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 Ghost Story For Christmas… December 23, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Horror , 9 commentsWhat was that?
That…that something that skittered quickly across the room, just there by the window. No, no - I can’t tell you what it was exactly, I only saw it from the corner of my eye and only for a second, it made a sound like someone running. Could you not hear it? No, not truly like footsteps, but the merest echo, the smallest scintilla of a shadow, of a tread. And now it’s stopped. But it is nearby, I can feel it. Quite nearby.
When I looked up, it wasn’t there. But, I know this; it’s in the room with us, a formless, nameless, something. I can feel it, that prickling sensation on the back of my neck. So close, it’s within touching distance. Right here. Right now. With me.
My heart is pounding so hard that it seems to fill my gullet, constricting my throat, I can’t breathe properly, getting light-headed, suffocating in here.
It’s…it’s over there. I know it’s over there, reaching out, getting closer now. So close.
It’s nothing. All I have to do is turn my neck and look. That’s all I have to do…
Holding your breath? Well, I tried. I’m not a skilled enough writer to find the words to scare the bejeesus out of you. That task is best left to the masters of that particular black art, Henry James, Charles Dickens who penned possibly the most famous Christmas ghost story, A Christmas Carol, and without doubt the finest author of such tales, medieval scholar Montague Rhodes James who wrote his 30-odd skin-crawlers basically as entertainments for his companions. The gift of terror at Christmas.
James, like old ‘Boz’, followed a fine Victorian English tradition of telling hair-raising Christmas Eve tales. He would gather his guests, students and colleagues (he was Provost at both King’s College, Cambridge and Eton), around a crackling Yuletide hearth and chill them to the very marrow, reading aloud some of the most flesh-tingling narratives of malevolent and supernatural horror written, stories that took place mostly in broad daylight in locations many of those listening knew well.
Dark, dark forces in the most familar, ordinary places. Very English indeed.
The BBC transferred the tradition to television in 1971, possibly inspired by their 1968 adaptation for the Omnibus strand Whistle and I’ll Come To You, broadcasting the first of what became an annual ‘ghost story for Christmas’ with The Stalls of Barchester. This series of chillers, most based on MR James (he rid himself of punctuation marks as a literary affectation) stories but including a couple of original scripts and one particularly effective adaptation of Dickens’ The Signalman, ran annually until 1978. Since then, we’ve had to make do with repeats, plus a brief series of chilling fireside tales told in typically avuncular manner by Christopher Lee some six years ago now (and which thoroughly deserve their own DVD release). They weren’t, by the way, ever officially titled ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’, but for eight Christmases running they arrived on our screens like little seasonal gifts from Auntie Beeb, very welcome, but always a trifle unexpected. Until we began to expect them. And then they stopped.
That is until last year when the increasingly excellent BBC4 broadcast The View From The Hill during their Christmas schedule, and followed it up this December with another MR James story, Number 13; fairly successful stabs at recreating what made the ’70s series so effective - a glimpse ‘from the corner of the retina’ of dreadful shades, a mere hint of something truly awful from beyond the grave.
It’s disappointing that, thus far, only two of BBC ‘ghost stories for Christmas’ have made it to DVD, plus the superb Omnibus film, all courtesy of the BFI. Fortunately, they are all rather good. And handily, the British Film Institute,has also just released a quite wonderful DVD of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, from Henry James’ novel The Turn of The Screw, another very British ghost story by way of a very American screenwriter. Have yourself a scary little Christmas…
Whistle And I’ll Come To You (1968)
‘QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT’
‘I ought to be able to make it out,’ he thought; ‘but I suppose I am a little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of it, I don’t believe I even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem simple enough. It ought to mean: “Who is this who is coming?” Well, the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him…’MR James
Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad.
Based on the MR James story, Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You My Lad, but very much director Jonathan Miller’s interpretation, Whistle And I’ll Come To You is probably the best of all the BBC James adaptations if not the most faithful. In James’s tale, ‘Professor Parkins’ is a young academic, holidaying on the east coast with a view to improving his golf game. As adapted by Miller, and beautifully enacted by Michael Horden, Parkins is a mumbling, somewhat introspective, late middle-aged eccentric, taking a winter break simply to walk, read and study; “Golf? Noooo…Not. Much” he tells the ‘colonel’, a fellow guest, relishing the words, constantly amused, and repeating phrases to no-one save himself.
