In short: Ghost Story (1974)

McFayden (Murray Melvin), a product of the British upper class if ever you’ll see one, has invited two former college friends to an old mansion. I say friends, but as a matter of fact, McFayden, Duller (Vivian MacKerrell) – the unpleasant product of the “sportsman” archetype – and the middle-class and clearly still suffering from bad memories of his school days Talbot (Larry Dann), didn’t really run in the same circles way back when. McFayden and Duller, connected by class if nothing else, start bullying and “teasing” Talbot in ways subtle and blunt.

Instead of simply exploding, or going somewhere else where a perfectly nice guy like him might be appreciated, Talbot begins seeing ghosts and visions about the mansion and its past, reliving a tale of cruelty and madness that slowly unfolds and attempts to envelop the man trapped in it whole.

This British film directed by Stephen “I made two movies about the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and they are both terrible in completely different ways” Weeks, with a script by Philip Norman and Rosemary Sutcliff (whom I know as the author of well-regarded historical novels for teenagers like “The Eagle of the 9th”, written before YA existed as a label or the genre it is today) is quite a pleasant surprise to me. Despite its title – and some knowing nods towards M.R. James – this is not a traditional ghost story in the antiquarian – nor the Victorian – manner,  but a film that uses its ghostly apparitions metaphorically to confront the sins of the past, in this case the psychological fall-out of the British class system, colonialism and the repression of women.

I’m not typically a fan of the “ghost as a metaphor” approach, yet the script simply makes it so engaging – if in a somewhat theatrical manner – there’s really no arguing against it. Characters are deeper and more complex than the stand-ins for their class they at first appear to be, and even the more melodramatic elements of the plot always feel organic and absolutely appropriate, earned by the film’s intelligence.

And even though Ghost Story really isn’t so much about the supernatural as the supernatural, and more like someone from the Pinter school of British stage writing trying their hand at a ghost story, there is still room for delightfully creepy moments in it; in a couple of scenes, this even seems to evoke the careful and ambiguous strangeness of British writers of the Weird like Aickman and de la Mare, not something one encounters on screen very often, and certainly not done as well as it is here.

Past Misdeeds: Cat Girl (1957)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After nine years of absence, Leonora Johnson (Barbara Shelley) returns to her ancestral home on insistence of her uncle Edmund Brandt (Ernest Milton). Leonora has bad memories of the place and her uncle's habit of making her life a decidedly cheerless one. Why, he even managed to torpedo her love to student of medicine Brian Marlowe (Robert "Bland" Ayres). Somehow, the end of her first big love had set Leonora on a path to a horrible taste in men (not that Brian's exactly like winning the lottery, as we will see), and now she's freshly married to Richard (Jack May), a semi-professional gold digger who is such a prick he even takes his not-so-secret lover Cathy (Paddy Webster) with them on the visit to Uncle.

As luck will have it, Leonora meets Brian again right before she arrives at her uncle's. Brian is now a full-grown psychiatrist (though, as it will later turn out, a crap one) and happily married to Dorothy (Kay Callard), which comes as a bit of a shock to Leonora who is quite obviously not at all over her love for the guy.

Once the travellers arrive at his place, Uncle Edmund shows himself not at all happy with Leonora bringing someone with her - not for the natural reason of Richard's personality, but because he has a secret to tell her. Edmund makes do anyway during a nightly meeting in which he discloses to Leonora that their family has been cursed for generations into a strange mind/body share affair with a leopard where the leopard kills whom- or whatever his partner pleases and the human partner takes on some of the leopard's more unpleasant psychological characteristics. Now is the time for Edmund to die and for Leonora to take on the curse's burden.

At first, Leonora doesn't believe her obviously quite mad relative, but soon enough Edmund is killed by his leopard, and she begins to feel changes inside of her that start to convince the young woman her uncle was telling the truth. She confides her troubles to Brian, but his mixture of bad rationalism and book burning is of no help to anyone.

Leonora's feelings about the family curse turn into certainty when Leonora and the leopard witness Richard having sex with Cathy in the woods close to the house, and the animal gives Richard his just deserts.

Leonora isn't happy with her familiar's deed, though, and confesses all to the police, who of course don't believe a single word the woman says and call in Brian in his capacity as a psychiatrist. Him being - as I said - a crap member of his profession, he takes on the case concerning an ex-lover who is still quite fixated on him after nine years of being apart and hates his wife's guts - a decision that would be idiotic even if the curse weren't real. Quite obviously, things won't go too well.

