB plot summary: On the mountainous frontier between British India and Afghanistan, circa 1860s, Zarak Khan kisses Salma, the youngest wife of his father, Haji Khan. Outraged, his father orders Zarak to be flogged to death but spares his life at the urging of an elderly Mullah. Zarak now leaves his village and becomes a notorious outlaw, prompting the British to assign a Major Ingram to capture him. Zarak and Ingram have several encounters, developing a grudging respect for each other.
This movie has several Bond connections. It was produced by Warwick Films, co-owned by Cubby Broccoli. It was directed by Terrance Young and written by Richard Maibaum. Bob Simmons was the main stuntman and Ted Moore was the cinematographer. Aunice Gayson who plays the wife of the main British officer was the first ever Bond girl. Anita Ekberg should have kept her mouth shut in FRWL. Patric MacGoohan was offered the part of James Bond, but turned it down on religious reasons. The leads Victor Mature and Michael Wilding are on the other hand unknown to me.
Zarak is actually based on a real man. According to a book Zarak fought the British in the Northwest Frontier in the 1920s and 30s until he was captured. He fought with the British against the Japanese in WWII. According to Wikipedia "In 1943 he was leading a patrol when its British officer was killed in an ambush. He watched another British patrol be attacked by the Japanese and sent messengers to summon a Gurkha force. To stop the Japanese from escaping with their prisoners before the Gurkhas arrived, he attacked them single-handed, and killed or wounded six soldiers before being overpowered. He refused to be beheaded and insisted on being flayed alive to buy time to enable the Gurkhas to arrive." That's commitment!
This movie probably has more in common with 1001 Nights than the real Northern Frontier and Afghanistan in the 1860s. It's colourful in every way. There are half-naked harem girls and borownface actors everywhere, but one wonders how Anita Ekberg's character managed to end up in Afghanistan. I don't think the filmmakers can be critisized for all the brownface on display considering how very few actors with the right etnicity worked in Britain at the time. It must have been brownface or no movie a tall. The House of Lords had issues with the half-naked harem girls. The original film poster was criticised by the House of Lords for "bordering on the obscene" and banned in the United Kingdom. Here it is:
I can see some of the seeds of the James Bond movies in Zarak. There is of cource the shared talent on screen and off. We can also see the interest in adventure, exotic locations (Morocco stood in for Afghanistan like it did in TLD) and a mix of violence and stunning women. But even though Zarak was made only six years before DN it looks old-fashioned compared to the first Bond movies in the way it's acted, edited and shot. But if you're looking for an old-fashioned action adventure movie you can do a lot worse than Zarak. I had fun watching it.
Youtube; Zarak: 1956 Adventure Drama with Victor Mature and Michael Wilding - YouTube
Fun fact: Terrance Young actually directed Ian Fleming! I'm not talking about the questionable shot of a man next to the train in FRWL, But in "Too hot to handle" (1960) directed by Young, an Australian actor named Ian Fleming plays a pawnbroker.
Last night I over indulged and watched three horrors from the seventies. I spent all afternoon writing these up. I suspect some have been reviewed before:
#1
THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971)
The Abominable Dr Phibes has one of the most astonishing beginnings I’ve ever seen for a horror film: a black garbed figure rises from the depths of his art deco mansion playing Mendelssohn’s War March of the Priests on his opulent Wurlitzer stage organ, turns to his unseen audience, dismounts and winds up a mechanical band who begin to recite a waltz, to which he dances across an enormous ballroom with an angelic white robed young woman. This bizarre romantic overture is broken a few moments later as the black-and-white twosome distribute a cage full of deadly flesh eating bats through the sky light of a soon-to-be deceased surgeon.
The film goes all camp on us after that, a series of increasingly peculiar assassinations linked by the ten plagues of Egypt – neither the right plagues nor in the correct order – and confounding a useless constabulary, led by a confused-looking Peter Jeffery. Joseph Cotton is the unsympathetic ‘hero’ of the piece, a surgeon whose team operated on and failed to save the life of Victoria Phibes. Vincent Price takes on a role odd even for him: a renowned concert musician and theologian who, having lost his wife and almost killing himself in a car crash, has brought himself back from the dead, fixing his vocal chords and repairing his seared flesh to the point he can adequately function and exact his revenge. He uses an amplifier to speak and takes sustenance through a hole in his neck. The final reveal of his tattered features beneath the prosthetic theatrical make up was chilling indeed, but unfortunately by then I’d ceased to be very interested in what was happening.
The grisly murders were delivered and then revealed in an increasingly laughable Carry On manner. I almost expected Kenneth’s Williams or Connor to play the victims it’s that hammy. Terry-Thomas was amusing as a pornography watching Doctor whose blood is drained from his body, a quite chilling method of disposal, which certainly got my interest. Yet director Robert Fuest has this slice of genuine horror accompanied by Vulnavia, the white robed woman, playing an intermezzo on a violin. This kind of auteur touch marks the film as unique, but doesn’t help the overall atmosphere of the piece, which continues to veer maniacally from terror to merriment. It’s fascinatingly watchable because of it. Price seems to inhabit a totally different platform to the rest of the cast and the constant jarring juxtapositions between horror and humour simply don’t work. I sat there engrossed, but I wasn’t sure if I kept watching because I was thrilled or because I merely wanted to see the next ridiculousness.
The very beautiful Virginia North, who of course graced On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Draco’s chess-mate, has the silent role of Vulnavia. Her motivation is never explained. Another of our alumni, Caroline Munro, is Dr Phibe’s dead wife, seen only in photographs [I don’t think it’s Munro in the coffin, I wasn’t sure]. The film is set in the mid-1920s, but the music mostly stems from the 1930s and 40s, which is another peculiarity. I kept thinking it was a seventies reworking of Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, but it lacks the epic scale. The whole murderous curiosity ends in an underground lair, on a moment of nightmarish pathos. Before the police can intervene, the nightscape black marble of Phibe’s tomb descends on his prostrate body, he rests at peace among the ravages of the final plague: darkness.
