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Watching Brief; Don’t Go ‘Round Tonight… October 30, 2009

Posted by John Hodson in : Horror, Film & DVD Reviews, British Film, Watching Brief , 2 comments

For Hallowe’en, Watching Brief scorns the accusations of being a corny old hack, and serves up a smörgåsbord of seasonal horror film recommendations…

The Wolf Man (R1 DVD); Suspending belief in the existence of werewolves is small beer to imagining the towering Lon Chaney Jr. as the son of the diminutive Claude Rains, not to mention Universal’s all-purpose ‘mittel yurpean’ set of what is allegedly a picturesque Welsh village. We won’t even go into the variety of mid-Atlantic accents, the absence of anyone sounding remotely like Max Boyce replaced by a veritable Cook’s Tour of the English regions, or the fact that Larry Talbot’s 18 year stay in the Land of the Free has rubbed off all the traces of his ‘little Lord Fauntleboyo’ upbringing.

Nevertheless, this Curt Siodmak scripted telling of the werewolf legend makes Talbot’s lycanthrope into the ultimate tragic horror figure, and perhaps the most interesting of Universal’s unholy three; cursed to became half man, half wolf ‘when the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright’, and to kill those that are nearest and dearest to him. Well, those nearest to him are certainly in big trouble.

The Wolf Man is a thinly veiled allegory on the beast that lurks within man; Talbot is hunky dory until he’s smitten by a gal, takes her into the woods (for a, ah, walk y’know) and gets bitten by Bela the gipsy (Bela Lugosi), who isn’t, puzzlingly, half man half wolf at the time, but all wolf. Thereafter, he’s in the grip of unimaginable forces, and driven to do heavens knows what to Gwen (Evelyn Ankers). Gasp.

There’s more than one way to skin a Hays Code…

Tightly written, and neatly directed by George Waggner, with iconic makeup by the real star of The Wolf Man, the great Jack Pierce. From this distance it’s also important to underline that the special effects added a real wow factor. The transfer from Universal, is excellent; they intend to do it all over again with a new special edition DVD set, they’re just waiting on the remake to get to our cinemas early next year. A toothsome prospect. I used to be a werewolf, but (altogether now), I’m alright nooooooow-ow-ow-ooowwwwww!

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (R1 DVD); Four years on from the incidents in The Wolf Man (only two years in filming terms), we discard the Great Big Book of Lycanthropic Legend, to bring poor, dead, hirsute Larry Talbot back to life. Open the casket, out with the wolfbane, a shaft of moonlight and pretty soon we’re all humming a snatch of the Creedence.

‘I see a bad moon risin’…

All semblance of anything that passes for logic goes out the window, as Larry seeks out Maleva (the always delightful Maria Ouspenskaya), and she has a solution to Mr Talbot’s problem. He wants to die, so let’s hit the high road to ‘Vasaria’ to find Baron Frankenstein, as he holds the secrets of life and death; who better? I mean, honestly.

‘I see trouble on the way…’

Slight impediment. Larry finds the Baron is now dead (obviously, not that much of a master of life and death), but needs to find his ‘Secret Diaries’, for within he’ll get the answers. As you would; ‘Dear Secret Diary, created a monster today, also found a way to kill werewolves, better than those rotten silver bullets (must nip down the patent office…)’

Before he does, Larry wakes the monster (Bela Lugosi), and, well, all hell breaks loose. Doctor Mannering (don’t ask) is mouthing the words of Frankenstein’s diaries like some remedial pupil in ‘Special School’, and mind bogglingly gasps: “I must see Frankenstein’s creation AT FULL POWER!” Uh, oh…

‘…don’t go ’round tonight, it’s bound to take your life…’

Poor Bela has no dialogue (ironically, the reason Lugosi turned down the James Whale original); preview audiences laughed at his Hungarian accent and all his lines were cut. Worse, the scene where the monster explains he’s nearly blind is excised, so his arms outstretched stagger looks plain daft, though it’s now the lazy, de rigueur method of impersonating said creature at fancy dress parties.

It’s deliriously loopy, but all the more lovable for it; you can imagine a young Mel Brooks watching, and taking notes. Universal’s transfer is, like many of their films from this era, quite super.

The Quatermass Xperiment (R2 DVD); seminal Hammer horror/sci-fi, from Nigel Kneale’s 1953 hit TV series, condensed for the big screen by Richard Landau and director Val Guest. It was Guest’s cunning plan to give the whole a kind of docu-drama feel, and weighing in at a lean 82 minutes (as opposed to the three hour TV production), the narrative fair gallops along. There isn’t a moment of wasted footage.

Hammer’s decision to place Americans as both the male and female leads (Margia Dean as ‘Judith Carroon’ and Brian Donlevy as ‘Professor Bernard Quatermass’) was purely commercial. Dean, it seems obvious, was post-dubbed for some reason, and as a result her performance suffers. But it’s Donlevy, slyly adding copious draughts of brandy to his flask of coffee during shooting, who usually comes in for most opprobrium - ‘over the hill’ and ‘wooden’ are two of more common, and more charitable, accusations. ‘Tom’ Kneale, it’s well known, was unhappy his quintessential English scientist had been replaced by an American tough (and usually bad) guy actor. In truth, as Guest opines on the DVD commentary track, he’s more than adequate, with his Quatermass driven, determined and no-nonsense - frankly, there’s not much screen time for anything else. Besides; I do like Donlevy, sober…or drunk. Allegedly.

While most other sci-fi (Kneale hated the term) films of the period of this kind - i.e. alien invasion - particularly Hollywood product, were simple allegories of the Cold War, Kneale’s piece could be read similarly, though the hugely influential British writer was far too complex for such a simplistic interpretation. Kneale was warning of hubris; when an arrogant, immature mankind reaches out into the unknown, he risks getting his fingers badly burnt.

It’s Richard Wordsworth’s doomed ‘Victor Carroon’ who commands the screen, the actor wordlessly conveying the nascent spaceman’s agony and sheer bloody terror as he transmogrifies into a planet threatening combination of species and lifeforms, with obvious comparisons to, and just as deadly as, the carrot from outer space that was The Thing From Another World. By the by, in his remake of the latter, John Carpenter, a huge Kneale fan, had his ‘Thing’ share a few more characteristics with Carroon than carrot…

The amiable Guest, who made his name with a series of easy going comedies, adapts to a genre that would set Hammer down a profitable path for two decades with effortless ease. He handles the screening of the spine-tingling mute cabin footage beautifully, the scene still oozing a squirming, chilly, menace half a century and more later. Much of the credit here must also go to composer James Bernard, making his film debut and the man whose scores would become Hammer signatures; here, as it does throughout the film, Bernard’s subtle yet ligature tight cue winds the tension.

Wonderful stuff, and the first in a trilogy of Hammer Quatermass (the ‘Xperiment’ of the title was to capitalise on the BBFC certification) films all of which, I simply could not resist watching again.

Incidentally, IMDB lists the OAR for The Quatermass Xperiment as 1.66:1, but also says:

“…This film was originally slated to be released in the United States by 20th Century Fox. However, to convince more exhibitors to install Cinemascope equipment, studio chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, pledged that all future 20th Century Fox releases would be in Cinemascope or a compatible anamorphic process. Since this Hammer production was shot in standard Academy, it had to be passed over. It was picked up and released through United Artists…”

The BFI can’t even confirm the AR; filmed during 1954 when the world was becoming wide, it’s more than possible that Guest had it shot in 1.66:1 but protected for 1.33:1. I gave it go for the first time at a ratio as close to 1.66:1 as I could. The credits are very tight, but thereafter it looks reasonable with no cut-off heads; However, I reverted to 1.33:1 the moment Dr. Brisco spots the slime trail at the zoo; wide, Brisco looks alarmed, but the trail, at the bottom of the screen, is out of shot.

On the whole, I think I prefer my ‘Xperiment’ in 1.33:1; I don’t think there’s any doubting it was framed thus. DDHE’s video transfer is quite good, nice and sharp with decent contrast. There’s a constant background hiss to the soundtrack, and sound levels vary, but it’s not unduly distracting. I hear MGM have prepped a HD version in the US and a Blu-ray presentation would be more than welcome, though the way catalogue releases are shaping up Stateside, I’m not about to hold my breath.

The Quatermass Experiment (R2 DVD); The 1953 television broadcast, or at least what remains of it. The first two parts are all that remain of the BBC’s gripping six-parter. Broadcast live, the initial brace of episodes were thankfully also captured on film; as you might expect, with three hours to play with, Kneale’s horrifying tale of the possible consequences of exploring the unknown has time to breathe. Thus, there are more characters (including a surprisingly sympathetic journalist) and greater characterisation (Quatermass comes across as far more conflicted, indeed desperate, about the havoc his British Rocket Group may have unwittingly wrought), it’s tremendously frustrating we have to leave the BBC dramatisation only a third of the way in.

It’s understandable Kneale was unhappy with Donlevy; his Quatermass is hardly as he envisaged and Reginald Tate plays him most effectively, but then again, he has time to characterise - watching the later Hammer production unfold, how the Manxman must have agonised over all that lost exposition.

The TV production seems to have the budget of half an episode of The Flowerpot Men, as we switch - live don’t forget - from a tiny sparse set to an even tinier and sparser part of the same studio. ‘So the comic strips were right’ says an awestruck onlooker at one point ‘they do wear those kinds of suits.’ Within eight years, the truth would out - spacemen did not in fact wear an odd mix of items fashioned after vintage diving gear, the lot bought wholesale by the Beeb costumers from the Portobello Road Army & Navy Stores…very disappointing!

Despite that, these tantalising snippets of The Quatermass Experiment transcend any problems; you can see why it left a nation spellbound, and Hammer films eager to get their chequebook out. Quatermass would not only provide a template for successive generations of film-makers, but would also enter the language to become a convenient shorthand for hyperbole prone hacks in search of a sensation seeking headline. Kneale’s creation entered the public consciousness to the extent that even those that have never seen the good professor in action have some idea what the dropping of his name entails. Bad things. Very bad things.

Picture quality is exactly as you would expect for 55-years-old TV, and some of the bugbears are part and parcel of the original production; no time to set things up ‘just so’, so the lighting sometimes causes unwanted lens flares, cues are missed and so on. Given all that, it’s not bad but it’s hardly the best example of vintage television preserved digitally, though probably it doesn’t differ much in this respect from the day it was first transmitted. Live TV folks, ’50s style. And it emptied pubs and churches the length and breadth of the land.

The mono sound is actually pretty good, Holst’s Mars hammered out effectively over those stylish main titles. The 2|entertain box set from which it hails, containing all three BBC productions - with the quite fabulous Quatermass And The Pit easily the stand-out - comes very highly recommended

Quatermass II (R1 DVD); Three years after the release of the first film, and Hammer again follows the Beeb’s lead. This time Kneale combines sci-fi and horror with a deep-seated paranoia. In The Quatermass Xperiment, Kneale warned of alien invasion from outer space. Here, it’s an enemy that’s already established and it’s happened even before the opening credits roll; the invaders have infiltrated society at the very highest echelons, both Government and the Police. The population isn’t aware that they are becoming zombie slave workers or, in one instance, being prepped as the main ingredient in a rather nasty inter-galactic bouillabaisse.

The original BBC script is adapted for the screen this time by Kneale himself with director Val Guest, and once again, the pace is relentless (even if the geography is suspect; Carlisle being a short ride, apparently, from Parliament Square). It feeds Cold War angst of an enemy within, the fears that enemy invasion could be insidious and covert, rather than the wholly overt threat of the first story. Of course, it also reads that you can’t trust anyone, even - or especially - our political masters. The alien landscape of the Shell Haven refinery in Essex proves the ideal location for the supposed manufacturing base for a ’synthetic food’; perhaps the most startling image in the whole film is of the bluff northern MP ‘Broadhead’ (Tom Chatto) covered in a skin-stripping slime, staggering, his smoking flesh boiling, down the ladder of one of the refinery’s huge, unearthly, domes.

