The Sect (1991)

Original title: La setta

After a prologue taking place a couple of decades earlier in the USA introduces us to a rather nasty cult leader (Tomas Arana) with the habit of cutting off faces in a rather occult-scientific way and threatens a decades-long plan, we fast forward into the future of the early 1990s, to a small town near Frankfurt.

After orphan turned teacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis) invites a rather smelly looking old gentleman – who will turn out to have the delightful name of Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom) - into her house because she nearly ran him over with her car, her life turns into a living nightmare, of course involving that face-cutting cult and the endgame of their plan.

In between an actual labyrinth hidden in her house’s cellar that contains a well connected to hell or a comparably unpleasant place, a nasty bug that may or may not lay an egg in her brain, a really creepy weirdo as her love interest, and the eventual realization that her whole life is a lie, the face cutting bit might actually appear rather harmless to our protagonist.

Before Michele Soavi became a work for hire director for Italian TV, and after working as an assistant director for Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, he directed a quartet of incredible horror movies, so wonderfully Italian in all the best ways, it is hard to believe they were made at the tail end of successful genre filmmaking in the country when most of his peers couldn’t get a good movie financed to save their lives.

The Sect is usually the least appreciated of these films. I’m not terribly surprised about that fact, for where the nightmarish mood of the other three films – Stage Fright, The Church and even that of Dellamorte dellamore - is rooted in as much proper narrative as you get with this arm of Italian horror (which isn’t much by the boring standards of the here and now), the film at hand goes as far in the direction of free-floating, macabre strangeness as possible while still being recognizable as a genre narrative. In this sense, as in its extreme – if different – stylishness this reminds me most of my favourite Argento movie Inferno. There as here, narrative concerns and real world logic matter little when compared to creating moods, feelings and impressions through a distinctive visual style.

Which rather seems to be the point of the whole project of the cinema of the fantastic as a whole when seen through the lens of these films, and most certainly the point of The Sect. The irrational and the supernatural by their very nature are meant to defy logic and explanation, and from this perspective, their only proper treatment would be through a film becoming illogical and outright weird.

In Miriam’s specific case, all of her ideas about her identity and the reasons underlying the way she leads her life are completely undermined (rather as if she had a labyrinth where most people have a cellar), and she finds herself the pawn of a ritual the cultists being involved in don’t actually appear to be able to grasp beyond a belief they are involved in a variation of Rosemary’s Baby.

Clearly, unlike the cultists, Soavi (who co-wrote with Argento and Gianni Romoli) was not terribly impressed with the ending of that film, so he writes a better one for Miriam than Rosemary got, an ending that mixes about five surprisingly feminist minutes with a further dollop of utter irrational weirdness only proper in this particular movie.

Needless to say, this is even less a film for everyone than most other movies are; though if it sings to you, as it does to me, it’s going to truly sing.

In short: Cuadecuc, vampir (1970)

Supposedly, this started out as a behind the scenes documentary about the making of Jess Franco’s version of Dracula. But something must have happened with director Pere Portabella on the way, for what we actually get is a film that uses the behind the scenes material, B-roll from the Franco movie, and assorted footage to tell its own version of Dracula in the proper chronological order. Shot in beautifully grainy black and white this looks like the somewhat more concise ghost of the Franco movie.

To make matters more interesting, Portabella doesn’t use dialogue or location sound for most parts of the movies – until Christopher Lee gets the final word, as he so clearly loved to have. The soundscape instead consists predominantly of electronic and not so electronic drones, manipulated jazz orchestral music and indefinable noises composed by Carles Santos. This not only adds to the movie’s avantgarde score card (or is it a bingo card?) but also combines with the atmospheric quality of the footage and Portabella’s often striking editing rhythms to produce a curiously eerie mood.

More often than not, things feel downright spooky, and even perfectly normal and natural moments like the application of a bit of bloody makeup on Soledad Miranda’s face (which Portabella quite sensibly seems to love as much as Franco did) can take on a tense, perhaps even mildly disturbing, quality. Other viewers’ mileage may vary considerably, of course, for my mood of ineffable eeriness might very well be yours of goofy camp, imaginary reader. Which either demonstrates the magic of filmmaking, or the pointlessness of all movie writing, depending on one’s mood.

