Episode #299: Take Aim at Nightmare City

Welcome back for another episode of the podcast you have come to love and cherish...at least we hope so?

This week Sammy and Will cover Nightmare City (1980) directed by Umberto Lenzi and Take Aim at the Police Van! (1960) directed by Seijun Suzuki!!! We hope you enjoy the episode and our ever getting closer to episode #300!!!

Direct download: ggtmc_299.mp3

Emails to midnitecinema@gmail.com

Adios!!!

The League Of Gentlemen (1960)

Okay, guys, it’s cards on the table time.  I have been to a lot of gentlemen’s clubs.  I mean a lot.  I have probably spent more money in these sorts of places than I have on my education and wardrobe combined (and if you’ve ever met me, you would find this extremely easy to believe, I guarantee it).  The way these places are typically portrayed on film is slightly exaggerated, though.  They’re usually depicted as dens of inequity, where there are no boundaries, and any woman’s body can be bought, in total, if the price is right.  Not true.  Oh, I’m sure there are places like that out there (though they invite the nomenclature “brothel” rather than “strip club” or “gentlemen’s club”).  I haven’t been in them (or if I have, I never witnessed anything along the lines of illegality).  Yes, really.

The strippers I’ve met were generally nice women simply looking to make a living in a way they are both adept at and out of which they derive some small amount of pleasure (or at least don't entirely loathe).  And even if you did get friskier than you should (and no, I did not, thank you very much), there are ample muscle-bound bouncers around to put you (and the ladies) in check.  I haven’t been in one of these clubs in a long while, but the last time I was in one, the experience was different.  The atmosphere of fun there used to be fun was all but gone (or at the absolute minimum, vastly changed).  I can only assume this is me getting old, finding places and people I used to enjoy have become shrug-worthy rather than exciting.  Perhaps it’s because these places, which used to be avoided by most, have become not only culturally accepted, but just plain cool to visit (remember what Groucho Marx said about clubs and memberships?).  And this is why I come down in the middle if I were to be asked whether I would to like hang out in a gentlemen’s club or with Basil Dearden’s The League Of Gentlemen.  Sadly, either would reach about the same level of fun from my current outlook.      

Seven men, at various low points in their lives, receive a copy of John Seaton’s The Golden Fleece with one half of a five-pound note in each.  Heeding the call, they meet with one Mr. Hyde (Jack Hawkins) for a luncheon.  The enigmatic man reveals that they are all ex-military, and, like the characters in the novel he sent them (which, by all accounts [and like its writer], is a fiction invented by either the filmmakers or John Boland, the [real] author of the [real] novel on which this film is based), he would like to plan and execute a daring, daytime robbery with their support. 

Primarily, this is more of an Assemble The Team film than it is a Heist film.  The majority of the runtime deals with prepping for the heist and how the men come together to do just that.  The reason for this, to my thinking, is because of the nature of these men.  Being ex-military, these men know about following orders and about the need for efficiency in such an undertaking.  This supersedes the differences over which the men would likely have conflicts.  For example, Stevens (Kieron Moore) is a homosexual, and he winds up rooming with the most heterosexual of the group, Lexy (Sir Richard Attenborough).  However, after a brief offhand remark about keeping the lights on at night, the situation is dropped, and the men get along like a house on fire.  And that’s part of the problem.  The men have very little to overcome in order to become a team, and their pasts do not intrude much to cause complications.  Thus, we are left with a film where the only tension comes in the form of the work the men take on, rather than from issues they have with each other.  This would be all well and good, were more of the film focused on the job, but much of it is following the men around as they cheerfully perform their duties like clockwork (accompanied by an anthemic, march-style score from Philip Green).  It makes for a bit of dry viewing, though it needs to be said that there are also several genuinely funny moments (one of the best being a breezy comment in regards to the status of Hyde’s wife), and stylistically the film’s camerawork and editing performs with the military precision of its characters.  So, in that respect it clicks.

Each of the men has a reason why he is taking on this job.  Porthill (Bryan Forbes) wants the money to escape the life of being a low-rent gigolo.  Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander) wants the money to escape an emasculating wife.  Lexy wants the money to buy into a lifestyle (and especially the women that come with it) which has eluded him.  As I stated above, however, these issues take a back seat once the training begins.  The reason for this is because it is not the money that these men truly crave.  It is the military lifestyle they used to share which each needs to fill the hole in his life.  All of them were drummed out of the military for one reason or another (and it’s not as if these discharges were unwarranted; one of them even got soldiers killed due to his alcoholism and gross negligence).  But the prepping and execution of the heist allows them to get back into and essentially complete a portion of their lives which had been cut short.  This is exemplified in the scene where the team pays a visit to a military training camp.  The men slide easily back into their military roles, and there is a facile confidence exuding from each of them which was not there when we first met them.  They may need the money, but they want to be military men again (or at least regain those aspects which gave their lives structure).  It’s a primal drive that fulfills their souls, not their wallets.   Without this they would be common criminals but with it, they are brothers-in-arms.

