The Big Whatsit

It’s been a while, and though my film watching has continued unabated (along with some half-written germs of reviews and many more semi-conceived outlines for bits of writing!) it’s been my treat to pick up the latest Hammer Icons set. Following the Adventure and Horror releases comes Icons of Suspense, a collection of six black and white offerings that show a number of different sides to the studio.

The tagline ‘Six Edge of your Seat Classics’ might be pushing it a bit, yet the Region 1 set presents some really good films that might otherwise have remained half-forgotten and unrestored in a lonely vault. As usual, the process of cleaning up these gems for DVD release is nothing short of remarkable. Digital crispness and sharp mono sound are the order of the day here. The lack of extras is a problem that lingers from Icons of Horror. All we get are trailers, which provide a typical sense of the gaudy thrills that surrounded each Hammer release, but there’s nothing else upon which to chew. The commentaries that accompanied Icons of Adventure are sadly absent, though some of the other extras on that set struck me as ‘grafted on’ rather than being essential companion pieces.

More troubling is the way the three discs are stacked onto a single hub, a sign of the lack of love that went into distributing the set that isn’t evidenced in the restoration. Surely, a bit more thought wouldn’t have gone amiss, and whilst on the subject there must be plenty of documentary material concerning Hammer that might have served as a nice addition.

Oh well, at least we have the films themselves, none of which I had seen previously. Some I will definitely watch again, particularly those with the tightest plotting, the economical storytelling that defined Hammer’s output. Others, the baggier efforts, seem to have been bulked out from short stories that were bloated to ensure a feature length release. Crucially, none are really weak, and for my money two of the pictures are bona fide classics…

Stop Me Before I Kill (1960)
The first entry in the set is this psychological thriller directed by Val Guest, which was released as The Full Treatment in the UK. We start with a car crash, and the rest of the film deals with its aftermath. Driver Alan Colby (Ronald Lewis) returns to physical health but fights a compulsion to murder his wife, Denise (Diane Cilento). Recuperating in Cannes, they meet psychiatrist, David Prade (Claude Dauphin), who offers to help Colby. The treatment can’t come too soon. Colby is unable to make love to Denise because he thinks he will throttle her. A wire he comes across in their flat becomes a near-fatal garotting weapon. Eventually, Prade helps our hero to come to terms with the car crash. He thinks he’s sane, but the following morning Denise is missing and their bathroom is a mess of blood…

Guest is a renowned writer-director in the Hammer canon, and there are moments in this film that remind you of his talent. One sequence finds Denise enjoying a skinny dip, watched by Colby but, as it turns out, also by Prade. Observing her through his binoculars, Denise’s shapely form is reflected in each voyeuristic lens. The trouble with the piece is that, at 108 minutes, it’s too long. The traditional, sub-90 minutes running time that was a hallmark of Hammer gives way to padding, too much padding, and there really isn’t enough going on to justify the extra minutes. That said, it saves its best thrills for the end, and while you might not feel much for the stiff, remote Alan, Cilento is a vision as Denise. The film also features an excessively dodgy cable car, the sort of contraption that screams ‘Abandon hope all who enter here.’

Cash on Demand (1961)
Things improve greatly with Cash on Demand, and not just for the presence of Hammer heavyweights Peter Cushing and Andre Morell. The film is based on an episode of the televised anthology series, Theatre 70, where it was called Gold Inside and featured Morell in the same role of suave robber, Colonel Gore-Hepburn. Here, Cushing is bank manager, Mr Fordyce, the sort of joy-free model of efficiency that every branch might have called for at one time. The plot is simple. Gore-Hepburn tells Fordyce that his wife is kidnapped and will be tortured and killed unless he helps him clean out the vault. The manager has no choice but to comply, knowing that one false step could leave him a widower.

The film is 80-minutes long, and an exercise in taut plotting and tension. Every ounce of suspense is etched onto Fordyce’s face as his world unravels around him. Morell appears to enjoy himself immensely, and with much of the action taking place in the manager’s office the two actors simply riff off each other. They’re note-perfect performances, particularly from Cushing whose cold veneer crumbles as he’s undermined and bullied by the robber. A scene of unexpected violence actually brings a tear to his eye, and there’s a cracking moment when he has to get a safe open before the alarm goes off, made exquisite as he fumbles for his keys cack-handedly.

Cash on Demand takes place on 23 December. The importance of Christmas is apparent, Fordyce coming across initially as Scrooge-like to his staff as they plan a seasonal party. This frostiness, particularly to his long-suffering deputy, Pearson (Richard Vernon), thaws by the film’s close, suggesting nods to ‘A Christmas Carol’ that can’t - and perhaps shouldn’t - be avoided. It’s a splendid piece of work. Incredibly, it took two years for the film to make it from completion to the screen, and then as a slimmed down support feature.

The Snorkel (1958)
The first scene of The Snorkel depicts a murder, an ingeniously planned and executed crime that isn’t unravelled until the final reel. By then, killer Paul Decker (Peter Van Eyck) believes he has gotten away with it, successfully doing away with both the mother and father of young Candy (Mandy Miller) in order to come into the family’s money. His only concern remains Candy herself. The girl is convinced that he’s responsible, and as the plot develops he realises he will need to see to her also before she figures out what’s going on and exposes him.

The Snorkel was directed by Guy Green, who had won an Oscar in 1948 for the cinematography on Great Expectations. Consequently, this is a film that looks great, even when filming in dark, confined spaces. It’s just a shame about the narrative, which slows down considerably following the first murder before picking up for the climax.Despite that, it’s a neatly made thriller. Van Eyck carries off his role superbly, at once ruthless murderer and figure of respectability whose cool never seems to break. Mandy Miller was a child star (she was BAFTA nominated for her role in 1952’s Mandy) who restricted her appearances to television following her convincing playing of Candy.

Maniac (1963)
Hammer goes all film noir for this thriller, a vehicle for matinee star Kerwin Mathews. Personally, I saw Mathews as a bland lead. Good looking yet oddly lacking in charisma in the likes of The Pirates of Blood River and Jack the Giant Killer, it’s here that he comes into his own as the roaming point of a love triangle. Dropped in sultry France (MGM’s Borehamwood backlot doubling suitably), Mathews plays a drifting painter who stays in a bar and falls for the landlady’s stepdaughter (Liliane Brousse). Little does he know that the girl is a rape victim. Her father killed the rapist and was subsequently declared criminally insane. At first, the landlady, Eve (Nadia Gray), appears to disapprove of the blossming affair, but it turns out she wants Kerwin for herself. It isn’t long before she has him ensnared and involves him in a plot to break her husband out of his asylum prison, and it’s here the troubles begin for our hero.

Several elements elevate this film into something a bit special. First, Mathews is excellent as Paul, quickly realising he’s part of a bigger plot and trying to keep from drifting out of his depth. Gray too plays a fantastic part. Eve is sexy, needy and conniving. The story burns slowly in the opening chapters but picks up after the breakout, when the man they helped to escape starts haunting his old family. The twists stack up and it’s never clear who is double-crossing who.

A dark treat, featuring a clever screenplay by Jimmy Sangster and Michael Carreras on directing duties. The latter has a tendency to stop the action in favour of some unnecessary diversion from time to time, but cranks up the sense of urgency when it matters.

Never take Candy from a Stranger (1960)
The tagline from this rarity went ‘Powerful! Shocking! Raw! Rough! Challenging! See a little girl molested!’, which lent the film a degree of luridity it didn’t need. In fact, Never take Candy from a Stranger treats its subject matter - that of child abuse - very seriously, whilst working both as a courtroom drama and latterly a thriller. When Peter Carter (Patrick Allen) takes a job as the school principal within a Canadian township, he takes with him his wife Sally (Gwen Watford) and young dauther, Jean (Janina Faye). The community is dominated by the Olderberry family, who own the area’s industrial concerns that provides work for its people. One evening, Jean reveals that she danced naked for Olderberry Snr (Felix Aylmer) in exchange for candy, and Carter files a complaint.

At this point, the film examines the prejudices of the day. It seems everyone knows that Olderberry is up to this kind of behaviour yet there’s a strong urge not to upset the applecart that involves taking him to court. The Olderberrys are just too powerful. Too much is at stake. Carter begins to experience the shunning of a town that would rather not have to deal with this sort of trouble, and sure enough the old pervert is acquitted after a harrowing courtroom experience for Jean. Let loose, the clearly demented Olderberry has one more shock left up his sleeve for Jean and her friend.

The final act, while shocking, is slightly out of kilter with what has already taken place. Never take Candy’s main message, that money can prejudice the wheels of justice, is a powerful one, today as it was fifty years ago, and director Cyril Frankel handles the sensitive nature of the trial with real intelligence. That such an ending was tacked on gives the impression the film needed to come full circle, of revealing the consequences of a wrongful acquittal, and while there’s nothing wrong with it as such it really isn’t necessary.

