Square Eyes; Citizen Kubrick… July 7, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , 4 commentsFans of the film genius, the reclusive, the enigmatic, the elusive unto death (and beyond) Stanley Kubrick are in for a treat with the UK digital channel More4’s screening of a special season of films and documentaries dedicated to the great man, during the second half of July.
As well as screenings of seven of Kubrick’s movies (Barry Lyndon, Paths of Glory, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Killer’s Kiss, The Killing & The Shining) the season features two rarely seen early career short documentaries; Day of The Fight (1951) and from the same year Flying Padre.
The season also includes a brand new documentary, part of C4’s True Stories strand; Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, plus four ‘bitesize’ Kubrick shorts, Stanley Kubrick’s Small Boxes, presumably culled from the same filming sessions as their longer parent, on both Channel 4 and More 4, in the 3 Minute Wonder slot.
To promote the season Channel 4 has filmed a quite astounding promo, which was recently reported in The Guardian newspaper thus:
Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining, complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director’s films.
The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining set.
Viewers get Kubrick’s point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director’s chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.
The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to “remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s”.
Channel 4 Creative Services, the broadcaster’s in-house creative resource, cast people who resembled Kubrick’s own crew including his script lady, assistant director and director of production, John Alcott, who also worked on films including 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with the director.
Look-a-likes were also found for Duvall, Danny Lloyd, who played Danny Torrance, and the twin girls who appear fleetingly in the film.
Most of the equipment that appears in the promotional clip was actually used in the filming of The Shining.
Many of the props that appear, including the tricycle and Kubrick’s script, were produced for the promotional clip based on photos or sketches from the late director’s archives.
The spot, which was shot over two days at London’s Bray Studios, was filmed using a 25mm Cooke lens – a favourite of Kubrick’s.
The promo can be seen currently on C4 and More4, and on The Guardian website here.
The Citizen Kubrick season (a title More4 initially coined for the season, from Jon Ronson’s original Guardian article, but look to have dropped), starts on Monday July 14. The schedule:
3 Minute Wonder: Stanley Kubrick’s Small Boxes; 14 July, 11:50am - 11:55am, Channel 4. Also 14 July, 1:05pm - 1:10pm, More4. Think Kubrick - Showing as part of More 4’s Stanley Kubrick season, the first of four short films concerning the late director. Members of Kubrick’s audience relate their fondest memories of his films.
3 Minute Wonder: Stanley Kubrick’s Small Boxes; 14 July, 11:55am - 12:00pm, Channel 4. Also 15 July, 1:05pm - 1:10pm, More4. Showing as part of More4’s Stanley Kubrick season, the second of four short films concerning the late director. Inspired by an actual callsheet from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, this film reconstructs the production meeting that took place prior to the callsheet being issued.
True Stories: Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes (2008); 15 July, 10:00pm - 11:05pm, More4. A biography of a remarkably talented man as seen though the rich collection of material he left behind. Stanley Kubrick’s films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing?
Two years after Kubrick’s death, Jon Ronson was invited to the director’s estate to explore the hundreds of boxes the legendary film director had collected during his decades at Childwick Manor in Hertfordshire. He’s been returning ever since, and the story of Kubrick and the archive, now housed at University of the Arts London, is revealed in this fascinating documentary.
Ronson asks: is it possible to get to understand such a man – and his extraordinary working methods – by looking through the hundreds of boxes he left behind?
Day of the Fight (1951): 15 July, 11.05pm, More4. Documentary short. A day in the life of a middleweight Irish boxer named Walter Cartier, particularly the day of his bout with black middleweight Bobby James.
3 Minute Wonder: Stanley Kubrick’s Small Boxes; 16 July, 1:05pm - 1:10pm, More4. Showing as part of More 4’s Stanley Kubrick season, the third of four short films concerning the late director. This film features a sequence of references to his most iconic works.
Barry Lyndon (1975); 16 July, 11pm, More4. Kubrick’s oeuvre was never more lavish, ravishing or brilliantly eccentric than in his 18th Century story of pugnacious Irish chancer Barry Lyndon, a man with a talent for money and appearances, but with a crippling lack of love in his heart.