MVT:  The heist is not handled as if it is the most important element of the film, what with each portion of it being carried off with very little kerfuffle to it.  However, it looks exceptional, and the smoke-choked streets, combined with the team scurrying around with gas masks and machineguns, is reminiscent of the classic images we have in our cultural consciousness of scenes of trench warfare from World War Two.  These striking visuals carry the audience over the more pedantic aspects of the picture (though it can certainly be argued that meticulousness is one of the main, if not THE main, draw of a Heist film). 

Make Or Break:  The first meeting of The League is a classic of exposition and whetting the appetite.  We get more background information on the characters, while also raising some new questions about them and their motivations.  Further, the scene solidifies the plot, handily, and it does it in a visually interesting fashion (no small feat, since it all takes place in one room; not quite Twelve Angry Men, but still…).

Score:  7.25/10

Circus Of Horrors (1960)

Dateline: England, 1947.  The police race to the home of Evelyn Morley (Colette Wilde), where the young-ish lady is in the process of smashing her boudoir to pieces dressed only in her skivvies.  You see, that rogue German plastic surgeon Dr. Rossiter (Anton Diffring) performed some illegal (?) work on the Ms. Morley, and now her face is a picture of grotesquery.  Fleeing down a winding road, Rossiter’s car explodes into flame as it careens down a mountainside.  Escaping by the skin of his teeth, Rossiter and his cronies, siblings Martin (Kenneth Griffith) and Angela (Jane Hylton), make their way to France.  There, Rossiter unveils his new face (pretty similar to the old one but no beard) and identity as Dr. Schüler, and he discovers that the scars of the recent war run deep.  The bad doc inveigles his way into ownership of Vanet’s (Donald Pleasence) circus by fixing the owner’s daughter Nicole’s (Carla Challoner as a youth, Yvonne Monlaur as a more mature youth) face.  The Circus Of Horrors rolls out.      

I cannot fathom getting plastic surgery, nor can I understand the compulsion people feel to do so voluntarily.  Certainly, the procedures have come a long way, and there are a great many folks who have benefited tremendously from the skilled hands of its practitioners, people who were maimed or deformed either by accident, intent, or caprice of nature.  But for those who feel that plastic surgery is some kind of fountain of youth, it is impossible to believe that they ever thought that it would do anything other than make them look even more risible and flat-out repellent than the ravages of time ever could.  They wind up resembling either crying-on-the-inside-style clowns or the sort of physical types Tod Browning would have given his eyeteeth to use in Freaks.  But one has to wonder; Have these people never seen someone who has had this kind of thing done?  Do they not realize that the odds on this operation having a positive outcome are slim to nil?  I can only assume that photos of plastic surgery disasters (apologies to Jello Biafra and Dead Kennedys) are banned in states like California.  Either that, or only blind people go in for plastic surgery.  The world may never know.

Sidney Hayer’s film (aka Le Cirque Des Horreurs aka Phantom Of The Circus) cannot really be classified as a Horror film, though it contains and is built on some horrific actions.  It was released the same year as both Psycho and Peeping Tom, and like those superlative films, tells the story of a psychopath (maybe more of a sociopath…).  Unlike those two films, though, Schüler does not struggle with the moral implications of his actions.  This is in part due to the fact that he is actually successful at what he does (professionally, anyway).  The prologue of the film doesn’t lay bare that he is a fraud perpetrating atrocities on people.  If anything, it’s the opposite, and we’re told this through his lackeys who comment that they have seen the doctor’s work firsthand restoring a child’s face.  Ms. Morley’s surgery was botched because she was trying to rush the procedures.  Her high-class sense of immediate gratification thwarts her own ends.  The audience doesn’t see Schüler’s previous successes, because one, Martin and Angela have no reason to deceive each other in private about the skills of their Teutonic compatriot, and two, the sight of Evelyn’s ugsome face attached to her come-hither body is both provocative and off-putting.  Of course, Schüler’s rampant narcissism is both his largest motivator and his greatest deficiency.  He cannot stand to not look perfect, and he desires this in those with whom he would associate romantically, the only exceptions to this being Martin and Angela.