These are the Damned (1963)
These are the Damned opens with the story of Teddy Boy gangs mugging unsuspecting tourists and at some point enters the realm of science fiction. Of all the pieces presented in this set, it’s the most ambiguous and refuses to comply with the usual Hammer staples of tight plotting and trimming away the baggage. Of the latter, the early scenes in which Oliver Reed’s cronies terrorise an American tourist (Macdonald Carey) don’t really fit in with what the film is ultimately trying to say, though as usual Reed is suitably scary as King - was he influenced by Alex from A Clockwork Orange (Burgess’s book was published a year before this film’s release), or indeed was his performance an influence on Stanley Kubrick?

Later, via an extended chase scene the characters stumble across a government experiment, namely a group of children who are being raised in isolation from the real world. They’re radioactive, in preparation for a post-nuclear war environment where they will be able to survive and restart the human race. Carey and his girl, Joan (Shirley Anne Field) resolve to rescue the kids from this madness, with the reluctant help of King, who is already experiencing the first symptoms of radiation exposion.

These are the Damned picks up once the main characters and children come into contact with each other. But it takes so long to get there, so much nonsense involving Carey and Joan as he tries to woo her (and viewers attempt to ignore the fact that he’s fifty and easily old enough to be her father), and the pursuit by King that hints at incestual undertones. There’s another character, a sculptress, who appears to be in the film for no other reason than because her house is a convenient place for hiding out in… That said, there’s undoubted power in the film’s main message concerning anxiety over the nuclear threat, and a sense of anger at the folly of humankind that overshadows the work. The film’s very last scene is one of the bleakest you are every likely to come across.

‘It’s all right. It’s quite all right, really. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry, you see. We have all the time in the world.’

On her Majesty’s Secret Service is an oddity in the Bond franchise. It almost bisects the Connery and Moore eras (’almost’ because Connery had another turn - or even two - as 007 left in him), and it plays like a return to the early days with its lack of gadgetry and spectacle. Then there’s its star. George Lazenby. The Australian model who just wasn’t Sean Connery, no matter how good the performance or material he was working with. OHMSS enjoyed respectable box office yet didn’t make the kind of fortune of the previous outings, which did for Lazenby whose ‘fall’ has attached a stigma to the movie ever since.

Over the years, Lazenby has become a byword for bad casting. So rubbished is his reputation that I expected to watch OHMSS and find myself cringing at his hamminess, wondering if my dining table was more or less wooden than his acting. Maybe directors warn their young actors to watch out or they’ll end up like George Lazenby. And so it came as some surprise that he wasn’t terrible at all. He could act. He had range, and most importantly for this role he had some degree of presence. In fact, he was pretty good, all told. His take on the part certainly demanded something different than what Connery had tackled previously.

In the film, Bond is expected to reveal his vulnerability more than once. There’s a scene where he is being pursued by Blofeld’s stooges through a Swiss village. He’s spent a good while eluding and tussling with them all the way down from SPECTRE’s mountaintop retreat and they’re closing in. Utterly drained, Bond has little left in him other than to pull his collars up, sit on a bench and look anonymous. Lazenby portrays the defeat and fear coursing through his body really well. It’s hard to imagine Connery pulling it off so convincingly. Even when his Bond was chased through a street carnival in Thunderball, Connery never looked as though he was in any real danger. But then, that was 007 as superhero. Lazenby’s brief is to play him as a human being and he’s up to the challenge. Sure, he was no Connery, but then imagine how everyone’s favourite Bond might have rough-housed his way through the climactic scene in OHMSS and be thankful that he didn’t. In Lazenby’s hands, Bond has to despair, and he does. More than once. And maybe it was this that sealed his fate; after all, the franchise became the juggernaut it did on the back of its star winking cheekily at death. Did punters queue up at the theatres to see 007 cry?

All that’s in the past, and the exploration of those complex emotions turning Daniel’s Craig blunt weapon into the cold-hearted killer he is in Casino Royale has lent a degree of revision to Lazenby’s turn. It’s after the depthless Roger Moore years that we can feel a sense of regret that the one-off didn’t get more chances to get to grips with his character, exposing the vulnerability of 007 yet further within a world that expects him to show little remorse. We got hints of his Bond in the character played by Timothy Dalton, and it’s little surprise that the complicated agent from The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill has turned out to be an artistic high point for the franchise, albeit one that didn’t mix too well with the public and forced it to revert to type with the safe Pierce Brosnan.

In the meantime, this one’s well worth another look. Diana Rigg, her career at its zenith, had the privilege of featuring throughout the film. The leading lady’s early appearance and co-starring role offered Rigg a rare opportunity to give her character - the Countessa Terasa Di Vincenzo, or just Tracy - almost as much depth as Lazenby’s 007, and she didn’t waste it. The pair have great chemistry, making their mutual attraction on the screen and subsequent engagement quite believable. Indeed, the only negative in her performance is the moment when she lulls Blofeld (Telly Savalas) into a false sense of security by reciting poetry to him as Bond and her father’s men close in on the villain’s headquarters. It’s a scene that just doesn’t work, suggesting Blofeld is a poor sucker for womanly wiles after he has spent the majority of the picture manipulating innocent females.

Elsewhere, Savalas adds a triumphant edge to the part of the main baddie. If Donald Pleasance suggested Blofeld as a twisted, deformed gnome, here he’s an action man, as prone to ski chases and bobsled pursuits as he is hatching fresh plans for world domination. As it is, Pleasance might sound closer to the mark, yet Savalas pulls it off through sheer charisma. His meetings with Bond - following those involving Pleasance and Connery in You Only Live Twice - provide an early instance of the Bond adventures not following a linear path. If the pair crossed paths previously, then why doesn’t Blofeld recognise 007 instantly, instead just about falling for his disguise as heraldry expert, Sir Hilary Bray?

Throw in a dramatic location at the very peak of the Alps, a favouring of brains over Q’s toys, and one of the best John Barry scores ever linked with a Bond film (it’s certainly on a par with You Only Live Twice), and you have the makings of an instant classic. But OHMSS has more up its perfectly tailored sleeve than that. The first half of the story tracks Bond’s attempts to discover and infiltrate Blofeld’s headquarters. This he does via Tracy, whose father (Gabrielle Ferzetti) has information that leads to where the evildoer is hiding. Along the way, he falls for the frosty girl, and the feelings become mutual as she succumbs to his lengthy courtship, sheer tenacity and charm. Once Blofeld imprisons Bond, the movie takes a turn for the exciting. The fun begins with a pursuit down a seemingly endless mountainside on skis. It’s a thrilling ride, made sublime by the work of Willy Bogner Jr, the former Alpine ski racer who shot reams of footage with the camera strapped to his chest, offering a skier’s eye view of the action. John Jordan filmed further scenes whilst sitting in a cradle that was suspended from a helicopter, allowing him to get unique shots of the stuntwork. Ever committed to carrying out the camera duties that others wouldn’t dare take on, Jordan had already lost a leg after an accident during the shooting of You Only Live Twice, and was to die a year later when another mishap whilst filming from a helicopter caused him to be sucked out and sent plummeting to his death. Scenes like those shot here are a testament to his amazing craft and single-minded commitment to getting the best footage possible. Added to the riveting ski scenes are a stock car race on ice, an avalanche that was provoked by planting strategically placed bombs in the snow, and a bobsled chase down Piz Gloria. It’s exhilerating stuff, never letting up, and only the most emotionally devastating pay-off could ever top it.

This we get with the last few minutes of the film. Having left Blofeld hanging from a tree trunk by his neck, seemingly paralysed, Bond marries Tracy, inviting all his Secret Service mates and even listening to some friendly advice from Q. As James and Tracy drive off in the flower-lined car, everything feels too perfect, and of course it is. The couple indulge in some verbal foreplay as they drive along mountain roads, and then stop to remove the flowers from their car. Blofeld and hench(wo)man Irma Bunt (Ilse Steppat) drive past and abruptly shower them with bullets. Bond survives, hurling himself behind the car, but as he’s about to set off in pursuit, he realises with a start that Tracy has been shot, point blank, in the head. Stunned, he cradles her body, tells a passing policeman not to hurry with help because there’s all the time in the world, and drops his head into hers with a lasting sob. The moment, shocking in its quiet tragedy after all the prior action, is weighted sublimely. Lazenby nails it, coming across as neither too bluff or hysterical. It’s something Connery simply couldn’t - or wouldn’t - have managed as well. Perhaps this is because, as film critic Danny Peary noted, the original Bond was more self-assured and virile. He commanded any scene in which he appeared, whilst Lazenby was not so confident and on occasion more vulnerable. Connery’s agent would never have allowed himself to fall in love with one woman, maybe aware that life was too short and easily lost to make it work. In Lazenby’s hands, Bond dares to lose his heart, gets married and pays the ultimate price.