Miller and Horden sketch an effective portrait of a very strange chap, one who lives almost entirely within himself and who is possibly on the edge of mental collapse. In his own voiceover introduction, Miller says that James’s story is “…a story of solitude and terror. It hints at the dangers of intellectual pride and show’s how a man’s reason can be overthrown when he fails to acknowledge those forces inside himself which he simply cannot understand.”
Parkins takes a walk along the bleak Norfolk beaches and cliffs, including a old, long abandoned coastal cemetary. One grave, at the cliff’s edge, takes his eye and he spots a bone protuding from the sandy earth. As he reaches down over the cliff face, Parkins sees something a deal more interesting; a hand-crafted whistle, a clearly ancient latin inscription, barely legible, running down its side.
Eschewing most of what he called James’s ‘ludicrously stilted’ dialogue Miller tells his story with a stripped down economy; a series of sometimes mudane - to draw us in to the ordinariness of Parkins situation and to set up our story at a leisurely pace - sometimes stunning, visual vignettes. No manipulative musical soundtrack is used, natural sounds providing their own atmosphere - the rasping call of crows, the crunch of boot on sand, the sea crashing against the groynes. Parkins’ grasp on the certainties of existence are steadily eroded, as thoughts of an afterlife, of the supernatual, which he has debunked in conversation with the colonel, become an internalised obsession. One he finds impossible to explain in a rational manner, and which leads to a deeply disturbing mental conflict.
Miller, and his Director of Photography Dick Bush, paint this picture superbly, underlining Parkins’ loneliness - and even hinting at a sexual frustration when, at dinner, he avoids a female diner’s coquettish smile - as he strides across miles of empty beach, a watery winter light bathing him in a cold, oneiric, evening glow. He’s quite alone…until he finds the old whistle, and looks back, troubled, over his shoulder. There, in the far distance, stands a deeply unsettling and shadowy figure, ominously threatening and eerily motionless against the setting sun.
From this moment on, Miller quickens the pace as the Professor’s world descends into sheer bloody terror. A number of small but unexplained incidents, a terrifying waking nightmare - complete with sparely used sound effects which have the power to make most viewers jerk out of their seats - combine to chip away at what Parkins knows to be true, to be real. And at last he’s reduced to a whimpering, gibbering, thumb-sucking wreck of a man, still denying the undeniable. As Kim Newman says in his BFI DVD liner notes, Miller doesn’t entirely abandon the ghostly and we are still left with an unanswered question: is Parkins insane, or did he really unleash some kind of supernatural force?
That Miller and his production team did all this, chilling and genuinely unnerving viewers with some backwards, slowed down ‘cow noises’ and ‘bedsheets on strings’ on a BBC Omnibus budget almost beggars belief; although, bless ‘em, it is film - no video is used here. Whistle and I’ll Come To You is still, nearly four decades on after its first broadcast in May 1968, quite spine-tingling and hideously entertaining. The BFI’s disc is excellent with a beautiful, almost unmarked transfer, the wonderful black and white, full-frame, photography rendered perfectly. I found Ramsey Campbell’s introduction interesting, though it was a little choppily edited, he does have a tendency to gabble - and I wish he hadn’t worn that T-shirt…
Campbell also reads his own MR James inspired story The Guide, on reflection it might have been better had someone else delivered it. Rather more interesting is Neil Brand’s reading of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad, which underlines exactly how much Miller changed things, and precisely what he means by ’stilted’ dialogue.
It’s classic television, and although not part of the subsequent strand, the classic Christmas-tide ghost story, which subtlely draws the audience in, and which refuses to insult the viewers’ intelligence. Another DVD presentation the BFI can be justly proud of.
