How The West Was Hijacked? June 23, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , 14 commentsHow The West Was Lost
Rich Hall’s BBC 4 documentary How The West Was Lost, screened as part of the digital channel’s recent Westerns Weekend, was, despite my earlier - and as it turns out totally unfounded - fears, really very good. The American comedian’s take on the western was perceptive, intelligent, thoroughly researched and neatly presented; I trembled at the thought of a low-brow gallop through the stereotypes of the genre. What we got was 90 minutes of literate, articulate and energetic dissection, enlivened by Hall’s acerbic wit, and all of it coming from someone who clearly loves the genre.
Attempting to cram the entire history of the western into a mere hour and a half is clearly an impossible task, and I suspect many fans could have taken issue with some of Hall’s observations, but I found myself riding by his side from the off, from the moment he kicked the ass of the ‘film geek’ with his laptop, his bluetooth headseat and his braying assertions (shades of Woody Allen - if only life were like this…), to his description of what he was trying to do was film a documentary; no, not at all like An Inconvenient Truth - that was a ‘Powerpoint presentation’…
My estimation of Hall rose considerably as he not only exonerated Peckinpah from those misguided souls who would have him carry the can for the stomach churning horror pornography that passes today for ‘graphic realism’, but he also visibly coloured as he spat out the sobriquet ‘fuckwit’ in relation to George ‘Dubya’ and his cowboy politics (favourite film; alledgedly High Noon, which is a little redolent of the T.U.C. adopting ‘The Strawbs’ Part of The Union as their anthem). Not only do I, as most of us surely, like a little affirmation, but I stand and whoop at the passion. Go Rich.
The only point in the How The West Was Lost where Rich (and note, I feel we are on first name terms, buddies even; Richie, Richmeister, The Richster…) and I parted company was during his clear dismissal of the Spaghetti Western, principally, the entire western canon of Sergio Leone. Hall (because now I recall the calumny, we’re back to formalities), chucked the whole bowl of spaghettis into the air, damned them with (very) faint praise, and then disdainfully smacked ‘em waaaay out over the bleachers.
The problem, as it appeared to Rich, (deep breaths; forgiveness kicking in) is that the Italians contaminated this purest of American film genres with their Marxist / Catholic sensibilities. These pantywaist Europeans pissed long and hard into the water hole. Rich grimaced and narrowed his eyes at the thought; I wanted the screen to transmogrify into an enormous Leone-esque ’scope close-up, and then for me and him to circle each other in that slow dance of death. Cue Ennio…
Over the past few years, I’ve stared deeply into the part of my soul that wants to be buried at John Ford Point and I’ve come to the conclusion that - gulp - I too, am not a huge fan of the Italian Western per se (now we eschew the ever so slightly xenophobic connotations ‘Spaghetti’ brings to the table).
But I am a huge fan of Sergio Leone and the westerns he fashioned with various talented collaborators; yes, they’re pretty much all ’something to do with death’, which is in itself particularly Catholic, still, aren’t all westerns? Good meets evil; someone has to end face down in the dust. Though in Leone’s case, good meets evil…and usually a third character who straddles both heaven and hell. As for the politics, well, that’s a little more complicated, and more of that later.
Yet all Leone’s westerns are undeniably made by a filmaker who has a genuine passion for the genre, the films of his youth, those halcyon days before Benito came to town, made himself sheriff and buggered up the idyll. Westerns may affirm an idealised view of America for a country that even now seems desperate to hang on to a myth of nation building and it’s pioneers as the very apotheosis of rugged individualism, but their appeal fell far outside the borders of the country from which they sprang.
The whole world over, westerns spoke to small boys, little pardners of all ages, who just needed heroes; Leone simply aped his heroes, those behind as well as in front of the camera, at the same time bringing something unique to the table, an outsiders view of the western legend. Art sometimes reflected reality in an era when Walter Cronkite was bringing increasingly bad, and increasingly graphic, news from South East Asia into America’s comfortable and cosy living rooms. In life as in fiction, the lines between the good, the bad and the ugly were blurring.
It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last; I’ve touched on American interventionism as inspiration before - Leone’s idol John Ford’s Rio Grande approves of and reflects American foreign policy in Korea, and surely Vietnam informed The Wild Bunch. Among others.
In the States particularly, the hoopla that surrounded Leone’s supposed ‘realistic’ violence was not only turning into a very queasy joke, but smacked of Americans circling the wagons to protect their mythos, their westerns from them thar pesky furriners. Leone was accused of hijacking the western, but the truth is, before he burst on the scene so dynamically, the genre, if not drowning, was certainly going down for the second time. Leone didn’t hijack it as much as point a genre that was losing it’s way into a whole other direction, one which some talented directors would pick up and run with, and lesser artists would grubbily exploit, even to this day.
Either way, Leone must now be seen, surely, as among the giants; at the very least, as the Richmeister generously pointed out, no Sergio, no Clint. He still unforgiven Rich..?
Duck You Sucker (1971)
Some spoilers, I should warn you…
Produced at the height of the Vietnam conflict, Duck You Sucker - aka (the director’s preferred title) Giù la testa, A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon A Time…The Revolution, depending on which country it was released in - was Sergio Leone’s corrosive look at revolutionary politics. I will, by the way, stick with Duck You Sucker as the title, my comments here referring to the U.S. R1 DVD of that name, restored, mono sound and all, with scenes reinstated from various cuts following the premiere. Cuts. ‘Twas ever thus for the burly Italian.
Duck You Sucker depicts a fly-blown, dirt poor Mexico, a country in complete turmoil with ragged arsed revolutionaries tearing at the throat of heavily armed Government forces, an army bolstered by foreign mercenaries and capable of breathtaking atrocities, the tools of any despotic regime.
The ruling classes, we are shown from the off, are powerful, rich, corrupt and contemptible of the poor. The poor simply want what the rich have; it’s the getting of it that’s at the heart of Duck You Sucker. Leone, scion of Italy, the country that down the centuries has embraced bloody change, opens his film with a quote from Mao Tse-tung:
“The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.”
We are, then, drawn into the first act of violence, but it’s hardly revolutionary; Mexican bandit Juan Miranda (a hugely enjoyable Rod Steiger, employing an outrageous accent) and his family of six boys (plus aging father), hold up a plush coachload of characters who are the very definition of bourgeois excess, killing the driver and shotgun, Juan raping the only woman in the group. If it’s a political statement, it is one that is pure and simple; you’ve got it, I want it. And I have the gun.
Moreover, Leone portrays this ship of fools as wallowing in a cesspit of their own excess. The coach itself is massive, a railway carriage affair pulled by eight straining horses through the pisspoor countryside. Inside the pampered posse gulp down an epicurean feast, swilling it down with copious amounts of wine, the camera focusing on their mouths so that they become glistening anuses. They are talking, literally, out of their backsides. The amoral Miranda has no time for them, only what they have, and at the end of his particular rainbow, where they put it; a nice juicy bank.
Providence sends him John Mallory (another excellent performance, and another outrageous accent from James Coburn), an I.R.A. explosives expert turned soldier of fortune. As we learn from a series of unfolding flashbacks - Leone follows the old Fordian dictum of there being little use in discarding a good trick - John is both a fighter and a lover, one-third of a ménage à trois, but an act of betrayal, or more correctly two acts of betrayal that lead to the same end, culminate in a devastating act of vengeance. On the run, he has quit his native Ireland.
Mallory is both a revolutionary and an idealist. But his tacit partnership with Miranda means that he’s soon forced to reassess not only what revolution means for those expendable agents of change, the poor bloody proletariat, but also for those chattering classes who promote it, urging others onto the guns, while at the same time sharing the same self-serving morals as those they seek to depose. Viva Zapata this is not.
Leone, and his fellow screenwriters Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, gift Miranda the dialogue which reveal their own feelings on the nature of armed struggle. A pivotal speech comes as John studiously reads a copy of Bakunin’s political tract The Patriotism, and makes a throwaway comment about ‘the revolution’. Juan, who is, much to his disgust, becoming an unwilling and unwitting hero of the struggle, angrily turns to the Irishman:
“I know what I am talking about when I am talking about the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can’t read the books, the poor people, and say, “We have to have a change.” So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They’re dead! That’s your revolution.