I was left completely dumb and, hours on, still have no idea whether I enjoyed the film or not.
#2
TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1976)
The penultimate Hammer production, 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter isn’t considered any great shakes by most critics. That’s a trifle unfair. It follows on the newly trodden path of the possession terror, as exemplified by The Exorcist. It’s often compared unfavourably with that other London-centric but American-starred shocker The Omen. It predates that classic by several months and is based on a much older novel, Dennis Wheatley’s from 1953.
It also features an excellent Hammer swansong from Christopher Lee as the obsessed and possessed defrocked priest Father Michael Rayner, whose life has been given over to serving the Lord of Chaos, Astaroth. Lee rarely gives a bad performance in anything, but he’s especially effectively cold-hearted in this one, never better than in two scenes where he responds to death in a completely ambivalent fashion. Firstly, a woman gives birth to the swollen, deformed foetus of Astaroth, the monster scratching and biting its way through her womb; Rayner’s companions are aghast at the horror, Lee’s expression suggests blissful admiration and devotion; this is a man completely enthral to his heretical compose. Latterly, one of the same companions, bleeds herself to death so her blood can be used to form a sacred boundary to the final satanic baptism. Rayner is unmoved. There is no sympathy for her husband, only a terse understanding of her sacrifice.
Director Peter Sykes had a chequered career. He ended up working in T.V. land, filming the popular Peter Bowles comedy-drama The Irish R.M. Here, he’s very constrained, but stokes the fire aplenty with those curious camera angles and scenes delivered in long shots. For instance, the initial confrontation between the cowardly Henry Beddows [Denholm Eliot] and Richard Widmark’s upright occult writer John Verney is played out in silence and watched through the people and wine glasses present at a book launch. Peter Sykes cleverly shoots Lee consistently from below or in close up, so he appears huge and menacing in every shot. The scene where he petrifies the luckless Beddows while speaking to him on the phone and twisting a chord around the handle – the poor man visualises a serpent slithering about his wrist – identifies Rayner’s power and his devil-incarnate nature.
Widmark’s the films Achilles heel. He’s not dynamic enough, preferring to play Verney as a solitary, resigned, bookish man. He doesn’t even want to be at his own launch party, and only takes on Beddows’ request out of blithe curiosity. Beddows is part of a satanic cult, the Children of the Lord. The cult have raised his daughter Catherine. She’s played by a young and prettily delicate Nastassja Kinski, whose rather good as the confused, enchanted and captivating teenager, displaying just the right amount of graciousness, while clearly offering a glint of seething adolescent trauma. She’s been raised in isolation at a Bavarian monastery awaiting her sixteenth birthday when she will be baptised in Astaroth’s new-born blood, allowing her to take on the power of the demon. For some obscure reason, this must be carried out at a deconsecrated mausoleum just outside Guildford. That handily transposes the action to London. To be brutal, the plot is all hocus pocus and doesn’t bear close examination. Sadly, Widmark simply isn’t au fait with Hammer Pictures and he’s ill-suited to the summary killings and witchery, looking mostly perplexed. He seems decidedly out of breath when forced to do any violent action.
The role seems to deserve a younger man, I feel. Anthony Valentine, who plays one of Rayner’s victims might have made a better stab at it, what with all that burgeoning anger he flourishes. Additionally he’s got youth on his side. When Verney travels to Heathrow to pick up Beddows’ daughter, you can’t understand why she travels with this crinkly old man so docilly. A younger version of Verney would have introduced the frisson of physical attraction, which doesn’t exist in the slightly creepy guardian-protector to naïve-virgin relationship we do have. It’s no wonder Catherine decides to escape.
In fact, increasing that sexual element would not have been out of place in a film which clearly introduced it as a means to sensationalise, yet also as a measure of the control Michael Rayner exerts over his flock. Rayner is surrounded by devoted nuns, conducts orgiastic love-rites, uses love and lust as a mystical weapon of fear, and derives untold pleasure from watching the women around him die; through this it’s clear he’s a masochistic trope of devil worshipper, utilising a powerful sexual magnetism to beguile and seduce his followers. However, while the narrative does involve these scenes – including some extremely youthful full-frontal nudity of Ms Kinski – in another the ugly blood-soaked Astaroth foetus appears to administer oral sex to the stupefied teen – their insertion seems somewhat arbitrary and the notion of sex as power is never driven home.
There are better sequences: a juxtaposition of scenes where a nun, Margaret, bores Astaroth while Catherine writhes in agony, experiencing for herself the demon’s birthing torment; the murder of Honor Blackman’s kittenish literary editor Anna; the confrontation with a sensuous evil spirit in an abandoned church; Catherine’s breathless escape; her longing, coquettish glances; all these seem to suggest the rapacious power of Michael Rayner and his devils far better than any nude orgy. Interestingly, the moral page is written in quite an old-fashioned way, for Verney, a single, solitary, studious man resists all efforts of satanic seduction, while all those around him are victims to the thrall of sexual awakenings.
There are some bloody murders, some spooky stuff with pentagrams and some spontaneous combustion. Paul Glass provides atmospheric, chiming music. David Watkin, who always did excellent cinematography for Richard Lester, comes up trumps again, giving the scenes urgency and a slanting eerie placement. The script is passable. The movie climaxes [😁] in a windy, gloomy, rather simplistic one-to-one between Lee and Widmark and you wonder how much better this might have been with Lee and Peter Cushing, sparring like the good old days, Hammer’s two stalwarts at it hammer and tongs, as it were. There was some criticism of the truncated end from contemporary audiences, but I rather like it. Less, sometimes is more.
Overall, however, I think both Sykes and Hammer missed a trick here and really ought to have created a more perceptive genre piece, instead they rather sensationalised all the sexual aspects without knowing where to take them. To the Devil a Daughter feels unlike any other Hammer Picture, a much more modern project, and this should be applauded, but the writers ought to have assembled something better than what we ended up with. The good performances from the support players and especially Christopher Lee try to save it, but the whole project teeters close to the moribund whenever Richard Widmark’s weary frame appears. The closing quote from Dennis Wheatley is rather a thumb up the author’s nose. He hated the film.