The British-based AIP production (and how's that for an ironic combination?) Cat Girl is not as close of a reworking of Jacques Tourneur's Cat People as I had expected after hearing its title and reading what the Internet in its wisdom tells about it. Sure, they are both films featuring a curse, murderous kitties and a woman's troubles to cope with her subconscious desires, but Cat Girl is so unambiguous in its treatment of the supernatural and so blunt in its psychology that both films are never seeing eye to eye about anything, and feel completely different from each other even though the British film should by all rights be an inferior copy of the US one.

That different feel is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. After all, Cat People does already exist, and I'm certainly not going to blame Cat Girl for being less of a rip-off than I had expected it to be.

If you can cope with its complete lack of subtlety, the film at hand is even a pretty good example of an attempt to combine outward appearances of the Gothic in horror - on show in the often pleasantly expressionist black and white photography of Peter Hennessy and the moody if conservative direction of Alfred Shaughnessy - with more modern ideas like the film's Freudian subtext about repressed female sexuality and desires expressed through acts of violence committed by a large cat.

Apart from its often sledgehammer-like treatment of its themes, the film's script (by AIP mainstay - and brother of Samuel Arkoff - Lou Rusoff) also suffers from some highly melodramatic dialogue not all of the actors are coping too well with. Fortunately, designated Cat Girl and future Hammer actress Barbara Shelley has to carry the main load of that part of the dialogue, and she doesn't have the slightest problem in selling it or her character to the audience. She even manages to smuggle some nuances into her performance I'm pretty sure weren't called for by Rusoff's script, making her character a bit more rounded, and believable as an actual person who once had hopes and dreams that all didn't work out one way or the other. It's difficult not to root for her even once she's gone over the deep end - though this might also have something to do with the fact that neither Robert Ayres nor Kay Callard who is playing his wife are even half as present or charismatic as Shelley is here. I didn't exactly want Callard to suffer, but the film sure as hell didn't do anything to make her enough of a person to care too much about her.


Shelley's performance plus the decent look of Cat Girl are more than enough for me to give the film a minor recommendation. I don't think this will make anyone re-think the importance of Cat People, but there is always room for perfectly fine melodramatic horror movies next to the more subtle classics of the genre with me.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Despite the dire warnings of the rather not superstitious and pretty worldly abbot Father Sandor (Andrew Keir) to keep away from the place, a quartet of British travellers – Helen (Barbara Shelley as the stick in the mud one who just might be right this time around), her husband Alan (Charles Tingwell), his brother Charles (Francis Matthews) and his wife Diana (Suzan Farmer) - on an educational jaunt through the Continent decide to make their way towards the village of Karlsbad.

Curiously enough, their hired local coach driver leaves them by the side of the road quite a bit away from the village as well as from the castle dominating the area. The good man seems to rather prefer not to stay in the area after dark. Things become even more peculiar from there on out: a driver-less horse carriage appears, but when the travellers attempt to drive it to the village, it races them straight to the castle. Let’s call it “Castle Dracula”, why don’t we? There, the strangeness still doesn’t end – having delivered our protagonists, the carriage races away again, with the traveller’s luggage still on board. At least the front door of the castle is open.

Despite Helen’s protests, the party enters, only to find a place that seems empty, yet also set for four visitors. Even more disturbing, the travellers’ luggage has somehow made its way into bedrooms in the castle.
After a bit, a decidedly creepy man named Klove (Philip Latham) appears and explains he’s keeping the place always ready for guests to continue the tradition of hospitality established by his late master, the always welcoming Count Dracula (Christopher Lee). That doesn’t explain even half of the weirdness going on, of course, but what’s a weary traveller to do?

Not surprisingly, Klove’s idea of hospitality is to murder the travellers to revive his late master with their blood, so, “running” would have been a good answer to that one, I believe. As it goes, only half of our protagonists will survive the night to flee to Father Sandor’s abbey, only to learn that the revived Dracula is not the kind of guy who keeps away from holy places once he’s set his fangs on a female neck.

The things I find most impressive about Hammer’s third Dracula film in ten years (marking the beginning of the films as a regular series, for better or worse, and given the quality of the films up to Scars, really for better), and only the second one to feature Christopher Lee’s count is how little happens in the first half of the movie, and how small the scale of its plot actually is. Or rather, how much trust Jimmy Sangster’s script has in director Terence Fisher’s ability to get by on sheer atmosphere alone, and how good the script itself is at making the small scale feel huge and eventful.