Shhh… So, please, don’t tell me about revolutions! And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!”
John gives a thoughtful grunt, then tosses his book, with it’s series of earnest page markers, into the mud. Essentially, Juan’s speech neatly underscores the apparently glib opening Mao quote; no revolution without blood and sacrifice, but whose blood? Whose sacrifice? Well, Miranda’s for a start. In a scene that seems to echo the Mai Lai massacre of then recent notoriety, Juan’s family is wiped out, their bodies among the heaps of corpses that the camera glides over, touching on this body and that before settling on the image of the bandit’s tiniest son, his startled, innocent eyes wide open, staring into the dark.
Later, Leone’s camera sweeps majestically over the rail yards as the army machine guns pits of prisoners by their hundreds; if the Italian director has already forced his viewers to draw parallels with a contemporary revolution, here he shows us an image the could easily have come from the conflict of his youth, drawing both together. This is what happens in war; Mussolini and Hitler (to name but two) held no exclusivity when it comes to the authorship of unspeakable crimes against humanity. And the madness goes on.
Mallory is again thrust before the realities when the revolutionary leader Dr. Villega (Romolo Valli) is captured and the Irishman, hidden in the shadows, spies him fingering compatriots for Government forces. When Villega is released and rejoins the struggle, presumably as a double-agent, only John knows the depths to which this hypocrite is capable of sinking and that there’s hardly a cigarillo wrapper between him and mealy-mouthed Governor Jaime (Franco Graziosi), the hated figurehead of the oppressive government forces.
It’s interesting that the Americans portrayed in the film are fat-cat peripheral figures; Donati and Leone’s story, however, has the U.S. as the country Juan and John choose as escape, to put the whole slaughterhouse of revolution behind them. America, a land of milk, honey and those ‘big fat juicy banks’. Another myth, and one that’s ultimately out of reach for them both.
If all this seems a little heavy going, then I apologise for giving that impression, for Duck You Sucker is a fun film. Time and again, Leone follows a great tradition (dare I mention Ford again?) of mixing sometimes grim narrative with humour and Steiger and Coburn (neither, incidentally, Leone’s first choices for their parts), consummate movie actors, are more than adept at both. In one scene, Juan contemplates his loss, and sits in twisted torment, tears streaming down his face as Mallory looks on unable to offer anything by way of comfort where no comfort can be found; from a cage above, a songbird shits on Juan’s head. Slowly he wipes the slime away, looks up in resignation and says; ‘But for the rich you sing…’ John’s face creases into that familiar toothy smile; tragedy and comedy - two sides of the same currency.
In the comparitively slight, but often astonishing, Leone canon, Duck You Sucker is usually overlooked. However, it is now being re-evaluated as one of his very best, beautifully shot by cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini and produced with all the love, care and budget which, from For a Few Dollars More onwards, fans had come to expect; the hundreds of extras that fill gorgeous - occasionally horrifying - vistas that go on forever in towering crane shots, the sets and costumes and particularly the period uniforms of the military, the wonderful Ennio Morricone score, the startlingly humongous explosions that put the wind up his leads who were cheerfully urged ‘closer, closer…’ by their safely out of range director.
There’s delight too in the ’Wicked Witch of The West’ outfit - to suggest a potent, but pantomime combination of power & evil - that he clads actress Rosita Torosh in for that opening scene. It’s that fine attention to detail, the smallest references which he enjoyed and knew would appeal to fellow film buffs, which underlines Leone’s love affair with movies and the western in particular. Leone didn’t simply hijack the western, he re-energised it, however briefly.
Incidentally, while Mallory’s I.R.A. backstory is another clear nod in the direction of Ford, one wonders if the very first shot of Duck You Sucker, of Juan urinating into a nest of ants - and onto his leg - is another sly dig at his rival Sam Peckinpah (Leone showed Sam dead and buried in My Name is Nobody), whose famous opening to The Wild Bunch, of a scorpion stinging itself as it is attacked by red ants is a clear foreshadowing of events to come. Leone’s ants end up drowning in foaming piss and trodden under foot - another foreshadowing; socio-political certainly, but Marxism be damned.
One can only imagine what the suits at MGM thought of that opening scene, not to mention a film that dealt with revolution, the caravan of chaos that routinely follows the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, at a time when well-fed, privileged middle-class kids were tearing up the Berkeley campus. They probably choked on their martinis. And of course, at some 160 minutes long, the running time became - yet again - one of the battlegrounds on which Leone fought and lost.
As much as 40 minutes was hacked out following the premiere, dismantling one of the central themes - and one rarely addressed by the director up until this point - the fulcrum of real human relationships; desire, love, lust, revenge, loss, regret. It’s only recently, following MGM’s restoration on DVD can we appreciate the fuller picture that Duck You Sucker paints. Yes, it’s long and languid - it would hardly be Leone otherwise - but it’s a beautifully involving piece of work that actually belies the apparently bum-numbing length. Ironic that Leone actually didn’t want to direct (he had Peter Bogdanovich in mind), but both his leads threatened to walk unless he took the chair; the Italian wouldn’t do so again, officially, for another 13 years.
The final shot of Duck You Sucker is of a bereft, angry Miranda staring into the lens of the camera, into the eyes of you and I. ‘What about me?’, a plaintive line of Juan’s dialogue from earlier in the movie is repeated and in response up comes the title ‘Duck You Sucker’ - keep your head down, and run the other way when they urge you to fight.
Or simply steal their money; much safer…
Becoming John Ford January 2, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Documentary, Film & DVD Reviews, About John Ford , 4 commentsWho was John Ford?
Artist and artisan, romantic and misanthrope, a loyal friend who could be cold-heart mean to those closest to him, an intellectual who wrapped himself in the cloak of a clod, a liberal with hawkish tendencies, a director to whom home and family were central motifs, yet who couldn’t cope with family life, could not wait to get away from home.
And hide himself behind the cameras.
John Ford: “The truth about myself is nobody’s business but my own.”
Nobody, not any of the great Ford biographers and scholars (Joe McBride’s Searching For John Ford, and the Andrew Sarris tome The John Ford Movie Mystery sum up the hopelessness of the task in their titles), his family, the members of his ’stock company’, his close friends, have revealed the essence of ‘Pappy’, the secret of just who Ford really was, and more importantly perhaps, why.
Of course, there are theories and McBride’s mighty biography, maybe more than most, postulates a good handful of them. But at the end, the real John Martin Feeney, inveterate teller of tall tales, inventions and outright lies, refuses to stand up, and any impression we grab at seems to run through our fingers like fine sand. There appears to be no simple truth to tell; we print the legend. Ford would have lapped it up.
Nick Redman’s new documentary, Becoming John Ford (U.S.; R1 DVD), ostensively tells the story of the evolution of ‘A John Ford Picture’, and the title gives hope that some of the many unanswered questions will be addressed. Essentially, it’s the story of Ford’s tenure at Fox / 20th Century Fox and the pictures he made under the stewardship of producer Darryl F. Zanuck; we learn a little of Ford’s eponymous ‘becoming’, but the core conundrum remains. A tightly wound Gordian knot that simply deflects every investigative sword blow.
John Ford: “It’s no use asking me to talk about art. I’m a journeyman director, traffic cop in front of the camera. If I had my way, every morning of my life, I’d be behind that camera at nine o’clock, waiting for the boys to roll ‘em. I’m a picture man.”
Orson Welles: “Jack had chips on his shoulders like epaulettes.”
Not that there’s any attempt to disguise the problem. At one point, screenwriter Lem Dobbs says, almost in exasperation: “All this jibber-jabber about John Ford and talking about his films, and all the books that have been written, and the essays and articles in Cahiers du Cinéma; you know it’s nonsense in the end because it doesn’t ever explain anything.”
For the ‘jibber-jabber’, Redman has lined up an impressive array of ‘Fordians’ and film historians - Dobbs, Joe McBride, James d’Arc, Rudy Behlmer, Janet Bergstrom, Jean-Christophe Jeuffre - plus Peter Fonda and Tom Mankiewicz. For the ‘leads’, a pair of writer / directors: Walter Hill, a lifelong Ford fan, provides the off-screen voice of the Old Man himself, gruff and no nonsense, Ron Shelton is a business like, if somewhat snippy, Zanuck.