Barry Lyndon was a box office flop on its first release. Perhaps after the spacey future pyschedelia of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the teen malcontent of A Clockwork Orange, this painterly adaptation of an obscure picaresque novel was a leap too far for contemporary audiences. Nevertheless, it’s a tour de force, with the director pushing the limits of film technology to realise his singular vision, developing new camera lenses to tell this 18th Century cautionary tale with only natural, available light.
3 Minute Wonder: Stanley Kubrick’s Small Boxes; 17 July, 1:05pm - 1:10pm, More4. Overlook - Showing as part of More4’s Stanley Kubrick season, the last of the four short films concerning the late director. An exploration of the ghostly continuity photos from The Shining.
Paths of Glory (1957); 17 July, 11:55am, More4. A story designed to make the blood boil: blameless French soldiers carry the can for their superiors’ mistakes after a botched WWI assault. A work of genius from Kubrick, with a brilliant performance from Kirk Douglas.
Paths Of Glory was the first time Stanley Kubrick got to work with a major star - and in the late 1950s, stars didn’t come any more major than Kirk Douglas. He championed this ‘hard to sell’ anti-war film to the Hollywood studios, and bankrolled the 28-year-old tyro director who, with his growing reputation, still had it all to prove in Hollywood. And with his indignant performance Douglas provides an emotional counterbalance to Kubrick’s chilly, conceptual style.
Flying Padre (1951); 18 July, 12.55pm, More4. Documentary short. Two days in the life of priest Father Fred Stadtmuller whose New Mexico parish is so large he can only spread goodness and light among his flock with the aid of a mono-plane.
Lolita (1962); 18 July, 9pm, More4. Kubrick’s controversial and deeply ironic black comedy stars James Mason as a middle aged professor obsessed with a precociously sexual minor. Adapted by Nabokov from his own novel
In filming a book derided at the time as paedophiliac pornography, Kubrick put both his artistic and commercial reputation on the line, but the result is a sophisticated and moving tragi-comedy riddled with queasy wit.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); 19 July, 1.30pm, More4. We know what the year 2001 looks like now, and it didn’t look much like Kubrick’s vision. But 2001: A Space Odyssey itself still looks immaculate. Spectacular, trailblazing and philosophical, it’s an undisputed masterpiece.
Kubrick, cinema’s chilliest genius, abandons conventional narrative here and presents a succession of beautifully-composed sketches on the theme of evolution, death and rebirth linked by the mystical presence of a large black monolith.
Killer’s Kiss (1955); 21 July, 11.30pm, More4. Stanley Kubrick’s stylish second feature, shot on a shoestring but a clear indication of the great things to come. Intricately plotted, it tells the story of a has-been boxer who falls for a beautiful broad with a violent boyfriend.
With three documentaries and one self-buried feature under his belt, Kubrick wrote, directed, co-produced and edited this film noir for just $75,000. The result might be primitive by the meticulous standards the director would later apply, but it remains an inventive evocation of time and place with some spectacularly sinister visual flourishes.
The Killing (1956); 23 July, 12.05am, More4. Tightly plotted heist-goes-wrong thriller with which established the reputation of legendary director Stanley Kubrick. Sterling Hayden stars as an icy ex-con masterminding a robbery at a race track. His meticulous plan is to create a distraction by shooting the favourite horse during a race, muscle into the course’s counting house and flee with the wedge before you can say “and they’re under starter’s orders.”
The Shining (1980); 25 July, 9pm, More4. Stanley Kubrick’s atmospheric adaptation of a Stephen King tale. Jack Nicholson stars, in maniacal, terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick’s Gothic chiller. Aspiring-writer Jack Torrance (Nicholson) accepts a job as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel during an icy Oregon winter so he can write his book. But the hotel has a macabre history that soon begins to worm its way into the present through the medium of his psychic son, Danny.
There are some reports of More4 also screening the 1953 documentary The Seafarers, Kubrick’s first colour feature which for 40 years was thought lost, but sadly this appears to have been removed from the More4 schedules. Keep your eyes open just in case there’s a change of heart and it is in fact screened on the night of Tuesday, July 15.
Stanley Kubrick’s archive is now housed at the University of the Arts London.