The frequent mentions of Connery in this piece gives a good impression of why the Australian had just one Bond film in him. Knowing Broccoli and Saltzman were casting for a new 007, Lazenby went to Connery’s barber and asked for a similar haircut, and then solicited his tailor for an identical suit. Thus armed, he hung around outside Saltzman’s offices until his secretary was distracted, and then promptly introduced himself to the producer as the new Bond. The stunt worked, but in the end Lazenby didn’t. Rumours that he was difficult to work with slipped from the production to the press, and it seems he struggled to identify with the newfound attention he was enjoying. Yet what really made his stay a short one was the unavoidable crime of not being Sean Connery. When the film didn’t enjoy the box office success of its predecessors (though it went on to be the biggest grossing movie of 1969), something had to change, and Lazenby became the scapegoat. Director Peter Hunt saw this as a pity, and perhaps it was. It’s left On her Majesty’s Secret Service as the franchise’s curiousity piece, an experiment in staying closer to Ian Fleming’s novel than in previous pictures, introducing a softer-edged Bond and trying a different actor in the role. There’s very little that’s wrong with it, including the magnificent credits sequence, one of Maurice Binder’s finest with its montage of previous 007 adventures and thumping John Barry theme tune. Soon enough however, Connery was back on board and returned to the larger than life antics reminiscent of his former outings in Diamonds are Forever. It was business as usual, with no mention of Tracy, as though this entry had never happened at all, and it was no better for that omission.

In an unfortunate coincidence of release dates, John Badham’s take on Dracula hit USA theatres three months after Love at First Bite. The George Hamilton romp, a playful yarn about the Count finding love in modern New York, was a box office hit, grossing more than $43m in 1979 and placing vampire comedies very much in vogue. What the world didn’t demand was a sober adaptation of material from both the book and the Broadway stage show, which starred Frank Langella as Dracula, but that’s what it got when the Badham movie premiered in July 1979. While it didn’t exactly bomb, the film took around half the gross of Love at First Bite and was considered a commercial failure. Dracula gained ground during the following decade, becoming a massive hit in the VHS rentals market. It remained the most recent screen version of Bram Stoker’s novel until Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish adaptation, which came out in 1992.

Badham’s edition broke with the tradition of Dracula films by concentrating far more on the Count’s sensual qualities. Up to that point, most releases suggested he had a hold over women, but the emphasis had been on his evil, his ability to draw female victims towards him via an ill-defined supernatural hypnosis. Not here. Langella, reprising his stage role for the film, is a highly sexual being. Charismatic and charming, he steals away with the fiance of Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve), who never stands a chance. Once the Count takes an interest in her, Lucy (Kate Nelligan) doesn’t look back. The virtuous Jonathan has lost any allure. The film spends some time dwelling on their courtship, one where Dracula is established as being in a league above those around him. You understand why he captivates Lucy. Various perfectly intoned ‘Good evening’s from him and she’s lost to Jonathan for good. Even when the Count dies and Harker believes his power over Lucy has ended, it’s clear from the look in her eyes that the truth is quite different. She’s Dracula’s, and not through the process of turning her into a vampire but via sex. In the film’s solitary sex scene, an abstract, suggestive piece of swirling reds and silhouetted lovers that’s dated rather badly, it’s made clear that he has shown her a good time. How can Jonathan, a slightly ridiculous figure in his Toad-esque Hispano-Suiza, possibly compare?

As with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a great deal of money was invested in this version, disconnecting it from the TV adaptations and Hammer’s cost-cutting offerings that came earlier. Dracula might have lost its Transylvanian opening, but little expense has been spared in recreating pre-World War One England. The production values are from the top drawer, as is the pedigree cast, and the film is topped off with a lustrous score from John Williams. The composer clearly enjoyed providing the music for Dracula, taking as his inspiration Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and riffing on the theme of everlasting love.

The story is rooted in Whitby, North Yorkshire, though the filming was all done in various locations around Cornwall. St Austell doubled as the coastline where the doomed ship carrying Dracula to England is beached. Camelot Castle in Tintagel serves as the Seward residence and mental hospital. Carfax Abbey is in fact the beautiful St Michael’s Mount. The Count gets to work as soon as he’s set foot in England. First, he bewitches the wan and sickly Mina Van Helsing (Jan Francis) seemingly because he can, before quickly seeing her off and moving onto Lucy. Poor Mina is little more than starters. In this version, she’s the daughter of Abraham Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier, complete with a thick Dutch accent - Francis’s comes and goes, presumably to give the impression of her settling into English society), who arrives at the scene after her death and is the only one with any real inkling of what really befell her.

In the film’s best scene, and by some distance its scariest, Van Helsing ventures to Mina’s grave to dispatch his daughter, who is now terrorising the community as a vampire. And what a vampire she makes! The Professor comes across an empty coffin, but one that has been ripped apart from within, leading to the labyrinth of mining tunnels below. Van Helsing descends, and in the cramped darkness drops his crucifix in a puddle. As he ferrets for the cross, the waters clear and reveal a nightmare vision of white looking down on him. It’s Mina, returning to her resting place and still wearing the tattered funereal dress she was buried in. He looks up, the full horror of what has become of her dawning on him, and the camera similarly tilts, gradually revealing a putrid, broken skinned demon with black eyes, matted hair, reddened mouth and bloodlust. Between them, Dr Seward (Donald Pleasance) and the Professor put Mina out of her misery, but the pain has told on her father. By all accounts, Olivier was a fan of Peter Cushing’s work in the Hammer Dracula franchise, and the emotional investment his tortured character puts in here gives him the advantage. It’s in his dealings with Langella where the ‘Cushing’ in his performance shines through. These are clever men, natural adversaries, and whilst you get the impression Dracula has some respect for the cross-wielding Professor all he gets in return is academic revulsion.

For audiences, the fate of Mina is proof of Dracula’s evil. He may be a good looking bloke with great hair who wears a cape well, but that’s where his lovemaking gets you, wandering the lonely night as a repellent living corpse. The race is now on to save Lucy from the same end, even as Miss Seward is succumbing to the Count’s seduction. His is a different vampire from the doomed hero played by Gary Oldman. Less openly demonic than Christopher Lee’s Dracula, Langella is nevertheless an empty individual, boasting to Van Helsing and Harker of his power and heritage whilst murdering the unfortunate Renfield (a superb Tony Haygarth) with a contemptuous neck break.

If there is a fault with Dracula, it is that there are few frights to be had. Apart from the scene detailed above (one I could barely watch when I first saw the film as a child), and the moment where he appears at Mina’s window (upside down, eyes glowing, after crawling down the wall outside), the scariest bits are those depicting Seward’s chaotic hospital, a real home for the mentally broken where screams are commonplace and inmates wander the stairways wearing pigs’ heads and wailing pitifully. I read a comment that Langella was just too handsome to make for an effectively creepy Dracula, and in fairness it wasn’t his brief to terrify the viewers. Though he takes Lucy and Mina, this vampire never bares his teeth, instead upping the smoulder value and leaving it to his brides to do the rest.

Is it even supposed to be scary? What we now savour is the brilliant cast, led by Olivier’s pained Van Helsing and the suffering etched on Eve’s face as he appreciates both what he’s up against and what he’s lost. This is an underrated adaptation, even in the colour-saturated version that has been ubiquitous since the film’s release on laserdisc in 1991. Apparently, Badham had initially intended his movie to be in black and white, in honour of the Universal classic from 1931, and it was only here that he had an opportunity to produce an edition that came close to his vision. Those who recall the warm colours of Dracula’s theatrical release and appearances in the 1980s - the studio (Universal again) deliberately overruling Badham in an attempt to showcase the film’s production values - demand a return to its original form, though there are no plans for a restored version and indeed my copy - the R2/4 DVD produced without a lot of love in 2006 - is as desaturated as they come. But does that really matter, as long as I still have visions of the undead Mina approaching, arms outstretched and the words ‘Papa, komme mit mir’ escaping her broken lips in that little, lost girl’s voice..?

Given the choice between Hammer’s two giant franchises - Dracula and Frankenstein - it’s the ‘good’ Baron who gets my vote. No disrespect to Christopher Lee’s Count. He’s still my favourite incarnation of the chalk-faced Transylvanian. But in the case of Frankenstein, Hammer appear to have mined a richer vein of storytelling. These movies, invariably starring Peter Cushing, produce the same basic yarn with each release, but it’s how they get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ that never fails to entertain. The Revenge of Frankenstein, the sequel to Hammer’s box office smash original, could have been a rehash of familiar material. The Curse of Franksentein loosely followed Universal’s 1931 classic, Frankenstein, and nobody would have blamed the studio for simply taking James Whales’s follow-up, The Bride, as its inspiration. Instead, writer Jimmy Sangster comes up with something entirely original, leading the plot in an unexpected direction.

Perhaps it’s the Cush’s playing of the Baron that makes the production hang together so well. This site has made no secret of its admiration for the Hammer veteran, and he’s clearly in his element with this meatiest of roles. What makes it so good is that Frankenstein is broadly portrayed as a villain, a body-snatching wrong ‘un who tampers with the stuff of life at the cost of others, yet in Cushing’s hands things aren’t so simple. His Baron is capable of showing great kindness to others, not least with his physically disabled assistant, Karl, to whom he offers a new, working body as a favour for saving his neck from the guillotine. He runs a clinic for the poor, yet it becomes clear this is a front for his favoured work and his patients are in fact the unwitting donors of the body parts he needs. That said, his aim is to cure the afflicted, albeit via a grotesque transplant of the brain into new quarters. However you choose to read him, what’s clear is that Cushing’s protagonist is a morally ambiguous character, and it’s to the actor’s credit that he slips neither into outright evil or pure goodness.