This time, there is no doubt about the original aspect ratio; Anchor Bay’s R1 DVD is transferred open-matte, and zooms to 1.66:1 beautifully. The transfer is excellent and the sound mostly nigh on perfect, the chatter of the machine guns given a satisfying thud, and the screams of the ‘thing’ suitably vast and otherworldly. As he does on the DVD of the first film, Val Guest again features on an interesting commentary track, his age at the time of recording no impediment to recalling incidents on and off the set.

Quatermass & The Pit (R1 DVD); the last of the triumvirate of Hammer Quatermass films, and it takes a Scot to get closer to the heart of the English Prof. Bernard Quatermass. 12 years after their last stab at Nigel Keale’s creation, and nine after the Beeb broadcast the TV version of the same story, once again director Roy Ward Baker has to tell the story condensed from a three-hour original at a fair lick.

Kneale eschews the paranoia of the his ‘Q X’ and ‘Q II’ for a mix of ghosties, ghoulies, the paranormal and science - aliens not a million miles from those unseen propagators of planets in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001; A Space Odessey. Good to see James Donald and Barbara Shelley (who is weirdly erotic even here; it’s not just me surely?), but Julian Glover is a little young for the blustering warrior Colonel Breen I feel.

The story builds but, unlike the TV presentation, the genuine chills are few; it sorely misses a James Bernard score, Tristram Cary’s cues a little workaday. However the sound department - taking their cue from the broadcast series - works overtime to cover in this respect with aural effects that help to build tension. If I appear to be a little harsh on the film, I temper that by saying it’s a favourite. Honest. But simply, having now seen the original BBC presentation with André Morell, that towers above it. Yes; it really is that good.

The climax is exciting, and nicely achieved, though what the hell was James Donald thinking of? Madness… Anchor Bay’s R1 transfer is non-anamorphic, but hails from a clean print.

The Black Cat (R1 DVD); Not the Edward G. Ulmar horror, but the cornball 1941 version with Bela Lugosi lurking about in the shadows, while folks are bumped off in ‘the old dark house’ - Broderick Crawford and Anne Gwynne play the roles Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard did with far more aplomb over at Paramount, while Gale Sondergaard is, well, Gale Sondergaard. Crawford asks of Basil Rathbone at one point: ‘Who do you think you are - Sherlock Holmes?’

Lots of running around, secret passages and amusing business by Hugh Herbert; the kind of thing Universal chucked off in five minutes during the war years to keep folks minds off the fact that the world was going to hell in a handcart. Alan Ladd is bottom of the cast list, but was bumped higher on the posters as audiences were wowed by the simultaneous release of This Gun For Hire.

Perfect late night viewing from Universal (and another nice transfer) that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Man Made Monster (R1 DVD); Take one mad scientist (Lionel Atwill), add an unlikely premise (’electro-biology’), stir in a big, daft affable dupe (Lon Chaney Jr.), season with stock characters (the blonde, the investigative reporter), leave to simmer for about an hour - et voila! A typical Universal horror cheapie, and one that it notable for setting Chaney’s career down a path that both carved his name in movie history, and cursed him to a life on the undercard. It was off the back of Man Made Monster that Chaney got the part of Larry Talbot, another unwitting, doomed monster, one that simply refused to die.

Man Made Monster has Chaney’s ‘Dan McCormick’ able to absorb huge amounts of electricity, and doing so for some unexplained reason, it gives him superhuman strength and makes him the willing slave to Atwill’s ‘Dr Paul Rigas’, a man who is clearly several shillings short of a full leccy meter.

McCormick kills ‘Dr. John Lawrence’ (Samuel S. Hinds - oh no, not that nice Peter Bailey!), he’s then hoicked off to die in the electric chair. Not a good idea. Duly energised by being zapped, and zapped again and again (and again), a glowing McCormick goes on a rampage, carries away ‘June Lawrence’ (Anne Nagel) in true monster stylee, then meets his nemesis - barbed wire. Oh, watch it yourself…

Universal’s transfer is just pristine, with excellent contrast, there’s nary a mark and the mono soundtrack is spot on. There are English (HoH) and French subtitles.

Plague of The Zombies (R1 DVD); Following on from watching the Beeb’s excellent Quatermass & The Pit, I was in the mood for more André Morell. It was Mike Parkinson and Granada’s Cinema that first had me hiding behind the sofa at clips of this as a 10-year-old, and it’s always had a special place in my heart. I still think the nightmare sequence is one of the most chilling to be found in any Hammer film, indeed - even in a genre now dominated by tawdry horror pornography - any horror. And it is the reason, if I take a short cut through the cemetery, I scurry, occasionally glancing nervously over my shoulder, watching the newly dug earth for signs of movement. My flesh creeps just to think about it.

It’s neatly directed by John Gilling, who also helmed a number of other Hammers, notably The Pirates of Blood River, as well as the effective The Flesh & The Fiends and The Night Caller (not to mention a slew of Department S episodes). Morell’s ‘Good’ is nicely matched by John Carson’s ‘Evil’ squire, and full marks to Roy Ashton’s makeup, Les Bowie’s effects which combine with James Bernard’s score (there really is no substitute when it comes to Hammer) to culminate in a notable chiller. Even if the pay-off proves to be ever so slightly bananas.

Anchor Bay’s transfer is quite good; there’s some evident print damage in the first reel, but’s pretty strong thereafter and the mono soundtrack is more than adequate.

Cue maniacal Vincent Price laugh, a creaky coffin lid closing, end titles; happy All Hallows’ Eve…

The Bed Sitting Room June 4, 2009

Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, British Film , 7 comments

“How long is this shit going to go on for?” snapped a United Artists executive at director Richard Lester during a pre-release screening of his 1969 comedy The Bed Sitting Room. That’s not, I would venture, a good start for any movie…

UA fast-tracked The Bed Sitting Room into production with a million dollar budget held over from Lester’s previous project Up Against It, still-born after its unlucky screenwriter Joe Orton had his skull smashed in by his lover. They wanted Help! or at the very least A Hard Day’s Night, sans the songs and the moptops. They got ‘this shit’.

Actually what they got (eventually - UA didn’t know what the hell to do with it for months after completion) was a quirky, surreal, very British, absurdist satire with barbed gags that zing off the screen like honey coated pieces of shrapnel; you don’t necessarily have to be a mature denizen of this sceptred isle to fully appreciate The Bed Sitting Room - after all, the Philadelphian born Anglophile Lester made the most British of British films - but it helps.

The Bed Sitting Room is spine no. 001 in the BFI’s exciting Flipside line, a new label dedicated to “films that were overlooked, marginalised, or undervalued at the original time of release, or sit outside the established canon of recognised classics”. It certainly fits that bill.

Developed from the play by long-time collaberators John Antrobus and the unique talent that was Spike Milligna (the well known typing error), fans of The Goons but more particularly Milligan’s anarchic ‘Q’ TV shows will instantly hear his master’s off-kilter voice shot through Antrobus’s screenplay. The Bed Sitting Room was contemporaneously compared to the work of Samuel Beckett (”with better jokes”), but you’ll see the lineage that leads from Goonery to Python, with a dollop of home Cookery (that’s Peter Cook-ery, gentle reader…) chucked in for seasoning.

Focusing on a tiny group of survivors following the “nuclear misunderstanding” that was World War 3, all of two minutes and 28 seconds long “including signing the peace treaty”, we find a disparate cross-section of British society muddling through in a radiation ravaged landscape…and slowly mutating into a parrot (Arthur Lowe in full pompous mode), a wardrobe (the ever delightful Mona Washbourne), a dog (get down Dudley Moore!) plus, best of all, the eponymous bed sitting room (the eye-wateringly wonderful Ralph Richardson, as the unfortunate Lord Fortnum of Alamein).

Lord Fortnum of Alamein: “It’s the latest early warning hat, it gives you an extra four minutes in bed.”
The BBC: “I’ve never worn a hat in bed. I’ve been a Catholic person for a long time now and I wouldn’t know where to begin. Is this your car sir?”
Lord Fortnum of Alamein: “It is. I acquired it from Lord Snowden…”
The BBC: “…not THE Lord Snowden?”
Lord Fortnum of Alamein: “No, A Lord Snowden.”
The BBC: “Ah, yes, the woods are full of them.”

Milligan plays a post-apocalyptic postman, popping up to deliver, well, all manner of useless stuff, not least a custard pie in the kisser for the starving Michael Horden, a doctor who spends his day atop a mountain of shoes, sorting the footwear of the 40 million or so dead, and dreaming of Hovis. It’s Horden and especially Milligan’s characters that betray the film’s origins, first as a one-act play, then a longer stage piece. Both Antrobus and Milligan were said to be unhappy with The Bed Sitting Room’s translation to the big-screen, a fact with which both contemporary critics, and much to the suits at UA’s chagrin, audiences seemed to agree. As pacy as it can be, you can see that it would probably have had far more energy on stage, bringing the style much closer to black farce, ironically more Orton-esque.

As it stands, and accepting the flaws, it’s a heroic effort. How could it not be given the talent on show? Yes, it does seem a tad languorous at times, Lester having seemingly fallen in love with the quarry in Surrey that stands in for a blasted and scorched central London. Cinematographer David Watkin lingers on unfeasibly vast piles of crockery, false teeth, used lightbulbs. On Everests of stone, rivers of lord knows what, valleys of rusted automobiles that will never run again, and we play a guessing game of longshot or closeup (are those huge boulders or small stones..?) We see the dome of St Paul’s rising out of the muck, an Underground escalator hangs in mid-air, and doorways, indeed whole porches, stand in acres of solitude, waiting for the visitorial proprieties. Take a bow Assheton Gorton, the art director also responsible for painting an entire South-east London street red for Blow Up.

This is not, despite the premise, as full on bonkers as, say, Milligan’s delightfully nuts The Great McGonagall; director Lester had, after all, a terrific track record of transmogrifying a script that had a quirky nature into a commercial success, something that Milligan sometimes appeared to care less about…as long as it made him giggle. However, it does say something that Lester rode in on the project his star ascendant - it was to be nigh on five years before he made another movie.

On the plus side, Milligan and Antrobus let no-one, not one scintilla of contemporary British society - politics, religion, the health service, the military, the police, the class-system, the bigots, the concept of mutually assured destruction, the whole fact of ‘hanging on in quiet desperation’ being the English way - escape their often acid satire. Absolutely bristling with ideas, even if, it must be said, some of the ambition is unfulfilled, The Bed Sitting Room is as much a product of time and place as Help!, but with the extermination of millions, starvation, survival and atomic mutation on the menu, even this most surreal bill of fare, it’s certainly not quite as cuddly.

Watching it today, though we aren’t as absolutely positive that we will end our days as shadows on the pavement as we were 40 years ago (and hence the potency of the anti-nuclear message is ever so slightly diminished), The Bed Sitting Room seems only to increase in stature. Not only because this particular form of comedy - and no-one could whip up a melange of satire, surrealism, hoary old jokes and cream pie gags quite like Spike - seems to be a long dead art. But were that not the case, have we the 21st century equivalent to perform it? As much as I admire Sir Ian, could McKellen stand in for Richardson, Paul Merton for Milligan? How about Peter Cook; who could possibly fill his boots…no, I give up.