In short: Star of India (1954)

After five years of war in India, French country squire Pierre St. Laurent (Cornel Wilde) returns to his home only to now find it the property of a widowed Dutch countess named Katrina (Jean Wallace). Governor Narbonne, the man responsible (and clearly evil because he is played by Herbert Lom) took Pierre’s home and estates for unpaid back taxes and sold them off, or so he says. He also offers no recourse (and certainly no apologies) to the rather incensed soldier.

Katrina, on the other hand, does. Apparently, another bit of bad business instigated by the Governor not only left her husband dead in a duel with the man, but also put the villain’s grubby hands on a family jewel that means rather a lot to her. Right now, it is hidden in a pretty tacky looking “Indian” statuette in Narbonne’s office. If Pierre would agree to, ahem, reacquire the jewel for Katrina, she’d pay him by giving him back everything that belonged to him. Obviously, the good lady might by leaving out some pertinent facts Pierre will learn in due course while swashbuckling, and sometimes scheming his way back to his proper home and hearth, and of course into Katrina’s heart.

While not a top tier swashbuckler, this Cornel Wilde vehicle directed by Arthur Lubin is often very good fun, featuring very satisfying amounts of fencing and intrigue, though not quite enough romance, for Katrina is basically non-existent for much of the plot between the first act and the finale.

The plot is mostly a somewhat obvious developed series of moves, feints, and reversals of exactly the kind you’d expect from a genre in which the plotting does quite appropriately tend to take on the quality of a fencing match. Yet despite being obvious, it’s also nearly always fun and develops in a good pace.

Rather more surprising is that this is a movie about a swashbuckling hero acquiring foreign loot to put it in the hand of a group that wants to put it back where it belongs (apparently to guarantee peace in India), not at all a move typical for this sort of thing, and certainly rather likeable.

As is much of the film, really. Wilde, despite generally getting a bit stiff in the intrigue and dialogue bits (as usual), was the kind of actor at least putting extra effort into those parts of his performances that didn’t come natural, and always did some convincing swashbuckling, too. Lom is always a delightful villain, in this particular case a guy who always seems completely outraged by the idea that anyone could try to pull any of the sort of dirty tricks he enjoys on him, which is the sort thing that makes a villain fun.

Three Films Make A Post: Take The Trip

Stone (1974): This Australian bikie (thanks for that term, Australia) exploitation movie is a weird thing. It starts out as a paranoid acid trip (that is to say, pretty awesome), turns into a nearly anthropological look at its version of bikie culture - with some added fun violence in between, of course – and ends with the sort of 70s downer business that really puts all that talk about honour in the scenes before into a rather brutal perspective.

One-time feature director and occasional actor Sandy Harbutt has quite the eye for going from 70s psychedelia, through the scenes that feel documentary, to the cheap and fun action, dropping some acerbic bits about class, and getting back to the bad trip quality while making things feel natural.

Hell Drivers (1957): There’s also quite a bit of class commentary in Cy Endfield’s curious mix of melodrama, truck action, and noir tropes. Unlike in many a 50s British movie, one can even imagine the director having met working class people before. The film also shows for its time surprising sympathy for its Italian “Gastarbeiter” character (though he is played by the decidedly not Italian Herbert Lom), and generally seems to have a good working idea of how a certain type of working class pride can easily be exploited to destructive ends.

On a less theoretical level, for my tastes, the film comes down a bit too hard on the side of the melodrama, putting the action and the noir elements sometimes too far in the back. The cast is pretty amazing however, not only featuring Lom, Patrick McGoohan, Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins in the leads, but having pop up William Hartnell, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, and even Sean Connery in small before they were famous parts.

The Comeback Trail (2020): George Gallo’s remake of the Harry Hurwitz movie is one of those comedies that sometimes go out of their way to repeat a joke for the slow audience members, likes to mistime perfectly fine punchlines, and often shows surprisingly little talent for staging its jokes as best as it could. Frome time to time, the script’s very funny indeed (particularly if you like your low budget movies), but just as often, it seems to coast on some basic ideas in it being funny without actually bothering with turning them into funny scenes.

That the resulting film is still watchable and entertaining enough (in an undemanding manner) is mostly the responsibility of the actors, well, really mostly Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman (a trio frankly much too good for the film), who put quite a bit of effort into classing up the joint. As an addendum for your nightmares, please appreciate how much Emile Hirsch looks like a young, thin, Jack Black in this one.