Square Eyes; Two More Short Film Seasons From The Beeb… June 26, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , 8 commentsFollowing up the Westerns Weekend and the British B Movies Week (more of a long weekend, I suppose, than a week, but let’s not nitpick), BBC 4 continues its summer films season with two more helpings.
This weekend the digital channel plumps for a Courtroom Dramas Weekend, the three - count ‘em - movie showings tethered together with another 90 minute documentary Strictly Courtroom; after Rich Hall’s invigorating look at the western and Matthew Sweet’s entertaining and informative look at the cheap and cheerful, it looks as if we could be in for something a little more mundane with the choice of actor Martin Shaw to present.
Nothing against Mr Shaw per se; I think he’s a fine thesp, but I’ve got a sneaking feeling that he’s been chosen less for his expertise and enthusiasm and more for the fact that he’s TV’s Judge John Deed. Still, you never know; as I discovered with Hall’s How The West Was Lost, these things should not necessarily be prejudged - and some of the interviewees look interesting. The blurb:
Actor Martin Shaw narrates a documentary which looks at how trials have been portrayed on the silver screen in the past century, from 12 Angry Men and Alfred Hitchcock’s [sic] Anatomy of A Murder to A Few Good Men and George Clooney’s Michael Clayton. Contributors include Geoffrey Robertson QC, OJ Simpson’s defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz, author and advocate Scott Turow and death row campaigner Clive Stafford Smith.
The blurb writer has clearly got his directors in a twist; let’s hope the error didn’t originate with Beeb. Alas poor Otto…
The season gets under way this Saturday, June 28, at 7.00pm with Stanley Kramer’s 1960 Oscar-nominated screen adaptation of the notorious 1925 Tennessee ‘Monkey Trial’, Inherit The Wind, in which a young teacher stood accused of violating state law by teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. A quite fabulous cast including Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly, Florence Eldridge, Dick York, Donna Anderson and Harry Morgan.
On Sunday Sidney J. Furie’s 1962 courtroom drama The Boys, shown last summer as part of the Beeb’s Festival of British Film, gets another airing. Four youths are accused of murdering a nightwatchman. The defence attempts to persuade the jury that the boys are guilty of a crime of passion and should not be executed - stars Richard Todd, Robert Morley, Felix Alymer, Dudley Sutton, Ronald Lacey & Tony Garnett.
Finally, on Monday night is Sidney Lumet’s wonderful The Verdict, from 1982, with Paul Newman (giving one of his finest performances), James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden and Milo O’Shea. An ambulance-chasing lawyer attempts to regain some integrity from one final case - a medical malpractice suit for a woman who lies in a coma. With his career fading, he has turned to drink for solace and finds himself in court facing one of the toughest lawyers in the country. An adaptation of Barry Reed’s novel, scripted by David Mamet.
As usual, Strictly Courtroom gets several outings; full details here.
The following weekend, and starting Saturday July 5, it’s British War Films - at 9.00pm look out for the documentary War Stories: Uncovering forgotten gems like Frieda and revisiting classics like Ice Cold in Alex, an exploration into how war films have changed with the times. They were a tool of government propaganda during WW2, and while the blockbusters of the1950s were part of national nostalgia, today they have been rediscovered and become celebrated icons of British culture.
No news on the presenter as yet, and it will, again, get several showings. Films in the season are:
We Dive at Dawn (kicking off the season on Saturday, July 5 at 7.30pm). Anthony Asquith’s World War II drama about a mission to hunt and destroy a dangerous German battleship in the Baltic which goes wrong when the British submarine runs short on fuel. Stars John Mills and Eric Portman.
The First of The Few (Saturday, July 5 at 10.35pm). Offered contracts and any number of enticing star roles after Gone with the Wind, Leslie Howard chose to leave Hollywood and return to England to make films designed to boost wartime morale. Here, he directs and stars as visionary aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell, the father of the Spitfire. The fine cast includes Rosamund John as his wife and David Niven as the test pilot, while William Walton’s score sums up an entire era of flying pictures. It was Howard’s final screen performance: his plane was shot down in 1943 on a mission that immediately became shrouded in mystery.