#3
BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)
Blood on Satan’s Claw begins scrolling its titles through a frame of blackthorns. The world of the early eighteenth century is already crawling with barbs and thickets. A young man plough’s the furrows of a dilapidated field. Ravens and crows, the blackest of black creatures, peck at the detritus. His pauper’s lunch remains abandoned, half-eaten, a blood sausage and an apple. He turns up parts of a corpse, manked with fur and a still-staring eye. Into what fresh hell has director Piers Haggard launched us?
Part of the short-lived ‘folk horror’ cycle, which began as early as Hammer’s The Reptile and proceeded to reach highs in Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw was crammed in between those two seminal works and doesn’t quite reach the same summits. It inhabits the typical gloomy, overcast, mud soaked, superstitious surrounds of Witchfinder… and purports to the similar moral certainty of The Wicker Man’s protagonist Neil Howie, that sin, specifically carnal sin, breeds evil.
Here, a visiting Judge, played astutely by Patrick Wymark, investigates the ‘corpse’, only to find it missing. Unknown to the Judge and the farmer, Ralph Gower, it’s been stolen by a local hussy, the brazen Angel Blake and she’s unleashed its demonic power. First, Peter Edmonton brings his fiancé Rosalind to meet his aunt. He wants to spend the night with her, and she with him, but he’s forced to wait, politely drinking port with the Judge, who tacitly admits he knows the young man’s intentions, explaining that he once loved Peter’s aunt. This admission in the puritanical times is highlighted when he toasts King Charles III, the Young Pretender, a man he considers of the enlightenment, who will banish the superstitions of the peasant folk. Yet it is exactly the two men’s intentions of desire which fuel the resurgent satanic demon.
Forced by convention to spend the night in the eerie attic of the lodge, Rosalind aroused by the prospect of Peter’s arrival, is suddenly driven insane, attacking the petrified aunt with what appears to be a claw-hand. Later, Peter imagines a beast creeping from under the floorboards and attacks the creature with a knife, only to awake from the nightmare to find he’s hacked off his own hand. The local doctor too prefers to believe in legends: “Why should I help you?” he scolds Ralph, “It wasn’t me who ploughed the field.”
Meanwhile, the children are behaving strangely, teasing and insulting the local pastor, Angel Blake at their helm. Two cheeky adolescents entice Mark Vespers into becoming a blood sacrifice. To deflect blame, Angel attempts to seduce the pastor, accusing him of being both perpetrator and predator. The rape and murder of Mark’s sister Cathy [Wendy Padbury, looking even younger than she did in Dr Who] eventually persuades the foolish, pompous and supercilious Squire that only the learned Judge can save them from an impending contagion.
The children are a scheming, euphoric brood. Aroused by pain, they see the act of playing games as a prelude to sin, ultimately sex and sacrificial death. Constantly photographed in close up, their lost, swollen eyes and still mouths elicit thoughts of abuse victims. The more rabid among them are callous, silent heavy breathers. All are afflicted by a strange growth of fur, which they flay from their bodies to help reconstitute the demon they call Behemoth. They recite ritual verse as meaninglessly as they do the Lord’s Prayer. Amongst the coven is Margaret, who villagers try to drown, thinking her a witch. Ralph misguidedly saves her, hoping the removal of the fur will redeem her soul. Instead she tries to convert him to the satanic cause, promising the delights of fornication. The Judge returns, interrogates Margaret, and leads an attack on the demon’s lair, a ruined church in the blackthorn woods.
The film is remarkably rich in its interpretation of religious uncertainty. The Pastor believes the way to convert and educate is through repetition and rote. The Judge sees religion as a battle of learned science against unwitting fantasy. Angel considers it to be malevolent desire. When overlaid with the unsettling images of youths engaged in carnal behaviour, watched over by two aged crones, who grin and snigger and sing as the deeds unfold in more graphic detail – bonfires, bondage, naked dancing, insinuated masturbation and sexual initiations – at one point Angel is clearly delivering oral sex to the mighty Behemoth – the experience of viewing Blood on Satan’s Claw is rather like becoming one of those anxious, haunted, confused teenagers, wondering how they got embroiled in this sickly ritual, yet unable to escape from it, so enthralled are they to the Behemoth’s fleshly practices.
The film doesn’t quite have the courage of its conviction. It has to remain fairly sly on the sexual content, although a young Linda Hayden’s marvellous creeping performance as the wanton seductress Angel doesn’t pull back, becoming more intensely feral as the moment of manifestation nears, a spitting viper of evil. She’s matched by the more desperate, almost simpering impertinence of Michele Dotrice’s Margaret [a million miles from Frank Spencer’s missus] who even after betraying her master retains an air of contempt for the uninitiated. “You can lay with me,” she pleads to Ralph, “You can lay with Angel” as if sex will cure all ill. The confusion is not apparent to the Judge, who leaves her tied to a stake, a meal for his slavering hunter dogs.
The film struggles with its depiction of evil because we actually see this beast, although only in a glimmering half-light. One of the delights is cinematographer Dick Bush’s use of natural light, giving every scene a breathy, slightly overcast look, but you can’t do much with a hairy creature costume, even in shadow. It appears to have a goat’s head, but the revelation scene is just deceptive enough. To not show the satanic creature at all might have heightened the notion of latent evil, which is clearly the intent, suggesting the power of the truly supernatural. Here it’s just a horny old goat. The original ending was meant to show the Judge and his outriders laying waste the village, killing good, evil and indifferent alike. I rather prefer that, but it was considered an ending too bleak.
Blood on Satan’s Claw is an intriguing film which delivers some expected thrills and tremors without ever quite fulfilling its promising intentions.
I like both the Phibes films, high camp horror with dodgy special effects, and made in the 70’s, what could be more perfect? 😁
Modesty Blaise (1966)
I watched this movie because the star, Monica Vitti died this week. We also get Terrence Stamp as Willie Garvin and Dirk Bogarde as Gabriel.