As usual, The Revenge was filmed at  Hammer’s Bray Studios, and for fans the movie can become a case of spotting the sets as they appeared in many other productions. The graveyard in which the Baron is supposedly buried has served as a cemetery on numerous occasions. Frankenstein’s cellar-based laboratory doubled as Dracula’s crypt. The latter, the centrepiece to any good offering about life made from dead flesh, is a riot of flashing lights and electricity sound effects. In an early scene, Frankenstein reveals an experiment to his new assistant, Dr Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews). It’s a pair of eyes and a disembodied arm, both of which are attached to an artificial brain powered by electricity. The Baron wishes to prove how complicated the human brain is by demonstrating the reactions of the arm and eyes to fire, and sure enough both get excited as he approaches with a lit bunsen burner. Played for dark laughs it may be, but Cushing and director, Terence Fisher, wear straight faces. They realise all this is ridiculous fare, but never make the mistake of being too knowing about it.

Once the business of Frankenstein’s latest escape from justice is dealt with, we’re into a familiar groove. Renaming himself Dr Stein (he later pops up in London’s Harley Street as Dr Franck), the Baron is up to his old tricks in Carlsbruck, Germany, getting up the noses of the medical establishment by making a success of his little practice whilst working on Karl’s new body. With the help of Kleve, his transplant is an apparent success. Karl wakes up in a fresh body, that of jobbing actor Michael Gwynne (best known perhaps as the duplicitous Lord Melbury in Fawlty Towers, but in ownership of a lengthy CV containing appearances in the likes of Cleopatra and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). As Karl recovers, the doctors toast their success. But there are warning signs. An earlier experiment carried out on a chimpanzee caused it to turn cannibalistic and eat its mate, but Stein believes he has overcome that obstacle.

Soon enough, Karl starts going wrong. He’s impressed initially with his handsome new face and fully functioning body, but he then begins to show psychotic tendencies, as well as the physical limitations of his old self manifesting themselves once again. As his face collapses alongside his mind, Karl turns to mindless murder. He then unwittingly reveals who Dr Stein really is, putting the Baron’s life in jeapordy. As the guillotine looms again, Frankenstein is reminded that he’s suddenly a long way from a moment earlier in the film where he treated his medical peers with utter scorn by making them wait for him in his ward, next to all those grubby, working class patients.

The Revenge really is good stuff. These were the days of Hammer’s early forays into horror, back when it was young, thrusting and in demand. The budgetary limitations only extend as far as some familiar shooting locations. Elsewhere, it’s a lavish affair, featuring great effects, make-up and costumes, all of which add up to the dark fairytale territory that Hammer aimed for. At its heart is Cushing, still some years away from the sense of repetition that came with making another schlock Frankenstein caper (though I have a soft spot for the 1967 offering, Frankenstein Created Woman) and enjoying himself thoroughly. The film may be over fifty years old, but it’s sprightly for its age and gives every impression of coming from a studio that was at its creative peak.

Two worlds collided for me on telly the other week when Russell Crowe turned up in Sky’s commentary box at Lord’s, fresh from a day’s filming of Robin Hood and present to watch the Aussies achieve a rare collapse against England. A bemused Nasser Hussain clearly didn’t know what to say to the actor, who is renowned for kicking off at a single wrong word yet turned out to be a rather affable figure who was happy to discuss his love for cricket. Either Nasser didn’t press, Crowe wasn’t talking or it was considered to be an unsuitable topic for the Ashes, but the details of his current film project didn’t crop up much. Robin Hood, as directed by Ridley Scott, is still very much in production and details on it are scarce, but by all accounts it’s an affair for revisionists, imagining the folklore character as an avenging angel who, along with the Sheriff of Nottingham is a fervent believer in the dead Richard the Lionheart’s dream of England and is prepared to fight to preserve it.

Hopefully, it won’t go the same way as the insipid King Arthur, the 2004 attempt to reconfigure the legendary monarch along more historically likely lines, which sounds good but produced a dull film from material that should be just about impossible to fail with. Scott has a real opportunity to create a genuinely fresh perspective on Hood, whose story been filmed many times and nearly always portrays him as the classic, noble-hearted hero who steals from the rich and, well, you know the rest. One of my favourite versions is the HTV television series from the 1980s, perhaps because it was the one I grew up with but also due to its heavy use of mythology, of setting Robin up as a hero of ages whose burden is to do right for the timeless land. True, Michael Praed looked like a L’Oreal commercial in forest green, but he was well supported by the likes of Ray Winstone as a gritty Will Scarlett, whilst Nickolas Grace made for a superb, unbalanced Sheriff.

It’s perhaps a shame for Grace that his take on the character was so effortlessly overshadowed by Alan Rickman, just about the only good thing in the otherwise terrible Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves from 1991. Rickman’s Sheriff is a glorious ham, a pantomime villain who lights up the screen whenever he’s on it, though this is partly because the rest of it goes on and on through its tired motions, all Costner vehicle and that bloody Bryan Adams song that was number one for the entire summer I was home from University, and as we know University summers last a long time. Of the rest, I have a soft spot for the 1976 Richard Lester film, Robin and Marian, starring Sean Connery as an ageing hero who returns from the Crusades to try and win Marian’s (Audrey Hepburn) heart one last time. Is this even a Robin Hood film in the truest sense? The characters are present and correct, but it’s about quite a different thing from the usual fare and its closing scene is heartbreaking. On a quite different tangent is the recent BBC series, which portrays Robin as a Hollyoaks character who has stumbled into the twelfth century to fight Lily Allen’s dad and a bloke who has a penchant for eyeliner and dresses as a gimp. My son loved it. He’s 9, and I suspect he was the target audience for just this sort of nonsense.

In reality though, the version any new movie finds itself squaring up to is The Adventures of Robin Hood, made in 1938 and available on a spiffing, two-disc DVD. Scott’s production will no doubt be an entirely different animal from the Errol Flynn starrer, but that’s no bad thing considering there’s very little that can match the sheer joie de vivre of the latter, while it would be sheer folly to try and recreate its sense of innocent fun for more cynical audiences. The Adventures has stamped its authority on cinema as a supreme example of how to get matinee movies absolutely right. It was an enormous hit with contemporary audiences, a marvel in Technicolor, whilst its Oscars for Art Direction, Editing and Music showed it hit all the correct notes with critics technically (it was also nominated for Best Picture). It’s still an absolute pleasure to watch, to melt in the luscious score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, admire the ravishing use of colour and the way Flynn’s easy charm juxtaposes beautifully with the acting chops of Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains as Sir Guy and Prince John respectively.

To appreciate The Adventures fully on DVD, you are invited to watch it as part of Warner Night at the Movies, a delicious ensemble of supporting features that reflects how contemporary cinema audiences would have enjoyed the experience. This starts with a trailer for Angels with Dirty Faces, the sort of flick that Warner was better associated with, before offering some vintage newsreel footage. The items on display concern a custom-built miniature tank for machine gunners, which looks horribly uncomfortable for its passengers, and a piece on Nazi Germany’s Anschluss with Austria, complete with ominous music. An eleven-minute music short follows, which features a series of quick-fire pieces by Freddie Rich and his Orchestra. My heart sank when I saw this coming on, but it happened to be lovely fare. Particularly memorable is the rendition of Loch Lomond sung by Nan Wynn who doesn’t sound as though she would recognise the Loch if she fell in it but gives a sweet performance nonetheless. The final support is Katnip Kollege, a Looney Tunes cartoon about the School of Swingology (just down the corridor from Zoology) in which the class dunce eventually gets the beat and woos a Betty Boo-esque dame. Altogether, it’s a deliberately twee and nicely compiled body of work, and shows just how different the 1930s moviegoing experience was from the corporate ads-trailers-feature routine we get today. All that’s missing is the opening and shutting curtains, and usherettes selling choc ices and Cornettoes at the front of the stalls.

The Adventures opens with some exposition about the oppression of Saxons by their Norman overlords, before moving on to Sir Guy catching Much (Herbert Mundin) as he kills one of the king’s deer. The bloodthirsty knight is all for killing Much as he stands, but fortunately Robin just happens to be in the area with his friend, Will Scarlett (Pattric Knowles, the one wearing, er scarlet) and he quickly sees off the ruffians. It isn’t long before Robin has got on the wrong side of Prince John, an oily regent who is plotting to usurp King Richard’s throne as the monarch is being held to an impossibly high ransom by the Emperor of Austria. Though impressed with Robin’s general roister doisterousness, the Prince vows to do away with his status as a focal point for all undermined Saxons, outlawing him, though this only serves the purpose of making him even more of a figurehead. Richard’s ransom also gives John an opportunity to raise more cash, though it’s obvious this is going straight into the Royal Treasury than for its public purpose, and the Saxons are squeezed further for taxes. Ultimately, people gather to Robin. As well as the well known Merry Men, like Little John (Alan Hale, who took the same part in the 1922 and 1950 Hood films) and Friar Tuck (a dry-witted Eugene Pallette), the outlaw puts together an army of Saxon outlaws, who turn Sherwood Forest into a fortress of manned branches and sliding poles made from vines. Shortly after, he kidnaps and humiliates a seething Sir Guy and also comes across Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland), who is initially repulsed by him yet comes around once she realises his cause is just.