What we get in a little over 93 minutes is a fairly rapid run-through of Ford’s early years at Universal, how he teamed up with Harry Carey to establish himself as ‘a director of westerns’, signed an exclusive deal with William Fox, and though he’d been making pictures some seven years made the film world sit up and take notice with The Iron Horse in 1924. When Fox signed the German director F.W. Murnau, proclaiming him to be an ‘artist of the cinema’, Ford gaped enviously at Sunrise and declared it the best film he’d ever seen. For several years, he aped European expressionist cinema, until he found a voice all his own and prop-man, extra, storyteller, journeyman, the guy who ‘had an eye for composition’, the artist, the genius, became John Ford.
Lem Dobbs: “If there is genius in the system, then Ford was the genius within that system.”
John Ford: “Irish and genius don’t mix well.”
It is not until Fox merges with Zanuck’s 20th Century Pictures in 1935, and genius meets genius, that we get to the meat of the story. Zanuck would later proclaim Ford as the best of directors, a true master (Ford’s response was typical: ‘That’s horseshit’), while Ford, untypically, reciprocated, praising Zanuck as a terrific cutter, adding that as a producer: “Darryl’s a genius…head and shoulders above the rest.”
Zanuck himself said that he would ‘cut through the hokum’, that he ‘believed in comedy but not farce’, the assumption being that he stymied some of Ford’s proclivities for humour that could be considered too broad, or for meandering from the essentials of the story. Ford trusted him enough to give him carte blanche in the editing room, though he’d long perfected the technique of cutting in the camera, leaving barely enough trims to let anyone stray too far from his vision.
They proved a formidable partnership; Zanuck who just loved Americana, and the red, white and blue director who was born to portray the history of his country in film after film.
Though Ford railed against studio interference, claiming Steamboat Round The Bend could have been a ‘great picture’ but for “the new man coming in and wanting to show off”, he and Zanuck quickly came to form a close and mutually beneficial alliance. Ford’s throwaway comment that he shot the moving military funeral scene in Wee Willie Winkie on the spur of the moment, belies the truth. It was, in fact, Zanuck’s flash of inspiration during discussions the previous night. And, of course, it was Zanuck himself who put Ford at the wheel of the Shirley Temple vehicle, a film for which, Joe McBride insists, Ford should have received an Oscar, and not for The Informer, claiming the latter the inferior work.
Lem Dobbs: “The measure of an artist is the level of interference they are able to transcend.”
Joseph McBride: “He was a tyrant, he was a sadist. The John Ford family, it’s sort of like a bunch of abused children, and an abusive father. And yet they were devoted to him.”
Zanuck was never a ‘wannabee’ director, instead he proved a motivational figure, allowing Ford a high degree of artistic freedom. Together they made their studio piles of money, and their respective mantles were piled high with awards. From The Prisoner of Shark Island, to Young Mr Lincoln, Drums Along The Mohawk and The Grapes of Wrath, Ford and Zanuck would continue with America’s story. Or, rather, a version of it.
Rudy Behlmer insists The Prisoner of Shark Island is historically accurate. It’s not, but it doesn’t matter; as Bergstrom says, it was the French who first pointed out that what Ford was doing was not portraying reality, but America’s great mythology. Print the legend was this story teller’s credo.
Darryl F. Zanuck: “I have seen the first rushes and they look great.”
John Ford: “Boys; the front office like the rushes. There must be something wrong. We’ll have to keep shooting until we find out what it is…”
There are hints that, even before My Darling Clementine, Zanuck and Ford banged heads. It was Zanuck’s idea to shoot a more optimistic ending to The Grapes of Wrath, and when Ford slowed the tempo during Drums Along The Mohawk, Zanuck complained it was ’too draggy’ adding tersely “They are called moving pictures because they move.” I’ve long pondered just how much Zanuck influenced ‘Drums’, perhaps excising some of what he considered Ford’s longueurs, a few ’grace notes’, but that’s Becoming John Ford’s only clue.
Both Zanuck and Ford served their country during wartime; their immediate post-conflict collaboration at Fox proved to be possibly the most contentious. It was Zanuck’s insistence to shoot the kiss to end My Darling Clementine, simply because preview audiences demanded one. This wasn’t his only change, however; edits were made to speed up the action and more music added to underscore certain sequences. Ford was distraught. James d’Arc says he prefers Zanuck’s final edit, yet the extant preview cut is (available on Fox’s current DVD of the film), to my mind, the far superior version - either way, it was the Zanuck / Ford valediction.
For those new to Ford’s world, Becoming John Ford provides a wealth of information of Ford’s Fox years, though there’s so much more to tell. Then again, what are libraries for? The documentary is available to buy on DVD on it’s own, but it works best if you already have a number of the films discussed on your shelves, or if you buy it as part of the Essential John Ford Collection, a DVD sub-set of the gargantuan Ford at Fox box - even at an hour and a half, there are precious few clips of any length.
John Ford: “Kiss her on the mouth, man; put some passion into it!”
Actor: “But Mr Ford, she’s playing my daughter…”
For dyed-in-the-wool Ford fans, there’s little here that they won’t have read or heard before, though there are some nuggets; Mankowicz tells of a fresh faced Robert Wagner overhearing Ford discussing a problem with his cameraman on What Price Glory. Thinking he would bring an apple to the teacher, the naive Wagner piped up: “I have an idea Mr Ford…” He got no further because his director decked him.
There are also some interesting opinions, particularly from Dobbs who says that Howard Hawks’ heroes were all about professionalism, getting the job done, Walsh’s heroes were all adventurers, while Ford’s were all about tradition. Dobbs says that ‘tradition’ is the most interesting, and I, not surprisingly as a card carrying Ford fan, would strongly agree.
It’s Dobbs who also asks - and here we are back to our problem again - “How did this crude, ugly man in many respects, achieve a body of work of surpassing beauty and poetry and depth and complexity?” McBride says that the mask Ford wore was part of his “devious, Irish self-protection”, while d’Arc claims that My Darling Clementine is worth another look for evidence. Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday can, he argues, be read as Ford’s on-screen doppelganger, a man who is fearful of expressing his true feelings, slightly afraid of woman and relationships, who astonishes all when he quotes a Shakespeare soliloquy word for word. The big pointer, says d’Arc, is the handkerchief that he continually presses to his mouth, the last thing that Holliday releases as he falls into the dirt. It is an interesting theory.
Peter Fonda, doing a passable impression of the ‘Duke’, relates how John Wayne told him of Ford’s benders on board his beloved yacht Araner, how he would crawl inside a sleeping bag in the main salon, drink himself into oblivion, lie in his own excretia for days. It would be up to two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Wayne and Fonda’s father Henry - both men owing their careers to ‘Pappy’ - to cover their noses, haul him out and clean him up. Greater love hath no man; but does it betray an unbearable level of self-loathing that Ford would abuse himself in this manner? If it does, why? Why John Ford…and the circle is complete.
Shot in a mixture of colour and monochrome and presented in a ratio of 1:33.1 - the better to accomodate the film clips - Becoming John Ford is an interesting and professionally executed documentary, each talking head interviewed in situ as if they were in a cinema watching a Ford picture and gossiping on it and it’s author, the low flicker of film through projector as a background. Christopher Caliendo’s unobstrusive score is rather nice and Redman’s direction is neat and generally unflashy; at least it seems he had a budget to work on here, unlike the impoverished offerings in Warner’s Peckinpah box set.
Jean-Christophe Jeuffre: “John Ford’s pictures represent the eternal soul and spirit of America.”
The extras include Ford’s colour 16mm documentary The Battle of Midway, an 18 minute tribute to the men who fought off the Japanese fleet to take this strategic Pacific Ocean island. Ford said that if the camera shakes - and it does, frequently - it’s not for effect, it is because shells were exploding at his feet. Watching it today is still a pretty emotional and visceral experience; quite how it affected wartime cinema audiences I can only guess. The Battle of Midway, narrated by Donald Crisp, with the voices of Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and Irving Pichel, is in very good condition, as is the additional ‘Midway’ footage, also included in the extras.
You’ll also find the shortened version of Gregg Toland’s (who was also part of Ford’s wartime film unit) December 7th, which is in rather less fine fettle (the full version is available on DVD from VCI Video), besides displaying the kind of queasy wartime racism that ‘Midway’ eschews.