Police Inspector: I expect you may be wondering why I’ve invited you all here this afternoon. I’ve just come from an audience with Her Majesty, Mrs Ethel Shroake, and I’m empowered by her to tell you that, in the future, clouds of poisonous nuclear fog will no longer be necessary. Mutations will cease sine die and, furthermore, I’m the bringer of glad tidings. A team of surgeons at the Woolwich hospital have just accomplished the world’s first successful complete body transplant. The donor was the entire population of South Wales, and the new body is functioning normally. I, myself, saw it sit up in bed, wink, and ask for a glass of beer.
All in all, I think we’re in for a time of peace, prosperity and stability, when the earth will burgeon forth anew, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the goat will give suck to the tiny bee.
At times of great national emergency, you’ll often find that a new leader tends to emerge. Here I am - so watch it.
Keep moving, everybody, that’s the spirit! Keep moving!

The cast, listed in the credits in order of height (naturally), is wholly excellent. Added to those mentioned above we have Frank Thornton as the living embodiment of the BBC, Harry Secombe as the seat of regional government (boyo), an 18-months pregnant Rita Tushingham, delivering a surprisingly pretty (and surprising) prose poem in praise of boyfriend Richard Warwick at the film’s mid-point, Roy Kinnear (heavily into rubber…), and Jimmy Edwards, who only needs 17s 6d to get him out of left luggage. The comic genius that was Marty Feldman makes his film debut in full nurses uniform, performs his own stunt (typically) as he makes a ‘Tarzan’ swing into a tree and fells it, and is given the best sight gag in the movie on his introduction. The eyes have it…

You will enjoy Ronnie Brody, the holocaust’s bemirrored transport chief, Henry Woolf, pedaling furiously to keep the Circle Line operational, Ronald Fraser is the whole British army, Jack Shepherd, as the underwater vicar (sounding for all the world like Ronnie Barker, mostly because he was revoiced by the versatile Mr B), Dandy Nichols (as Mrs Ethel Shroake of Leytonstone; otherwise HM The Queen. Sing: “God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393a High Street Leytonstone…”) looks distinctly uncomfortable astride a horse, and Peter Cook, initially a police inspector to Dud’s barking sergeant, then revealed by Horden (”…That IS God - I recognise the voice…”) to be deified. Two years earlier, Cookie was the devil and now he’s the Lord God Almighty.

Well, we all know that REALLY don’t we?

The Disc

Some have found the BFI’s Blu-ray disc to have lip-sync problems; I can, happily, report none at all. Player related? Player/amp/connection related? Who knows - all this HD stuff is still uncharted territory for many. All I can say is that there are no problems here. The MGM sourced 1.85:1 (most probably the original ratio for at least U.S. screenings) transfer is excellent, sharp and more than reasonably detailed with no outstanding dirt or damage of note. Things do get a little less clear during the latter third when Lester uses heavy filters to give the impression of a nuclear sunset, but this is precisely how the film should look. Like previous BFI HD transfers, this is very film-like, very commendable. The uncompressed mono sound came over loud and clear on my system too; more than adequate.

The extras are not plentiful (apparently, apart from supporting the release - according to the BFI’s, and fellow FJ blogger, Michael Brooke - Lester declined to be involved per se in the production, hence no commentary, no new filmed interview), but they are utterly fascinating; previously unbroadcast interviews by Bernard Braden for his Now and Then TV show with Cook (30 minutes), Milligan (40 minutes) and Lester (17 minutes) in 1967 (hence the latter discussing How I Won The War and Cook puffing Bedazzled). These filmed interviews are beautifully preserved time capsules - I thought Milligan’s was particularly personally revealing. Had the disc contained the interviews alone, it would, in my humble opinion, still be well worth a purchase. There’s a trailer, in HD, in not quite as good condition as the main feature, but it’s nicely done and makes me want to watch the film all over again. 

You’ll also find a handsome 28-page booklet inside the case with stills from the film, an essay by the aforementioned Mr Brooke, an April 1970 review of the movie by Russell Cambell, a write-up on Lester by Neil Sinyard, and some very much appreciated contextual notes on those Now and Then interviews. There are sub-titles for the hearing impaired in English and the whole is coded BD Region ‘B’.

So, a hit, a palpable hit for the new BFI Flipside line, The Bed Sitting Room belongs on the shelves of any fan of British cinema. Possibly the shelf in your bed sitting room - it’s also available on SD DVD for you luddites (I jest, before you send a hit man round…). For many different reasons, I loved it, I really did; I’m sure you will too.

Can I also commend to you clydefro’s take on the film and disc at DVD Times, which you will find here, and for actual screencaps of the film itself - capturing HD seems to be a black art I cannot master - see DVD Beaver here. Incidentally part of that ’support’ from Lester I mentioned earlier included taking part in a Q&A at a recent screening of The Bed Sitting Room at the NFT, and this BBC Podcast, in which, amongst other films, he discusses the movie. Download it while you can (*EDIT* - now removed by the Beeb; you missed it!) .

Keep moving! Keep moving everybody..!

C’est Magnifique - The Red Shoes Wows Cannes May 20, 2009

Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, DVD News & Info, British Film , 4 comments

In my previous post, I mentioned that Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger and (it would be churlish not to give him equal billing) Jack Cardiff’s The Red Shoes had been meticulously restored and was set for a special screening at the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival earlier this month.

The Guardian’s report accurately sums up the reception this eye-popping British masterpiece was accorded. Charlotte Higgins wrote:

…I had never seen The Red Shoes on the big screen, leave alone like this. The restoration is stupendous. Its director of photography, the late Jack Cardiff, was a stickler for colour – he even, according to the man sitting next to me at the screening, mixed his own house paint.

The colours of the restored Red Shoes absolutely leap from the screen. Moira Shearer is all icy skin, palely freckled. And then there is her hair, that miraculous sheet of red-gold fire. As she walks towards the Royal Opera House in an early scene, that vivid shade is visually echoed by a bunch of amber chrysanthemums from the flower market briefly seen at the front of the shot. Then, dramatically backlit during the extended, surrealistic scene in which she dances the ballet The Red Shoes, it suddenly flames a shocking scarlet.

There are a couple of scenes on the railway station at Monte Carlo, and the restoration shows us just how carefully they were made – a woman in a crimson coat here, a burst of purest blue delphiniums there. Dressed in a cloud of tulle in a shade somewhere between peacock and ocean green, Shearer mounts the steps of a Monte Carlo villa, the sky hotly Mediterranean, transformed into a kind of sea goddess. Imagine you possess a faded, tattered photograph of someone you love, and then, quite unexpectedly, you see them again, solid, living and breathing. That was what watching the restored Red Shoes felt like…

Be sure to watch the Thelma Schoonmaker interview video on that page linked above; fascinating stuff, and you get a few glimpses of the finished restoration.

The news piece at the Film Foundation website - here - also makes for interesting reading, especially the roster of just who was in involved in the project. Three cheers for the press… Also, check out ‘The Red Shoes’ shines anew from The Los Angeles Times in which Robert Gitt of UCLA fame appears, I’m sure inadvertently, to give a good kicking to the BFI, who provided the original elements from which his digital restoration was made:

…Not that restoring those colors to their original brilliance was easy. First, it turned out that every reel of the original negative, which had been stored in Great Britain, had been attacked by mold, causing what Gitt describes as “thousands of visible tiny cracks and fissures…”

By the way, at the bottom of that Film Foundation page, you’ll find a link to the Film Foundation’s lush Preservation Booklet on The Red Shoes in PDF format, presumably the same booklet handed round to the audience at Cannes, and containing some interesting notes from Martin Scorsese and Ian Christie (plus the confirmation that The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp is also on the slate for a similar full wash and brush up). Says Christie:

…Seen in full-scale projection, The Red Shoes is not only one of cinema’s great sensuous experiences, but a profound meditation on the power and the price of all-consuming spectacle. Beyond the intensity of its performances and the beauty of its images, it is this reflexive quality, shared with other masterpieces of the 1940s, that makes it a true classic, capable of being endlessly re-interpreted and rediscovered…

Incidentally, Scorsese, of course the driving force behind this as so many restoration projects, earned himself a standing ovation at Cannes for his impassioned pre-screening eulogy to Powell, Pressburger and The Red Shoes:

…passion drives every single, extraordinary moment of The Red Shoes, and it’s what makes the film’s glorious Technicolor images so forceful and moving, now restored to their full, shimmering beauty. The characters and their world are brought to life with the aching beauty they themselves long to create. The vivid reds and deep blues, the vibrant yellows and rich blacks, the lustrous fleshtones of the close-ups, some of them ecstatic and some agonizing, or both at once…so many moments, so many conflicting emotions, such a swirl of color and light and sound, all burned into my mind from that very first viewing, the first of many…

And the restoration will be seen all over the world. ITV Global Entertainment (who were, you may recall, Granada International, who merged with Carlton; oh, do keep up…) is said to have struck more than 20 international home entertainment licenses for the digital restoration of The Red Shoes since the Cannes screening. The licenses include: Atlantic Films AB (Scandinavia), Magna Pacific (Australia), Filmax (Spain) and (of course, being their own home entertainment division) ITV DVD (U.K.).

ITV Global Entertainment director of home entertainment & digital Steve Gallant said “We’re delighted to be announcing these new international deals for Michael Powell’s brilliant and lovingly restored The Red Shoes. This is part of our ongoing film restoration commitment, preserving our critically acclaimed and hugely popular library of landmark British film titles for a new generation of film lovers.”

ITV DVD is set to release the new restoration on both DVD and Blu-ray on June 29 in the U.K., though the BD of The Red Shoes looks to be, at least initially, a HMV exclusive; with Janus credited with helping the project, a Criterion ‘do-over’ can’t be far behind. Don’t forget to look out for digital screenings of The Red Shoes in the U.K. from this December.

Rule Britannia - Scorsese and Schoonmaker on British Cinema

While we’re on the subject of P&P and S&S, there’s excellent news from Screendaily.com on Scorsese and Schoonmaker’s long-gestating feature documentary about the history of British cinema: 

…Speaking to ScreenDaily as he took a thee-day break from post-production on his new feature, Shutter Island, to attend tonight’s (May 20) Cannes Classics screening of The Red Shoes, Scorsese said: “As soon we finish mixing Shutter Island, which will be in August, Thelma and I are going to go back and take up where we were in the British documentary and hopefully construct a rough cut by the time I shoot my next picture.”

Scorsese is a passionate fan of many British films and he cites such movies as Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp, Guy Hamilton’s An Inspector Calls as well as work by Joseph Losey, Seth Holt, Ronald Neame and John Gilling as important early influences on him. He also acknowledges that his own approach to using voice-over in his own movies was directly influenced by Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets.“Kind Hearts and Coronets was a big favourite among my family and people who were watching television in the early 1950s. It’s a film that influences a great deal what I do with voice-over,” Scorsese added…

Two posts in a month; I’m in danger of becoming prolific…

Spend Sundays With James Bond… May 9, 2009

Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, British Film , 1 comment so far

In celebration of the centenary of producer Albert R. ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, born April 5, 1909, a season of classic James Bond films have been digitally restored and are returning to UK cinemas distributed by classic film specialists, Park Circus.

During June, restored versions of four classic James Bond films, DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, GOLDFINGER and ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, will be screening on consecutive Sundays at over 60 cinemas around the country.

The four classic films will be screened via the UK Film Council’s Digital Screen Network, enabling, say Park Circus, audiences ”to enjoy the outstanding picture quality and improved sound offered by this technologically advanced format”. The digital release is Lottery funded through the UK Film Council’s Prints and Advertising Fund.

The Bond films in the Broccoli centenary season have been digitally restored, as per the recent Blu-ray releases, frame by frame by Lowry Digital Images, the world’s leader in digital restoration and image enhancement. The process involves taking moving pictures that show signs of age and wear, removing the fading, dirt, scratches and other defects that occur over time, and returning them to their original condition. Park Circus were behind the nationwide digital screenings of Goldfinger a couple of years back; a spectacular experience.