One of the film’s many pleasures is that it takes a complicated story about the difficult relations between Saxons and Normans in an England ruled with iron by the latter, and makes it easy. In part, this is because the Norman rulers are so obviously the bad guys, self servers all whilst the noble Anglo-Saxons are reduced to serfs. Robin becomes an easy man to follow. In the lead role, Flynn oozes charisma, even though his inclination to throw his head back and laugh heartily comes across as more than a little theatrical. It’s amazing to think that the part was initially intended for James Cagney, then the biggest star in the Warner stable, whilst Flynn was just on the rise thanks to his fine turn in Captain Blood yet didn’t appear to be the obvious man for the job until he donned the green tights. Born in Tasmania and capable of speaking like a perfect English gentleman, Flynn was in fact at an ideal age and point in his career to play Robin. His lusty take on the part is sublime, particularly as it quickly becomes clear that he can’t die - even when Sir Guy captures him - and there’s a resulting tongue in cheek element to his turn that’s just irresistible.

Flynn had already appeared in films with his co-star, de Havilland, in two productions prior to Robin Hood. Still several years away from becoming dissatisfied with the parts offered to her by Warner, de Havilland makes for a comely Maid. She has one of the hardest roles in the film as the sole character who changes sides during its events. Whilst everyone else is either typecast easily as a goodie (Saxon) or villainous Norman, she starts as a haughty Norman ward before slowly being won around by Robin. Considering the simplicity of the script, she actually makes this process look quite natural and organic, though once on the outlaws’ side she’s there for keeps. The scene where she demonstrates to Robin that she can chew on mutton in the traditional way is absolutely sweet.

As for the villains, Rains is excellent as Prince John. Machiavellian and shrewd, he’s every inch the John we grew up reading about in stories, the wheeler dealer who is fine as a cloak and dagger usurper yet collapses once the chips are down. His henchmen are Rathbone as a suitably nasty Sir Guy, and Melville Cooper who provides some significant comic relief as the Sheriff. I think Rathbone is quite the best thing in The Adventures. A superb swordsman who only ever hints at the assiduous intelligence he clearly possesses, he has in many ways a thankless task as the black-hearted Norman knight but is electrifying whenever he’s on the screen thanks to a suave cool that only occasionally erupts.  

The action moves quickly; the set pieces winning and inspired by the 1922 version starring an athletic Douglas Fairbanks who performed many of his own stunts. It’s set amidst a Sherwood Forest that appears in glorious, lustrous tones. An early instance of three-strip Technicolor, the film must have looked a real treat in 1938 when the use of colour in movies was largely an experimental process that didn’t always work and was still viewed essentially as a gimmick in order to get bums on seats. Not here. The forest looks gorgeous, due in part to technicians who sprayed the foliage to make it show up better on the film. Even better are the scenes shot against a setting sun, shown principally when the Normans are torturing Saxons against a ravishing, blood-red backdrop. On the DVD set, an hour-long documentary on the Technicolor process is far more fascinating than alluded to here. The sheer painstaking dirge for everyone involved in the film as a consequence of using Technicolor turned out to be entirely worth it, yet getting everything to look right was a tough call for the cast and crew, as explained in the feature. Colour is something we take for granted now, but back then it was new and special, and The Adventures must take some credit for promoting its usage.

For their Sherwood Forest, the production team used Bidwell Park in Chico, California. Pasadena’s Busch Gardens doubled as the site for Prince John’s archery tournament. Original director, William Keighley, was removed by Hal B Walls once it became clear the film needed to be more exciting. At the time, Michael Curtiz was available. The Hungarian born director was a veteran of adventure films, including Captain Blood, and once hired turned The Adventures into the swashbuckling affair it would eventually be renowned for. Everything clicked, seemingly by happy accident, a not untraditional story of a sometimes troubled production that somehow worked out for the best. Key to its standing was a substantial return on its production costs. The Adventures ended up putting Warner out of pocket by over $2m, an extravagant sum for its time even though every penny can be seen on the screen. Fortunately, it was an unambiguous success at the box office, making around $4m in its first year and more with subsequent rereleases.

And it’s easy to see why. The Adventures is quite simply an excellent piece of work, put together with care and love, and with only joy for its audience. True, it’s a simple-hearted yarn about good versus evil, one in which both sides are painted with broad, unmistakeable brushstrokes, but it’s told so winningly and with such lavish production values that there just isn’t anything about it that’s not likeable. Even to 2009 viewers, it has enormous entertainment value for viewers of all ages, looks great and never takes itself too seriously. A more perfect use of just under 98 minutes of my life I would struggle to find.

The 1935 Fox Film Corporation production of Dante’s Inferno cost just under $750k to make. It featured two actors who were due to be among Hollywood’s biggest stars - Spencer Tracy and Rita Hayworth - along with future Oscar winner, Claire Trevor. Production values were high, the movie boasting some spectacular sets and special effects, and it also carried a relevant message for its Depression era audience. Yet the Inferno is largely forgotten, a footnote in the careers of people who went on to bigger and better things. It’s unavailable on DVD, with no plans for a release (I caught it on Sky Movies Classics), neither it seems any great demand. One for completists only, perhaps for Tracy fans who want to see what ‘Spence’ was up to before he moved to MGM and became a star, or maybe those fulfilling a wish to catch Hayworth’s debut performance, back when she was billed as Rita Cansino and put in a brief yet memorable cameo as a breezy dancer.

Actually, it isn’t at all difficult to work out the reasons for the Inferno’s obscurity. The film isn’t a very good one, with its ‘club you around the head’ moralising that soon becomes rather condescending. The action follows Jim Carter (Tracy), a down on his luck grifter who happens upon Pop McWade’s (Henry B Walthall) carnival concession, Dante’s Inferno. Despite the impressive interiors and artwork of the attraction, Pop can’t pay people to enter and it’s Carter’s natural showmanship that winds up putting bums on seats. Instead of mimicking Pop’s promotion of the Inferno as a lesson in how to be good, Carter emphasises its lurid, sensationalist aspects, which naturally works with the public. Soon, he’s made enough money to buy a larger plot and build a bigger inferno, but in doing so he screws over several of his ‘carnie’ colleagues and passes a blind eye over the health and safety concerns surrounding the attraction. The bigger, better Inferno is now all about profit, the bottom line. Carter has lost his way, and only Pop - who keeps his job as the Virgil-esque tour guide - can see it.

So far, so Selznick, and there’s plenty in the film to keep fans of cheap morality pieces happy. Things really tip over the edge for Carter when he plugs all his money into a pleasure liner, one that promises to be a voyage of endless decadence and pleasure seeking for its high-rolling guests. But the ship is highly unsafe, and he knows it. By this point, his wife Betty (Trevor) has left him, taking their son with her as a consequence of his unscrupulous nature, yet he hasn’t learned a thing, even after Pop shows him what Dante envisaged hell to be like for unrepentant sinners.

It’s this latter element that makes up the high point of the film, a nine-minute tour of the inferno that is described by Leslie Halliwell as ‘one of the most unexpected, imaginative and striking pieces of cinema in Hollywood’s history.’ Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s cantica from The Divine Comedy, the movie changes tone entirely for the duration of the vision, a wordless glimpse into various recesses of hell where the damned linger and are punished. These include scenes of near-naked people throwing themselves into the fiery abyss, suicides who now grope the air pathetically as branches of gnarled trees, the misers in life who are now forced to shift vast boulders for eternity, heretics being crushed by the weight of their own tombstones, fire and brimstone pouring over exposed blasphemers, and so on.

If these scenes appear utterly at odds with the rest of the movie, then it’s possibly because according to some sources the footage comes from an earlier piece, the 1924 edition of Dante’s Inferno directed by Henry Otto that until recently was considered to be lost. Gothic in nature and vast in scope, the grim despair and strange, otherworldly beauty of hell does appear to have been ripped from a different film, and it would be easy to believe this was the case. Aside from some lingering shots on Carter’s pleasure liner of revellers that cleverly mirror the hell scenes (though they’re being about something entirely different), the vision is completely inconsistent with the tone of the overall piece and somewhat superior in terms of its quality. It’s been suggested that the film’s terrible depiction of the afterlife was inspired by the German expressionism that could be found everywhere in the 1920s, yet there’s little of Metropolis’s jutting skyscrapers or the crazy, surreally angled buildings of Dr Cagliari on display here. Rather, it’s reminiscent of the woodcut artwork of Gustave Dore, who produced a series of works in the nineteenth century based on scenes from Dante’s poem.