Rounding off the wartime shorts is the eight minutes long Torpedo Squadron, filmed without narration using footage from Ford’s time shooting ‘Midway’; an unembriodered, save for patriotic music, memorial to USN Torpedo Squadron 8, most of whom died during the fighting. I can barely watch this kind of stuff without shedding a tear, which marks me, not a veteran of course, but as the son of a family that served their country and paid the price.
Finally, there are vintage program galleries for The Iron Horse and Four Sons (beautifully reproduced in the large Ford at Fox box), pressbook galleries for six more Ford at Fox titles, plus advertising and stills galleries for many more. Sound comes in English stereo, with English, French and Spanish subtitles.
Last words from John Ford himself, Walter Hill lowering his voice into a conspiratorial tone:
“Y’know, I don’t want this to get out; I posed as an illiterate.
“Auditory imagery; the chance to project symphonic qualities for the creation and holding of a mood, so that pictures will no longer be limited to pure and simple narrative for material.
“Oh, I like talking pictures…”
Trick Or Treat… November 1, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, Horror, British Film , 10 commentsThirty 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…
A Peckinpah Idolator Writes… September 19, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , 9 commentsI was recently accused of being a Sam Peckinpah ‘idolator’. Stone me; accused. Like…this is a bad thing?
Being the internet, it’s not unknown for complete strangers to waft up to you and make what appear to be the most bizarre assertions, when in fact they’re only gently yanking your chain. Something I’m very well aware of myself; not being the most assiduous user of the ubiquitous ’smiley’ (the Luddite in me thinks the English language is a robust enough form of communication to illuminate without illustrations), my sometimes misplaced shafts of wit can be - have been - mistaken for declarations of war.
However, there was no doubt that this was an ‘accusation’, like being outed as a criminal - ‘YOU BOY! You’re a Peckinpah Fan!! SEIZE HIM!’ - or having a small, er, member - ‘Look at the size of your tiny Peckinpah! HAHAHAHA’ - and, to me, quite baffling. Akin to being denounced as a lover of battered cod ’n chips out of the paper, Edward Elgar, The Beatles, dandelion and burdock, the sound of waves crashing on rocks and the smell of my wife’s skin. All perfectly scrumptious things, every single one of them guaranteed to press my buttons - guilty on all counts.
But it’s a puzzle. I mean, how can one not admire one of the cinematic giants of the last century? I’ll stand up and be counted, yelling to anyone within hearing: ‘I AM a Peckinpah idolator!’ It would make a perfectly good t-shirt slogan, well, that or ‘Peckinpah fans do it in slo-mo…’
So, yes; let’s go - Sam was, and remains, ’The Man’. In my (and many, many, others) opinion. And there’s the nub, for, gentle reader, I coudn’t give a trio of flying plaster ducks what anyone else thinks. You can’t see it? What’s all the fuss? You have my deepest sympathy, but, please, step away from the blog. Quickly now. Shoo.
Sam Peckinpah’s star shone relatively briefly, but oh so very brightly. In little more than a bare handful of films he served up tales that worked on many levels. Rattling good narratives, wonderfully photographed and edited, within which, should you choose to look, can be found the paradoxical nature of human beings, their perverse desires and emotions, ‘good’ co-existing on the same plain as ‘bad’. In truth, what we’re seeing is Peckinpah’s view of the world and his own bruised relationships with friends, colleagues, family, the women he treated so badly; the director stripped bare. It’s a sometimes romantic, sometimes charming or brutal, odd times shockingly painful auteurism, but Peckinpah’s great films are never less than fascinating and tremendously rewarding, even if the mirror that is thrust into our face makes us squirm and sweat. Finding out precisely why is what makes ‘Bloody Sam’ so bloody marvellous.
He was a genius with dialogue, could transform a banal sow’s ear of a script into a silk purse. His endless hours in the cutting room, sculpting down 1000s and 1000s of feet of film, trimming by a single frame here and there, produced unforgettable adrenaline fuelled, dizzying scenes, beautiful images that excite, enthrall and stir our emotions. That is, when he wasn’t mean drunk or drug addled, busy inflicting a death by a thousand cuts on that wiry, increasingly frail, body, or pushing everyone that mattered away from him. Some mistake his work for nihilism; his end makes the error understandable, but the great films are so damned…human.
Yes, I do kneel in awe; Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch, Cross of Iron, Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (to name but a few of the few) are all works to astonish. I haven’t seen a film that bears him name that doesn’t have at least something to commend it, even such late autumnal frippery as Convoy. Well, that is, until now…
The Deadly Companions
This being a painful experience, I’ll try to keep this brief, so I’ll begin by summing up Sam Peckinpah’s first feature; what should have been a dazzling debut on the Hollywood stage, is a God-awful mess. Badly written, badly acted, clumsily directed and edited, the only fascination is waiting for some spark, some small sign, that this is a Peckinpah film. It never really comes. The Deadly Companions is so risible, it might have ended Sam’s career right there and then.
The saving grace is that this isn’t a Sam Peckinpah film…
Set in the late 1860s, ‘Yellowleg’ (Brian Keith), a former sergeant in the Union army, takes up with a couple of villains - Turk (Chill Wills) and Billy (Steve Cochran) - and together they plan a bank robbery. In a shoot-out, Yellowleg accidentally kills Mead (Billy Vaughan), the nine-year-old son of dance-hall hostess Kit Tilden (Maureen O’Hara). Riddled with guilt, Yellowleg seeks redemption by escorting the woman through Apache territory to the long abandoned gravesite of Kit’s husband, to bury her son next to him.
Now, come on; this is deep into Peckinpah territory (Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada provides the obvious echo), and all the elements are in place - children playing in the street, the preacher in the saloon (Strother Martin), Wills bad, mad ’Turk’ (a version of the character fleshed out properly in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid), betrayal, loss, remorse. None of it comes together; everyone seems to be acting in a different film. Only Keith, familiar with his director from their work together on television, appears to find anywhere near the right rhythm.
The characters, burdoned with clumsy dialogue, seem to be barely sketched in; Wills and Keith are occasionally interesting, but nothing is carried through to a proper conclusion. Poor Steve Cochran, resplendent in a slightly bizarre, pristine, gunfighter’s garb, is simply surplus to requirements and Lord knows what O’Hara is supposed to be. Kit is clearly meant to be a woman forced to do anything to make ends meet, and thus a town pariah; like Yellowleg, she’s an outsider. But dressed to the nines in immaculate make-up, even in the most harrowing circumstances, there’s not a hint of that in O’Hara’s performance, it’s all so…bland; a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit.
I didn’t care about Kit’s loss, about whether they’d make it or not, about who was going to live and who was going to die, there was no suspension of belief. What was fascinating was the fact I was watching A Very Poor Film bearing the name of A Very Great Director…and thus an absolute must see for Peckinpah completists.
The direction is barely adequate, the odd flash, nothing more, no-one paying any great attention to the continuity, the cutaways or editing. The frankly irritating score by Marlin Skiles would have disgraced a TV movie, the whole topped and tailed by la O’Hara warbling some pastiche of a melancholy ‘oirish’ ballad, penned by Skiles and the multi-talented ’Charles B. FitzSimons’.
Oh, yes. Not a Peckinpah film.
Rewind. Having given Sam an ultimatum to soften his approach on his hard-hitting, critically acclaimed television series The Westerner - and Sam being Sam, told them where to shove it - the next big step for Peckinpah was into film. His star in The Westerner, Brian Keith, had just had a huge hit with the sugary pap that was The Parent Trap with Maureen O’Hara and was offered the lead role in what was a pet project of O’Hara and her producer brother Charles FitzSimons.
Keith, who saw a ‘pretty bad’ script, was in; providing Sam Peckinpah was sat in the director’s chair. Sam would fix The Deadly Companions, no problem; it was the sort of challenge he relished.
Except. FitzSimons had laboured three years on that piece of crap, with the author of the novel ‘The Deadly Companions’ A.S. Fleischman, and believed that the film was destined for greatness. He had to take Peckinpah to get Keith, but that didn’t mean he had to use him. When Sam turned up with 20 pages of rewrites, according to David Weddle, author of Sam Peckinpah; If They Move Kill ‘Em, FitzSimons promptly stuffed them in the waste bin and told the stunned director that he’d been hired to direct, not write. If only.