Also in line with the Powell and Hitchcock films, the protagonist in this film is a voyeur.  But again, Schüler doesn’t hide this fact.  Unlike Norman Bates, who stares at his guests through holes in the wall, or Mark Lewis, who stares at his victims from behind his lethal camera’s lens, Schüler stands in the wings of the big top tent and gazes longingly at his objects of desire in full view of anyone who happens to be walking by and far more importantly, in front of Angela.  Angela desires Schüler’s gaze to be on her, and it is the one place it almost never is.  She cannot compete with his ideas of perfection in beauty, and her desperate fawning over the doctor’s every whim smacks of self-loathing.  In competition with Angela for Schüler’s gaze is Nicole, whose burgeoning sexuality she wants to offer up to the man who made her beautiful and in effect, created her as she is today.  Unlike Angela, though, when Nicole asks Schüler to look at her, he gladly does so, his eyes ravishing her every time.  And it is Nicole who will take the place of the circus’s top-billed attraction Magda (Vanda Hudson) and move up a notch in the head psycho’s estimation (when Schüler asks if Nicole loves him, she states, “Of course, I do.  You gave me life.”).  That this line isn’t pursued earnestly through to the end of the film and is, in effect, dropped once the direly bland and openly misogynistic Arthur (Conrad Phillips) shows up is frustrating, as it feels like the filmmakers went for the easier path, when they could have explored some truly dense and twisted areas of the human psyche.  

In a bizarre “beauty and the beast” way, Schüler enjoys looking at the obliteration of that which he bred and which has turned against him.  The women who he has transmogrified into beauties eventually reject Schüler’s amorous attentions, and since he cannot have them, no one can, and they must die.  His vainglorious nature calls for the death of those which he feels he deserves above all others.  And since his murders are all constructed to appear as accidents, he can smugly watch out in the open, innocence in his appearance, arousal in his gaze.  His hubris is boundless, and it requires constant feeding.  But like the cantankerous “gorilla” with whom he shares an animosity, ultimately it is Schüler’s inner base animal which will devour him.

MVT:  Anton Diffring’s performance is the perfect blend of charming exterior and chilling interior.  He doesn’t need to go big to get his point across, but even when he does, he is always convincing and disturbing, by turns.  This is a man you don’t want to be around, and the actor captures it masterfully, I think.

Make Or Break:  The knife throwing scene Makes the film for me.  We know what’s happening, we know what’s coming next, and even though the tension in the scene builds nicely, there is still a sense of aloofness in its depiction.  It’s almost as if Hayers is placing the audience in the same visual space as the film’s villain (something done throughout the film but which stands out in the murder scenes), so that we have the chance to experience the gaze the way Schüler may.  That we feel horrified rather than spent (or I did; I don’t know about you) at the scene’s climax is what differentiates us from the Schülers of the world.

Score:  6.75/10

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Cruel Story of Youth (1960)

It’s funny how the progression of time can alter a film’s impact. Take for example when “Cruel Story of Youth” was released. It was Japan in 1960 and the story centered around two rebellious teens who run off together and get pregnant. They skip classes constantly and get involved in racketeering. Worst of all, they discuss having an abortion. This side of life was shunned by viewers, creating huge controversy for Nagisa Oshima’s film (which he probably enjoyed).

If this film were released today, it wouldn’t have as strong of an impact. The abortion angle would stir the pot, but it’s nothing groundbreaking. As for the rebellious teens, that’s the farthest thing from shocking nowadays. We have hundreds of High Schoolers pregnant and dropping out of school, never even making it to college. Those that do only spend a few years removed from High School until they start getting engaged and starting a family. Today’s age moves at a more rapid pace.

The only aspect of “Cruel Story of Youth” that’s impact remains intact nowadays is the racketeering. I can’t state how it was received during it’s initial release, but I’ll state that it actually turned me off. That’s not to say it ruined the film for me. I still found it to be a solid feature from Oshima, who is a fantastic director! For me, it was a nuisance to the more dramatic elements.

I was more involved in the twisted relationship of Kiyoshi (Yûsuke Kawazu) and Makoto (Miyuki Kuwano) than I was in their seedy ways of making money. The violent outbursts and back and forth attitude was unheard of then, but fairly common now. This made for an interesting time capsule as much as it is an interesting story.

What does stand firmly today is the culture clash between Kiyoshi and her parents. They grew up strict and war torn while she is at the cusp of late night rendezvous. It doesn’t really matter what decade you originated in, you’ll eventually morph into the type of parents represented here. At least I hope so! I don’t want to hear stories twenty years from now about parents complaining that, back in their day, they gave up everything in High School and liked it!

There’s not too much more to say about “Cruel Story of Youth”. While the story itself hasn’t aged fantastically, the direction and acting have. There’s a reason Oshima is considered one of Japan’s greatest. He’s got a way of dissecting characters and shows no fear when it comes to dealing with hard topics (the way he nonchalantly handles abortion is harsher than had he forced it). The racketeering angle threw me off and did hold this back from being a favorite of his. It’s still a solid film at the end of the day!

MVT: Oshima. He handles the material quite classily and never forces it upon the viewer.

Make or Break: When Kiyoshi abruptly moves out of her parents’ house. That’s when the film and the relationship really pick up!

Final Score: 7.25/10