The film’s director, Harry Lachman, started out as a painter, having emigrated to Paris in 1911 and gaining a reputation as part of the post-impressionist movement. After getting involved in film, first as a set designer within the French film industry, Lachman moved back to America as an established director and was eventually given the job of putting Dante’s Inferno onto the screen. A fan of Dore, it’s clear to see the engraver’s work in the movie’s hell scenes, while it’s also possible to detect the director letting his own artistic vision reign free over these sequences. According to the New York Times, the film employed 3,000 extras - all toned, muscular bodies, which perhaps wasn’t what Dante had in mind when he first put his image to paper but at least ensured that the damned looked good in their tiny loincloths - and an army of technicans to bring Lachman’s terrifying vision to life.

So who did create these scenes? Were they culled from an earlier production, slotted into an otherwise simple-minded yarn where the ‘good’ are those with the least selfish dreams? Or did they come from Lachman, who was allowed to make these visions as he wanted to whilst being saddled elsewhere with a pedestrian affair? Nobody seems to agree, and there are compelling arguments for either side. Neither does it really matter. Otto’s 1924 film survives on a few remaining prints at the film archive of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The 1935 version has been largely consigned to history, dusted off occasionally for a matinee screening on a backwater of the Sky Movie channels and unavailable for purchase.

Only, it does matter. Though much of the film is forgettable nonsense, the hell scenes are an incredible vision and live on in the inspiration they offered to later film makers. They’re present in the hellish chaos of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia, through to Vincent Ward’s romantic fable about the afterlife, What Dreams May Come, and Lars von Trier’s upcoming Antichrist, besides making their mark on just about every subsequent depiction of hell on screen. Perhaps this imaginative legacy means the film deserves better.

After the relative high of Star Trek, I have found some of this season’s new movies to be rather flat and disappointing. Perhaps it’s the curse of the sequel, beginning with the leaden Night at the Museum 2, which retreads virtually the entire material of its prequel (including many of its gags!) presumably in an effort to squeeze more money out of the franchise. I saw no point to any of it, which was made worse by the fact I quite enjoyed the first instalment. Then, as now, Steve Coogan was the funniest thing on display but he isn’t in this one as much. Mine wife is a big Dan Brown fan, and as such we simply had to see Angels and Demons. I went in with low expectations, particularly given some of the reviews, and had a ball, thanks mainly to the way the film hurtles along at breakneck speed and made me forget to worry too much about what was happening because, oh look, here’s another murdered priest. It was terrible, of course, yet not without merit, and surely the Tourist Board of Rome will be able to set up some marketing gimmick with all those statues that just happen to be pointing at things and in the world of the movie that means a clue.

If I’m being overly kind to ‘good crap’ like Angels and Demons, then worse is to come. Nothing prepared me for the unremitting awfulness of Goal III. Well, that isn’t entirely true. Its ’straight to DVD’ status suggested I wasn’t in for a treat, nor the fact Amazon had already slashed the price considerably one week into its release. The one-star reviews on IMDb weren’t exactly encouraging, and I guess it was only ‘brand loyalty’ that persuaded me to order a copy. After all, I had seen the first two chapters at the cinema and a lingering hope that it might just be watchable spurred me to part with my cash. Big mistake.

The first chapter was no one’s idea of a masterpiece, but it was glossily produced and weaved its yarn about a young Mexican who lands a trial at Newcastle United with some style. A lot rested on the shoulders of Kuno Becker, in the lead role of Santiago ‘Santi’ Munez. Whereas many critics were content to slate him both for his apparent lack of football talent and ‘rabbit caught in headlights’ acting style, he brought enough boyish charm to the part to win most viewers over. The film was helped by the participation of various football people, including the Newcastle first team, David Beckham and then England manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson, all of whom giving the project a degree of credibility, indeed Goal! was made with the blessing and participation of FIFA, who approved of its core message that anyone can indeed make it to the top, providing they have the talent and dedication. I imagine this sentiment will cock the eyebrows of most Chairmen outside the Premiership’s top four clubs, but that’s the movie’s fantasy for you.

Goal 2 showed signs of an already ailing franchise. Slipped quietly onto screens in the UK, its premise - Santi is transferred to Real Madrid and contests the Champions League - held little of the charm of its predecessor. The story of WAGs and rich footballers who learn that money isn’t everything gave nothing for the ordinary viewer to identify with, and its best parts concerned the struggles of Santi’s teammate, Gavin (Alessandro Nivola), who was coping with the onset of retirement. Less surefooted was Anna Friel, our hero’s girlfriend who ended the film pregnant and alone, and a subplot that had Santi scouring the backstreets of Madrid for his mother seemed to be shoehorned in for the sake of a cheap human interest story.

Both movies ran along the same faultline, one that proved a fatal flaw, as it has for any football-based fiction. It is that as dramatic as the Goal trilogy might have purported to be, it could never match the unscripted, arbitrary and occasionally unfair highs and lows that come with following soccer in real life. Several days before watching Goal III, I caught Brazil taking on Egypt in the Confederations Cup, a match that sounded like a procession for the former yet ended in a squeaky bum 4-3 win, the decider scored with minutes left on the clock. The game was a rollercoaster, a saga of your football minnow standing up to one of the best sides in the world and almost claiming a result. With stuff like this taking place all the time in football, there’s very little left for fiction to cling on to, and I think it speaks volumes that the most successful soccer novel critically by some distance - David Peace’s The Damned United - is an imagining of real life events that bastardises most of its characters and upset the Clough family with its one note sketching of Brian as a boorish, boozy big head.

None of the above forgives Goal III. If the downturn in quality between the first two instalments is noticeable, here it’s in free fall. Every element of the production points towards a film that has been rushed out on the cheap, released because the series was supposed to contain three parts yet nobody is very interested in seeing it through to its conclusion. The whole affair plays like a rejected script from the Sky One series, Dream Team. Yes, it really is that bad.

Let’s start with the plot. Though ostensibly still following the fortunes of Santi - who features prominently on the DVD cover - Goal III is barely about him at all. He’s there, but his role now is to interact with the two English footballers who are attempting to stake their places in Sven’s World Cup squad for Germany (yep, we’re stuck in 2006) whilst igniting their love lives. One falls for an actress he meets on the set of a movie production and, erm, that’s about it. The other, who’s a bugger for the bottle, finds out he has a young child via some lost sweetheart who still appears to be waiting for him to reappear in her life years after he left her with one in the oven. And that’s about it. Friel clearly had enough sense to steer clear of this turkey. Her character is dismissed in a passing conversation, as though that’s all she deserves, though having watched Goal III it’s for certain she had the last laugh.

Any actual football appears rarely, and there’s a good reason for that. The first two Goal films featured the actors mixing with real-life stars of the game, lending the action a degree of realism, but that’s all over with now. Goal III is allowed to use footage from England’s internationals during the World Cup finals yet the actors either appear ‘away’ from the players, or are superimposed against a background of supporters and done so very obviously. The effect of this is horrible and belongs in a pre-CGI era of naff cheapness, looking like something you might have once played on the Commodore 64.

Worse still is the fact that these budgetary limits mean there’s no tinkering with the conclusion of England’s World Cup. Anyone who knows when England were knocked out - and who by - will find no change in the narrative here because the producers can’t afford to shoot any additional footage. The tournament ends on the fluffed penalty of one of the actors and, er, that’s it once again. And what was the point of any of that? Clearly, by this stage in the franchise the soccer is no longer the point, or even a significant facet, of the story. It’s incidental, inserted by obligation to the film’s title but nothing more than a footnote of the sub-soap plotting.

I don’t suppose that would matter if Goal III was suspenseful, gripping or satisfying on any dramatic level, but it isn’t. In fact it’s boring, which is something you could never accuse the previous episodes of being, for all their other faults. The actors aren’t good enough to make you care for them, being the cheeky lads mag stereotypes who seem to have walked straight out of a Wkd commercial, neither does the script give them any depth. Becker pops up sporadically to remind you this is an official sequel, sporting a ridiculous haircut and now carrying more poundage than in the earlier films. However you choose to look at it, the film is terrible, churned out to squeeze the last possible drop of revenue from the franchise and amazingly making the other lacklustre sequels of the summer look like gems in comparison. In a final insult to its audience, Goal III only features one cameo from a ‘football person,’ and it’s reviled Newcastle owner, Mike Ashley, who tells Nick Moran’s oily agent where to go. Moran has the good grace to spend much of the film looking pretty apologetic about what he’s doing. Ashley actually appears to believe he’s doing a good turn for his own public image, which isn’t the only own goal scored before this sorry mess crawls to a finish.

DVD has done many good things for the Hammer back catalogue, and the best surely has to be its ability to dust off forgotten films like Captain Clegg and restore them for a new generation of viewers. Tucked away on Side B of the second disc within Universal’s superior The Hammer Horror Series set, Captain Clegg might have none of the lustre that comes with the studio’s Dracula or Frankenstein features but that doesn’t make it inferior. Give it several minutes to warm up and this swashbuckling tale of south coast skullduggery - disguised as horror fare - is incredibly good fun, moves with the pace of a densely layered plot stuffed into 82 minutes, and features some cracking performances.