The film has pretensions that it can’t hope to fulfill given the circumstances. Shot in Panavision - with a handful of glorious shots cobbled together by Sam and his veteran cinematographer Bill Clothier - the credits proclaim ‘Filmed in it’s entirity in THE STATE OF ARIZONA and at the town of OLD TUCSON’. Even the use of Clothier, who had worked with Ford, is a statement of sorts.
FitzSimons and O’Hara clearly wanted ‘greatness’ on the cheap. Their budget was a miserly $530,000, their schedule a bare 21 days. FitzSimons stood over Peckinpah every one of those days, ordering him, like a callow rookie, how to stage and shoot scenes. He also forbade - forbade - Peckinpah from giving his sister direction. Having been ordered about the set by Ford, O’Hara clearly felt herself too grand to submit to entreaties from this movie whelp.
Naturally, in her tedious autobiography, ‘Tis Herself, Ms O’Hara has a rather different version of events, recalling that it was a ‘fiasco’ because Peckinpah hadn’t got a clue how to direct a movie. “He was oblivious to the fact that he was missing shots that were necessary to cut together a cohesive story in the editing room” says Maureen of one of cinema’s great editors, adding that ‘Charlie’ had to come in each day to tell him which reaction and cutaway shots were needed. The final film was ‘too artsy’ because Sam wouldn’t shoot the big action scene in which our merry band fight off those pesky injuns. Oh, if only he’d have listened to his leading lady and her producer brother, but obviously our debutant director just would not be told…
When shooting was over, FitzSimons kicked Sam out of the cutting room and edited this patchwork melodrama together himself. The Deadly Companions was quickly seen for what it was, dumped into a few flea-pits and promptly disappeared. It was subsequently reissued in the States on the back of Sam’s later hits as Trigger Happy. So much for ‘greatness’. I would have paid good money to see the look on the faces of O’Hara and FitzSimons when Ride The High Country came romping home.
Optimum’s UK R2 disc of The Deadly Companions has no extras, not even a trailer. But the transfer is really very good, colourful and true and there’s barely a mark to be seen in this anamorphic ’scope presentation. The mono English soundtrack (the only option) occasionally goes in and out of synchronisation; this could be a disc / player related problem, but I’m not completely positive, the problems (not huge) reoccuring in the same places on multiple viewings. There are no subtitles. The menus are backed by O’Hara belting out that incongruous theme song, which is truly annoying; she has a decent voice, but what were you thinking Charlie?
Despite my very large reservations over the film, I’m really glad to have The Deadly Companions and to have seen it, at last, in it’s original aspect ratio.
All the more in view of what arrived in the post - thank you Dave - only a few days later…
The Westerner: Jeff
If The Deadly Companions gives the impression that Sam Peckinpah went on a directorial crash course between that and his next project, the sublime Ride The High Country, then watching the 30 minute gem that is Jeff, the first jaw-dropping episode of 13 he made for Dick Powell’s Four Star Productions of The Westerner, will quickly reassure that this visionary’s talent was already very firmly in place.
Let’s rewind again, a year or so before FitzSimons needed a patsy. Peckinpah had come off a successful run of TV’s The Rifleman, nevertheless slightly disillusioned; he wanted to fashion something grittier, something over which he had absolute control - writing, editing, dubbing, the works. Powell gave him that freedom and Sam came up with the goods - The Westerner. Thirteen half hour episodes, starring Brian Keith as the eponymous drifter ‘Dave Blassingame’, produced by the finest talent Peckinpah could assemble, and at the top of the pecking order with final say, honing scripts, cajoling, yelling at his team, encouraging them to aim higher - Sam himself.
Opening the series was Jeff, an astonishingly tight (like the rest, shot in a mere three days), intelligent and gripping half-hour playlet that comes on like a short movie rather than production line television. Directed, like five other The Westerner episodes, by Sam and co-written by him with Robert Heverley, Jeff was photographed by Lucien Ballard, in stark, high contrast monochrome, beginning a partnership that would continue through five feature films together.
Jeff opens with a shot of Warren Oates, one of a gaggle of boozy cowhands, getting liquored up in a dingy little fly-blown border bar. It’s Oates first time with Peckinpah, certainly not his last, and he doesn’t utter a coherent word. On The Westerner, Peckinpah would begin to assemble his stock company.
The drunks have their lascivious eyes on Jeff (Diana Millay), the bar’s ‘hostess’, there to serve more than just drinks at the behest of owner Denny Lipp (wonderfully played by Geoffrey Toone). Denny is an English bare-knuckle fighter, still in good shape, and not averse to using his meaty fists on the girl. His girl.
Into this God-forsaken town, on a dead beat horse, rides a weary Dave Blassingame (Brian Keith). Dave is accosted by an older woman, the light of God in her mad eyes, a copy of the scriptures for sale in her outstretched hands. Blassingame sees a charity case, pays the woman, and stomps off purposefully into the bar with his dog ‘Brown’.
Blassingame has come into town to rescue Jeff, a girl he knows from way back, from her nightmare existence. However, Denny returns to the bar with his cronies. Of course they fight, but the kicker is that Denny has a desperate need for the girl who has become his slave. Bested and humiliated, he yells at Blassingame to take her and get out…but she simply can’t leave her pimp and this abusive relationship; ‘You want something that isn’t here’ Jeff tells Dave sadly ‘You want something that maybe never was.’
The director / writer, whose own marriage was fast falling apart, gives voice to his own disillusionment, his own bitterness. As Dave goes to leave and Jeff tries to console him, Blassingame tells her softly: ‘Why should I worry about you?’ while at the same time, oh, so gently unknotting a ribbon from her hair and palming it into his heart’s pocket. Pure Peckinpah.
‘My dad used to tell me women must be God’s favourites ‘cos He made ‘em finer than anything else in creation’ Blassingame informs a triumphant Denny, ‘Well He must hate your guts for what you’ve done to ‘em.’ The fighter retorts that Dave is a sore loser. ‘I sure am’ says Blassingame quietly before laying out Denny with a haymaker, an empty victory.
As he leaves town, Dave once again meets the grubby religious woman (modelled certainly on Peckinpah’s mother, Fern) who asks him if he did in fact find salvation? Blassingame shakes his head; ‘And you?’ he replies. ‘I surely have’ she says smiling a lunatic smile, and behind her, scrawled on an adobe wall, we can see the words: ‘Tonight a soul is lost / He wonders the wide earth / But he finds only emptiness.’
The piece is a joy and must have hit 1960s America like a slap across the kisser; the dour, downbeat set, sawdust scattered on the floorboards, the vicious fistfights, the noir-like lighting, the glowering, deadly indian bartender, the whole seedy setting for this tale of romance, a love triangle. The script is finely tuned, the dialogue is clearly Peckinpah; the whole cast, but Denny’s preening pimp, dressed shabbily, their faces dirty, clothes torn and dusty, even - especially - the girl. And all, I’ll remind you, in just 30 blissful minutes, several years before Leone’s own western triumphs.
Weddle describes Jeff as a ‘minor masterpiece’, and it’s so far from Peckinpah’s work on The Deadly Companions that it’s impossible to reconcile Sam as author of both…but then, as described, he wasn’t.
Edge of Darkness August 20, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Action / Adventure / Thriller , 4 commentsIn 1985, heavily pregnant with our first child, my wife was admitted into hospital, doctors concerned at her steadily rising blood pressure. There was nothing to be alarmed about, we were constantly assured by Labour Ward staff; ‘…just routine’, ‘…everything will be fine, no need to worry’. And yet there was, there really was.”Did you remember?” said my partner, clutching at my arm as she lay in her newly made up bed, her brow knotted with anxiety, “Did you remember to tape Edge of Darkness?”
Katherine Louise - Katie, Kate, or just plain Kat to her contemporaries - was born on December 2, that same night episode five, ‘Northmoor’, was broadcast and duly captured on VHS. Just over a week or so later, my wife returned from hospital with our beautiful daughter swaddled cosily in a blanket. Exhausted, relieved, glowing, she relaxed on the sofa and, while our child slept soundly (a miracle in itself), demanded we sit through all six episodes of this majestic BBC series back to back.