This is a very strange movie! If you don't know who Modesty Blaise, she's an ex-criminal who starts working for MI6. If the character was given better movies Modesty Blaise had the potential to rival The Bond series, I think.
But they do so many strange things in this movie. Why is Modesty blonde in most of the movie? Why does Modesty behave like a giddy schoolgirl much of the time? Why are the fight scenes sh*t? Why does Modesty seem incompetent much of the time? Why is a copy of the Modesty Blaise comic book next to Modesty on the sofa? Why is Lob replaced by an Arab? What's the facination with wigs? Why does Modesty look and dress like Modesty Blaise for about two minutes? And why .... oh WHY do Modesty and Garvin break out in (out of tune) song during the big final action scene, singing about getting married????? 🤣
But the movie isn't all bad. The locations are really good. Stamp and Bogarde are often good. I like the stylish and often trippy sets. The score is fun. I enjoy the bizarre tone of the movie, it's even somewhat in tone with the comics. Most of all I was never bored and I often had fun watching it.
It's on youtube: Modesty Blaise (Dirk Bogarde) (1966) - YouTube
I totally agree that Lee is good in this (when isn't he?) and that Widmark is dreadful. Apparently, that extended to offscreen as well with him being rude and disdainful to the crew. Casting him was a big mistake, one dating back to Hammer's early days when they felt they had to have an American star to sell their films in the USA. Surely by now Christopher Lee in a horror film was enough?
The ending was a major problem, and was cobbled together from what they had shot, what they were allowed to show, and what was actually intended. IMHO, it doesn't work.
There were censorship problems as well, with the then 14-year old Nastassja Kinski being full-frontal naked.
Dennis Wheatley was horrified (in the wrong way) and refused permission for more films of his work- after being very pleased with The Devil Rides Out some years earlier.
The Untouchables
An almost always pleasing film to rewatch. This time, my 93-year-old Dad joined me and kept awake for this showing that began on telly at 9pm. I'd encouraged Mum and Dad to see it back when it was released - we saw it at the Ewell cinema I was telling you about a few posts ago, now defunct. But there were loads of local teenagers making a noise and going 'gross!' when there was blood, of which there was a lot.
In truth, some of the sniping they made, while disrespectful, sometimes made sense. Costner as Ness going into his friend's apartment and seeing blood everywhere - but then being suddenly shocked to see his body (I'm keeping it vague because some haven't seen the film, perhaps.) Some I still don't quite understand http://[spoiler] If he gets the Attorney General to switch the juries at the end by telling him his name is on the ledger when it isn't, how is that leverage? The judge will just say, no it isn't, get lost! http://[/spoiler]
In view of party gate in the UK, I don't understand how no political commenters have failed to point out the similarity between Sir Keir 'Elliot Ness' Starmer and Boris 'Al Capone' Johnson, in view of the Prohibition themes during Lockdown and the contrasting personalities of the men. That said, it only occurred to me tonight!
Guess I haven't figured out how to do spoiler alerts! 😣
Roger Moore 1927-2017
My guess is the judge knows he's taken bribes, so he can't know his name isn't in the ledger.
Ah, okay!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Number24 Yes, Modesty Blaise is an odd one. It's hopelessly miscast all-round and director Joseph Losey seems completely ill at ease among spies and spying. I recall a very good sequence where Garvin (and Modesty? I forget) go skin diving underneath a yacht and perform a jewel heist or something - it was the best bit in the whole thing. Monica Vitti is gorgeous, but she's no fan's idea of Modesty Blaise, brunette wig or not. To best appreciate Miss Vitti's talents you really need to watch L'Avventura - which also stars our own Gabriele Ferzetti.
I spent the last couple of evenings watching two war films. These are long reviews, so hold tight:
#1
IS PARIS BURNING? (1966)
Rene Clement’s huge, almost forgotten, war epic about the resistance and the eventual breaching of Paris in August 1944 is worth a look if you can stomach almost three hours of longwinded distinctly amorphic action.
Ah, the film isn’t so bad and garnered decent reviews on release, but Clement doesn’t seem to understand what sort of film he wants to make. The first half revolves around the political infighting between the various French factions in Paris. Not being familiar with the exact history, I had no idea who was who and who represented who, and there is no subtitle to aid clarity [as there was for instance in The Longest Day, which trod a similar semi-documentary path]. Putting that to one side, some of the scenes proceed with vim and vigour.
Gert Frobe commands attention in his every scene as the sympathetic General Von Choltitz, ordered by Hitler to burn Paris to the ground if necessary. His turn of allegiance is delicately played; when he discovers two SS officers in his quarters he prepares to shoot them, before realising they have orders to steal the Bayeux Tapestry for Himmler, which provokes his giggling disdain. Frobe reveals how good and subtle an actor he is, not just a gratuitous Bond villain. Orson Welles crops up as the Swedish ambassador, Nordling, mediating for political prisoners and, later, for a cease fire. He’s rather understated for a change. The roster of stars ploughs on: Jean Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Alain Delon, Glenn Ford, Yves Montand, Robert Stack, Simone Signoret, Jean Pierre Cassel, Michel Piccoli, etc. Kirk Douglas crops up unexpectedly as General Patton and you wonder if he’d have made a decent stab at it had he been cast in that man’s biopic. A great cast generally not doing a lot. I’d have preferred the film not to be dubbed.
Action wise, the film never gets going. There’s a splendid early scene at a railway station which evokes all the dread of the concentration camp as prisoners are forced screaming onto transports. The one man Nordling wants to save is slaughtered on the platform and Clement organises a magnificent backwards tracking shot past the bleeding corpse as the train disappears in the opposite direction. Maurice Jarre’s overzealous score is memorably muted. Later on Anthony Perkins’ doomed G.I. dreamer has an affective death scene in a Parisian café. Some moments of bizarre comedy feel so unusual they must be based on real incidents. There’s decent monochrome photography from Marcel Grignon which blends well with the documentary footage. I spent much time wondering why Clement’s wartime Paris was so deserted, but then you see the guerrilla movie shots and realise that’s exactly how it was.