Ill Met By Moonlight (Sunday, July 6, 9.00pm). Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1958 war movie. I quote the Radio Times:Dirk Bogarde is on stirring form as a British officer given the task of working with the partisans in occupied Crete to kidnap the local German commander (Marius Goring), in a tale loosely based on a real operation in the Second World War. Fine acting, rugged scenery and a trenchant score all add to the film’s attractions. The Americans gave it the more prosaic title of Night Ambush.
Not my favourite P&P, but I’ve said it before, even second rate Powell & Pressburger is worth a watch. The RT insist, by the way, that Powell & Pressburger were not famed for their war films. Oh, really..?
Overlord (Monday, July 7, 10.00pm). Made over a period of several years and finally released in 1975; stars Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball and Julie Neesam. The RT doesn’t reckon much to Stuart Cooper’s labour of love: Made with the co-operation of the Imperial War Museum, this account of the D-Day landings attempts to convey the grim reality of the soldier’s lot by combining newsreel footage with dramatic re-enactments. Unfortunately, too much time was spent rooting out clips and not enough on the script, which is a collection of clichéd ideas and utterances. Director Stuart Cooper - who, as an actor, played one of the original Dirty Dozen in the wartime blockbuster of the same name - seems content to allow his cast to remain inanimate, while his presentation of the combat sequences comes dangerously close to suggesting war may be hell, but is also grotesquely beautiful. A bold venture, but poorly executed.
Or as Criterion state: Seamlessly interweaving archival war footage and a fictional narrative, Stuart Cooper’s immersive account of one twenty-year-old’s journey from basic training to the front lines of D-day brings all the terrors and isolation of war to life with jolting authenticity. Overlord, impressionistically shot by Stanley Kubrick’s longtime cinematographer John Alcott, is both a document of World War II and a dreamlike meditation on man’s smallness in a large, incomprehensible machine.
All I can say is that if you haven’t seen it before, make an effort to do so; the Radio Times reviewer may have a point, but it is indeed a bold venture, and it is at times utterly gorgeous, with a climax that’s long telegraphed but still packs a wallop. It’s rarely shown on terrestrial TV; it’s highly recommended, if you not possess either the fine R1 Criterion or R2 Metrodome DVD sets. On that basis alone Overlord must not be dismissed.
The British War Films Weekend is yet to show on the BBC 4 website, but a quick search in a few days will bring you up the full schedule no doubt, should you wish to prepare your recorders.
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…
Square Eyes; British B Movie Week on BBC 4 June 16, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , 4 commentsBBC 4 follows up last week’s Westerns Weekend with British B Movie Week starting next Saturday, June 21, featuring a number of movies rarely aired on British television and none of them available on DVD, to my knowledge, this side of The Pond.
Author and film historian Matthew Sweet introduces the films and hosts a new 90-minute documentary Truly, Madly, Cheaply reappraising over half a century of British B movies, from John Mills on the wrong end of a whipping in The Lash through to the giant gorilla Konga running amok in Croydon. Sweet argues that the cheapness of these films, unlike the A film, ensured they often portrayed Britain as it really was, even when (as in the case of 1970s sex movies) that wasn’t necessarily a nice place to be. Features interviews with the people behind the films including Sir John Mortimer, Patricia Laffan and Michael Winner. Truly, Madly, Cheaply will be shown several times during the short season.
Amongst the films being aired are quota-quickies from Michael Powell and Bernard Vorhaus, through to a cheap and cheerful Hammer style 70s zombie-bikers flick. They are:
The Last Journey; John Brahm and Bernard Vorhaus co-directed this 1936 portmanteau thriller. A train driver driven mad with jealousy after discovering his wife’s affair, embarks on his last journey before he retires. Should be the BBC’s restored and remastered version from National Film and Television Archive materials. Kicking off the week at 7.30pm on June 21.
Lazybones; Michael Powell’s 1935 65-minute romantic comedy, made at Twickenham Film Studios. Ian Hunter is cast as Sir Reginald Ford, an extremely idle baronet who, along with his titled father, is also completely penniless. Seeking a solution to his lack of solvency, Ford pursues American heiress Kitty McCarthy (Claire Luce)… The plot is predictable, but the film nevertheless displays the first hints of Powell’s inimitable style.