Three Films Make A Post: Two bad people are about to meet two worse people.

Some Kind of Hate (2015): Whereas I thought that director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s follow-up film Daniel Isn’t Real (perhaps later more about that one on a later date) was a brilliant horror film about mental illness and the idea of “normality”, this, Mortimer’s first feature really doesn’t work at all. This one’s about the trauma of bullying and an undead girl taking vengeance on bullies and taking things rather too far. Apart from obvious structural problems like terrible pacing and way too much repetition, what this one suffers under most is a certain heart on its sleeve quality that suggests filmmakers a bit too close to the theme they want to talk about and therefor unable to step away from it enough to turn it into functioning art. A couple of the kills are pretty cleverly staged and imagined, at least, but it’s clear throughout that the film has much greater ambitions than being a slash fest it simply can’t fulfil.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist (post-revisionist?) Western on the other hand seems to be able to fulfil all of its ambitions easily, but then the comparison between a debut horror movie by a young guy just starting out and an experienced director like Reichardt at the top of her game is completely unfair of me, probably to both films. Anyway, Reichardt’s ambitions here are many: at once to show a naturalistic, detail-focussed tale of settlers on the Oregon trail but also to sip from the mythic well that has been built over the bones of such settlers; talking about America today by talking about its past; facing the complexities of societal misogyny and racism head-on. She’s doing all that in a film shot with some of the starker values of post 2000s US indie cinema – the very digital camerawork, the realistic sound (though leave it to Reichardt to make it a highly constructed realistic sound clearly designed), the paucity of a classical dramatic plot, the slow pacing. Which shouldn’t work terribly well at all, but in practice, the whole film has a nearly magical quality of slowly growing intensity and will eventually feel at once naturalistic and utterly not of this world.

The Ladykillers (1955): And now for something completely different, a classic British black comedy about criminals and old ladies by Alexander Mackendrick (made for Ealing Studios who had a bit of form for this sort of thing) that’s about as subversive about society, to be precise about how a classist society reads social cues and roles and the way this twists even the people who think themselves clever enough to use this for their own profit, as can be.


It’s classically stylish British comedy cinema of this type, with actors like Alec Guiness, Katie Johnson, Cecil Parker, a young Peter Sellers, or Herbert Lom treating their roles with an arch humour that never can quite disguise the actual humanity behind characters that aren’t treated terribly compassionately by the film they are in.

Snowbound (1948)

Post-war Britain. Demobilized Blair (Dennis Price) is trying to earn his keep by working as a movie extra, when he’s not failing at selling whatever it is he writes (we only learn it isn’t screenplays). His new director turns out to be a man called Engles (Robert Newton), Blair’s former CO before Engles got drafted into intelligence operations. Engles has a much better proposition for Blair than the movie extra lark: why not go on a well-paid vacation to a ski cabin in the Italian Alps and observe what the other people living there are up to?  Officially, Blair’s supposed to write a screenplay for Engles. Despite his old boss not giving him any further details, Blair agrees, perhaps a little intrigued, perhaps a little stupid – a combination that’ll get him through the rest of the movie.

Because our protagonist is officially at the hut to write a screenplay for Engles, Blair is accompanied by one Wesson (Stanley Holloway), an oblivious director of photography who manages to know even less than our protagonist does.

Once at the hut, Blair encounters quite the rogue’s gallery of not at all suspicious people. There’s shady Brit Mayne (Guy Middleton), shady Greek Keramikos (Herbert Lom), a shady fake countess and Blairish love interest actually called Carla (Mila Parély) and her shady fixer Valdini (Marcel Dalio). Come to think of it, even the owner of the hut, one Aldo (Willy Fueter) is pretty shady. It’s quite obvious even to Blair – who is not a terribly insightful sort of thriller protagonist – that these people know one another, even though they strenuously pretend not to, that not one of them seems to be using their real name or nationality (apart from Valdini, perhaps), and that they are clearly there for sinister and mysterious reasons.