Music rises to a crescendo, fade out, cut to:
2007. That little baby, my little baby, is now 21-years-old and on a different medium - DVD - ’Detective Ronald Craven’ is still red eyed mourning the death of the his 21-year-old daughter, his little girl. This most significant of television dramas suddenly takes on a whole new significance. We’re joined at the hip, this bluff Yorkshire cop and I, he’s living in a horrifying world of pain that I can at long last - but have no real wish whatsoever to - truly empathise with. The crushing weight of his grief suddenly reaches out of the screen and becomes suffocating. I stifle a sob, silent tears prick my eyes.
Just as that opening, gut-wrenching scene in Don’t Look Now during a TV showing a couple of decades ago, roused my wife who said quietly: ‘I’m just going to check on Kate…’, I glance at the window, urging her car to turn into the drive. Powerful stuff, the ties that bind. And they only get stronger. I feel a certain synergy at work…
Edge of Darkness
…He cried like a baby
He screamed like a panther
In the middle of the night
And he saddled his pony
And he went for a rideIt was the time of the preacher
In the year of ‘01
Now the lesson is over
And the killing’s begun…The Time of The Preacher - Willie Nelson
Hark! What is that noise like ten thousand honey bees? A host of angels, a veritable celestial choir of cherubim, a’plucking at instruments fashioned by omnipotent Titans? Better than that, gentle reader, for it is Eric Clapton. God himself, in fact, who, with Michael Kaman’s orchestrations, and a few choice popular songs (Tom Waits, New Order, and let’s give a really big hand to Mr Willie Nelson, whose lyrics above almost form a libretto …) gave the BBC TV nuclear thriller Edge of Darkness a great and wonderful gift, something that would enable it to defy time itself. A score that was written in the mid-’80s.
But doesn’t sound like it.
Of course, it’s not the only reason that Edge of Darkness is still so very powerful, so relevant today. Far from it, but, unlike many contemporary productions the score doesn’t set it firmly and irretrievably in the period, like a mosquito caught in amber, or Axel Foley trotting through Beverly Hills to a Harold Faltermeyer riff.
Clapton’s agonised guitar, gently weeping for, well, any number of things as we are soon to find out, is the first thing we hear as the curtain rises on this finely crafted six part series. Eric’s guitar, backed by the irritating honking of an alarm, guards peering warily into the murk, and the clank and rattle of train carriages, one of them routinely carrying an innocent looking flask containing enough nuclear material to irradiate a good part of the western hemisphere for two lifetimes or more.
If you aren’t hooked now, even after these few seconds, you probably never will be.
[Watching a recording of ‘Come Dancing’] Nobody dances like the British! They deserved the Falklands.
Darius Jedburgh
The story. While investigating a union ballot rigging scandal, Yorkshire CID officer Ronald Craven’s daughter Emma is brutally murdered. Craven subsequently finds that Emma is part of a shadowy ecological action group, Gaia, that has broken into Northmoor, a nuclear waste processing plant, and the subject of an American takeover. With the help of a larger than life CIA officer, Darius Jedburgh, Craven determines to get into Northmoor, to retrace the Gaia team’s footsteps, and unlock the underground plant’s dark secret.
Edge of Darkness was, and remains, a television phenomenon. Eerily prescient, touchingly human, unbearably moving, gently humorous, it struck gold at the 1986 BAFTAs winning a clutch of awards, after receiving seven nominations. Bob Peck deservedly took ‘Best Actor’ or his role as Craven, a characterisation that must have put the 41-years-old Peck through an emotional wringer for weeks on end. Craven spends most of the piece in utter despair, willing to risk all to try and make sense of his loss, but more importantly perhaps, to discover simply who his daughter, Emma (Joanne Whalley), was, who she had become, and why. There’s a quite marvellous shot, Edge of Darkness’s most iconic perhaps, of a completely uncomprehending Craven, lying blank eyed on his dead daughter’s bed, the room still full of the detritus of Emma’s childhood, her teddy bear clutched to his chest in one hand, her gun lying casually across his crotch in the other; a neat Freudian touch.
Craven’s relationship with his daughter is central to the narrative, and any queasy ambiguity I may have sensed in it in the mid-’80s, has now evaporated. After she’s blasted into bloody eternity by both barrells of a sawn off shotgun, Emma returns to haunt her father. She appears and disappears randomly, post mortem, to tell her father some unwanted home truths, to drop the odd hint. Craven’s mind, trying to make sense of a senseless murder, begins to slot piece after piece into the puzzle with these clues ostensibly and dramatically, from beyond the grave. But of course, Emma’s dead and buried, and it’s the grief stricken copper’s imagination that simply won’t, can’t, let her rest in peace. Not yet, not until he knows why.
It was the stoic Emma, barely 10-years-old, who comforted her father when Craven lost his wife to cancer. She was the rock on which Craven clung in sheer desperation, the only constant in his world. But Emma has been living a life of which Craven knows nothing; she’s the daughter of a police officer and a suspected ‘terrorist’, and it’s this duality that’s a recurring theme in Edge of Darkness. Most everyone appears to be playing a double game, while themselves being relentlessly played.
“Well, bodies kept turning up in the bunkers, and you need air support to play outta the rough. Kinda puts you off your game.”
Darius Jedburgh
Peck isn’t given the choicest lines in Troy Kennedy Martin’s densely packed and convoluted story - those go to Joe Don Baker, also nominated, for his juicy portrayal of the hugely enjoyable CIA spook Darius Jedburgh - but, the camera doesn’t lie, constantly roaming over Peck’s face in tight close-ups that shriek volumes. Peck defines Craven’s implacable, truly haunted stillness perfectly, he is the calm at the heart of the storm that wheels around this irresistible, immovable detective.
Director Martin Campbell and Producer Michael Wearing lifted their award for ‘Best Drama Series/Serial’, Andrew Dunn, who produced some memorable imagery won ‘Best Film Cameraman’, and ‘Best Film Editor’ was shared between Ardan Fisher and Dan Rae. Of course, messers Clapton and Kaman took the ‘Best Original Television Music’ category, and Joanne Whalley, an actress who showed so much promise before flitting to Hollywood to become a hyphen, was nominated but did not win.
There was no BAFTA for Best Script; had there been, Kennedy Martin, a veteran scriptwriter with The Italian Job, Z Cars, The Sweeney and many others to his credit, would have been a shoo-in. Delightfully, it’s a script that rewards on multiple viewings, those quick-fire, almost throwaway, lines revealing new depths of character, new twists and turns as cross becomes double, triple cross. No-one is quite whom they seem, no-one appears to have a clear motivation. Except Craven.
It’s almost extraordinary, in these days of bloated TV franchises, that Kennedy Martin manages to fit a narrative with such scope into this neat package. ‘Nuclear thriller’ almost diminishes the scale of what’s on offer here. From almost parochial beginnings, it becomes apparent that at stake is the future of the human race itself, whose fate of first becoming the slaves of the new atomic demi-Gods, and then crossing the universe as some sort of star hopping nuclear stormtroopers is clearly mapped out by the chairman of the ‘Fusion Corporation of Kansas’ (a sly allusion, I believe, to The Wizard of Oz) Jerry Grogan (Kenneth Nelson). This diminutive, fascistic American, is heading what to all intents and purposes is a putsch, in his thrall, the most destructive power on the planet both freeing and enslaving mankind. As Edge of Darkness demonstrates, decades on from Oppenheimer, the wielding of such ultimate power can also bring ultimate destruction, especially under the immature stewardship of homo sapians. If man is willing to glibly offer up his home world as sacrifice for such a nightmare, then what can save the Earth…or is the planet, is she, more than capable of defending herself?
That’s the problem with plutonium, Craven; it’s limited in its application. It’s not user-friendly. But as a vehicle for regaining one’s self-respect, oh, it’s got a lot goin’ for it. Damn right I turned it into a bomb!