The film is a story told by winners. While Gert Frobe’s character may be stereotypically sympathetic, Clement and his writer’s present an overarched, bleached view of the war. There’s no suggestion of collaborators or spies, or even the Vichy government, and, other than one occasion, no suggestion of atrocities. The antisemitic element of Nazism isn’t mentioned at all. It’s as if all Parisians were all for the resistance and that too represents all of France. Co-writer Francis Ford Coppola blamed French President Charles de Gaulle, who reportedly interfered in the production, particularly insisting the role of the Communists – who launched the initial resurgence in Paris and seized most of the municipal buildings – was downplayed. Coppola considered de Gaulle’s actions to be political censorship.
Mad Magazine satirised the movie as Is Paris Boring? A trifle unfair, although I did have to wait three hours for Maurice Jarre’s splendid accordion based theme tune to finally materialise while aerial views of Paris germinate from black and white to technicolour as the end titles roll. Is Paris Burning? fits into that slew of sixties war films, like Anzio or Battle of Britain, which attempted to tell true stories at length and in depth. It’s long, but lacks depth because it doesn’t present its characters clearly enough to provoke our interest, excepting the ones who perhaps shouldn’t matter to us so much: the Swede and the German.
Good, but not great.
#2
THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1968 / 1971)
This monumental documentary work is a film which deserves inclusion on any list of great war films, though accepting some newsreel footage, it doesn’t feature any scenes of fighting through its entire four hour and ten minute length.
Made less than twenty five years after the cessation of hostilities, when memories and wounds were still raw, Marcel Ophuls’ masterpiece attempts to explain the Occupation and the Vichy administration through the words of the people who experienced it, soldiers, politicians, farmers, chemists, aristocrats, cinema owners, spies, Germans, Jews and French alike. Ophuls takes as his fulcrum the town of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, close to Vichy where the government sat, in what was known as the Free Zone. Conditions in the Clermont of 1968 don’t look much better than those of 1940. You can understand why these farmers refused to be subdued. They really had nothing to lose except their soil and during the war over 50% of their toil was being exported to Germany in aid, which was part of the Armistice agreement, but resulted in increased poverty.
The film opens with the pharmacist, Marcel Verdier, discussing the Occupation with his many children. He’s asked what people thought at the time and replies: “…the two emotions I experienced the most were sorrow and pity.” The film neatly divides itself in half following his statement. The Collapse is the sorrow and The Choice is the pity. The nature of the French army’s capitulation, its unpreparedness for war is underlined in several of the early interviews. There is certainly sorrow at being occupied, matched by bitterness towards the British after the unprovoked sinking of the French navy at Mers-el-Kepis. Former British P.M. Anthony Eden explains how the French Admirals were offered the opportunity to sail to the UK and join the Allied forces, but they refused. Even the merchant ships in Britain preferred to skulk. They had, he implies, completely surrendered, physically and mentally. Eden considered Marshal Petain, who assumed power after Paul Reynard was ousted, to be a defeatist and a reactionary. “They were not an elected government in exile, like the Belgians and the Dutch,” he regrets, suggesting the ultimate tragedy for France was this de facto dictatorship.
Petain’s government was a fascist one in all but name, authoritarian, xenophobic, antisemitic, violently traditionalist and steeped in Catholicism. The Vichy regime’s leading slogan was Work, Family, Nation, uncomfortably similar to the Nazi Work and Bread or One People, One Empire, One Leader. Petain’s personal history of antisemitism and Anglophobia does not however prevent him from having admirers, even in 1968. The film does not shirk from discussing the uncomfortable issues of torture, imprisonment, deportation, concentration camps and, eventually, military collaboration, issue which had rarely spoken of in the previous decades.
“Some tendencies in human behaviour will grow like weeds unless we tend to our youth,” continues a conciliatory Verdier. Some observers saw France’s capitulation as an inevitable consequence of divisive French politics, which had seen a far-left government attempting to remove a stifling complacency. They shrug their shoulders with resigned acceptance. One aristocrat, Christian de la Maizière, discusses the combustible atmosphere in schools and colleges, how in-fighting became more important than the greater good of the nation. Even more surprising is the organic nature of French resistance. While Charles De Gaulle made much of his famous ‘call to arms’, it hardly registered in France. Most of the interviewees never heard it and had no idea who he was in 1940. Soldiers who returned from the short war were gaoled as undesirables, fuelling anti-Vichy resentment. A future Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes, goes at some length to explain his show trail, imprisonment, escape and eventual reunion with De Gaulle. As a Jew, the racist nature of the establishment became all too clear to him, and he’s remarkably stoic about it. Another interviewee attempts to use statistics to wriggle an explanation for summary deportations; when they are thrown back at him as incorrect, he holds his head in shameful silence. The defining story of Petain’s and President Pierre Laval’s complicity is the enforced deportation of over 4000 Jewish children to Auschwitz, an order unusually not requested by the German command. None of the children survived the war.
The resistance itself is described as classless and dignified. “The problems of everyday life ceased. We were all outcasts of society, free from social structure,” admits Emanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, the upper-class leader of one of the resistance groups in Clermont. “Most of us were failures with Quixotic ideas.” His attitude, as an outsider of the elite, was completely different to the bourgeoisie, who had much more to lose, and used the circumstances of occupation to profit from it. The ordinary man or woman gained nothing from Vichy and instead took to arms. One leader, known affectionately as Gaspar, explains how the war propelled him to local prominence, a place he would never have attained otherwise. He admits to having been raised on crime, yet also has a striking ability to sense the unsettling nature of the contemporary times, comparing it to the attitudes of the Vichy regime: “A type of neo-Nazism is slowly rearing its ugly head. This is why we need these discussions.”
Gaspar grasps the political situation far more earnestly than the television executives and governmental ministers who banned the documentary. In fact, it’s fair to say his comment still holds much resonance today. This film ought to be required viewing for schools, to help students understand the implications of surrender and the ease with which a minority of sympathisers can exert powerful control and extreme policy over a massed population. The passivity of the general French public is frequently put on trial here. The victims of denouncements are and were many. “He was denounced by bad French people. That’s the only reason he went to prison,” bemoans a shrewish wife when her husband shrugs his shoulders and utters: “Revenge isn’t worth it.” The men around the table all know who the perpetrator was and is. Their own silence on the matter seems sentence enough. This really is being ‘sent to Coventry.’