The Perils of Paulette December 20, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Horror, Comedy, Action / Adventure / Thriller, Film & DVD Reviews , add a commentReap The Wild Wind (1942)
I’m desperately in love with Paulette Goddard. There; I said it, and I don’t care who knows! The only impediment to my ardour is the age difference - the luscious Ms Goddard was born in 1910 - and the fact that she died nearly 17 years ago. But nevertheless, I’m in love…and I sigh when she hits the screen. *Sigh*…
1942’s Reap The Wild Wind was a genuine Hollywood blockbuster from the Paramount studios, and had all the ingredients, and then some, necessary for a big, flashy slice of hugely entertaining hokum - a fantastic cast, a rip-roaring story, Oscar winning special effects, three-strip Technicolor cinematography that is good enough to make you weep. And the last vital ingredient to pull this circus together and make it all work. What’s that? Well if I tell you that the full USA title was Cecil B. DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind.
Not in any sense a great auteur, C.B. knew how to entertain, even if he was scathing in his private assessment of the audience that lapped up his brand of three-ring showmanship. His trademark was entertaining, and entertaining BIG. So here we have a movie that DeMille himself - he was never shy - sells to his audience in his opening narration, a story, set in the 1840’s, that ’sweeps the ocean, with mighty ships plying their trade, braving the hurricanes off the Florida Keys, providing the lifeblood for American commerce…’ It’s a bit of a flag waver, what with the war and all…
We open with ‘Captain Jack Stuart’ (John Wayne) unconscious on the deck of his own ship, his villainous first mate ‘Mathias Widgeon’ (Victor Kilian) about to drive the clipper onto the unforgiving rocks of Key West.
It’s a vile plot by the most evil of salvage men ‘King Cutler’ (played with wonderful relish by the great Raymond Massey) to get himself half the value of the ship’s cargo for nothing more than a simple bribe; a game he’s been playing to make himself and his cohorts fantastically rich, while the ship owners, and principally their attorney ‘Steve Tolliver’ (Ray Milland), determine to seek him out and hang him and his kind from the yard arm.
Slap in the middle is ’Loxi Claiborne’ (the aforementioned Ms Goddard), who runs a decent, honest salvage company. While Cutler and his men scurry about ripping the cargo out of Stuart’s sinking ship, it’s Loxi and ‘Capt. Phil Philpott’ (another superb sketch by character actor Lynne Overman) who set about rescuing the crew, even though Capt. Phil grumbles ‘men don’t bring no salvage money’.
Stuart is wrongly dismissed as Captain and he blames Tolliver. But it’s the attorney who, despite the acrimony, fights for Stuart to be given command of the line’s new steam flagship The Southern Cross. However both men’s love for Loxi is about to lead them into deep water, double crossing and death. The action gets a little bogged down in a meldodramatic courtroom sequence, but the film balances that with a superb underwater sequence, which took two months to film, involving a giant rubber squid (oh, c’mon give ‘em a break - in 1942 that looked as real as, well, ‘Bruce’ did in Jaws), a race against time and a Florida hurricane.
It’s one hell of a romp; Goddard gives us glimpses of what her ‘Scarlett O’Hara’ might had been like had she passed her screen test, flouncing about in petticoats and tossing off a ‘fiddle di dee’ here and there at her black ‘mammy’ (the black characters are treated, I’m afraid, shamefully). Milland’s Tolliver is something of a ‘Scarlet’ too, a Pimpernel figure, ever so slightly camp with his ‘talking’ lap dog, dandy clothes and just where did he get that hairstyle? Thankfully, he is not quite the hapless fop he appears - he’s an action man when required (of course), taking charge when Waynes angry, but dithering, Stuart can’t get his act together.
It’s worth mentioning here that for the 1954 theatrical re-release, the ‘Duke’ was given top billing in posters because of his increased star status, and Susan Hayward (who plays Goddard’s little sister), and who had since 1942 become a major star instead of a supporting player, was misleadingly billed second. Formerly top-billed Milland got third billing in the new campaign, while leading lady Goddard was demoted to fourth billing. I might add that Milland’s likeness doesn’t even make the front cover of the current DVD release (that’s Goddard and Wayne) where he’s given third billing…it’s worse on the back cover, where Milland comes a lowly fifth. Ah, fickle Hollywood…
Look among the cast too for Robert Preston, Charles Bickford, Walter Hampden, Louise Beavers, Hedda Hopper (in her last film role before she started to bite the hand that fed her). Victor Young’s sweeping score is very redolent of the period, all in all, fans of the Golden Era of Hollywood will be delighted to see the film again…and again.