The tale of how Captain Clegg made it onto the screen is legend in itself. His story is part of the adventures of the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, the lead character in a popular series of novels by Russell Thorndike. Anthony Hinds was forced to make changes to his screenplay for the film once it transpired that Disney had bought the rights to adapt Thorndike’s books for the screen, and sure enough the tale was dramatised in a mini-series starring Patrick McGoohan (edited for cinema audiences in the UK). The main amendment in Hammer’s version saw Clegg become Parson Blyss, removing any reference to Dr Syn in the process. The character’s mythology remains, however, almost in its entirety, as does the supporting cast. Some of the dialogue between Blyss and Mipps in the film hints at a back story that could only mean anything to followers of Thorndike’s novels and, as luck would have it, gives Captain Clegg a lot more depth than it might otherwise achieve.

In America, the film was released as Night Creatures, and indeed this is what it’s called on the R1 set. According to its Wiki, Hammer has promised their American distributor a picture based on Richard Matheson’s novel, I am Legend, which would be entitled Night Creatures. They were warned off continuing the project because the subject matter would make it too strong for the certifiers. A contract was a contract, however, and Hammer offered Captain Clegg instead, emphasising the spectres that haunt the marshes in the story in order to justify the title. A shame, as the story was strong enough when focusing on the derring-do of the smugglers. Ultimately, it was this that really differentiated Hammer’s picture from that produced by Disney, the latter released as a straightforward family offering whilst Night Creatures was marketed to a more mature audience.

The ‘night creatures’ - men on horseback wearing skeleton costumes with luminous paint - are actually the weakest element of the film. Of far more interest is the good Parson (Peter Cushing), who in his first scene admonishes his congregation for their half-hearted hymn signing. It’s clear that Cushing is having a whale of a time in this picture. Whether playing the angelic Blyss or flipping his character fluidly to become the leader of the smugglers (and Cushing is subtle enough to make his change look absolutely natural), he’s in imperial form and runs rings around Patrick Allen as the virtuous Captain Collier. Collier is in Romney Marshes to investigate a claim of smuggling but finds next to no evidence. Fortunately for him, the community is flawed enough to give him sufficient motivation to stick around, and then there are the erratic actions of his captive Mulatto (Milton Reid) to consider. Why does the mute giant, who was rendered so and left for dead by Clegg, take such a deadly interest in the Parson? What lies behind the legend of the marsh creatures? Something’s not right, whether it’s in the scarecrow that appears to be in various places at once, and might even make the occasional gesture, or the bottles of fine wine that turn up in the cabinets of the Parson and the spineless Squire (Derek Frances).

In reality, all Collier ever needed to do was look into the background of Imogene (Yvonne Romain), the village tavern’s serving wench. Nobody that exotic should be anywhere near the Suffolk coast and there’s an easy connection between her and Clegg - alleged to be hanged and then buried in the churchyard - that any investigator worth his salt would explore. But not Collier. Like much of the audience, he sees Imogene as nothing more than eye candy, lovely eye candy for sure but that’s where her story ends. Or does it?

Neither does Collier bother much with the Squire’s son, Harry (Oliver Reed), Imogene’s lover and a key member of the smugglers. Reed is fantastic in Captain Clegg. Even though his role is that of a callow youth, the young gun to Clegg’s old hand, the actor has far too much smouldering intensity to be boring. Watching Reed in these early roles, it’s clear why he still commanded so much attention during his ‘Wild Thing’ years. The charismatic talent was there. Bags of it. Of the remaining cast, Michael Ripper is his usual likeable self, thoroughly enjoying himself as Mipps, a jolly jack-tar if ever there was one. Everyone knows that Hammer films are onto a winner when Ripper ‘rips’ up the stage. The man gives a full-blooded turn, as ever. And then there’s Collier, who is turned into a surprisingly sympathetic character by Allen. Despite his squarest of jaws, the good Captain has some depth in the hands of this fine actor whose brief was surely just to make a two-dimensional authority figure of his part.

The smugglers’ attempts to dodge the authorities are what make this movie such good, roister-doistering fun. In one scene, a villager sends Collier’s entire company deep into Romney Marshes on a search for the night creatures, a diversion while his mates arrange a shipment of continental wine. It’s so high-spirited that you could forget smuggling was nothing like the knockabout high jinks portrayed here and personified in Mipps’s easy laughter. There’s nothing of the desperate cut-throatery of real life where these fellows are concerned. The smugglers are the good guys, and if there is a concern that we aren’t cheering them on enough it transpires Clegg is doing it all to put money back into the community, stealing from the rich - the government - and giving to the poor. Bless.

But then, Hammer’s mandate was rarely to offer a slice of gritty, hard life in their work but rather to entertain, and Captain Clegg delivers on that front. It might have been forgotten if not for the efforts of a group of loving restorers, and it’s certainly deemed to be among the lesser works of the studio’s catalogue, but the film represents nothing less than Hammer at its considerable creative peak.

‘Darling, I give you very best duck.‘

In You Only Live Twice, SPECTRE have their headquarters in a hollowed out volcano, complete with a retractable fake lake. The scheme involves playing off the Russians and Americans against each other in the space race by pretending to be ‘the other side’ and sending a shuttle off into the heavens to literally swallow satellites that are already out there. Watching it all happen, I was left thinking about how much their subversive antics would have cost and concluding that surely the money was better spent elsewhere. Come to think of it, if Blofeld aka #1 saw James Bond as such a threat, why didn’t he just divert a few million into some account that would pay for endless assassins, and keep hiring them until the job was done? After all, even 007 must sleep sometimes. They’d get him, if they really tried.

But then, looking beneath YOLT to find any sense of what’s going on is virtually impossible. By now, the Bond movie franchise had moved so far from its literary roots that very little beside the book titles remained of Ian Fleming’s source material. 007 himself was less a spy and more a kind of superhero, strolling out of danger with his suit uncreased and hair in place, an appropriate quip about the only acknowledgement he’d make that anything had in fact happened. In other words, it’s pure fantasy, comic book fare. Roald Dahl was given two rules before he went off to write the screenplay - (i) it has to be set in Japan (ii) SPECTRE’s base has to be inside a volcano, and the resulting script is a wild and crazy thing. Dahl truly lets rip on the narrative, including helicopters equipped with enormous magnets that can lift a car off the ground and Bond being disguised as a Japanese peasant for almost no reason at all.

For me, the movie is a guilty pleasure. I know that YOLT is a load of hogwash. I know that it probably should have suffered for Sean Connery’s half-hearted playing of the title role, let alone the flat disappointment of Donald Pleasance’s turn as Blofeld (previously an anonymous figure who was never seen by the audience). I know that this entry more than any other Bond film provided the material for Mike Myers’s Austin Powers trilogy. But I love it. Accepting YOLT for what it is, and ignoring the fact that the genuinely brilliant From Russia with Love was just three movies ago, it soon becomes clear that the producers wanted their audiences to have nothing more than good, knockabout fun with what was taking place on the screen and I think it achieves that.

The first big plus point comes with John Barry’s score. I haven’t discussed Barry’s work in too much detail when covering the previous Bond films. There’s a reason for that, and it is the sheer bodacity he brings to this movie. In places, YOLT’s score is like a mix of all the best bits from the previous outings. The Bond theme itself makes a welcome return as 007 fights enemy helicopters. Elsewhere, Barry comes up with an Orient-inspired title song, which features the beautiful tones of Nancy Sinatra, and then there’s ‘Capsule in Space,’ a rather gorgeous concoction of wonder and terror that accompanies shots of American and Russian satellites being swallowed up by SPECTRE vessels.

It’s widely believed that Lewis Gilbert made a fairly pedestrian fist at directing YOLT. Fortunately, he had Oscar-winning cinematographer, Freddie Young, on his staff, which means the film never looks less than gorgeous. You see Young’s hand in some of the early scenes, indulgent, expansive shots of Japan at sunset with orange skies framing the vista. Lovely stuff. Equally ravishing are the scenes where Bond flies over the countryside in Little Nellie. Below, Japan’s volcanic regions are lusciously framed and worthy of any travelogue. Elsewhere, the blistering script and high production values mean that all Gilbert really has to do is point the camera and shoot. YOLT is no director’s picture. Rarely is a great deal of imagination put into its composition, though there’s one effective shot where Bond is racing across a roof, pursued by many baddies, and the camera simply pans back to take a passive, bird’s eye view of the action.