Psychomania; Don Sharp’s 1973 kitchy horror. The members of The Living Dead gang commit suicide believing they will become immortal, but things don’t turn out quite as they expect. Nicky Henson has a hoot as the Angel from Hell, and he is superbly supported by Beryl Reid as his devil-worshipping mum and George Sanders (alternately fighting off yawns, knowing winks and blushes) as her ghoulish butler. This British horror cheapie ends up so ridiculous, it works. It was available on DVD in R1 courtesy of Image Entertainment, sadly now OOP, but a couple of places are still listing a very cheap (so probably nasty) 4:3 version from Geneon / Pioneer.
The Black Rider; Wolf Rilla directs this 1954 ‘boys own’ crime thriller. A reporter (Jimmy Hanley) investigating sightings of a strange hooded figure on a motorbike is led to a castle hideout for a group of smugglers. And they would have got away with it but for that pesky father of the former ’Magpie’ presenter…
Cover Girl Killer; another crime thriller, from Terry Bishop (1959). A series of murders of magazine cover-girls baffles the police. Starring Hary H Corbett in a rare straight role and Felicity Young.
Marilyn; known as Roadhouse Girl in the US, Wolf Rilla in the chair again for this pretty entertaining 1953 quickie. In a fit of jealousy over his wife (Sandra Dorne), a garage owner (Leslie Dwyer) gets into a fight with an employee (Maxwell Reed).
Full details available on the BBC 4 website here.
Square Eyes; Showing Very Soon… June 13, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Square Eyes , add a commentFor digitally equipped UK based telly viewers, there’s a feast of westerns on BBC 4 this weekend that you might like to take note of.
As well as two-thirds of the ‘Cavalry Trilogy’ and two of the very finest John Ford / John Wayne collaborations (as I write that, I’m mindful that Ford would bristle at the suggestion…) - Fort Apache, essentially Ford’s coruscating take on Custer and featuring some breathtaking monochrome cinematography courtesy of Archie Stout, plus the Technicolor splendour (the Beeb print allowing) of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - BBC 4 is showing Ford’s brilliantly realised Wagon Master, just released by Universal in the UK, with a fair to middling transfer, but unavailable in R1.
Kicking off the short season, at 7.30pm on Saturday June 14 is Sam Fuller’s superb Run of The Arrow, as yet sadly unavailable on DVD either side of The Pond, with Rod Steiger somehow managing to spellbind despite another of his ’Oirish’ accents that are as authentic as Guinness brewed in Cleveland. Alex Cox’s 2007 comedy drama Searchers 2.0 gets its first terrestrial telly outing on Monday, June 16, and you’ll also find a smattering of documentaries - a repeat for Reputations: John Wayne, a look at the life and times of The Duke, but I quake a little at the prospect of the newly minted How the West Was Lost in which: “…Comedian Rich Hall looks at classic westerns from Buffalo Bill to Unforgiven, and sees their influence on films such as Reservoir Dogs and Taxi Driver.”
Hey; western fandom is a serious business…full details of the Westerns Weekend on the BBC 4 website here.
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.
Teddington’s Lost & Found, And A Tale Of Two TCMs… September 10, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, DVD News & Info, British Film , 3 commentsVisitors to the Filmjournal site will already know that the ever excellent clydefro is making a weekly effort to point you at the best of the output from the Stateside Turner Classic Movies cable station, so I hope he won’t mind me gently treading on his territory.
It’s in a good cause; I want to highlight a season of Warner Bros. First National films made at Teddington Studios. On Mondays September 17 and September 24, film fans in the U.S. will see a variety of very rare ’quota quickies’ from the British studio. And I quote:
The second installment of TCM’s remarkable “Lost and Found” series is comprised of films made at London’s famed Teddington Studios by Warner Bros. First National during the period 1932-1943. The series includes the U.S. premieres of two early works from director Michael Powell of The Red Shoes (1948) fame – the drama Something Always Happens (1934) starring Ian Hunter, and the crime thriller Crown vs. Stevens (1936) starring Beatrix Thompson. The other premieres are Crime Unlimited (1935) starring Lilli Palmer, Man of the Moment (1935) starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., The Peterville Diamond (1942) starring Anne Crawford and The Dark Tower(1943) starring David Farrar…
Known as “quota quickies,” these films were shot at a fast pace on low budgets to meet the demands of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, created by the United Kingdom Parliament to require a yearly quota of British-made movies and hopefully counter Hollywood’s dominance of the cinema world. (Never considered a success, the Act was modified over the years and repealed in 1960.) The films made at Teddington during its Warner Bros. era were strictly for the U.K. market, and most were never seen on this side of the Atlantic. Of more than 100 such films, only 33 are known to survive.