Universal’s DVD has been around in R1 almost since the dawn of the format, but was only released as a stand alone disc in R2 a couple of years ago, after previously being part of the same studio’s generally poor John Wayne Box Set. Not that long ago (not least for slapdash stuff like the ‘Wayne’ box) the mere mention of Universal would send shivers down my spine. Thankfully, the studio has upped its game both in Region 1 and Region 2, and now - what a turnaround - can be generally relied on to do the right thing at least as far as transfer quality is considered. But what a revelation Reap The Wild Wind is - it’s nigh on Warners top-standard quality, true eye candy.
The colours - and I just love three-strip Technicolor when it’s presented as well as this - are wonderfully rendered; just check the plumage on the parrot in the tavern sequence for instance (or the plumage on Ms. Goddard…). There’s a little grain early on, but not too much to complain about, and it’s as clean as a whistle with very few nicks and marks. Universal has done a fantastic job with a beautiful transfer that can only have come from elements in top class condition. The mono sound is clear and strong.
The shame is that there are no extras, save for a trailer, also in excellent shape. It would have been nice to have had a featurette on Reap The Wild Wind, or a documentary on Milland, Goddard, or DeMille, that larger than life figure himself. But really, with the film looking this eye wateringly good, it’s almost churlish to gripe, and this is Universal after all, a studio that is oft times quite casual, and a little stingy on the extras front, particularly as far as many of its Oscar winning back catalogue films are concerned.
But the film, the standard of the transfer, is paramount (sorry Universal; no pun intended). We have to be thankful for small mercies.
The Ghost Breakers (1940)
Geoff Montgomery: It’s worse than horrible because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.
Larry Lawrence: You mean like Democrats?
Two years earlier and Ms Goddard and Bob Hope were busy trying - and succeeding - to recreate the success of their previous year’s smash The Cat and The Canary. The veteran, and versatile, George Marshall was in the director’s chair, picking the bones (pun fully intended) out of Dickey & Goddard’s (no relation) pre-WW1 Broadway play The Ghost Breaker. They added an ’s’, made some tweaks to the gags, put some backbone into the female lead’s character and came away with an 85 minute comedy thriller, a ‘frightmare’ with laughs, the very epitome of both the genre and cinematic efficiency.
‘Mary Carter’ (Goddard) inherits an eerie castle, her family’s ancestral home built on glum, forbidding island off the coast of Cuba. Mary is off to claim her birthright, and gets tangled up with radio star ’Larry Lawrence’ (Hope on cracking form), who’s on the run from the mob and the law for a murder he thinks, mistakenly, he’s committed. With attempts on Mary’s life, voodoo warnings and threats of death and disaster dogging their every move, our heroine, Larry and his butler ‘Alex’ (Willie Best), come up against spooks, zombies…and an all too human menace.
There’s not a scene wasted, not a line of spare dialogue in The Ghost Breakers. The strengths of The Cat and The Canary are here yet again; plenty of laughs, lots of frights all in a tight, economical package. Yes, Willie Best, is there to roll his eyes and knock his knees, but he’s a great foil for Hope, who can’t himself appear too much of a dunderhead. He does, after all, have to solve the mystery, save the girl and find the family treasure.
It’s light family fare, but it’s still marvellously entertaining with a snappy script that cracks wise, Bob Hope-style (naturally), impressive sets, mattes and lighting (Oscar winner Charles Lang was the cinematographer) that create a suitable ‘haunted house’ ambiance. The special effects - particularly the ‘ghost walk’ - are still quite impressive and Noble Johnson as the zombie is really very creepy indeed.
Goddard herself is not quite the woman in distress that some may expect. She screams to order, certainly, but she also brings an eye-flashing feistiness to the character that’s quite refreshing. Though, it has to be said, it is typical of some of the better films of the period. The ’40s, I think, provided a bumper crop of fantastic roles for women, at a time when, by sheer necessity, women were coming into their own in a society at war. Ironically, as the decade faded so did the gorgeous Ms Goddard’s star. A star that burned for a relatively short time, but wonderfully bright.