In terms of its story, YOLT is forgettable; indeed the plot seems to have been set up to string together grand set pieces. At no point is it the most coherent piece of work, beginning with the pre-credits moment where Bond is ‘killed’ so that SPECTRE will stop pursuing him and thus allow him to infiltrate their plans undetected. Are there no other agents who could do this? Besides which, 007 doesn’t waste any time in getting himself noticed once he sets foot in Japan (after being fired out of a frickin’ submarine in the general direction of the Japanese coast, presumably somewhere near Tokyo because that’s where he pops up next), so what was the point exactly? Similar craziness comes later in the infamous scene where Bond is disguised as a Japanese peasant. Naturally, he leaves what is made out to be a lengthy process of prosthetic application (performed by girls wearing bikinis!) looking pretty much exactly the same as before, nor does there turn out to be any good reason for the work in the first place. By the time he’s made his way into SPECTRE’s volcanic HQ, the disguise mysteriously disappears, maybe out of sheer embarassment. In any event, this hasn’t stopped the scene from being lampooned to death, most effectively in Team America.

For all the criticism, once YOLT reveals its grandest effect - Blofeld’s hollowed out volcano, which cost anything over $1m to build at Pinewood studios - all is forgiven. It’s a superb set, produced on a vast scale, and demonstrated the producers’ commitment to spectacle over gritty realism. They had a point. The takings for Thunderball were such that audiences clearly wanted to see things to make their jaws drop and the sheer imagination that went into designing SPECTRE’s headquarters must have done just that. What made it even more gripping was knowing that the whole thing would be destroyed, Bond living to fight another day.

Only in this instance, Bond would indeed live but in a different guise. Connery made it clear during production that this would be his last turn as the spy, and even though the sentiment turned out to be premature, it made the hype surrounding YOLT all the more frenetic. What drove him to hang up the Walther PPK remains something of a mystery. The official line was the sheer level of hounding that Connery suffered at the hands of the media whenever he was filming as Bond. By all accounts, he enjoyed little to no privacy, though further causes could have been the way the character was changing into an invulnerable superhero, the lack of effort he had to put in as an actor when people turned up to see the sets, effects and locations, coupled with sheer boredom. There was certainly a point where this argument was concerned. By now, the franchise was developing into a circus attraction, a visually impressive fantasy ahead of such secondary elements as plot and character development. And ironically, YOLT turned out to be nothing like the box office bonanza that Thunderball had produced. With a new Bond came a fresh approach to the material, a back to basics effort that would turn the agent back into a human being. Of sorts.

‘Dear girl, don’t flatter yourself. What I did this evening was for Queen and country. You don’t think it gave me any pleasure, do you?’

Thunderball remains the most successful of all Bond movies at the box office. Adjusted for inflation, its take (at 2008 prices) was a formidable $966.4m. Neither is it hard to see why the film did so well. All the right elements were in place - Connery, Young, Barry, Binder, etc - along with the things that we now traditionally associate with the franchise. Much of the action takes place in the Bahamas, which have rarely looked more like a paradise location. Bond gets various glamorous women to play with, not to mention an array of enemies and the uncovering of a dastardly SPECTRE plot.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the cracks appear. After an extravagant pre-credits sequence in which Bond breaks just about anything worth breaking during a fight before escaping with the help of a rather unecessary jet pack, we get to meet this episode’s baddie. Enter Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), also SPECTRE #2, a figure of sufficient portent to make gendarmes shy away from issuing him with a parket ticket yet in reality a hired hand to the still anonymous #1. A heavy he is, whether being effortlessly duped by 007 or letting the agent work under his nose for much of the movie’s duration. Largo has so many opportunities to see off Bond yet fails entirely to do so, instead allowing the agent to give him the slip again and again, not to mention making off with his ‘kept’ girl, Domino (Claudine Auger).

That wouldn’t be so bad, but much of Bond’s detective work takes place underwater. Thunderball’s producers clearly spent an awful lot of money on their acquatic scenes, enough to ensure we watch stuff happening beneath the waves again and again. The film scored a first for the detail and clarity of its underwater footage and for that feat alone it deserves some kudos. But the troubles with acquatic filming soon become apparent. One is that it is by definition slower and more sluggish than normal action. The second is that it isn’t often obvious who’s who; the protagonists wear swimming masks and that makes it difficult to pick people out, indeed in one action sequence the only way you can tell who’s Bond is from the fact that he alone is wearing shorts. The sheer number of underwater scenes doesn’t quite turn the film into ‘Thunderbore’ but it doesn’t fall too far short.

Things bode far from well during Bond’s stay on a health farm. His near death on a back stretching machine - followed by his vengenance involving a steam tub and a strategically positioned broom - along with his interminably slow uncovering of a SPECTRE plot is bad enough, but worse comes with his treatment of Nurse Molly (Patricia Fearing). 007 has his usual eye for the lady, but this is the first time in the series that his advances are more lecherous than charming; his wooing of her via an opportunistic bit of blackmail is uncomfortable, certainly from a twenty first century perspective, and has an unfortunate whiff of ‘Carry on Bond’ about it. I remember a time when the agent could win a girl’s heart with his winning smile and boyish quips; this is just seedy.

Of course, being a Terence Young movie Thunderball is never really bad. What irks is it’s nod to excess. It was felt quite clearly that high concept action is what audiences wanted, hence Thunderball’s budget being far greater than that lavished on any of the previous outings. Money was sunk into the replica model of the hijacked nuclear jet. A cool $500k went on Largo’s yacht, Disco Valante. Unfortunately, it seems this where much of the creative effort went also, leaving us with a good looking piece yet a drama that plods too often. It picks up whenever Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) is on the screen, so much so that you can almost forgive the film for its bland lead villain. Fiona is SPECTRE’s femme fatale. Like any decent Bond bad girl (see also Xenia Onatopp (groan!) in Goldeneye), she’s instantly more attractive than the heroine and uses this as a weapon. When not luring the luckless Derval (Paul Stassino) to his doom, she’s bedding Bond himself, via the slaying of his assistant Paula (an underused Martine Beswick). Later, she very nearly sees off the agent, or at least puts him in a state of some peril, which is more than can be said for the fairly rubbish Largo. His weapon of choice - a lampoon-friendly shark-infested pool - can’t match Fiona’s deadly, desirable charms.

Fiona introduces herself to the movie with a seduction scene. She keeps Derval occupied before he goes off to test pilot a British Vulcan bomber, which just happens to be armed with two nuclear warheads. In anticipation of this, SPECTRE have spent two years training a doppelganger, who thanks also to plastic surgery looks and acts exactly like Derval, all the better for impersonating him. The double, Angelo Palazzi (also Stassino) kills the original and then naturally demands more money for carrying out his sabotage work on the plane. I like this bit, as much as I enjoy the scene where #1 kills a henchman for embezzlement (using a frickin’ electric chair, no less). It seems that SPECTRE, an organisation made up of crooks and thieves, occasionally has to deal with people from within who are trying to steal from it, which is entirely credible.

Thunderball runs for 130 minutes, which makes it the lengthiest of the Bond movies to date and also noticeably the flabbiest. Too often the action is cut short with scenes of Largo and 007 talking, and these bits are just weird. After all, Bond’s opposition to the eyepatch wearing villain is pretty much established from their first meeting and yet they maintain a strange semblance of feigned friendliness in their conversation. Certainly, Largo is blase enough to let Bond carry on with Domino. We’re supposed to believe that she helps James because she’s Derval’s sister and the agent recruits her to the cause by telling her of his fate. By this late point, however, she’s fallen for him already, indeed there’s no question she’s his from the moment he pulls her flipper from a coral in their opening seconds together. Auger certainly makes for a comely Domino, but she’s no match for Fiona in terms of sex appeal and simperingly messes up the one favour Bond asks of her. This leads to one of Thunderball’s most unintentionally comic moments. Largo advances on her, wielding what looks like a cigarette and some ice cubes and explaining that ‘This for heat, these for cold, applied scientifically and slowly’ will lead to untold levels of pain. No please, make it stop! Then she’s rescued by a scientist who has hardly appeared in the film up to this point, no doubt a character whose scenes have nearly all been cut. It’s a bit of a mess, in truth, and just as bad as the film’s conclusion, which involves Largo’s boat heading at top speed towards a reef, which is rather clumsily represented by the outside footage being played quickly through the yacht windows.

The special edition DVD features an excellent documentary on the Bond phenomenom, which of course it was by this stage. A mixture of audience favour and sheer momentum (they were releasing one film per year, putting it on a par with the rolling hype garnered by the Lord of the Rings trilogy) meant that by the time Thunderball was due for release over the Christmas holiday in 1965, you could buy just about anything featuring the 007 brand. The marketing and anticipation surrounding the movie meant it couldn’t fail, and it didn’t. Regardless of its ‘by the numbers’ direction and working to strict formula, the public lapped it up, greenlighting the direction into which the franchise was heading. Following its initial run at the theatres, Thunderball was rereleased as a double bill. One trailer on the DVD blends scenes from the movie with others off From Russia with Love, the films being shown on one ticket, and already there appears a gulf in class and imagination between the pictures. This wasn’t too gapingly apparent yet. Connery was still on board and the franchise retained enough ideas to keep Bond fresh. Yet Thunderball offered an early glimpse of what happened to the series when money and spectacle were chosen ahead of characterisation and plot development. It’s just okay, and that isn’t good enough for this secret agent.