The British attitude to the resistance was that it had a split personality: De Gaulle organising from afar, a reluctant, nervous right-wing and the proactive communists. While De Gaulle might have been glad of the Communists at the time, he had no love for them. British spy Dennis Rake considered the Communists the better end of the organisation. You sense the antagonism between the factions still festering years after the events. The idea of a unified resistance is a celebrated lie. The version of it presented in Rene Clement’s Is Paris Burning? is quite obviously a convenient narrative fallacy.
Rake himself provides an interesting story. As a homosexual, he found being a spy allowed him to hide his true identity. Ultimately, his pretence didn’t last and he risked exposure by building a relationship with a German officer. Rake doesn’t mention if he obtained any military secrets from his lover, but his situation and personality as a homosexual appears to have been accepted by his contacts in the resistance more than it would had he remained in London.
Latterly, the interviewer returns to the ornate mansion owned by Christian de la Maizière, once the seat of the Vichy administration. He was barred from his own home as an embarrassment to the regime having been enrolled in the Charlemagne Division, a branch of the Waffen SS. French soldiers were forced to join because it was part of the armistice agreement, part of Vichy policy and “a full sign of collaboration and integration.” Yet Petain and Laval couldn’t admit it. The role of the Charlemagne Division is still rarely spoken of by historians. They fought in the retreat from Russia and the last three hundred of them, including Maizière, took part in the siege of Berlin. He saw his allegiance as a political one: he couldn’t be a communist, his privileged background virtually forbade it, and as an adolescent it was easier to side with the people you were surrounded with, who were mostly antisemites. It wasn’t a religious or a political ideology, he suggests, it was more a rebellion against, yet adhering to the rules of, his upbringing. For his sins he won a two Iron Crosses, but seems remarkably repentant and liberal in the footage. By all accounts, his personal views did change dramatically.
Not so the Germans who are interviewed, one of whom sits resplendent with his SS insignia on his lapel, smoking cigars at his daughter’s wedding. They seem to tacitly agree with the old propaganda. They never saw anything. They never heard anything. They committed no crime. Everyone was very nice to us. The other side of the coin tells it very differently. Just occasionally you sense the curtain start to be pulled from their eyes, but something makes them yank it shut again. It makes for uncomfortable viewing. You wonder how the residents of Clermont might react to the Germans’ interpretation of events. Near the end of the film, Marcel Verdier relates a story of how as liberation approached he almost shot a defenceless German guard, but refused to do so as the man’s plea for clemency was so pathetic. We had the sorrow; that was pity of a sort, I suppose.
What makes The Sorrow and the Pity so powerful is the film maker’s intent not to make any judgement. He carefully interviews collaborators, resistance fighters, opponents and allies alike with a detached, scholarly bent. He allows the answers and stories and justifications to stand without responsive comment. There is not even a narration; a few minor title cards remind us where we are and who we are listening to. Audience reaction becomes entirely individual and uninfluenced. It is this more than anything which frightened those in power in 1968, that to allow people to draw their own conclusions without editorial input might just be a step to anarchy. The events on Parisian streets in 1968 might suggest anarchy was upper most in their minds, and Ophuls’ film does nothing to dispel the myth that the hierarchy of France in the 1940s were collaborators and neo-fascists: the people who lived through it openly admit it.
I urge anyone with an interest in the Second World War and its impact on communities and individuals to watch this film which is an essential document of a past still familiar to many living today.
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1992)
After a decade of Hollywood making important pictures which were small in stature, Michael Mann chose to go epic in scale and reintroduce audiences to Fenimore Cooper’s hoary old story of the Indian woodsman Hawkeye. Along with Kevin Costner ‘s Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans reinvented interpretations of the western for a modern audience, although this is more of an Eastern and pre-dates the period of the ‘wild west’ by some one hundred years. The executives sat up, took notice and remembered, for a short while at least, that movies should be big and broad and beautiful, even if the action is brutal.
There’s not a lot of character development in this film. You need to take a lot on trust and Trevor Jones & Randy Edelman’s piercing music score helps place your emotions better than the acting. When the romance – or the lust – kicks in, they recreate the same pulsing beat as the violence: this is a wild romance driven by desperate times. Mann’s not over bothered about the emotional side of things, to be fair, nor is he inventive with conversations, which tend to take place face to face, flat on, side on, with little cinematic imagination. He saves all that for the tough action scenes, of which there are many: fighting, stabbing, running, shooting, scalping, etc.
Daniel Day Lewis confirmed his star status, but his accent is all over the place. He’s given terrific support from Wes Studi as the villainous, vengeful Mohawk, Magua, and Russell Means as the thoughtful, Chingachgook, the last Mohican of the title. Madeleine Stowe and Jodhi May are helplessly one-dimensional, but lovely to look at.
The film improves as it progresses and the final confrontation between Magua’s Huron rebels and the three sympathetic Mohicans is suitably satisfying and heart breakingly intense , all the more successful for being conducted in virtual silence. There are no long speeches to tell the audience what the characters are experiencing, Mann is showing us and his perseverance pays off with one of the bleakest heroic battles in film history, for the fight of the Mohicans is already lost by the time the last axe descends.
Fittingly, like a great poem, Mann draws the audience back to the fabulous opening landscapes of New York state [actually the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina] allowing us to remember that life will still continue, despite the deaths which surrounds us. Fabulous entertainment. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I almost hesitate to say, they don’t make films like this much these days.
Black Sunday (1977)
Not-bad thrilller with FRWL's Robert Shaw and semi-Bond regular Walter Gotell in the cast.
Members of the Black September group plot a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl; Shaw plays a Mossad agent who aligns with US intelligence and law enforcement agencies to thwart the attack.