Sunday 7 June: DR. NO
Sunday 14 June: FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
Sunday 21 June: GOLDFINGER
Sunday 28 June: ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

The following Picturehouse venues will be taking part in the screenings:

• Aberdeen - Belmont Picturehouse
• Bath - The Little Theatre Cinema
• Brighton - Duke of York’s Picturehouse
• Cambridge - Arts Picturehouse
• Exeter - Picturehouse
• Greenwich - Picturehouse
• Henley-on-Thames - Regal Picturehouse
• Liverpool - Picturehouse at FACT
• London - Clapham Picturehouse
• London - Gate Cinema Notting Hill
• London - Stratford Picturehouse
• Norwich - Cinema City
• Oxford - Phoenix Picturehouse
• Stratford-upon-Avon - Picturehouse
• York - City Screen Picturehouse

Plus the following selected cinemas:

• Belfast - QFT*
• Belper - Ritz*
• Bo’ness - Hippodrome
• Birmingham - Electric Cinema
• Bristol - Showcase Cinema De Lux
• Bristol - Watershed Cinema
• Cardiff - Chapter Cinema
• Cumbria - Graves Cumberland
• Cumbria - Workington Plaza
• Derby - Quad
• Derby - Showcase Cinema De Lux
• Dublin - Light House
• Dundee - Dundee Contemporary Arts
• Glasgow - Glasgow Film Theatre
• Inverness - Eden Court Theatre*
• Ipswich - Hollywood Film Theatre
• Leicester - Showcase Cinema De Lux
• London - Everyman Belsize Park
• London - The Lexi Cinema
• London - Phoenix Cinema East Finchley
• London - Screen on the Green
• Newbury - Corn Exchange
• Newcastle - Tyneside Cinema
• Prestatyn - Scala
• Reigate - Screen*
• Richmond - Curzon
• Sheffield - Showroom Cinema
• Somerset - Wells Film Centre
• Stirling - Macrobert
• Winchester - Screen
• Wolverhampton - Light House

* check venue for details of screenings, as they may vary from the above schedule.

CLASSICS AT CANNES…

More from Park Circus; the UK based outfit says that the beautiful restoration of the Powell/Pressburger classic THE RED SHOES and a new print of the groundbreaking thriller VICTIM have been selected to screen at the 62nd Cannes International Film Festival (May 13-24) as part of the Cannes Classics strand.

Academy Award-winning THE RED SHOES is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made. The film has been restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in association with The British Film Institute, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd. (formerly Granada International), and Janus Films. Restoration funding was provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The Film Foundation, and the Louis B. Mayer Foundation. THE RED SHOES will be presented in the Debussy Theatre with Martin Scorsese, honorary President of Cannes Classics 2009, and Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell in attendance. The film is also scheduled for a limited UK theatrical release in December (as is THIS SPORTING LIFE in June and THE GODFATHER from September).

The sixth annual selection of Cannes Classics, a showcase for restored and rediscovered films, will also screen Jean-Luc Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), Luchino Visconti’s SENSO (1954) and Jacques Tati’s comedy favourite MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953).

Cannes Classics will also celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of US film-maker Joseph Losey, with screenings of ACCIDENT (1967) and a new print of DON GIOVANNI (1979).

Scorsese’s own World Cinema Foundation will present three films: Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), Shadi Abdei Salam’s AL-MOMIA (1969) and Emilio Gomez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann’s REDES (1936).

Also, in celebration of Columbia Pictures’ 85th anniversary, and as a tribute to composer Maurice Jarre, David Lean’s multi-award-winning classic LAWRENCE OF ARABIA will be screening at the Cinema On The Beach in Cannes.

Finally, Park Circus say it now has worldwide rights to screen movies in the Rohauer Film Collection, which includes the works of Buster Keaton, D.W. Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks, as well as films such as Hitchcock’s JAMAICA INN the Joan Crawford classic SUDDEN FEAR and the recently restored PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN; could that presage a DVD release..?

According to the Film Foundation, ’Pandora’ was “…restored by George Eastman House, in cooperation with The Douris Corporation, at Cineric, Inc. in New York City. After an exhaustive worldwide search, no original negatives could be found. Working from separation master positives created in 1951, the film was restored photochemicallyusing the Cineric Single Pass System to re-register the color records and manufacture timed separation negatives. Sections of the film were scanned 4K resolution to perform digital dirt and scratch removal. Additionally, the soundtrack was fully restored by Audio Mechanics in Burbank, California. Funding was provided by The Film Foundation, the Franco-American Cultural Fund, and the Rome Film Festival.”

David Lean Centenary; Special Events, Theatrical Showings, new 10 DVD Box Set… March 10, 2008

Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, DVD News & Info, British Film , 5 comments

This is Sir David Lean’s centenary year. 

To mark the event, and as a tribute to the great director - born 25 March 1908, died 16 April, 1991 - 10 films directed by Lean during the 1940s and ’50s have been ‘faithfully restored’ by the BFI National Archive, in partnership with Granada International. Alongside many special events both at home and abroad, the films will be shown theatrically and form a special season on the film channel Film 4, before being released in the U.K. in a David Lean Cententary Collection box set come August.

The blurb:

…The sparkling new restorations were announced as part of a year-long programme of events, screenings, tributes, book and DVD releases involving different organisations and allowing people across Britain to discover and rediscover Lean’s work.

The £1 million restoration project was completed thanks to generous funding from the David Lean Foundation. The Foundation was set up at Lean’s request to promote the appreciation of film as an art form and to encourage skills and technical excellence in filmmaking.

David Lean remains one of Britain’s most widely known and respected directors and many of his films are part of our national memory, whether the forlorn couple in the station café or that tiny figure shimmering on the desert horizon. A master of visual storytelling, Lean was meticulous in his craft and admired by filmmakers for his loving attention to detail. Like Hitchcock, Lean loved to explore the nature of British or English identity whether on the Home Front of wartime drama, literary adaptations and doomed romances, or on the larger canvas of his later Hollywood-backed epics.

Most of us know the great Lean epics that won many awards here and in Hollywood - The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) - but he directed 16 fiction films and edited numerous others in a career that spanned six decades. The BFI and its partners aim to cast new light on his earlier work which includes the classics In Which We Serve (1942), Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946), also enabling people to rediscover lesser-known films such as The Passionate Friends (1948), to be released by the BFI in June.

At BFI Southbank in June and July there will be a retrospective of the 16 feature films Lean directed, as well as a number of the more significant ones he edited, including Pygmalion (1938) by Anthony Asquith and 49th Parallel (1941), directed by Michael Powell. The two month season, in association with Film 4, will also include events with documentary clips, discussions and feature presentations from experts exploring themes around his career and working style.

Throughout the year, brand new 35mm and high definition digital prints of the restored films will be screened up and down the country by Granada International, through its theatrical partners Park Circus and the BFI, and by Canal Plus. A complete season is also planned for screening on Film 4 in September, taking Lean’s films to a wider audience across Britain. Also ITV DVD and Optimum will release the newly restored pictures on DVD in the UK in August.

BAFTA is a charity organisation with long-established links with David Lean, which supports, develops and promotes the art forms of the moving image. BAFTA will be holding events and screenings in London, New York and Los Angeles for the public and for Academy members, which started with a tribute to David Lean at the Orange British Academy Film Awards on 10 February. There will be further tributes in the US later in the year, and during the first weekend in August four restored prints will be screened publicly at BAFTA’s headquarters on Piccadilly. The annual David Lean Lecture will also take place as usual this year, details of the date and 2008 lecturer are yet to be announced.

Carnforth Tribute

Also paying tribute to David Lean will be Carnforth Station in Lancashire, the location for most of the key scenes in Brief Encounter (1945). This poignant story of unfulfilled passion and guilt will be shown along with other Lean classics during a week of screenings in March at the station itself or in nearby Lancaster.

A week-long calendar of ‘fun-filled activities’ at both Carnforth Station Visitor Centre and the Dukes Theatre, Lancaster will be launched on Saturday 22 March. There will be special screenings of the newly restored films Great Expectations; Brief Encounter; Dr Zhivago and Oliver Twist at both venues, and there will be a David Lean exhibition at Carnforth Station to commemorate the life and career of ‘one of the most iconic film directors of all time’:

DAVID LEAN CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS PROGRAMME
22nd – 29th March 2008
Sat 22nd March
LAUNCH DAY
3pm Great Expectations Dukes
6pm Brief Encounter Carnforth
6pm-8pm Evening meal / Browse Visitor Centre Carnforth
8pm Brief Encounter Carnforth
Tues 25th March
CENTENARY DAY
7.30pm Oliver Twist Carnforth
Thurs 27th March
5.15pm Dr Zhivago Dukes
8.30pm David Lean Lecture/Discussion Dukes
Fri 28th March
7.00pm Still Life Carnforth & 8.30pm After Dark Theatre
Sat 29th March
5.30pm Summer Madness Dukes
An exhibition of the life and work of David Lean will be on display throughout in the Furness & Midland Hall.

In February David Lean: A Biography was republished by Faber & Faber UK. Written by filmmaker and historian Kevin Brownlow who spent many hours in conversation with David Lean, his family and co-workers, this exhaustive book is universally acknowledged to be the definitive biography and provides the reader with a unique insight into the man, the director, his career and his work. It’s a mammoth tome and fascinating reading, not least in the way Brownlow describes how Lean had the capacity to completely cut out of his life those who were no longer of any use, be they ex-lovers or former colleagues.

A two-day conference gathering together filmmakers, writers, scholars and collaborators of Lean is planned for late July at Queen Mary University of London and will offer a broad range of perspectives examining aspects of the director’s life and career in cinema.

The David Lean Film Restoration Project

Perhaps the most mouth-watering prospect for fans is the aforementioned restoration and theatrical presentation of 10 of Lean’s films, from before his ‘epic’ period, and perhaps all the more satisfying for it. It is these films that explore ‘Englishness’, whether we’re stood on the bridge of a stricken Naval vessel with the stiff-upper lipped Captain ‘D’, struggling vainly to maintain some semblance of middle-class morality in a railway canteen, or finding the cracks in the patriarchal society in a Salford boot shop.

The films with then be released in a 10 DVD box set by ITV DVD, with Hobson’s Choice and The Sound Barrier re-released by Optimum; a bit tough on those Lean fans who already have the 2006 released nine disc David Lean Collection (it’s minus In Which We Serve) from ITV DVD, only to find that obsolescence is just around the corner. Incidentally, the transfers in that set range from excellent to average - it will be interesting to see what transpires in the new set; new extras would be nice. The blurb:

All film restorations require collaboration, but the David Lean Film Restoration Project partnership is a model for how this kind of collaboration can most profoundly affect film heritage. The David Lean Foundation, whose resources come directly from the revenue the films of David Lean still generate, sponsored the restoration of eleven* of the sixteen films that David Lean directed.

The BFI undertook the technical side of the restoration of ten of these titles, working with Granada International and Canal Plus. The BFI National Archive in Berkhamsted is now the permanent home of the preservation elements resulting from the restoration work. The restored films will be the basis of all distributed elements in the future, ensuring that every audience everywhere will see the restored version of each film.

The overall technical approach to the project, led by Andrea Kalas, Senior Preservation Manager of the Archive Film Lab, was to find the best surviving material on each title and restore and preserve each film using the best methods available. For 8 of the films this involved collaboration with Granada International’s Perivale archive and working with the technical team headed by Fiona Maxwell, Director of Operations and Servicing. As quality considerations focus mainly on elements duplicated from an original, each element was inspected for quality and condition. Dirt and scratches can be printed in, and focus and fluctuation issues in the image can also occur. Condition issues can include signs of deterioration, mould, and most often the effects of usage.