Darius Jedburgh
These were controversial issues that were at the cutting edge of the news agenda back then, far more so today. The ‘Gaia’ theories - that living and nonliving parts of the earth are viewed as a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism - postulated by Professor James Lovelock in the 1960s, and dubbed ‘crank science’ by the scientific establishment at the time, were key to Kennedy Martin’s story, as the hypothesis gained new credence by what was still a nascent ecological movement. That man would sow the seeds of his own destruction, that the planet would fight back, seemed like the stuff of science fantasy however, even the blink of an eye that was 22 years ago.
This is heady stuff for a story that begins with an almost mundane police investigation in deepest Yorkshire. For Kennedy Martin, it was a deliberate dramatic device: “The art is to start with a familiar idea and take the audience with you on a plane, so that when they look down they are thousands of miles above the Earth.” Edge of Darkness; it’s a wide-ranging thriller, it’s an intimate human tragedy, it’s also a very hefty swipe at the nation’s contemporary nuclear strategy, wearing it’s left leaning politics so very visibly on it’s sleeve that then Labour Shadow Cabinet member Michael Meacher MP was given a small ’acting’ role (as himself). The Tories were apoplectic. Oh, goody…
Kennedy Martin has said his series was driven by a feeling of political pessimism, (which this writer shared), Reagan and ‘Star Wars’ in The White House, the jingoistic Thatcher in Number 10, and a feeling that Britain was being herded towards becoming a nuclear state. But there is also, he says, a moral optimism, inspired by the very notion of ‘Gaia’, the birth of new movements and new ideas.
Intriguingly, Kennedy Martin initally intended Craven and Grogan to be polar opposites in every way, our Yorkshire hero to be the embodiment of the ‘Green Man’ “…the spirit of the planet” he recalled “whose destiny was to confront and destroy in the name of the planet the free-market forces of modern entrepreneurial capitalism.”
At the end of the story, Kennedy Martin famously had to be dissuaded from the ultimate ‘green’ denouement - turning Craven into a tree, an idea both Peck and Campbell baulked at. In Troy Kennedy Martin’s introduction to Edge of Darkness (Faber and Faber, 1990) the writer says: “This aspect of Edge of Darkness usually separated the men from the boys at Television Centre. “I am writing a story about a detective who turns into a tree.” “Oh, yes,” would be the guarded reply. “Who’s this for, Channel 4?” Eventually I was persuaded out of the notion but not before some of its spirit had rubbed off on Craven’s character.”
For Joe Don Baker, his portrayal of the golf-obsessed Jedburgh is probably the role of his lifetime. Jedburgh is old-school CIA, he knows all the dirty tricks, invented most of them, he’s a wildly eccentric loose cannon, almost teetering on the edge of insanity. Baker’s performance is as huge as Peck’s is subtle, and he makes his red, white and blue warrior not only Craven’s best ally, but also the one most likely to put a bullet in his brain. As the mob hit man in Charley Varrick, Baker was deadly and detestable, as the unpredictable and unstable Colonel Jedburgh he simply lights up the screen, but his character, if anything, is every bit as dangerous. Baker was fulsome in his praise of the production: “In America, they just churn these things out, you mess it up and it’s ‘move on son’. They just couldn’t have been better, they asked me time and again did I want another take and I could do it as often as I needed until I felt it was right. Quality was everything.”
They said get into the ball game, and steal the ball.
Darius Jedburgh
It’s Jedburgh who immediately sizes up Craven, croons Willie Nelson’s ‘The Time of The Preacher’, which Craven, smiling a knowing smile, duets. Favourite Jedburgh moments are plentiful; the sight of this bear-like killer hunkering down on his sofa with a bucket of popcorn and a recording of Come Dancing; upending his golf bag and tipping balls, clubs, a carbine and several hand grenades on the floor; realising that Craven is going to break into Northmoor, his face wreathed by a huge grin at the prospect; producing two poisonous, panic inducing bars of plutonium from a briefcase - ‘Get it while it’s hot!’; skittering purposefully round the Highland cottage for that last grim showdown.
The rest of the casting is perfection; the gorgeous Zoë Wanamaker as ‘Gaia’ activist Clementine, Tim McInnery as Emma’s slimy lover, Charles Kay and Ian McNeice as a pair of British spies, the very antithesis of Bond, John Woodvine, Jack Watson, right on down to the Gordon Wharmby as the ’Caretaker’ - the devil is in the detail, and the detailing is really quite special. I wondered about Jedburgh, and how much like Brando’s Kurtz he looked in his uniform. There’s also the scene where Craven and Jedburgh break into a secure room piled high with art and luxury goods, antiques, an MG sportscar, fine wine and food - tinned lobster, caviar - stashed away during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Watching the pair tuck incongruously into a candlelit dinner deep beneath the earth, also reminded me of Apocalypse Now. It is likely coincidence, but I like to think of it as a nod.
Edge of Darkness is one of the great television highlights, certainly from my lifetime. Most TV is really quite ephemeral, but any decent drama can stand the test of time, while some actually improve with age, with each viewing. Edge of Darkness is that rare beast, a critically lauded production that’s as satisfying, as relevant, and - for this viewer at least - more gripping, more personal and thought provoking than it was in 1985. Even if someone may have to ask: ‘What’s a union leader? And what’s a coal miner..?’
I am NOT on YOUR side!
Ronald Craven
The BBC’s two-disc DVD set has been around for a while now in the U.K., superseding an inferior release from Revelation. The transfer is quite decent, blocking occasionally on the darker scenes, but overall it’s clean, with good sound; it looks and sounds exactly what it is, two decades old telly. There are a number of extras; a 35 minute featurette ‘Magnox - Secrets of The Edge of Darkness’, a clip from the BBC’s ‘Did You See?’, Bob Peck - who tragically died in 1999 - relaxing with Frank Bough, and his knitwear, on the ‘Breakfast Time’ sofa, BAFTA interviews with Peck and Baker, plus two more interviews post the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards from 1986 with Peck and Michael Wearing. There’s also an isolated score, but, as it’s used sparingly and infrequently (unlike today), it’s not something you’d listen to recreationally.
New Zealander Martin Cambell, has, of course, gone on to grander productions - Casino Royale is just one - but none better. Five years ago he expressed a desire to bring Edge of Darkness to the big screen. I close my eyes and think all-action car chases, explosions, a Yorkshire cop transmogrified to one of New York’s finest, Grogan replaced by a Russian oligarch. Dear God, Martin, nooooo…
The Chattering Cyclops… August 10, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews , add a comment‘How naive of me to think a mere atom bomb could fell the chattering cyclops!’
Sideshow Bob - The Simpsons; Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming
There’s a danger inherent in watching anything, I suppose, that you aren’t too familiar with, something you admired only in a dim and dusty past. There is the awful possibility that you now see it for what it is and always was, a total clunker. A blessed memory, forever to be thereafter indentified as ‘fools’ gold’. Dear God in heaven, what kind of numbskull could ever have seen anything in that? Please sir, it was me; I was that numbskull…
Nowhere is this better expressed than in the arena of archive television, the endless hours of safe, homogenised, conveyor belt entertainment, acted out on rickety cardboard sets, appalling formulaic scripts mouthed by those of little talent, directed by those with little interest. All we have to protect ourselves is a butter-hued glow of nostalgia, strip that away and it’s another piece of your past exposed to the withering gaze of cruel reality, trodden underfoot by the grim march of time, expunged from the file marked ‘happy memories’.
I was glued to the box when Starsky and Hutch were roaring round the mean streets of, well, wherever the hell it was shot, in that big red phallus of theirs (my car at the time, a red Escort 1100, was trimmed accordingly - eat rubber suckers…); have you even tried to sit through the first five minutes of this buddy cop flim-flam recently? Don’t get me started on The Six Million Dollar Man, and did I really think that thirtysomething was essential viewing? The Thought Police will surely come and cart me away right after I admit, at chez Hodson, there were guffaws as the nuclear family sat around and gawped at Love Thy Neighbour. Gulp.
Television cooks up huge amounts of material, chews it up and vomits it out. Sometimes it’s simply crafted (and I use the term loosely) for the ‘now’, instant culture, digested and plopped into the toilet bowl of history (dare I mention repeats, or is that enough, already, of the bodily functions analogies). Odd times it’s good enough still to call down the years, but with all this, this…stuff, you have to be careful when you’re mining the archives. What’s that? They’ve released Big Breadwinner Hog on DVD; I think I liked that. ‘Think’. Not good enough with limited shelf space, limited time (limited funds). Watching the ‘chattering cyclops’ today, most shows seem to have outstayed their welcome almost by the time the opening credits fade. It’s hard to believe now isn’t it, for example, that both The World at War, and Brownlow and Gill’s Unknown Chaplin were broadcast by the U.K.’s premier commercial channel during ‘prime time’; those were days when documentaries were possibly the only examples of ‘reality TV’.