David MacDonald’s Snowbound, based on a Hammond Innes novel, is an interesting, if sometimes a little creaky, post-war thriller. The creakiness isn’t really the film’s fault: MacDonald certainly couldn’t know how the suspense techniques popularized by Hitchcock he uses, the know-nothing/innocent everyman protagonist who just happens to look like a film star, and so on, and so forth, would be regurgitated in the following decades so often by so many filmmakers that by now even a film which uses them well but not brilliantly (as Snowbound mostly does) can feel a little less well made than it actually is.

At times the film also nears the borders of the noir, but usually tends to step away from them at the last moment, out of British politeness and the abhorrence of making a scene, one supposes.

But let’s talk about Snowbound’s strengths. Certainly there’s no fault to be found with its main actors, a party of character actors whose somewhat ambiguous nationalities are a perfect fit for the just as ambiguous characters they are playing. Lom’s performance is particularly fine, balancing on the line between the sinister and the personable in an excellent acrobatics act, but everyone else works out great as the sort of people looking for any shady get rich quick scheme that populated Europe shortly after World War II in popular fiction (and perhaps in parts of reality).

There’s a palpable anxiety running through the film, a consciousness the war may be over, but the people fighting in it, and particularly the people who fought it behind the scenes are still there, lingering, searching something or someone, or planning to one day continue the madness they started. The ambiguity of characters’ identities or motivations only seems the logical conclusion to this state of affairs. Apart from Blair, of course. He somehow managed to make it through the war without getting a case of ambiguity or cynicism, and without learning that you probably shouldn’t go skiing with every shady character with attractive facial hair. Fortunately, Price for most of the time manages to sell him as a man in over his head instead of the complete idiot a lesser actor might have come up with when confronted with the same script.


Visually, the film is often atmospheric, generally attractive and usually clear. DP Stephen Dade certainly wasn’t a John Alton but he knew his way around night shots, lingering shadows, and other elements typical of black and white photography of the time, so there’s usually visual pull to any given scene, even if its is only another tableau one of men talking somewhere or other. The exterior and skiing shots – apparently done by Reg Johnson – are attractive too, if perhaps used a bit more indulgently than strictly necessary.

In short: Gambit (1966)

Harry Dean (Michael Caine) and his friend Emile (John Abbott) have a most excellent plan to steal some of the art treasures of reclusive multi-(multi-multi-)millionaire Shahbandar (Herbert “Who’s Austro-Hungarian?” Lom). It’s simplicity itself, really: just hire passport-less dancer Nicole Chang (Shirley “Eurasian” MacLaine) who just happens to look exactly like Shahbandar’s dead wife to distract him, and steal away.

As it happens, Harry’s wonderful plan doesn’t really survive contact with reality, for neither is Shabandar as gullible as Harry expected, nor as easily distracted; and Nicole isn’t the walking manikin he dreams of either. Consequently, things get complicated fast.

Ronald Neame’s Gambit is a rather delightful caper movie, and I say that as someone who generally prefers heist movies to their comedic caper brethren, and only laughs on three pre-planned days per month (four days in October). However, Gambit does feature such a fine comedic cast, and such a clever script I didn’t actually want to resist it. Neame’s direction isn’t flashy, but he’s perfect with the pacing (something even I know to be most important in comedies), and does well with the curious semi-orientalist exoticism the film is playing with.

The film’s exoticism is of a very particular kind, though, always up to breaking away from cliché when the film wants to, something that does fit a film that is very much about the unpredictability of life and people very well. Consequently, this is a film where a rich – and what exactly is Shahbandar’s supposed to be, an Arab (and from where), a Muslim Indian, or what? – Eastern man takes people out to watch flamenco dancing.

Some of the film’s best scenes proceed in a comparable manner, first setting up Harry’s perfect, simple and orderly plan, and then showing it breaking down under contact with a more complex and just plain messier reality, particularly a woman who turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the mute, unblinking living doll of Harry’s imagining. And if you find a bit of matter of fact mainstream feminism hidden there, have a cookie, they’re very good.

Apart from that, Caine, MacLaine and Lom really are very enjoyable to watch together, with fine comedic interplay and very different approaches on how to deliver a punch line that come together exactly because of their difference. It’s all very delightful.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,crime,comedy,in short,ronald neame,shirley maclaine,michael caine,herbert lom

Ten Little Indians (1974)

aka And Then There Were None

Under various pretexts, the mysterious U.N. Owen invites a group of people (Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Adolfo Celi, Herbert Lom, Gert Fröbe, Maria Rohm, Charles Aznavour, Stéphane Audran, Alberto de Mendoza and Richard Attenborough) into an unused hotel smack dab in the Iranian desert next to some picturesque ruins.