Original camera negatives of many of the films were badly damaged: with scratches, frames missing, tears, even one important original negative entirely missing. Elements from both the BFI and Granada International archives were viewed and compared to find the best materials to work from.

The next stage was to decide how and where to complete the restoration which needed specialized equipment and expertise. Archival film is often fragile and in need of printers and scanners that have been optimized for this purpose, and the knowledge of the experts who are restoring the films is crucial. The ability to ensure that Guy Green’s black and white cinematography is brought back to life with utmost care is the ability to understand how to effectively reproduce sharpness, contrast and the greyscale range. To ensure that the Blithe Spirit is a shade of green that looks ghostly and not cartoonish, requires an understanding of the Technicolor process and how to replicate that in modern film stocks.

The ten films were restored by one of three standard film restoration processes:
Photochemical, Digital Sections and Full Digital Intermediate. Each film also had digital audio restoration. Although the Archive Film Lab at the BFI National Archive was the main facility for the restoration work, other film labs such as Cineric in New York were used for additional specialized work. Following the photo-chemical work, Granada International remastered their films to High Definition with full digital picture and sound restoration.

THE RESTORED TITLES

IN WHICH WE SERVE
Lean shared the directing credit with Noël Coward, who wrote and starred in this tense and moving account of life on board a wartime destroyer. Although based on the experiences of Louis Mountbatten, this is a state-of-the-nation film with social divisions on shore faithfully mirrored aboard ship. Lean arranged all the camera set-ups and directed Coward in his scenes in front of the camera.
With John Mills, Bernard Miles, Celia Johnson, Richard Attenborough.
UK / 1942 / bw / 116 mins / Granada International / Park Circus

THIS HAPPY BREED
Noël Coward was again the source for this story of a London lower middle-class suburban family in the inter-war years from 1919 to 1939. The finely and wittily observed family feuds unfold against a panorama of public events ranging from the General Strike of 1926 to the outbreak of war itself. Beautifully acted by an ensemble cast and shot in Technicolor, the film was a huge contemporary hit and has lost little of its appeal.
With Robert Newton, Celia Johnson, John Mills, Kay Walsh, Stanley Holloway.
UK / 1944 / Technicolor / 114 mins / Granada International / Park Circus

BLITHE SPIRIT
David Lean’s first comedy, again scripted by Noël Coward from his Broadway hit, stars Rex Harrison as a successful and cheerfully cynical novelist whose marital bliss is interrupted by the mischievous ghost of his first wife, visible to him but invisible to everyone else. The simple but effective special effects, all the more impressive in Technicolor, won an Oscar.
With Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond, Margaret Rutherford.
UK / 1945 / Technicolor / 96 mins / Granada International / Park Circus

BRIEF ENCOUNTER
David Lean’s international reputation was established with this study of unfulfilled passion and guilt – themes that were to recur in his later work. Critically debated, mocked, referenced and remade, this account of an unconsummated affair between a middle-class housewife and a doctor, forced to meet at a railway station, retains a tight emotional grip on any contemporary audience.
With Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard.
UK / 1945 / bw / 86 mins / Granada International / Park Circus

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Undoubtedly one of the finest Dickens adaptations, the film is studded with memorable setpieces, from young Pip’s hair-raising encounter with Magwitch in the graveyard to the eerie Gothic fantasy world of Miss Havisham. The Oscar-winning team of cinematographer Guy Green and production designer John Bryan bring Dickens’ settings to vivid, indelible life.
With John Mills, Valerie Hobson, Bernard Miles, Alec Guinness.
UK / 1946 / bw / 118 mins / Granada International / BFI (licensed by Park Circus)

OLIVER TWIST
Dickens’ extravagant vision of Victorian London is perfectly balanced by superb performances and Lean’s fierce grip on the sprawling narrative. Guy Green and John Bryan lend an Expressionist look to Fagin’s hellish underworld and Alec Guinness, in his second major role, gives a finely judged theatrical – if controversial – depiction of Fagin himself. Lean was always eager to open a film without dialogue and here he excels himself with a tour de force sequence of Oliver’s pregnant mother battling against a storm.
With Robert Newton, John Howard Davies, Kay Walsh.
UK / 1948 / bw / 116 mins / Granada International / BFI (licensed by Park Circus)

THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
Re-released by the BFI to mark David Lean’s centenary in 2008, The Passionate Friends has been hailed by critic David Thomson as his work ‘most deserving rediscovery’. Mary (Ann Todd) has chosen a comfortable secure life with her rich banker husband (Claude Rains) over romantic passion with her first love Steven (Trevor Howard). Turmoil ensues when Steven suddenly reappears in her life. With its subtle performances, nuanced direction and beautiful cinematography, Lean’s absorbing romance, adapted from a story by H G Wells, is a fascinating companion piece to Brief Encounter.
With Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, Claude Rains.
UK / 1948 / bw / 91 mins / Granada International / BFI (licensed by Park Circus)

MADELEINE
In this period drama, set in Victorian Glasgow and based on a true story, Lean exploits the ambiguous and enigmatic screen presence of Ann Todd. Here she plays a young woman who, rebelling against her patriarchal father, falls for a penniless but exploitative French aristocrat who later dies of arsenic poisoning. Madeleine is anything but a victim, daring to expose her sexuality. Guy Green’s deep focus photography owes much to CITIZEN KANE.
With Leslie Banks, Elizabeth Sellars, Ivan Desny.
UK / 1949 / 91 mins / Granada International / BFI (licensed by Park Circus)

THE SOUND BARRIER
The human cost of scientific progress underlies this story of an aircraft manufacturer whose obsession for perfection leads him into near madness and brings his family suffering – a tendency shared by Lean himself. The script by Terence Rattigan delivers the drama, but the exhilarating aerial footage and the score by Malcolm Arnold are what lodge in the memory.
With Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd, Nigel Patrick.
UK / 1952 / bw / 118 mins / Canal Plus

HOBSON’S CHOICE
Charles Laughton delivers a bravura performance as a self-important Lancashire bootmaker who attempts to dictate his daughter’s choice of husband, only to find that she marries his downtrodden and simple-minded employee and starts a rival business. Set in the 1890s, this working class comedy by Harold Brighouse was first staged in 1916 but is here given a fresh breath of cinematic life thanks to luminous cinematography by Jack Hildyard.
With John Mills, Brenda de Banzie, Prunella Scales.
UK / 1953 / bw / 107 mins / Canal Plus

*Mentioned above, the 11th film restored is Summer Madness, one of the last independent films Lean made and the most important in need of restoration.

The work was carried out five years ago by experts at the British Film Institute at a cost approaching £60,000 with support from the American Academy Foundation and the David Lean Foundation, and a screening of the film closed the 2003 The Venice Film Festival.

Kevin Brownlow, David Lean’s biographer, said: “Colour film has a horrible habit of fading and this was in Eastmancolor, which wasn’t a permanent colour.

“But Lean was such a visual artist it is important to get it as close as possible to what it originally looked like. What is strange about Summer Madness is that it was his favourite film. It’s a curious choice for someone who made Lawrence of Arabia.”

More details on Centenary activities at the BFI here and at the Carnforth Railway Visitors Centre here. Meanwhile, it’s worthwhile ending with a précis of the diary of just some of the special event highlights, though it has still to be finalised:

March

Screenings of Lean films in Carnforth, Lancaster and, his birthplace, Croydon.

25 March 

Centenary of David Lean’s birth. Academy members’ screening of Ryan’s Daughter in 70mm at 195 Piccadilly, London. Film4 screening of The Bridge on the River Kwai

April

An evening in honour of David Lean as part of Brit Week, presented by BAFTA/LA in Los Angeles.

7 – 11 April

Granada International to launch the David Lean Centenary collection to international broadcasters at MIPTV in Cannes

Summer

Open-air screening events (BFI, Park Circus) TBC

June

Ten newly restored titles released across the UK - The David Lean Foundation has generously funded the restoration of ten of Sir David Lean’s sixteen films by the BFI National Archive, Granada International and Canal Plus, and these will be available in high quality 35mm prints and HD digital format through BFI Distribution and Park Circus.

June – July

Rediscover David Lean: Retrospective at BFI Southbank. In addition to screening all of David Lean’s works as director and a selection of those which he edited, BFI Southbank will also present a number of events ranging from presentations by experts in particular aspects of his work, to introduced screenings by those associated with individual titles and will also include discussions embracing different perspectives on some of these classic titles.

July – December

USA theatrical tour (BFI, Park Circus)

24 / 25 July

David Lean Conference, Queen Mary University of London. Gathering together film-makers, writers, scholars and people who knew Lean, this conference will offer a broad range of perspectives. Papers welcome on individual films, conditions of production, literary adaptation, key collaborations, as well as all other aspects of Lean’s life in the cinema.

August

ITVDVD release The David Lean Centenary Collection. Optimum Releasing issue The Sound Barrier and Hobson’s Choice on DVD

2 – 3 August

Public screenings of a selection of four restored prints of David Lean films at BAFTA’s headquarters on 195 Piccadilly, London

September

An event in honour of David Lean, presented by BAFTA East Coast in New York City. David Lean Season on Film4, including restored prints. Opening of The David Lean Library at the National Film and Television School - Generously supported by the David Lean Foundation, the light and airy David Lean Library is a central feature of the School’s new building, completed in time for the new academic year starting at the end of January 2008. As well as increased space for books and study, the new Library provides improved storage facilities for the School’s collections, including room for many years of growth in audio-visual material.

Date TBC

BAFTA David Lean Centenary Lecture - Since 2001, the David Lean Foundation has generously supported BAFTA’s high profile annual film lecture at 195 Piccadilly designed to educate, inform and inspire practitioners by providing insight into the experiences of some of the world’s most compelling filmmakers. Previous lectures have been given by Sydney Pollack, Robert Altman, Ken Loach, John Boorman, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone and David Lynch. The lecturer for 2008 has yet to be announced.

Trick Or Treat… November 1, 2007

Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, Horror, British Film , 10 comments

Thirty years on from the introduction of the Compact Disc as a medium for playing recorded music, the debate over whether digital or that old analogue war horse, the vinyl record, is best still rages. And, as we see more and more films, particularly cinema classics, screened in a digital format, just as surely will a parallel debate divide movie buffs.

The naysayers claim that movies presented in cinemas digitally will never actually look like film. A digital presentation lacks the warmth, the vibrancy, the depth and the black levels of film. Certainly it lacks film’s ‘organic’ attributes; any nicks and marks - or lack of - seen in any given digital transfer are embedded there forever. There’s no going back, year after year to your favourite festival to see that new print take on the patina of age. A digital presentation is locked, caught in time; age shall not wither it. Only advancing technology.

There’s also the issue of the projectionist; watching How The West Was Won at Bradford a while back I was mindful that it takes no little skill or experience to fire up multi-panel ’Cinerama’ screenings, and the projectors themselves are hulking, complex things of some beauty, a glimpse of which brought a strange desire, deeply embedded in the psyche of most male adults, to go tinker with (preferably armed with a small tool kit). I strongly suspect the difference between a film and digital projectionist, equates to the gulf between a Chef de Cuisine and your average burger flipper.

My own reservations about digital were largely swept aside, however, during this year’s Summer of British Film Festival when I took in as many screenings as I could, all of them digitally projected and every one a blissful encounter. It wasn’t just that I viewed several films that I had never seen in a cinema before, but the fact that I was enjoying the communal experience in the company of people who were seeing the films for the first time; a vicarious pleasure.

I’ve read that other screenings had their own problems - out of synch sound seems to be a digital bugbear - but only once did I become fully aware that I was watching a movie, not as a combination of celluloid, emulsion and light, but via binary and laser, a short video glitch marring an otherwise impeccable showing of a stunning transfer of Goldfinger.