You’ll find a decent supporting cast too, among them; Richard Carlson, Anthony Quinn, Paul Fix and Robert Ryan’s first ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ screen appearance.
Universal’s R1 DVD of Paramount’s The Ghost Breakers is again pretty impressive for a 66-year-old black and white film; it’s very clean and tidy with decent contrast and no evidence that I could see of any obtrusive edge-enhancement. The soundtrack is similarly free of any clicks, or distortion with clear dialogue and an atmospheric score by Ernest Toch.
All that and Paulette Goddard in a bathing costume? A no-brainer, gentle reader…
Something Wicked This Way Comes… October 17, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film General, Horror , 4 commentsBy the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
‘Macbeth’ (4.1.45-6)
Seen any scary movies recently? Anything that makes your skin crawl, the hairs stand up, cat-like, on the back of your neck, that make you rush for a light switch in a darkened room?
How about one that makes you peek at the screen through your fingers (Casualty doesn’t count - that’s not ’scary’, that’s ’squeamish’. And I’m not just talking Simon McCorkindale’s acting), or quicken your step down that dark alley?
Tough one isn’t it? After all, it’s only moving pictures, men and women dressing up and pretending, and I’m a little older now than the days when Daleks or Yeti sent me scurrying behind the sofa at Saturday teatime, so my buttons aren’t quite so easily pressed. Or are they…
I must admit to avoiding the mirror on that 3am trip to the bathroom, eyes half open, a still unrisen sun casting an eerie monochrome shroud over the bedroom. I know there’s nothing in the mirror, I won’t see some misshapen ghoul gazing at me with hideous yellow eyes, just over my shoulder, from the glass.
I know. So I clamp my eyes tight shut and won’t look.
When I return home late at night alone, park the car, walk the handful of yards to the front door, I know there’s nothing waiting for me in the shrubs. Nothing mean and slavering, nothing other wordly with blood shot eyes, red in tooth, claw and intent, waiting to tear me limb from quaking limb. So, again, I don’t even look. I just hurry as I try, hands trembling ever so slightly, to jam the key in the lock and hurry inside, the hot breath of imagination on my collar. Nothing to be afraid of, save a totally irrational fear of fear itself.
Each one of us has a different threshold of fear. I recall, quite clearly, sitting in a cinema audience that were laughing - in all the wrong places - at Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The chap next to me professed to being an aficionado of The Hills Have Eyes, so Kubrick’s horror film must have seemed like just another Grimm fairy tale compared to that particular nightmare. Not for him the beautiful compositions of Mr Kubrick, the high-wire thespianism of Mr Nicholson. Bring on the cinema of the abattoir…
But gore stuffed films about serial killers - families of inbred mutant serial killers, killers with chainsaws, axes, or a liking for fresh liver and Chianti - have never been high on my watch list, even if some, against my expectations, have turned out to be better or classier - even funnier - than their premise (Psycho or Hannibal for instance).
No, first Universal and their series of 1930s and ’40s monster movies and then Hammer from the ’50s to the ’70s, aided and abetted by piles of imported American horror magazines devoted to the genre (containing handy tips on how to recreate the magic of Jack Pierce in the comfort of your own home with, say a little flour and lots of ketchup…), gave me that first frisson of fear. I’m still a big fan; do they scare me? Well, no, not really, but they do call up from the dark recesses of my memory the feelings of fear from decades ago, which might be some kind of second hand scare. Besides, I’m mightily entertained and thrilled by films that did genuinely have cinema audiences screaming.
My mother, who is old enough to recall, tells me of people actually fleeing the local flea pit when James Whale’s Frankenstein was shown in the ’30s, and there were similar scenes 20-odd years later when the camera dollied in on Christopher Lee, tearing off his bandages and snarling with feral intent at Peter Cushing. Do I flee, either physically or metaphorically, now? Obviously not, we denizens of the 21st century have simply seen too much, but my heart still beats a little faster at these images of this ghoulish, unstoppable monster that I know could, if it so desired, thrust its fist into my chest and emerge clutching my still beating heart, dripping life’s blood from between the creature’s boney fingers. Despite my protestations, am I not just a little bit frightened? If I’m honest, maybe…
Strange when De Niro’s creature did that very thing in Ken Branagh’s 1994 version of the story, it wasn’t in the least terrifying. Not seeing it was more terrible somehow (or maybe, in deference to Kathy Burke, I was cheered by the fact that it was Helen Bonham Carter who was the victim); now the camera lingers too long, the buckets of Kensington Gore are filled to the brim. Less really is more, for this viewer at least.