On their first evening, a tape message by the voice of God, or Orson Welles, accuses everyone in the house of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Usually, that would be quite enough to stop every party, but this one takes until Charles Aznavour sings a song with an invisible band to get antsy; or the sudden nervousness might be on account of his death by poisoning shortly afterwards.

Now, our protagonists find themselves trapped in the Hotel, for the desert seem rather unconquerable, and there are neither cars nor telephones around. Soon, more people die based on a free very interpretation of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, and people become increasingly paranoid, convinced the killer must be one amongst their ten.

Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians seems to be a book that brings out the best in the people adapting it, perhaps because it lacks a single annoying detective and replaces her or him with a perfect opportunity for a bunch of actors to emote, chew scenery, or something of that kind.

Dubious yet sometimes lucky British producer Harry Alan Towers loved the material so much, he made three adaptations of it, about one every fifteen years. Okay, I suspect he needed to keep making them to keep a license alive, but given that two out of these three films are actually rather good, that’s not the worst that could have happened. As far as I understand, this second Towers version uses much of the dialogue from his first version, but it still retains a character very much of its own thanks to its acting ensemble, its locations, and Peter Collinson’s direction.

Collinson, a man with mediocre as well as quite great films on his CV, clearly saw the opportunities the locations Towers acquired gave him to build a rather macabre mood. His camera finds the inherent threat in the hotel’s interiors where spacious oriental kitsch meets occidental colour-blindness, he uses spectacular staircases for playing games of the audience watching someone watching someone else while he himself is being watched without needing more camera involvement than decidedly clever placement, etc, and so forth.

The film’s visual style seems highly influenced by the giallo, the camera generally being positioned in the more peculiar and telling ways available with no conversation – and this is a very conversation heavy peace – not enhanced by direction that seeks to express the mood inside a room via its own movement and positioning even before the actors do anything at all. Like many a giallo director, Collinson succeeds in leapfrogging an audience’s scepticism towards a faintly – or very – ridiculous plot by creating a mood that suggests dreamscapes and the workings of the subconscious, making it very easy to read the resulting films in a manner where what a film’s plot has to say becomes secondary to what its mood tells us about its characters and the meaning of the world surrounding them.

I am – obviously – very fond of that approach to filmmaking, perhaps even to a fault, but I think this particular Christie novel just calls for it. This is, after all, a film about members of the upperclass and the bourgeoisie having to show and confront the truths behind their masks and the lies they tell themselves to get to sleep at night. Why, two of the more working class characters might even be called innocent, which would probably be more telling in a class-political sense if the other two weren’t just as murderous the bourgeois.

These characters are brought to life in various ways between subtlety, thespian grandstanding, and good old scenery-chewing with most of the involved well able and willing to use all three approaches, depending on what any given scene calls for. It’s all rather lovely to watch, particularly in scenes like the surreal confrontation between Lom and Attenborough with two packs of matches and a billiard table as a prop.

This all adds up to a very fine movie, even if the ending eschews to embrace the darkness of the novel and goes for a rather more normal happy end that only fits the tone of what came before vaguely. Despite the problem of the ending, Ten Little Indians is another exception to my usual “Ugh, Agatha Christie” rule.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,italian movies,french movies,spanish movies,german movies,reviews,mystery,peter collinson,oliver reed,elke sommer,herbert lom,gert fröbe,richard attenborough,alberto de mendoza,stéphane audran,adolfo celi,maria rohm,charles aznavour

Assignment To Kill (1968)

An insurance company, quite unwilling to pay out a load of money to beyond the law multimillionaire Curt Valayan (John Gielgud) for the "accidental" sinking of a few ships that left twenty-eight dead bodies behind, hires cynical investigator Richard Cutting (Patrick O'Neal). The company hopes that Cutting will be able to find information Walter Green, a man formerly in the employ of Valayan's chief of illegalities Matt Wilson (Herbert Lom), may have left behind when he died in a plane "accident" over the Swiss Alps just before he could sell off said information to them.