Many distinguished actors worked at Teddington during its Warner Bros. period; also represented in the TCM series are Michael Redgrave in Sons of the Sea (1941), Richard Greene in Flying Fortress (1942) and John Gielgud in The Prime Minster (1941). Among those films considered permanently lost, one of the most historically significant is 1934’s Murder in Monte Carlo, in which a young actor named Errol Flynn so impressed Warner Bros. executives that they dispatched him to Hollywood.
Teddington Studios has a long and interesting history dating to the 1880s. It became a production center for feature films in 1916 and was leased, then purchased, by Warner Bros. in the early 1930s. In 1944, during the dwindling days of World War II, a German rocket exploded on the property, causing extensive damage. Eventually reconstructed, the studios would become home to Thames Television, and today the facility remains an important media center.
The link above takes you to the TCM website and from there, the programme details, including full synopses of each film, plus video snippets. Good stuff. But the even better news is, apparently, ads being broadcast for the season say that the films will be transferred to DVD and are going to be available ‘before Christmas’. Be nice if it comes to pass.
While I’m here, I’ll use this as an opportunity to vent my spleen, in a very small way, at TCM’s U.K. output - a quick look at the website shows immediately that the Brit station is, by comparison, the American version’s impoverished cousin, both online and on air. Not only that, while there are some real gems to be found over here, they pale by comparison with the rich output of TCM U.S. For a start, it’s highly unlikely we’ll get a version of the Teddington Studios season broadcast in the country from which the films actually emanated. Bonkers.
TCM U.K.’s films are shown usually (but not always) in the correct aspect ratio, but never anamorphically (widescreen TVs being, apparently, the domain of those permanently tuned to Big Brother). We also have to put with showings broken up by ad breaks, something even Murdoch’s Sky Movies channels do not stoop to.
I get the distinct impression that, in close association with Warners savvy classic home entertainment arm, TCM U.S. is a station aimed at legions of film buffs and cineastes of all ages. While TCM U.K. - it’s myriad commercials zeroing in on those nearing the front of the queue in God’s waiting room - is targeted at those wrinkly and technophobic old film fans who think Brad Pitt was at the heart of the mighty conflict between Arthur Scargill and Maggie Thatcher. And who appreciate being prodded every half hour to get ready for the next big adventure in life. Which is death.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that TCM U.K. exists at all is something of a triumph when you consider television’s overall output. But as you can see, it could be so much better…
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…
Broken Trail March 5, 2007
Posted by John Hodson in : Television, Film & DVD Reviews, Westerns , 2 commentsPrentice Ritter: I get rousted out of my sleep sometimes when Nature calls. I find there’s something frightenin’ ’bout that hour of the night ’cause there ain’t no foolin’ yourself ’bout what you done or what you hadn’t done with your life.
The western, the genre that spawned the very first narrative film, has fallen on hard times. Critics have been writing the western’s obituary for around the past four decades, but while it’s taken an arrow, and is hurt bad, it’s not quite ready for Boot Hill yet.
Just when you’re ready to whistle up a coffin (or maybe make that three…), along comes an Unforgiven, an Open Range or a The Proposition, and there’s much talk of a dramatic revival. One that never really comes to pass.
What makes some great westerns so is seemingly, sadly, unfashionable for today’s Cineplex audiences - the comfortable longueurs of something that sprawls across the screen like Once Upon a Time In The West, the fresh-scrubbed, golden hued mythos of a Stagecoach or a Shane, the subtlety of male relationships that is the bedrock of a Red River or a Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
In the decades that westerns were produced by their 100s, they covered practically every situation one can think of, and cross pollinated into other genres - musicals, comedies, noir, westerns that took their lead from Shakespeare, from contemporary events, there are psychological westerns, graphically violent westerns, westerns that deconstruct the myths they themselves espoused at cinema’s dawn.