Both men are on top of their respective game here. Sangster manages to use strong brush strokes to create surprisingly multi-dimensional characters whose fates feel actually horrifying because they are so undeserved, fates they could have done little to avoid. For these characters act plausible enough to a weird situation. Even the romantic couple of the film doesn’t so much feel bland and a bit stupid but like people confronted with a situation they couldn’t have been prepared for without the knowledge they are in a horror movie; and that kind of meta lies far in the future. The script escalates wonderfully too, the slow first half making room for a second one that’s basically a thrill a minute, Lee’s this time around wildly animalistic Dracula (whose lack of dialogue may or may not have been caused by Lee hating Sangster’s dialogue, or by Sangster not writing any dialogue for Lee because he was sick of Lee’s complaining about is writing, or just by Sangster knowing his job quite well, depending on which story you prefer to believe) staying a believably horrific threat throughout.

Fisher for his part indeed does get by on an ability to build an atmosphere of fine, gothically inclined dread for the first half of the movie, turning out many a moment that still has a certain nightmarish quality all these decades later. I’m particularly fond of Dracula’s resurrection scene, a scene I couldn’t imagine being done any better by anyone, my beloved Italians included. And once it’s time for the more outwardly exciting second half of the film, the director rises to that occasion too. Judged by the number of memorable scenes alone, it’s difficult to call Prince of Darkness anything other than one of Hammer’s masterpieces.

Add to that Sangster’s script, a generally good cast (with Shelley and Keir the not surprising stand-outs to me), Christopher Lee doing his snarling best where he too often seemed to phone his performances in once he decided a film was under his dignity (but not enough under his dignity to not take the money), a Van Helsing replacement in Sandor who works particularly well because he isn’t like Van Helsing at all, and the film’s certainly not becoming worse.

In short: Blind Corner (1963)

aka Man in the Dark

Blind composer of horrible popular songs Paul Gregory (William Sylvester) thinks his marriage to former actress Anne (Barbara Shelley) is a bit more healthy than it really is, with Anne tolerating his bouts of cynicism (caused by his blindness) and his low-level alcoholism, and he in turn tolerating her unpleasant interest in money and love for being the social butterfly of the couple.

In truth, Anne has not been loving anything about Paul anymore but his money for quite some time now, and is having an affair with the young, and rather weak-willed, painter Rickie Seldon (Alexander Davion); Paul for his part is not exactly doing much to dissuade his secretary Joan (Elizabeth Shepherd) from her big fat crush on him.

Anne knows quite well that she won't be able to divorce Paul and keep access to his pile of money, so she's trying to convince Rickie to murder her husband, who likes to cavort drunk on their flat's balcony, so that they both can be together and rich - or so she says. Rickie's not too excited about the plan, but once Paul finds out about the affair and Anne puts the painter on the spot telling him he's either going to kill her husband or will never see her again (and, to Rickie's defence, she is played by Barbara Shelley), he comes around to the plan.

Both haven't counted on Paul being blind but far from stupid or helpless, though. There's also an additional nasty surprise waiting for the painter.

Lance Comfort's Blind Corner is - despite two horrid musical numbers that make quite clear why Beatlemania was good and necessary - a pretty swell little melodramatic thriller.

Comfort's direction isn't much to talk about. Blind Corner more a case of a director not getting in the way of his actors than of one putting his own mark on the proceedings, but that does of course imply that Comfort - veteran of British B-movies that he was - was quite capable of realizing the quality of his cast and giving them room to do their thing without him trying to get in their way.

For it is the quality of the cast and the script that makes Blind Corner worth watching. All of the principals are just really excellent at fleshing out the small complexities the script by James Kelley allows them. Sylvester's projection of a combination of ill-served romanticism (which is paralleled in Davion's also rather problematic - seeing as it leads him into an affair with a married woman and a murder plan - romanticism), bitterness and self-loathing is a thing to behold, while also making it more understandable why Anne might not want to live with him any longer (without excusing murder, obviously). Shelley (who is one of the great actresses of British genre films, of course) for her part makes for a fantastic femme fatale, carrying herself with the right mixture of allure and cruelty, yet also showing why life with Paul has - at least in part - made her how she is, in a performance that's more complex than you'd expect in your run of the mill low budgeted thriller melodrama.

Blind Corner is a fine example of the British low budget thriller, and comes highly recommended, even to the fools who don't adore Barbara Shelley.