Cutting quickly finds out that Green isn't as dead as everyone expected, and seems to have fled to his native Zürich, where he now has been hiding out for six months. Unfortunately, Wilson realizes this interesting fact at about the same time Cutting does, so it becomes a race to find Green and get him to - respectively - cooperate or murder him. Cutting's efforts are supported by Dominique Laurant (Joan Hackett), Green's former part-time secretary who helped him out with the hiding business without ever realizing what her boss was involved with. Dominique, a young woman with moral principles and a thing for a cynical old freelancer, might be able to break through Cutting's amoral shell, and drive him to do something good for once in his life, but when has that sort of thing ever been healthy for a woman in a movie like this?

Despite not featuring any actual spies, Sheldon Reynolds's Assignment to Kill is very much a spy movie, and one closer to the less silly Eurospy films than James Bond to boot. In place of professional spies, the film features various freelancers working a dirty business that is a lot like your usual spy game, and whose morals are just as fluent and ambiguous as those found in the more earnest spy movies. Interestingly, the characters "in the know" are talking about post-national spy politics before those were very much in vogue in the genre. It's only 1968 (and you'll know it) but patriotism is already no excuse the characters in this movie are willing to use for doing horrible things to innocents and each other; they do it for money, or because it's the only thing they're good at, or just because they never bother to think about the moral implications of their actions.

Given this - depending on one's tastes either bitter or honest - view of affairs it's neither a wonder nor much of a surprise the film's only character with uncompromised morals has to die to give Cutting some of his sense of justice back. Which he then proceeds to defend with the same mixture of lies, violence and betrayal he uses in less worthy causes - and that's without interpreting the film's final act exclusively as very personal vengeance that uses justice only as a pretext.

With this less than bright and shiny text and subtext, it may come as a bit of a surprise that Assignment's tone is quite a bit more chipper than one would expect. There's more dry humour than bitter tears on screen. The interplay between O'Neal and Hackett fluctuates between sarcastic repartee, surprising tenderness and hints of actual emotional complexity, and stands out as a particularly - and surprising - human relationship that counteracts what could be an exercise in nihilism. Of course, the film at hand is still pretty cynical once you think about it: after all, Cutting may have taken down the bad guys in the end, but Dominique is still dead, Cutting's methods are still the same they have always been, and the world won't change just because three particular bastards haven't any power in it any more.

What makes Assignment work as well as it does, though, is how little it tries to push these darker elements of its script at its audience. They are there when you're willing to think about what you are seeing, but they never try to take control of the movie's surface. This surface is that of a very well made semi-Eurospy movie made in the US, with some decent action scenes, quipping characters, many well-constructed moments of suspense, and a rhythm that's as snappy as anything you'll find in the genre.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,spies,sheldon reynolds,patrick o'neal,joan hackett,herbert lom,john gielgud

In short: Mysterious Island (1961)

This adaptation of Jules Verne's novel whose plot will hardly need any synopsis is - like many a movie featuring the great Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation - a childhood favourite of mine, so any idea of objectivity goes right out the window. However, I don't think Cy Endfield's movie actually needs the nostalgia factor to deserve praise.

After all, this is a film that begins with a rousing balloon escape, turns into a Robinsonade (and the kind of self-conscious Robinsonade that mentions Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to boot), shows off some dangerous giant stop motion animals - a crabby crab, a rude flightless bird, some peeved bees and a grabby chambered nautilus -, sinks a pirate ship, meets Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom), destroys a sunken city, blows up a volcano, and even finds time to invent what should be a steampunk fashion staple in form of the shortest goatskin dress of the 19th century; all in just 110 minutes of running time, directed by Enfield with a sense of excitement and an enthusiasm for the adventurous incident you don't get to see every day.

Somehow, the film even finds time to be silently progressive: Neb Nugent (Dan Jackson), the black member of our group of heroes, may not have as much agency as one would wish for looking back from times when this sort of this has become important, but is still treated as an actual person whose opinions and emotions are respected by his companions without any condescension, something that was not par for the course in 1961; the English noble woman (Joan Greenwood) is much more practical than her position in life or (again, in an adventure movie in 1961) her gender would lead to expect; in general class, gender and race lines are permanently being overstepped by the characters without it elucidating any comment, with the unspoken subtext that rational beings will overcome such artificial divisions when they have been given the opportunity to. One might find the film's politics naively optimistic, but if we don't even allow ourselves to dream of the improvability of humanity in our SF adventure movies, we might as well all step in line and pray to our corporate overlords. And isn't it a fine irony that Mysterious Island was in fact financed by some of those very same corporate overlords? But I digress.