People young enough to be Billy Fisher’s grandchildren laughed in all the right places during Billy Liar, those to whom WWII is just a few musty old pages in history books became misty eyed during The Dam Busters as the camera silently panned through the empty quarters of the airmen who would never return. You could have heard a pin drop.

So, a hit, a palpable hit for digital, one which will encourage more showings of classic films on the big screen. Fired up by all this ‘digitation’, the BFI restoration of Hammer’s 1958 classic Dracula, began a limited U.K. theatrical showing last night, fittingly on Hallowe’en.

There has been much controversy over the BFI’s involvement in restoring Dracula since it was showcased at Cannes last May. Back then, the BFI National Archive, Senior Preservation Manager Andrea Kalas was quoted as saying:

“The restoration of what many fans call the best Hammer horror film required extensive research into reported censored scenes. Rumour and fact, not unlike the Dracula story itself, are intermingled.

“Our research into missing scenes led us to every conceivable resource from the vaults of Warner Bros to an archive in Japan. Scenes censored by the BBFC for the release of the UK version, but included in the US version, have been recovered. In addition, the US title, Horror of Dracula, had been attached to most theatrical and video releases. We have restored the original British release title with its distinctive illuminated “D.”

“Ben Thompson of the BFI National Archive film lab oversaw the restoration and it is due to his diligence and perfectionism that the film is restored. We owe special thanks to Richard Dayton and Eric Aijala of YCM Laboratories and Tim Everett, Ned Price and Bill Rush at Warner Bros.”

The BFI went on to add: 

The film was restored from the original negative, except for the original British title and the censored scenes, which were from dupe negatives found in Warner Bros’ vaults. The original prints were released on IB-Technicolor prints, and Richard Dayton at YCM Laboratories in Burbank worked with Ben to achieve this particular look.

However the Custodes Lucis Group, who claim to be ‘members of staff of the British Film Institute and people who work with the Institute in a variety of ways’ have a different tale to tell. Back in June their site reported:

Highlight of the BFI’s Cannes presence this year was a presentation of a new version of Dracula (1958) which the BFI claimed had been restored by the Archive.  This raised some eyebrows when it was first announced, as the 50th anniversary of the film’s release is not until 2008, and the first Hammer film was produced in 1935.  Moreover, because of the vagaries of distribution and donation, the NFTVA had never actually been able to acquire any material on this title in the past, and, of course, colour feature films are extremely costly items to restore.  Considering the vast number of NFTVA-held titles in urgent need of preservation, restoration, rediscovery, and so on, to pick a film not in the collection, one which would eat up most, if not all, of the preservation budget for the year, and one not due for any kind of commemorative release, seemed a little peculiar.

However, on May 15th, a press release was posted on the BFI website, headed “Dracula in Cannes” [part of which is reproduced above]…

We all know that Dracula is a fantasy but surely no-one ever expected the British Film Institute to dream up such a fantastical press release.  There is not a shred of truth in these assertions.  The BFI did not restore the 1958 Hammer Dracula.  This was done by Warner Bros. (the copyright owners) about six years ago, and was, by all accounts a very straightforward procedure, requiring no research, as the negative they worked from (of the American release version) was complete and in good condition.  All the “BFI National Archive” did, in reality, was to have a laboratory in California add the British main titles to the American release picture, thus producing a hybrid that was never, ever in distribution. So much for the BFI’s policy of enhanced curatorial control.  Such a decision – to create, in effect, a new work without clearly documenting the modification – would be anathema to any right-thinking archivist elsewhere in the world.  In the BFI’s new fantasy land, though, it seems that anything goes.

In an interview published in The Independent on Sunday…Anthony Minghella, Chair of the BFI’s Board of Governors, talking about the high cost of archival duplication, noted that “… we are restoring the Hammer film starring Christopher Lee as Dracula…”  The question is: who lied to whom?  Did Mr Minghella genuinely believe that the BFI/NFTVA was carrying out a full restoration of this classic?  If so, he must have had the information from Amanda Nevill.  Did Ms Nevill genuinely believe that the Archive was carrying out such a restoration?  If so, she must have had the information from Andrea Kalas.  Where does this extraordinary chain of deception begin and end?

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that such a restoration (had it really taken place) would have run entirely counter to the BFI’s stated policy that the studios should look after their own, and that the Archive should work only on films which have no rights’ owners and are therefore exploitable commercially.  And what would the Film Council have said had the BFI spent its money on this restoration? 

Pretty strong language, and quite shocking stuff*. However, none of that detracts from what was a superb digital showing of Dracula last night; from the moment the pristine BBFC certification hit the screen, up came the Universal Internationallogo and there it was - virtually unmarked, beautifully framed (unlike the current DVD releases on both sides of the Atlantic), just enough film grain to stop it looking unnatural, and shown in the original 1.66:1 ratio. The colours, particularly the vivid, bloody reds, were strong and vibrant; it whets the appetite for the home video re-release that Warners have promised, and that will no doubt come in the film’s 50th anniversary year, 2008.

Even more pleasing for this viewer was the fact that my 15-years-old son was held spellbound by Terence Fisher’s half century old film, and confessed, without shame later that it scared him, something, I must admit, I didn’t quite expect of a dyed in the wool denizen of the 21st century whose only previous encounter with the Prince of Darkness was a showing of the meeting between Mr Lugosi, Mr Abbott and Mr Costello. Oh, and he didn’t ask once what our corpuscle hungry Count wanted with a librarian (come to think of it, what did he want with a librarian? Are they tastier? Bite a librarian today, and report back to me post haste. On the other hand, best not. I digress…)

I thought I’d overplayed my hand when I described the final encounter between Dracula and Van Helsing as one of the greatest scenes in horror film history. But no, not only does it still raise the hairs on the back of my neck (even thinking about it now, James Bernard’s score literally racing, galloping along…), it also did it for the boy. How very satisfying.

Three showings last night, we plumped for the early screening at 6pm, so I decided to round off Hallowe’en with a midnight showing chez Hodson of Brides of Dracula on DVD, the beautiful R1 transfer from Universal. I doubt my admiration for Peter Cushing could increase further, but while in Dracula, Christopher Lee has the plumb role that dominates while he’s off screen, it’s Cushing’s considerable craft and ability that is the glue that holds both films together and which left a big daft smile on my face.

A consummate professional, Cushing inhabits the character of Van Helsing, making sure that he’s the very embodiment of a 19th century physician by perfecting bits of ‘business’, whether it’s handling antique equipment - needles, swabs, the wonderful Phonograph (listen how he enunciates on the recording) -  with an easy familiarity or alighting from a moving carriage with the athletic grace of someone who does so daily. When Universal revived the character recently, they trumpeted that they had reinvented Van Helsing as a ‘kick ass action hero’. Surely some mistake? Mr Cushing got there first. Picture his Professor Van Helsing - a snarling, feral, Dracula closing in for the kill - leaping to the table top, springboarding to rip down the curtains and bathe his foe in deadly sunlight, or jumping to catch the sails of the windmill, thus forming the shadow of an enormous vampire culling crucifix - nobody does it better.

You can find out more on when and where Dracula is being shown here. Go now, my children of the night, and book your tickets…

So, while film in our living rooms have been steadily moving towards a digital future for the past decade, it seems more of us will be watching movies in similar fashion theatrically. Vue will open Europe’s first all-digital cinema in Hull in December - it’s coming whether we like it or not.

Cost must be a factor, as must ease of operation. Yet if digital means that new life is breathed into classic films so that they can be enjoyed, where they belong, on the big screen by new generations, can that ever be seen as a bad thing? Obviously film must come first, but providing preservation of the original elements is paramount, providing that digital technology can give the viewer the most filmlike experience possible, I’m finding it hard to come up with a downside.

Will digital ultimately ‘kill’ traditional film? I don’t think so. Perhaps we should note that while CD signalled the end for the turntable more than three decades ago, vinyl records are still very much with us.

*Nov. 8 update; when these allegations were first made, it appears a poster at the British Film Forums had this to say, which I’ll leave for you to read without comment from me:

As Senior Curator (Fiction) at the BFI National Archive, I’d like [to] answer the points raised over our work on DRACULA. The work undertaken by Warner Bros in the mid-1990s was not a restoration as such but simply the preparation of digital materials for a DVD release. The BFI has prepared new preservation materials on film from the original negative. The new version, incorporating the original UK title sequence, benefits from additional technical work that has been carried out on both picture and sound. Furthermore, we have reinstated a brief sequence which was cut from the UK release version by the BBFC. None of this is a secret and we are pleased to offer the film to UK audiences in as complete a form as is currently possible.

Can I also add a small caveat as regards Dracula, which raises more issues. The BFI has been showing their restored print - not in digital form - at the National Film Theatre in London and there are several reports around the ‘net from very disappointed viewers that all is not as it should be; it’s marked, murky and with poor sound. Why should the digital version be so much better? Good question isn’t it…

Teddington’s Lost & Found, And A Tale Of Two TCMs… September 10, 2007

Posted by John Hodson in : Television, DVD News & Info, British Film , 3 comments

Visitors to the Filmjournal site will already know that the ever excellent clydefro is making a weekly effort to point you at the best of the output from the Stateside Turner Classic Movies cable station, so I hope he won’t mind me gently treading on his territory.

It’s in a good cause; I want to highlight a season of Warner Bros. First National films made at Teddington Studios. On Mondays September 17 and September 24, film fans in the U.S. will see a variety of very rare ’quota quickies’ from the British studio. And I quote:

The second installment of TCM’s remarkable “Lost and Found” series is comprised of films made at London’s famed Teddington Studios by Warner Bros. First National during the period 1932-1943. The series includes the U.S. premieres of two early works from director Michael Powell of The Red Shoes (1948) fame – the drama Something Always Happens (1934) starring Ian Hunter, and the crime thriller Crown vs. Stevens (1936) starring Beatrix Thompson. The other premieres are Crime Unlimited (1935) starring Lilli Palmer, Man of the Moment (1935) starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., The Peterville Diamond (1942) starring Anne Crawford and The Dark Tower(1943) starring David Farrar…

Known as “quota quickies,” these films were shot at a fast pace on low budgets to meet the demands of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, created by the United Kingdom Parliament to require a yearly quota of British-made movies and hopefully counter Hollywood’s dominance of the cinema world. (Never considered a success, the Act was modified over the years and repealed in 1960.) The films made at Teddington during its Warner Bros. era were strictly for the U.K. market, and most were never seen on this side of the Atlantic. Of more than 100 such films, only 33 are known to survive.

Many distinguished actors worked at Teddington during its Warner Bros. period; also represented in the TCM series are Michael Redgrave in Sons of the Sea (1941), Richard Greene in Flying Fortress (1942) and John Gielgud in The Prime Minster (1941). Among those films considered permanently lost, one of the most historically significant is 1934’s Murder in Monte Carlo, in which a young actor named Errol Flynn so impressed Warner Bros. executives that they dispatched him to Hollywood.

Teddington Studios has a long and interesting history dating to the 1880s. It became a production center for feature films in 1916 and was leased, then purchased, by Warner Bros. in the early 1930s. In 1944, during the dwindling days of World War II, a German rocket exploded on the property, causing extensive damage. Eventually reconstructed, the studios would become home to Thames Television, and today the facility remains an important media center.

The link above takes you to the TCM website and from there, the programme details, including full synopses of each film, plus video snippets. Good stuff. But the even better news is, apparently, ads being broadcast for the season say that the films will be transferred to DVD and are going to be available ‘before Christmas’. Be nice if it comes to pass.

While I’m here, I’ll use this as an opportunity to vent my spleen, in a very small way, at TCM’s U.K. output - a quick look at the website shows immediately that the Brit station is, by comparison, the American version’s impoverished cousin, both online and on air. Not only that, while there are some real gems to be found over here, they pale by comparison with the rich output of TCM U.S. For a start, it’s highly unlikely we’ll get a version of the Teddington Studios season broadcast in the country from which the films actually emanated. Bonkers.