 

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On WTF: Cat Girl (1957)

An AIP-produced UK variation on some of the themes of Cat People. Whatever could go wrong? Obviously, a lot could, and a lot did, but, as my write-up on WTF-Film explains, there are still reasons (most of them called Barbara Shelley) to like the film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,other places,horror,barbara shelley,alfred shaughnessy

Shadow of the Cat (1961)

With the help of the two servants of the house, Walter Venable (Andre Morell) murders his wife Ella (Catherine Lacey) after thirty years of trying to get at her money in vain. It seems marriage impostors in the olden times were much more patient than today. The killers dig a (quite shallow) grave for their victim in the nearby woods, and report her as missing in the conviction that Ella's reputation as being a bit of an eccentric will be enough to not make the police look into her disappearance too closely.

Walter and his cronies haven't counted on various complicating factors, though. First and foremost, Ella's death has not gone without a witness. Her cat Tabitha has seen everything and his highly displeased by losing her favourite food-bearing monkey. The harmless looking cat begins a reign of terror by doing lots of spring-loaded catting and throwing evil glances at the trio. It's also not too good for anyone's peace of mind that Walter might have been able to press his wife into writing a new testament that makes him the sole heir of her fortune, but her original will that gives everything to her favourite niece Beth (Barbara Shelley) is still hidden away somewhere in the house. For some reason, Walter invites Beth into the house as soon as Ella has "disappeared". Despite stealing her inheritance, the old bastard seems to be rather fond of her.

Neither the local police, nor Michael Latimer (Conrad Phillips), the young owner of the local newspaper who was quite friendly with Ella, are convinced by the supposed circumstances of the old lady's disappearance either. Latimer can't prove anything, but that surely isn't going to stop him from snooping around, especially after he and Beth begin to look at each other with the proper romantic lead expressions on their faces.

Soon the cat terror is getting to Walter so much that he's suffering a minor heart attack and decides to send for some of his low-life, untrustworthy relatives to help him find the will and - most importantly - kill the cat. Alas, this is going to escalate the cat terror into outright murder, and also brings further people without scruples but with a desperate need for money into the house.

Shadow of the Cat was produced by "B.H.P. Productions", which was a label Hammer Films used for co-productions in which they provided other firms with studio room and (as in this case) creative talent. In fact, some of the film's sets were earlier seen in one of the Frankenstein films, if in colour and not in black and white; director John Gilling was of course part of Hammer's talent bullpen, as were actors Shelley and Morell.

Mostly, Shadow does play out like a lower budget version of a mainstream Hammer film, with sensibilities a bit more old-fashioned than those shown by productions made under the mother label at the time, but still feeling very Hammer nonetheless.

The old-fashionedness is probably the Shadow's most problematic aspect. The film's script might just as well have been written in 1936 as in 1961, with not much of it hinting at a film with gothic inclinations made after Corman's House of Usher.

However, that doesn't necessarily make Shadow of the Cat a bad film. What it does is make it a film trading in any sort of daring for competence and professionalism and the decided refusal to actually be of its own time. Fortunately for the film and its viewers, the professionalism of everyone involved is large enough to provide for a slightly creaky, yet very entertaining little movie if one is not going in expecting anything original.

Gilling's direction is at least decent; from time to time, his use of shadows hints at the influence of Universal Horror, and it is in these moments the film's balancing act between thriller and outright horror film does pay off.

George Baxt's script does have its problems, obviously. I found it a little difficult to actually buy into the cute little tabby cat at a ruthless mastermind provoking people into their deaths. It's also not necessarily easy to buy into all of the film's villains going into hysterics about the animal. Sure, a guilty conscience could play its part in a case like this, but accepting half a dozen people in mortal fear of a tabby seems a bit more work than my suspension of disbelief should be doing.

On the more positive side, Baxt provides most of the villains (except for the servants, whose exemption from being actual persons is - I suspect - based on the mortal sin of being members of the working class) with at least a second dimension. I quite appreciated the script giving most everyone a motive for their being so greedy as to go to murder (although I would have loved an explanation why Walter waited thirty years to go through with his murder plans). It's also quite nice to see a semi-Gothic movie heroine with a bit of backbone like Shelley's Beth. I wouldn't exactly say she has agency, but at least she's not the fainting kind who is only there to be menaced and kidnapped.

Some of my objections might make the film sound worse than it actually is, I'm afraid. When you're able to pretend it was made in 1936 and not 1961, you'll probably find Shadow of the Cat to be an entertaining little film. At least it was to me.

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