On the level of pure filmmaking, there's little to criticize about Mysterious Island: Harryhausen's effects are pretty much perfect; Endfield's direction tight in that effective way that has no room for showing off and keeps brilliant direction all too easily from being called brilliant; the script is imaginative and more complex than it has any need to be; Bernard Herrmann's score is rousing and playful in turns. If I needed to find fault with something, it's probably the acting of Michael Craig and Michael Callan, respectively the movie's square-jawed hero and the teenage heartthrob, but they're not that bad, really. The rest of the cast fills their archetypal roles admirably.

So yeah, Mysterious Island. Watch it. It's still awesome.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,in short,adventure,sf,cy endfield,michael craig,joan greenwood,dan jackson,michael callan,herbert lom,beth rogan,ray harryhausen

Dark Places (1973)

Old Mister Marr (Carleton Hobbs) dies in an English asylum for the mentally ill, telling his friend Edward Foster (Robert Hardy being very very fragile) something about money hidden behind a wall, probably a wall in Marr's old mansion from where Marr's wife, his children, and their nanny one day just disappeared, which may or may not have been the beginning of the man's madness.

It just so happens that Marr leaves said mansion to Foster, and boy, are there many walls inside behind which money might be hidden. But Foster isn't the only one who knows about the money. The local physician, Ian Mandeville (Christopher Lee, there to cash in a paycheck, not to act) and his sister Sarah (Joan Collins, playing the role Joan Collins always plays in these movies, but hey, she is at least acting that much) have heard about the hidden treasure, too, and both seem hell-bent on acquiring it by any means (looking like Christopher Lee, flirting like Joan Collins) necessary. Marr's lawyer Prescott (Herbert Lom) is also clearly in the know about the money. Now, you may ask yourself why these people haven't looked for the money long before Foster arrived, seeing as how the mansion has been empty and slowly rotting away for decades; and there you are, already thinking things through more thoroughly than the writers of the film.

Prescott's and the Mandevilles' vague plans to get at the money aren't Edward's only problems, though, for the mansion has a peculiar influence on him. There's a picture of the young Marr hanging over a fireplace, and he just happens to look exactly like Edward does. Soon, the face of a young woman in a window, noises, lights and the laughing of children haunt Edward. Eventually, he will have waking dreams in which he sees himself as Marr, living with a mad wife and two sociopathic children, and not quite thinking an affair with the nanny (Jane Birkin) through. Why, it's all enough to drive a man to lose his identity.

Dark Places is one of the many films of Don Sharp, a seasoned workman director with some moments of brilliance in his filmography. In its first half hour or so, Dark Places promises to be one of Sharp's outstanding movies, with a properly gothic atmosphere so thick you won't forget Sharp had been working for Hammer for a bit. At the beginning, the film seems to strive to mix a classic British ghost story about a haunted house that drives a man into doubting his own identity and losing contact with reality with the type of rather spooky thriller the British film industry loved so dearly. That's a genre combination akin to mixing rice and refried black beans (read: perfect), so I found myself enjoying these early stages very much.

Alas, the film's script lacks the proper tightness ghost stories - at least of this type - and thrillers sorely need. Instead of slowly but surely building its plot out of hints and a tightening feeling of menace, the writers opt for over-exposition in form of Edward's hallucinations. Used more subtly, these could have been an excellent way to demonstrate our protagonist's deteriorating state of mind and give us glimpses at what really happened in the mansion in the past, but the script goes for a sledgehammer obviousness that killed most of my engagement with the story; even in 1973, we had seen all this before again and again, and realized with much more elegance. As it stands, the film shows its cards way too early and then doesn't seem to know what to do afterwards, except for shuffling its feet and showing Christopher Lee looking bored.

Sharp does his best with the rather indifferent script, but he's not the kind of stylistically dominant director who can turn Dark Places into anything more than a solid, watchable movie. Of course, there are worse things than that.

 

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