TCM U.K.’s films are shown usually (but not always) in the correct aspect ratio, but never anamorphically (widescreen TVs being, apparently, the domain of those permanently tuned to Big Brother). We also have to put with showings broken up by ad breaks, something even Murdoch’s Sky Movies channels do not stoop to.

I get the distinct impression that, in close association with Warners savvy classic home entertainment arm, TCM U.S. is a station aimed at legions of film buffs and cineastes of all ages. While TCM U.K. - it’s myriad commercials zeroing in on those nearing the front of the queue in God’s waiting room - is targeted at those wrinkly and technophobic old film fans who think Brad Pitt was at the heart of the mighty conflict between Arthur Scargill and Maggie Thatcher. And who appreciate being prodded every half hour to get ready for the next big adventure in life. Which is death.

Don’t get me wrong, the fact that TCM U.K. exists at all is something of a triumph when you consider television’s overall output. But as you can see, it could be so much better…

Reed All About It… August 6, 2007

Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, British Film, Crime / Noir / Thriller , 3 comments

A Kid For Two Farthings (1955) 

Carol Reed’s A Kid For Two Farthings tends to divide opinion. There are those that see it as a frankly soppy piece of contemporary nostalgia, filled with stereotypical characters, who inhabit a mythical, rose-tinted cityscape. And there are others who see a film with a great big heart, an extraordinary evocation, from Wolf Mankowitz’s novel and screenplay, of the post-war East End of London. I’m a cynic by nature, but, gentle reader, I fall unashamedly into the camp of the latter.

As if it wasn’t already obvious from Odd Man Out, The Third Man, Oliver! and The Fallen Idol, A Kid For Two Farthings is further evidence that Reed is a wonderful director of children, and in the lead as ‘Joe’, Jonathan Ashmore gives a stupendous performance - his only film performance - a boy who believes utterly in the magical powers of his pet ‘unicorn’, the eponymous pocket money purchased one-horned animal of the title.

Living above an impoverished tailor’s shop with his careworn mother, Joanna (Celia Johnson), Joe spends his days weaving between market stalls, chatting amiably with the spivs and the hawkers, beguiling kindly shop owners or staring wide-eyed at the wrestlers who bounce off each others bloated muscles in the gym. As in The Fallen Idol, we see the film unfold mostly from this innocent’s perspective, our perceptions tuned to his; the sights and incredible cacophony of the East End markets, the vivid colours that stand out midst the grimy, slum-like, post-war surroundings, the larger than life, almost Runyon-esque, characters. And a life-affirming belief, not only in magic - or the merest possibility that it exists - but that things can only get better.

Joe is told by the benign Jewish tailor Mr Kandinsky (David Kossoff - who else?), that unicorns exist and grant their owners wishes. When Joe buys a sickly goat with a single twisted horn, his childish innocence convinces him that his ‘unicorn’ will change life for the better not only for himself but also for those around him.

Woven into this tale we have body-builder Sam (Joe Robinson) and Sonia (the truly gorgeous Diana Dors), seemingly doomed never to name the day, ‘Ice’ Berg (Sid James), purveyor of dodgy diamond rings, ‘Python’ Macklin (played with impressive relish by former World Heavyweight Champ Primo Carnera), the bad-guy wrestler determind to get Sonia into his patented ‘Python grip’.

Home Vision’s US R1 DVD is open matte (it was most likely projected at 1.66:1), but the Technicolor cinematography of A.S. Bates is, if not perfectly presented, sometimes eye wateringly beautiful. Benjemin Frankel’s score is quite spare, most of the ‘music’ provided by the location, the occasional radio or record playing in the background, but the main theme wafts in and out played on an old gramophone wheeled around the East End on a pram by a wandering tramp (Joseph - father of Frances - Tomelty), another touch of whimsy, one of many in this wholly whimsical film.

It’s just one, I think, of the interesting aspects of a fascinating production that’s packed with familiar faces; as well as the aforementioned, the cast boasts such familiar faces as Brenda De Banzie, Irene Handel, Danny Green and Sid Tafler.

Where there is life, there is hope; it’s not an unwelcome message even in this most determinedly optimistic tale (especially in these determinedly pessimistic times). And while not everyone ends with their wishes fulfilled, A Kid For Two Farthings, tells us, while there is a glimmer of hope, to hang on tight to our dreams.

There are no extras on the R1 disc, but it’s available quite cheaply. A Kid For Two Farthings is also available in the UK, but from public domain specialists Orbit Media so I cannot vouch for the quality. However, it will be part of what looks like to be a super Diana Dors Collection from ITV DVD released this month in the UK, which also includes Good Time Girl (1948), The Calendar (1948), Oliver Twist (1948), It’s Not Cricket (1949), Diamond City (1949), A Boy, A Girl and a Bike (1949), As Long as They’re Happy (1955), and Three for All (1975). The set is completed by a couple of documentaries from the Granada Ventures catalogue: The Blonde Bombshell, and Who Got Diana Dors’ Millions?

The Man Between (1953)

If you’re searching for a theme that connects Carol Reed’s sublime Odd Man Out, The Third Man and The Man Between, then, I suppose, ‘men on the run’ is the most obvious. But while James Mason’s Johnny McQueen is a doomed idealist, crucified by accident and circumstance, and Orson Welles Harry Lime is an utterly charming, yet chilling moral vacuum, in The Man Between Mason’s Ivo Kern is the post-conflict everyman for whom the start of the war brought an abrupt end to everything he held dear. Though Ivo is German, his fate was mirrored by millions of others round the globe - the war brought an end to the former lawyer’s life of easy rationality and social order; it shattered his belief in basic justice and humanity. Ivo is, simply, a hybrid of the first two characters. And all of them are ultimately doomed by love.

Critics saw The Man Between as a somehow failed The Third Man, the two sharing blasted post-war backdrops and a protagonist who ghosts between the West and the netherworld of a Soviet controlled sector. Here it’s Berlin rather than Vienna, but the similarities do the film a disservice; Ivo is no Harry, he’s no serial user of friends and lovers, a criminal from cradle to grave. Ivo is damaged goods, a man who served his country at huge personal cost, who cannot accept that even broken by an overwhelming burden of guilt, he is still capable of an altruistic act. As Kerns Mason is, of course, typically brilliant.

Claire Bloom is also superb as the resourceful Susanne Mallinson, the girl who gets unwittingly caught up in Ivo’s world of gangsters and political thugs when she visits her Army medico brother Martin (Geoffrey Toone) and his wife Bettina (Hidegard Knef). When Susanne suspects Bettina of an affair with the charming Ivo, she can’t imagine that she’ll become the kidnapped pawn in a plan to capture allied spy Olaf Kastner (Ernst Schröder). With the pieces moving swiftly around the board in Soviet East Berlin, can Ivo get Susanne safely back to the West?

Having earlier mentioned Reed and children, it would be remiss of me not to spotlight Dieter Krause as the young look-out, ‘Horst’ (kitted out, deliberately, to resemble the all-American ’kid down the block’), and, ironically, it is this child’s love for Ivo as much as the blossoming relationship between Susanne and the German, that precipitates tragedy.

The Man Between is beautifully scripted by Harry Kurnitz and an uncredited Eric Linklater from Walter Ebert’s story, with Mason given some delightfully spry one-liners - ‘The Germans always had to learn languages - the army never knew where it would be going next’. It might not be quite as sharp as Greene (but then who is?), and it suffers the tricky problem of having a multi-lingual cast of characters. Reed solves the problem of Germans speaking to Germans by first having them speak in their mother tongue then switching abruptly to English, a solution I never find satisfying. I missed Robert Krasker’s signature stark cinematography, but that doesn’t mean to say Desmond Dickinson doesn’t do a fine, if workmanlike, job, and he’s given lots of opportunity as Ivo and Susanne dodge through Berlin’s pock-marked nightime landscape. There’s an atypical John Addison score, a decadent clarinet sounding out the theme for a Berlin, the ‘city between’, that is caught in a tug-of-war - the acceptable face of capitalism pulling harder than granite hearted communism.

The Man Between is part of Optimum’s excellent UK R2 James Mason: Screen Icon Collection. There’s an oddity inasmuch as it’s presented in anamorphic 1.66:1, and I’m almost certain this 1953 film was framed for Academy; the German R2, I am told, is presented full frame. Wide, The Man Between is a little tight and there are too many shots that leave tops of the actors heads out of the top of the frame. It may be that it’s one of those films that was indeed shown wide, as the widescreen boom took hold, but I’m not entirely convinced it was shot that way. In fact, I’m nigh on certain it wasn’t. The good news is that it’s decent transfer with nice contrast and very few marks or blemishes. The only audio track is English mono, which is good, and there are no subtitles or extras of any kind.

The third link, I suppose, between the three Reed films mentioned in this review, is the sense of despair and futility as the end credits roll, a sharp contrast to the reaction to A Kid For Two Farthings, but strangely, somehow, not a million miles from it. It might be something in the English psyche that I can see even that as a positive reaction, and I ache to put myself through it again, and again.

P.S…

Just a quick word on the rest of the titles that make up Optimum’s James Mason: Screen Icon Collection which is in the usual space saving folding digipack arragement typical of this series. I’ve had a quick look at the rest of the titles and it’s interesting to note that three of the discs precisely replicate - transfers, extras, disc art and all - the extant versions; 5 Fingers, currently available from Optimum, plus Network’s The Man in Grey and the sublime, the spectacular (I do like it…) Odd Man Out. Only Network’s rather nicely put together booket, Soldier in The Snow, from that title is missing.

Ealing’s The Bells Go Down is a fair transfer, a little grainy, some flecking here and there, and like The Man Between, no extras whatsoever. There’s a bigger budget at play, and a recognisable cast of star names, but, as a visceral document of London’s Firefighters during the Blitz it can’t hold a candle (no pun intended) to the same year’s I Was A Fireman (aka Fires Were Started) from Humphrey Jennings. More on that some other time, hopefully.

Cry ‘God for Larry, Hammer Films and Network!’ April 29, 2007

Posted by John Hodson in : DVD News & Info, British Film , 6 comments

“If I wasn’t an actor, I think I’d have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life - it’s an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.”

Laurence Olivier 

2007 marks the centenary of the birth of Laurence Olivier (May 22 to be precise), once regarded as the world’s leading stage and screen actor.

Lord Olivier, as he was after being elevated in 1970 (the first actor to receive the accolade; the only other to be honoured by a peerage is Lord Attenborough), is, perhaps, perceived today as an old-fashioned declamatory actor, whose sometimes flamboyant film performances meant that even towards the end of his lifetime, he was being reassessed by those who preferred the minimalist approach of the modern thespian.

However, anyone who thinks Olivier should now simply be considered a rather choice smoked ham should watch, for instance, his spine-tingling performance as Archie Rice in The Entertainer, feel that frisson of disgust as his demonic ’Richard Crookback’ shuffles forward to confide and conspire with the camera in Richard III, genuinely thrill to the Agincourt speech in Henry V, or enjoy his quite intimate screen performance in Bunny Lake is Missing.

As well as bringing, via his screen adaptations, the works of Shakespeare to the masses - and having already mentioned cured meats - it must be said that Olivier relished the opportunity to ham it up with the very best. He couldn’t resist the chance to be lip-smackingly salacious in the adaptation of Harold Robbins The Betsy, and some think his French Canadian trapper ‘Johnnie’ in Powell and Pressburger’s The 49th Parallel maybe needs to be turned down just a notch or two (but not this fan). Towards the end of his career, if Hollywood wanted variations on any number of ‘mittle European ackzents’, Lord Larry was their man. Who can forget Olivier’s ‘weißer engel’, doing for dentistry what Jaws did for recreational swimming? Or his frail (he was actually ill at the time; in fact he was in ill-health for the last two decades of his life) but dogged Nazi hunter ‘Ezra Lieberman’ in The Boys From Brazil?