Watching in quick succession Paul Schrader’s Exorcist prequel Dominion and Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon last weekend provided two excellent examples of just what I’m attempting to explain. Dominion, with its God-awful levitating demon, it’s piss-poor cliche ridden script and pathetic ‘good’ (in this instance the Catholic Church) versus ‘evil’ (Satan and all his hoardes, natch) premise was about as scary as your average episode of Buffy. What do these demons want, I found myself asking halfway through; world domination? Death and destruction? For me to vote Republican? Or put three sugars in my tea? Do I care? Do I buggery…
MR James however tapped into an ancient irrationality, a fear of something as old as time itself, with his story Casting The Runes, brought vividly to life in Night of The Demon. It’s a tribute to Tourneur that the marionette (modelled on a slightly angry looking Irish Wolfhound) foisted on him by the producers, doesn’t diminish the power of the story of a rational man of science stalked by the promise of a ghastly death. The image of Niall MacGinnis conjuring up a hellish supernatural storm, dressed as some kind of clown from Hades is fabulously creepy. I know exactly what Julian Karswell (almost certainly based on Aleister Crowley; a contemporary of James) wants; he wants money, pots of it, and a long, comfortable, life…the price is his soul. A deal many of us have mulled over at some point in our lives, I suspect. Some of the scariest moments are simple shadows, shards of light, a few puffs of smoke and the wheeling sound of some antediluvian evil, gathering its power, in the distance.
Now, do I believe all this mumbo jumbo? You betcha. Hook, line and big daft doll…
And that’s the key to some of cinema’s best monsters isn’t it? Unseen terrors; humungous rubber sharks and big guys in even bigger rubber suits aren’t scary, but the audience, given the right suggestion of terror, can create visions of monsters better than the best special effects. Monsters from the id.
Among my recently watched pile were a trio of BBC TV ’Ghost Story for Christmas’ adaptations, made with little budget, no special effects to speak of, but which still, I’m pleased to report, hold the power to make the pulse race some three decades on from first broadcast. What scared me in Whistle and I’ll Come to You? A bed sheet being dragged along on a piece of string and an eerie understated soundtrack; and it did, it truly did. What about The Signalman? The look of horror, sheer bloody visceral terror, on Denholm Elliot’s face and the ringing of an otherwise unheard bell. A Warning to the Curious? A black clad shade, first glimpsed as if from the corner of one’s eye, then hurtling hell for leather through the woods, illuminated by a watery winter sun, the merciless thing’s hand raised to strike. MR James again and Dickens; class will out.
Which brings me to Nigel Kneale who tied all these fears together very neatly in Quatermass & The Pit, ancient horrors ‘rationalised’ through science. Kneale’s boogie men, his ghosts, are made all the more real when science provides the answers (it’s for that reason that I find Carpenter’s Kneale tribute Prince of Darkness better than many would have me believe). What’s really scary here is that science, as we know, can never fully control it’s manifestations. Once the genie is out of the bottle, can we get it back in? Ask Kim Jong-il.
Speaking of ‘real’ terror and I must come to Nic Roeg’s sublime Don’t Look Now, a film wherein almost every character has some form of psychic power, but what is it? A British ‘horror’ film (it has been described as such)? A thriller? An exploration of coincidence, the supernatural, the ties that invisibly bind the human family? A love story? However you describe it, it’s a fabulous piece of film-making and and I’m really looking forward to Optimum’s forthcoming DVD special edition, Roeg commentary and all.
Of all the ’scary’ movies I’ve watched and rewatched recently, this is the only one that had the power to genuinely terrify, that leaves me sweaty and agitated, my gorge rising; and that’s only the first scene. Maybe, just maybe, that was one of Mary Shelley’s subtexts in Frankenstein, the petrifying obligation of being a parent, of being responsible for a life.
Real life. Scares the hell out of me…