Reasonably entertaining escapist film 2.5/5
Hell's angels (1930)
Who spends their Saturday night watching a movie from 1930 on Youtube? My friend and I, that's who! 😀
We didn't regret it at all. It's about two brothers Monte and Ray join the Royal Flying Corps in WWI, Ray falls in love with the Faithless Helen (Jean Harlow who at 19 had only had uncredited parts earlier). In fact several of the main cast are morally dubious, but brave in combat. The movie was know as the Titanic of its day: huge spectacle, huge budget, huge production problems and finally huge boxoffice. We were surprised by how modern the movie seemed compared to other movies of the age. Most of the acting wasn't overly theatrical, the main characters seem modern and the action is very good. The action scenes are still spectacular! There are at least thirthy fighter scenes in a single shot in some scenes and the zeppelin sequence is great: Howard Hughes Hells Angels - The Zeppelin Part - YouTube
I also noticed the movie used real German speakers to play Germans. Hollywood still hire people of the wrong nationailty to play and speak as foreigners, even as recently as last year's Black Widow. I also found it facinating to see how bombing (both from airships and bomber planes) was done in WWI, something I haven't seen anywhere before. It's rare to watch a big budget action movie that's ninty years old for enjoyment, but that's what we did.
Here it is: Hell's Angels - A Howard Hughes Production (1930) - YouTube
I too watched Modesty Blaise (1966) over the weekend and filed a full report over in the Modesty Blaise thread.
its better than I remembered, you just have to forget everything you know about Peter O'Donnell's characters, and soak up the lush visuals. I accidentally typed the malaplopism "spychedelic" as I was writing, which ought to be a thing. This is better spy-chedelia than Casino Royale at any rate.
Do you like my suggestions for cast and director for a imagined modern Modesty Blaise movie I just posted in the Modesty Blaise thread?
I dont know all these contemporary actors you do, so only have an opinion on your choice for Tarrant, and thats an enthusiastic yes!
Dalton plays a somewhat similar team leader type in the Doom Patrol teevee series.
Kaya Scudelario is a Brazilian-British actress. She was in the TV-series Skins, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the Maze Runner series, she was the lead in Crawl and her next movie is "The king's daughter" with Pierce Brosnan. I think she's the best candidate today.
She's also talented and is the right age.
THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933)
Directed by James Whale, after his success with both Frankenstein (1931) and The Old Dark House (1932) his third horror outing mixes slapstick with genuine suspense. A stranger rents a room at an inn in an English village, he is swathed in bandages and dark goggles. After defaulting on his rent he assaults the landlord and then disrobes, this is when we find out he is invisible, he plays pranks on the villagers in a slapstick manner which is out of step with the rest of the film, the landlady puts a particularly irritating performance. We find out that the invisible man is a scientist and he returns to his colleague with plans to dominate the world through invisibility. The special effects must have been very effective at the time and although perfunctory today, they still look decent enough to be enjoyable. A mistake towards the end of the movie shows the invisible man making footprints in the snow, but instead of naked feet they are footprints of shoes!
I love the Universal Monsters movies and this is a short (70 minutes) entry that delivers what it promises, although I think that the slapstick scenes work against the movie and as such it isn’t as good as it could have been.
When I was a kid in the 60’s I used to collect the Aurora monster model kits and I had the idea of producing a British version of The Invisible Man with an empty box 😁
😁😁😁
The same Una O'Connor does the same act in "Bride Of Frankenstein", again to the detriment of the film.
The Nice Guys
I caught this on telly last night, it's a comedy thriller set in 1977 about two 'mismatched' cops played by La La Land's Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, it's from a few years back now.
I found it highly entertaining - though as a movie you might wonder what the hell was going on. Essentially it's a pastiche of all things 70s, an affectionate send-up of the styles. There's one scene where the two cops - actually they're private investigators pairing up for the same case - attend a really cool, flash and decadent party that looks like the best thing ever. Only today do I wonder who they managed to gain entry to such a swanky event, but that's movies for ya. It's not clear how one of the PIs can even afford to rent his lovely pad with his daughter but you don't really care to be honest.
Being a pastiche, you do not get quite involved or taken in with the main plot, similar with other such recent films as Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Licorice Pizza. The tone is all, wow, isn't this funny, the stuff they did back then? The film, like many of its day, has the porn industry as a theme and like the 'Book Covers' thread on this forum, it's unclear sometimes if we are meant to enjoy or abhor various aspects of it - the film opens with a lingering shot of a naked porn star, her lithe, supple breasts on show, but I think she might be dead so I switched over for that and then back. (I always feel when I'm writing this stuff these days that I have Barbel breathing down my neck...) There's also a mention of 'anal' - not sure that was even a thing in porn land back then, still what do I know.
Gosling's young teenage daughter tags along, she's a funny character but signposts that nothing too terrible is going to happen to her. It's an odd film really, not always as funny as it should be, not outright send up. The 70s did do this kind of thing better, except they really did become watered down nonsense, it took the late 80s to kill them off. I know technically Lethal Weapon and Die Hard are comedy thrillers, but not in that sense, you are invested in the outcome and you are pumped up, believing it is really happening, the jokes are there to heighten that, not reduce it. In this, when someone really dies it is a nasty shock, though in shoot outs so you see passers-by get offed and never referenced again so it's tonally uneven.
Compare with the better Indiana Jones films. Raiders is obv set in wartime or thereabouts, you have Nazis and cars with sideboards ffs! But rarely does it jar, rare is there anything to make you think, wow, things were different then! You don't see Indy enter a movie theatre where a black and white film is showing. Ford doesn't sport a pencil thin moustache like film stars of the day. Much of the look is classic - characters wear timeless suits or army uniforms or the leather jacket and chinos look. No music from the era is played. So you are kept in the moment and go along with it. Crystal Skulls had too many nods to the 50s and I don't hold out hope for the next one, if rumours of Indy in Carnaby Street are true, it could all get a bit Austin Powers. The difference being, the film makers didn't grow up in wartime but with the belated sequels they are revisiting the sets of their youth. Skulls also tried to do something with the idea that Indy, like your Dad, was a cool guy one time but like many of us grow up irritable, I can see what they were doing here but I didn't enjoy it.