There’s a great story told by William Goldman about Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman turned up on set and Olivier was aghast at his appearance. The Great Man asked what on earth was wrong and Hoffman replied that he was playing a character who hadn’t slept all night…so Hoffman hadn’t slept.

Olivier, ever disparaging of ‘the Method’, gave him an exasperated look and said: ‘Why don’t you just ACT it dear boy?’

I always find Olivier, in productions good, bad, or indifferent, to be excellent value for money, in his Shakespearian roles he’s simply hypnotic. As a small boy I was bought an ‘EP’ (remember them?) of Treasure Island, with Donald Wolfit as ‘Long John’. I hadn’t a clue who Wolfit was at the time, but was told he’d been ‘a very great stage actor’, yet he was a man who was little regarded by the time he died in 1968. Maybe Olivier has become a ‘Donald Wolfit’ for another generation? Whatever. I loved that record and thought Wolfit was just fab. Olivier is fab too…

In R2, Network is prepping two box sets for release next month:

Laurence Olivier Presents: Five works by 20th century playwrights, presented by one of the greatest actors of the modern age, with an outstanding range of international talent. Plays include: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams); The Collection (Harold Pinter); Hindle Wakes (Stanley Houghton); Come Back, Little Sheba (William Inge); Saturday, Sunday, Monday (by Eduardo de Filippo).

and…

The Laurence Olivier Centenary Collection: Henry V, Richard III, The Ebony Tower, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Merchant of Venice, The South Bank Show: Laurence Olivier - A Life (originally aired in two parts), plus the six plays in the Laurence Olivier Presents box.

Meanwhile there are number of celebrations planned throughout the UK including special screenings. The BBC reported recently that Henry V gets digital makeover:

…For a screening at the Brighton Festival on the south coast of England this year, composer Dominic Sewell has digitally removed William Walton’s original score so that the film can have its music performed by a live orchestra. The orchestra will play the music in synchronisation with newly-remastered images on the screen - digitally enhanced as part of an ongoing project to celebrate the centenary of Olivier’s birth……Henry V, made to boost morale during World War II, is regarded as a British film classic. Olivier was both its star and director, and as such the film is at the centrepiece of the centenary of his birth in 1907.

Once it has been fully restored, it will be screened in a number of venues later this year - including at the Cannes Film Festival.

The process of digitally restoring it is being overseen by Fiona Maxwell, director of operations and servicing at British media company Granada International, which owns the rights to a number of Olivier classics.

She said that by going back to original 35mm negatives and re-transferring them on modern equipment, “we can get them back to their former glory.”

“We can regrade them, get the colour that is within those negatives,” she said.

While some restoration will also be in real time - by passing the negative through a bath to get rid of dirt, for example - the frame-by-frame restoration made possible by computer has meant that even scratches that occurred within the negatives on which the film was originally shot can now be removed.

“You can literally take a wipe across the screen,” Ms Maxwell said.

“Sometimes it’s like turning on light - because people have got used to dirt and fading, and think this is what an old film looks like.”

You’ll see at this link that Brighton Festival’s Henry V has sold out. And it looks superb too - Walton’s music, particularly the charge of the French towards the English bowmen, is fantastic. The scene - the sun glinting off the armour, the bright, primary colours of the banners and shields, the verdant battlefield, a deep, azure blue sky - should be a Technicolor marvel, but on the current unrestored R2 DVD, it’s sometimes drab and badly marked. A restored Henry V in all it’s Plantagenet splendour would be an eyewatering delight; it’s not been confirmed, but I cannot believe that the restoration will not be included in the ‘Centenary’ box. Here’s hoping.

‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’

This news from HammerWeb is being greeted with delight on various internet fora. Click though and you’ll see that DD Home Entertainment has struck a deal with Columbia which means that UK based DDHE - already responsible for a number of excellent Hammer and horror releases including The Quatermass Xperiment - is set to pull the trigger on even more Hammer:

“…A spokesman for DD is keen to stress that the exact titles due to be released are dependent on the results of an ongoing evaluation of archive materials, but we can confirm that the thirteen Hammer titles provisionally scheduled for release are The Camp On Blood Island, Cash on Demand, Creatures the World Forgot, The Damned, Don’t Panic Chaps, The Gorgon, Maniac, Never Take Sweets From a Stranger, The Stranglers of Bombay, Sword of Sherwood Forest, Taste of Fear, The Terror of the Tongs and Watch it Sailor. There may be other titles to follow.”

Tucked in with the Hammer news is this snippet: “In the meantime, DD’s release of Columbia titles will get underway with the British DVD premiere of the 1957 film Night of the Demon. DD are planning a collector’s edition of this classic horror film and work is already underway on exclusive behind-the-scenes extra features.”

Columbia has already done an excellent job in R1 with Night of The Demon / Curse of The Demon, but a release with some substantial extras would be marvellous. It’s one of the great iconic British horror films, deftly directed by Jacques Tourneur, the noirish shadows and suggestion creating far more creeping menace than the rubber monster foisted on Tourneur for the final scenes. I really must get round to buying Tony Earnshaw’s book Beating the Devil: The Making of ‘Night of the Demon’…

DDHE’s presentations vary in quality, sometimes excellent, sometimes awful, and sometimes they make elementary and frustrating mistakes in authoring. They do try hard, however, paying for the inclusion of a commentary here or a featurette there, and I rather like the booklets they often include with their bigger releases. They obviously haven’t the budget of the big studios to carry out major restorations on their own, but providing they are given decent elements in the first place - and you would think Columbia will have access to such - I’m quite hopeful.

With Warners hinting that they are set to revisit their Hammer titles - the crown jewels as far as most fans are concerned - it’s looking to be a great year for afficionados of the films from Bray and Elstree.

Things to Come… 

Finally - finally - the specs and art are up for the Things to Come: Special Edition on the Network site:

• Brand new digital restoration of the longest existing version
• Virtual Extended Edition – a viewing option allowing for the inclusion of text and images from long-missing and unfilmed scenes to present a tantalising ‘what if?’
• Brand-new audio commentary with Things to Come expert Nick Cooper
• On Reflection: Brian Aldiss on H.G. Wells – 25 minute documentary from 1971
• Ralph Richardson interview by Russell Harty in 1975
• Extensive booklet written by Nick Cooper
• The Wandering Sickness – an original 78rpm recording
• Comprehensive image gallery, including many rare stills
• Merchandise image gallery
• US re-release trailer

The artwork is beautiful, certainly an improvement over the proposed box art for the aborted 2006 release. One press release from Network adds: ‘This extended version is taken from a high quality 35mm print from the BFI archives’. If I recall correctly, the restored British Film Institute print, first screened a couple of years ago now, is some three minutes longer than the more commonly seen American cut. Nick Cooper confirmed to me that this release is an improvement on the DDHE transfer; just how much of an improvement remains to be seen.

The waiting is quite painful, and any readers of this blog will know it’s become something of a saga - not long to go, thankfully, now. I might actually get through a post without mentioning it!

Having said that, we may have to go though all this again (groan..). Word came out recently that the U.S. rights to a number of Korda films had passed from MGM / UA into the hands of Janus Films. The Private Life of Henry VIII, Things to Come, The Thief of Bagdad (to name but three), all from Criterion?

It’s a tantalising thought…

Comings…and Goings… April 10, 2007

Posted by John Hodson in : DVD News & Info, British Film , 1 comment so far

Ever since it was tentatively announced last year by Network in the UK, there has been much speculation about just what might be ’special’ about their ‘Special Edition’ DVD of Things to Come.

I’ve mentioned it here a couple of times and, it seems, disinformation and rumour has been the order. Up until now hopefully.

As reported previously, William Cameron Menzies seminal sci-fi epic is being screened at Sci-Fi London next month in association with distributors Network, and when details were at last posted on the Festival Website, it looked like we were in for an astonishing treat. Those details have now been amended, but originally they gave the running time as 116 minutes and claimed: “…Released in 1936 at 87 minutes, we screen the original director’s version with 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage. The film has been painstakingly restored and we present it in glorious HD….”

With some incredulity, I reported the above over at the Roobarb’s Forum, and got this reply from Nick Cooper. Note that the UK standard TV format, PAL, means that film runs 4% fast, so that when he talks of ‘uplift’ he’s quoting timings for film at normal speed without PAL conversion:

Sadly, that’s an error. Basically, the various reported or known running times of the film are:
130m - Rough cut (reported)
117m 13s - Version submitted to the BBFC in Feb 1936 (passed as an ‘A’)
108m 40s - London trade screening, premiere, and initial 1936 release
98m 06s - Shorter version in UK circulation by late-1936
96m 24s - American release - The version of the film that had always been released on VHS and shown on TV since 1986 in the UK runs to 92m 42s on film - 89m exactly in PAL format.

There are prints floating around in the US with two additional scenes and two segments from existing scenes running to 3m 42, that therefore “uplift” this running time to the 96m 24s of the US release, although they are otherwise missing other footage and therefore as a whole run shorter than 92m 42s.

The Network release re-instates these four scene/segments, as reflected by the BBFC-quoted running time of 92m 45s. The simple fact is that this is all the actual footage that remains from the film, barring a few alternate shots of existing scenes that survive in trailers.

Production paperwork is virtually non-existent, but there is a continuity/editing script containing an additional ten scenes or segments from existing scenes. Because each shot in this script is timed (in feet and frames), it’s possible to work out the extra running time of these ten scene/segments; overall they uplift the running time to 104m 41s.

Obviously this is still a bit short of the initial 1936 UK release and considerably less than the version certified by the BBFC. Wells published what was essentially the shooting script in October 1935, and it’s notable that where footage actually exists - or is documented in the above-mentioned continuity script - the published version is spot-on.

That’s not surprising, since Wells’s contract stipulated that the film had to be shot exactly as he wrote it, pretty much to the word, so the additional material does pretty much “fill in the gaps” that remain. That said, there are at least two scenes (coincidentally, one of which is being reinstated) that do not appear in the published script, so clearly there was at least one further revision before filming finished in late 1935.

More detail on my website: www.thingstocome.org.uk

My sincere thanks to Nick for clearing up the confusion on the running time front. It still looks like a treat - just not the one we might have imagined! All we are waiting for now is for Network to give us the news of any extra features, and for them to deliver a sparkling transfer with crystal clear sound. Here’s hoping, and with the May release of the disc still on track we won’t have to wait too much longer to find out.

Optimum’s yo-yoing schedule looks to have ‘yo’d’ against their proposed release of Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoleon. At first, they looked to be releasing a cut, sonorised, 1934 version of the film, but then, to much amazement, Optimum announced that they had reached a deal with Francis Ford Coppola to release his ‘restoration’ of the film with a score by his father Carmine. The result, in some quarters, was outrage and a call for a boycott of the release until Coppola, who claims to hold the worldwide rights for the film, came to an agreement with Kevin Brownlow to allow his much better restored version to be screened and released via the BFI on DVD.

Well, no need for that boycott now. Optimum has pulled the release from their schedule ‘due to a rights issue’. The deal with Coppola was apparently one he could refuse. Optimum’s release of Gance’s Austerlitz has also been canned.

Finally, in this mini news round-up, fans of vintage British films rejoice - I’m delighted to report that ITV DVD is set to release The Stewart Granger Collection: Adam and Evelyne, Blanche Fury, Caesar And Cleopatra, Captain Boycott, Fanny By Gaslight, The Lamp Still Burns, Love Story, Madonna of The Seven Moons, The Magic Bow and Waterloo Road come June in the UK. Huzzah!

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