And when cinema-goers fell out of love with the cattle drives, the saloon bars and the dusty, wooden fronted, frontier towns, westerns took off into other settings, into outer space, for instance, with blasters replacing six guns, special effects usually in place of literate scripts…
The common thread of this most malleable of genres - an individual, or a group of men, pitted against an adversary where only courage and muscle, their wits and a six-gun will bail them out - has endured, though the location, the untamed America of the late 19th century, seemingly no longer strikes a chord with the vast majority of modern audiences, or at least enough to make the western the sure fire hit it once was.
Ironically television, once the western film’s - indeed, the movies as a whole - mortal enemy in the small screen boom of the 1950s, looks to be riding to the rescue. Over the past decade there have been several decent westerns on TV, some of them suffering slightly by being evidently underfunded (the sheer scale of the battle got away from the makers of Gettysburg, a huge army of 1000s of extras being beyond their pockets). But big screen values are now trickling down to the small. Leading the charge is Robert Duvall and Walter Hill, an acolyte of Sam Peckinpah, and both self-confessed lifelong fans of horse operas.
Hill gave us three aces with The Long Riders, Wild Bill and Geronimo, and westerns in all but name - Southern Comfort, Trespass and Extreme Prejudice. The big, burly Californian also directed the pilot episode and was consulting producer of HBO’s Deadwood, an exhilarating spittoon of a series; a foul-mouthed, entertaining, if ephemeral, hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last year Hill was in the chair for Broken Trail, a terrific three-hour two-parter, the very first made specifically for the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel, produced by and starring the quite fabulous Robert Duvall, for whom this was the third part of his own western trilogy, following the hugely successful adaptation of Larry McMurty’s (he of the excellent Brokeback Mountain) Lonesome Dove for TV, and Kevin Costner’s admirable Fordian western movie, Open Range.
The latter was another of those films that was going to make the western fashionable again, but Costner’s follow up in the same genre appears to have stalled. The big screen turned it’s face from the traditional style and story of Open Range, and the best we’ve had, in recent years, has been the hard nosed, fly-blown and bloody Australian frontier of The Proposition, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, less of a western I suppose - despite it’s tedious ‘gay cowboy’ tag - more of a tragic love story, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Tommy Lee Jones’ ‘Peckinpah-esque’ Tex-Mex chilli pepper of a modern day western.
It has been down to Duvall’s production company, Butcher’s Run Films, to give us what is the real Open Range successor in the shape of Broken Trail, a small-screen project with those aforementioned lush big screen values.
Like Open Range, I can’t think of a better description for Broken Trail than a ’good old fashioned western’, an elegiac ‘end of trail’ story of good versus evil. These events take place with the west on the cusp of the 20th century, and the death of a way of life and maybe of a whole set of values that, had they not been commonplace, is more satisfying to imagine that they should have been so. For if the men that built the west were wholly otherwise, is not an entire nation constructed on the most questionable foundations? Print the legend - it’s easier on the eye, and the heart.
Thus, Broken Trail gives us both good guys and bad, no anti-heroes here, no blurring of the lines. The good are straight and true, the bad are just plain nasty and the ugly, well, she runs the whorehouse…
A ‘broken trail’ is one that, through natural disaster, human intervention or just plain lack of use, runs no place. Broken Trail deals with a number of lives that, mostly through happenstance, come together, some going nowhere, others that are damaged through circumstance or the intervention of evil-doers. How these ‘trails’ are made whole again and put back on the map, or wiped off it, is the essence of Alan Geoffrion’s script.
The year is 1898 and Prentice ‘Print’ Ritter (Robert Duvall) invites his estranged nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Hayden Church) to join him driving 500 head of horses from Oregon to Wyoming, animals desperately needed by both the British Army for their war against the Boers, and by the United States Cavalry for the Spanish American conflict.
Print, tired after a life in the saddle and gambling all on this hazardous journey, tells the drifting Tom that his mother has died and effectively disowned him in her Will, leaving the family ranch to her brother rather than the son who left home under a cloud several years earlier. Print is offering Tom a chance not only to earn some real hard cash, but to make something of his wasted life at last along the tough Oregon Trail.
On their journey, Print and Tom pick up a number of waifs and strays; Henry ‘Heck’ Gilpin