Another reason for the failure of Temple of Doom and Skulls is simpler - imo the comedy didn't work in either. Raiders I enjoy for the female lead's performance, she is a great foil for Indy, likewise Connery in Crusade. The love interest and the kid in Temple are painful, and there is never much comedy had between Indy and his kid in Skulls, not the return of Marianne imo. As with Bond, I personally find if the jokes don't work or aren't there, it quickly becomes a case of 'Why am I watching this? I don't actually believe it...'
Anyway, I recommend The Nice Guys which has a couple of Bond moments in it, one involving a pool, you'd enjoy and it looks good, some nice songs on the soundtrack latterly. Shame there wasn't a sequel.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I watched The Nice Guys in the cinema and thought it was rubbish. However, in my defence, I didn't realise it was a comedy. Subsequently, I spent most of the film wondering why the characters were such dolts.
Still, I don't need to misinterpret a film to believe it's a failure:
THE ODESSA FILE (1974)
I expect many of you have watched The Odessa File. Based on Frederick Forsyth’s doorstep thriller, Jon Voigt is miscast as a Berlin journalist who stumbles across an elaborate plan by ex-Nazis to assist Nasser’s Egypt during their long campaign against Israel. In doing so he uncovers a frightening labyrinthine network of ex-Nazis living and working in 1960s Germany. I won’t go into detail as it takes some unravelling. Suffice to say there’s not enough tension, Voight’s character is something of a blinkered idiot and I didn’t believe it for a second. I was impressed with Mary Tamm as Voight’s girlfriend, but that’s got less to do with the movie and more to do with a youthful Dr Who fantasy [Miss Tamm played one of the Doctor’s assistants.] I digress. There’s not a lot of action, which sets it apart from some thrillers of the day. The acting’s fairly wooden all-round until Maximillian Schell enters the fray as the villain of the piece Eduard Roschmann, the ‘Butcher of Riga’.
Roschmann was a real person and the novel and film forced him into the open – he was hiding in plain sight in Argentina and eventually turned up dead in Paraguay in 1977, in unclear circumstances. However, there are tremendous fictional liberties taken with not only Roschmann’s story but that of the Nazi Ratlines. For instance the role of the Catholic church, in particular the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, is glossed over, as is the complicity of the American, British and Soviet governments in adopting ex-Nazis as spies, informants and scientists in return for clemency. The history of pro-fascist South American regimes and their open-door policy is well-documented, but hardly touched on here. The Odessa organisation never officially existed except as an overarching US administrator’s codeword for the various different ratlines.
Ronald Neame was a classy British director and he’d just had his biggest hit with the effects laden The Poseidon Adventure, but he becomes all-a-stuck here. I applaud his effort to play down the thrills, but he’s made the movie so dull one begins to pick problems with it. There’s a whole sequence where Voigt’s character agrees to infiltrate Odessa and to support his cover has to learn all aspects of the Waffen SS. This was tosh. I didn’t expect it to succeed. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
In a break between blockbuster rock operas, Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the anodyne score. They managed to get Perry Como to sing the theme. However, one decent song, one good fight scene and one decent five-minute cameo does not a decent thriller make.
I'd read Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File and it is a brilliant book, of course not surprising as it's the same era as The Day of the Jackal. Not an easy read however due to its portrayal of what went on in the death camps, so avoid if you're feeling a bit down. The character's infiltration of the covert SS is laboured over, not rushed as in the film, as if it's done in a month or so. Latterly, the film just diverges from the book to cut corners, it's a Boys from Brazil bit of nonsense, it lacks authenticity. The book would work better as a TV series, along the lines of Le Carre's The Night Manager TV adaptation.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Robin and Marion (1976)
Robin Hood (Sean Connery) and Little John has been fighting for king Richard (Richard Harris) in the crusades and now in France. By the time the king dies Robin has lost a lot of illusions about his Richard. Robin and John return to England and the Sherwood forest where they find Will Scarlett and Friar Tuck who seems to be played by Hodor in GoT. To Robin's shock Marian (Audrey Hepburn) has become a nun. The sheriff (Robert Shaw) still resides in Nothingham. Robin quickly rekindles his love for Marian and his hate for the sheriff.
It's an interesting idea to imagine what happened to Robin Hood and the people around him twenty years later. Everyone moves slower and are more wise to the world. It's great to see Connery and Shaw as enemies thirteen years after FRWL. Shaw plays the sheriff with a been-there-done-that cynicism. Connery's Robin is a mix of romanticism, a sense of adventure and lost illusions.
You can't deny the star power of the two leads. I also like the humor, dialoge and one last adventure mood of "Robin and Marion". We also get a John Barry score. Barry is always good, but I think this one is one of his least memorable. The fight scenes are often too bloodless. Tricks like getting someone in a headlock, turning away from the camera and only then "cutting their throath" get too obvious. We also see modern ships in the background during the sheriff's men's choir practise. On several occations it's obvious Robin Hood isn't wearing any undergarments. Connery is a Scotsman after all! 😁
I think they get the mix of adventure, nostalgia and two impressive leads largely right and I enjoyed the movie.
Video: Robin And Marian 1976 - Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw - Bing video
Reading the cast of "Robin And Marian" I came across Ian Holm and was reminded- several years ago, my son and I watched a batch of movies over a weekend. If memory serves, they were "Alien", "Brazil", Kenneth Branagh's version of "Frankenstein", one of "The Lord Of The Rings" series, and "From Hell". A pretty varied bunch, picked by both of us. Towards the end, he turned to me and said "Dad, is Ian Holm in every movie ever made?" 😁
Not at all. Christopher Lee was in most of them at 282 IMDB entries while Ian Holm was more relaxed at only 134. 😏
😁 Of course Christopher Lee is the winner!
Edit: You'll be familiar with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? It actually works better as Six Degrees of Christopher Lee, but it's too late to change the name of that game now (and it works better phonetically with Six Degrees Of Seperation).