I’ve not been big, then, on revisiting old TV shows, my DVD collection betraying relatively few examples, and mostly those that I’m truly certain that I will enjoy again and again - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I Claudius, The Prisoner, The Norman Conquests, Pennies From Heaven, ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (both Jeremy Brett and Peter Cushing), Fawlty Towers, what exists of ’Quatermass’, a handful of ‘Who’ - for old times sake, I was there when they broadcast the first episode - Shooting The Past, ‘Blackstuff’, well, you get the idea. A mixture, I would hope, of genuine classics and barefaced nostalgia. But what is becoming apparent is, I’m turning to more and more of it.
Now that may be as a result of the desperate need to fill up the many dozens of channels now broadcasting via cable and satellite, so, I’ve been able to catch a few gems - and a few scruffy examples of cheap and nasty fake jewellery - that haven’t seen the light of day on terrestrial telly for years. And it’s the tip of the iceberg. Both ITV and the Beeb are planning on opening up their archives to enable downloads of decades of programming - from Hughie Green to Camberwick Green, The Newcomers, Callan, Brucie at The Palladium, The Squirrels, Bootsie and Snudge, Tony Hancock, Space City, The Forsyte Saga et al. TV heaven or hell? I can’t quite make my mind up; my head says loftily ’Civilisation‘, my heart snatches the remote and yells: ’sod off! I wannna watch Howard’s Way…’
Adam Adamant Lives!
Unlike film, when it comes to actually slapping down the cash for archive televsion material, I rarely plunge into the unknown, one recent exception however being Adam Adamant Lives! Having clear recall only of who our hero was, the title sequence and theme, a couple of scenes, and the fact I once owned a genuine plastic ‘Adam Adamant’ swordstick (complete with rubber safety tip - play nice now kids), a few months ago I bought the series on DVD when it dropped into my budget. It was a bit of a whim, and these gambles rarely pay off, but on this occasion the set turned out to be not only a beautiful time capsule, but a genuinely delightful surprise.
Gerald Harper is our eponymous doer of derring, a wealthy Victorian/Edwardian adventurer who, when called on to do his duty for Queen (or King, it being 1902 at the start of the adventures), does it with great relish; Adamant, secure in the knowledge of his own invincibility, loves nothing better than a good punch-up in the service of his country. While battling his arch-foe ‘The Face’ (for every hero there has surely to be a nemesis), Adamant’s eye for the ladies proves to be his Achilles heel, he is captured, drugged, and frozen in a state of suspended animation. The damnable fiends! It isn’t until the Swinging Sixties that the ice-pop that is Adamant is discovered, thawed and revived, using methodology that scientists today, finding permafrost pickled mammoths, would give their eye-teeth for. Once again Adamant is ready take up the cudgels against the forces of evil, the new barons of crime - after first, of course, visiting his boot-maker and finding they handily still have his measurements on record. A true gentleman must have his hand made boots, a fresh cape and starched wing collars.
Conceived in 1966 by Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman and producer Verity Lambert, Adam Adamant Lives! is a hybrid of 007, Sherlock Holmes and Bulldog Drummond; indeed but for a rights hiccup, the series would have been Sexton Blake Lives! Of course, the core idea of the series - the return of a legendary, long thought dead, crime fighter into unfamiliar modern day surroundings - has since been yoinked out of the Beeb’s pocket for the ‘Austin Powers’ series, and gifted Stuart Goddard his stage name. Though the show was originally scheduled by the BBC as post watershed adult viewing, that sub-Bondian mixture of sex and sadism, watered down for mass consumption on the telly, appealed quite naturally to children of all ages.
Adamant’s characteristics, his old world charm, dress, and manners, the kittenish sidekick, and his array of villains set on world domination (or simply the domination of Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach), put the series head to head in the battle for viewer’s affections with The Avengers over on ITV, which was, after all, the Beeb’s aim. However, ever careful with the licence payer’s cash, ‘Auntie’ was a little stingy with the budget; ‘Adamant’ was shot quickly, lacking the glossier production values of the opposition, the shaky sets redolent of ‘Who’ and it’s more forgiving target audience. After two series, it was gone, back in the deep freeze…but not for good.
Last year BBC DVD and 2 Entertain produced a handsome U.K. R2 five-disc set, containing all 17 of the remaining Adam Adamant Lives! episodes and a real feast of extras; a thoroughly interesting 52 minute documentary ‘This Man Is The One’, commentary tracks, with a genuine warmth of feeling for this long dead - or should I say dormant - project, by the urbane Harper, Lambert and the lovely Juliet Harmer on the first and last episodes broadcast. Harmer plays ‘Georgina Jones’, Adamant’s decorative, but not quite so swinging companion; they make a decent enough pair, but oddly lack the sexual chemistry of the opposition on the commercial channel. There are also featurettes, outtakes, full scripts in PDF format plus audio extracts from the dozen missing episodes, a photo gallery and more.
The icing on the cake is author Andrew Pixley’s superbly informative 64-page booklet of viewing notes - a goldmine of stills, wonderfully well-researched episode guides, including the background to the untransmitted pilot, and an overview of the whole project, one that briefly shone so bright, but ultimately, like so many other adversaries, failed to knock Steed and Mrs Peel off their pedestal.
Watching the set today left this viewer’s mug wreathed in smiles. Harper is a sheer delight as Adamant; ever dapper, not a crease, not a hair (not an eyebrow) out of place, he despatches his foes using sword, fist or martial arts. Harper occasionally glances straight at the camera, staight at us, which could be disconcerting, but this slightly post-modern nod seems to render us inclusive, part of the action. He addresses his companion as ‘Miss Jones’ in a manner that’s possibly a little too reminiscent of Rising Damp, and the fact that the Beeb broadcast episode two as episode three thinking no-one would notice (had they suddenly cast Arthur Mullard as Adamant mid-story, mid-scene, it would have been slightly less apparent), simply adds to the charm. Adamant has hardly shaken off the freezer frost and he is instantly accepted back to the bosom of H.M. Government, who whistle him up quicker than you can say ‘Victorian values’; much more fun than a gunboat. By episode two (which is in fact episode three…), this man who has ridden nothing more powerful than a, well, one horsepower horse, is suddenly zooming around Britain in a hopped up Mini Cooper. Yeah, baby…
The quality of the transfers, like the quality of the episodes, are mostly excellent, some better than others, depending on the source. The first episode, ‘A Vintage Year For Scoundrels’ is beautiful, the last, ‘A Sinister Sort Of Service’, thought to have been lost, but found on 16mm film, is less so; but none are truly offensive. Ironically, in view of the Beeb’s aim to try and topple The Avengers, writers for the series included Avengers alumni Tony Williamson and Brian Clemens, and one Ridley Scott, whose major credit to date had been directing a handful of Z Cars episodes, was behind the camera for ‘The League Of Uncharitable Ladies’. It was not, then, for the want of trying; as Newman wrote to Harper in 1967 after Adam Adamant Lives! was cancelled: “The series, from where I sat, was a near miss - we were so close to having something really great…”
The title sequence is superb, and it’s that, more than any other aspect of this utterly charming show, that has been lodged in my mind for the past 40 years. Kathy Kirby belts out the theme song (also presented as a whole in this set), Adamant, cloak billowing, springs his cane-sword menacingly from it’s innocent looking sheath, smiles that deadly smile - ‘Bold as a knight in white armour/Cold as a shot from a gun…This man is the one…’ sings the gorgeous, the pouting, the tragic, Kathy.
Close my eyes and I’m 10-years-old. Funny what gifts a shiny little disc can bring you…
Reed All About It… August 6, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, British Film, Crime / Noir / Thriller , 3 commentsA 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.
God, Mammon and Imperial Entanglements… April 9, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Historical Drama , 2 commentsHaving no faith whatsoever myself, it’s perhaps a littl