Prior to hosting Moviedrome, filmmaker Alex Cox guest introduced two films for another BBC Two series entitled The Film Club (1986-1991) on March 5, 1988. The two films were 1967’s Point Blank (directed by John Boorman) and 1973’s The Long Goodbye (directed by Robert Altman).
The Wicker Man was written by Anthony Shaffer, the author of Sleuth. Cinefantastique called it, rather optimistically, the Citizen Kane of horror films. Its British director was Robin Hardy, who formerly specialised in television commercials. It has a cult reputation despite the fact that most of those who rate it very highly have not seen the original version. It was initially 102 minutes long, but the owners of the film decided that it would be much better if they cut 15 minutes and put it out as the second half of a double bill. (This was back in the days when you used to get two films for the price of one.) So they cut it down to 87 minutes and, in 1973, released it on a double bill with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. As the years went by and the film’s cult reputation grew, attempts were made to restore the missing portions, but most of the original negative had gone missing. Apparently it had ended up in the pylons that support the M4 motorway. The ‘original version’ has now been partly restored for television. However, there’s one principal scene still missing, an early sequence in which Edward Woodward, who plays a Scottish police officer, is introduced, and we’re told he’s engaged to be married and has not yet ‘known a woman’. This is worth bearing in mind as you enjoy the pagan delights of The Wicker Man, which include Lindsay Kemp, the mime artist, Christopher Lee without his cape, and Britt Ekland dubbed in Scottish.
‘Electra Glide’ is the name of a full-dress Harley Davidson motorcycle that was manufactured in the United States. A few years back, all motorcycle cops over there used to ride Harleys, but in the 1970s, the Harley Davidson MC Corporation fell upon hard times, and now most American cops ride Japanese bikes, which they call 'rice burners’. No matter – this is a fairy story about the last honest motorcycle cop in Monument Valley. Monument Valley is on the Navaho Indian Reservation in northern Arizona – a sacred place. John Ford discovered it and shot his westerns there; nowadays, they use it to shoot car commercials. Electra Glide in Blue was directed by an American, James William Guercio, formerly the manager of the mellow rock band Chicago. It stars Robert Blake, who is the same height as Alan Ladd to the quarter inch. It was filmed by Conrad Hall who also shot Fat City. Today Conrad Hall shoots bank commercials in Monument Valley. The film is an interesting one. It’s sort of the cops’ response to Easy Rider, particularly at the end. It was also very influenced by a gay film, Scorpio Rising, directed by Kenneth Anger. Guercio never made another film after Electra Glide In Blue; he retired to a ranch in Colorado and was not seen again. A pity, because this is a good film, especially if you like motorcycles.
Diva is just the sort of film that American movie critics love: big on style and short on substance. And, of course, because it’s French. It’s the kind of film that gets called ‘scintillating’, or 'fabulous, frothy fun’. It doesn’t, however, have any real passion, nor any acting worthy of note. It doesn’t have a theme or any real direction, but what it does have is art direction. It’s the only film I’ve ever seen where a whole sequence has been designed around a packet of cigarettes–the colour of the walls, the set decoration, the costumes, everything exists to complement a packet of Gitanes. It’s an art director’s film and the name of the art director is Hilton Mocconnico. Hilton’s film is, I guess, what you’d call a New Wave film. It’s a post-punk, hyper-modern, ultra-realist sort of subject. It’s fresh and shiny, like one of those glum-looking models that stare out at you from the pages of The Face. It also features musical selections from the noted opera La Wally–une de mes favorites. A lot of people like Diva, which became an instant cult when it opened.
Trancers is an example of the low-budget science fiction that came out of Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Some of it, such as Night of the Comet, was made by the new independent companies like Atlantic; some by the venerable Roger Corman at his studio in Venice, California, a former lumber yard; and a lot of it, including Trancers, came from an independent outfit called Empire, run by Charles Band, the director of this film. Most of this stuff rips off of Alien or Star Wars. Trancers is a rip-off of Blade Runner with a substantial nod to The Terminator. In that sense, its taste is excellent - it has time-traveling cops and flying police cars - but its grasp is longer than its reach.
Assault on Precinct 13 was the second film directed by John Carpenter. It has a tremendous cult reputation, as has his first, Dark Star, which he directed and co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon.
razil is the film that Michael Radford’s 1984 should have been. It has all the atmosphere and preoccupations of Orwell’s book, plus references to heavy metal comics, Eisenstein and Mad magazine. Gilliam said, when asked where the story takes place, ‘Somewhere on the Los Angeles/Belfast border’.
Get Carter is a nasty British gangster film. For some reason, all British movie gangsters are extremely nasty - from Richard Attenborough’s Pinky Doyle in Brighton Rock in 1947 through Richard Burton’s and Bob Hoskins’ anti-heroes in, respectively, Villain (1971) and The Long Good Friday (1980), up to and including The Krays (1990). All our gangster heroes (unlike Edward G. Robinson or Jean Paul Belmondo) are schizoid, sadistic arseholes who shoot people in the kneecaps and sentimentalise about their mums. Rather like the real thing, in fact.
Goin’ South was the second film Nicholson directed, the first being Drive, He Said. His third directorial effort, The Two Jakes, comes out this year. Goin’ South is a product of the old Nicholson/BBS gang who made Easy Rider. The cameraman was Nestor Almendros, the producers Harold Schneider and Harry Gittes, who lent his name to the character J.J. Gittes in Chinatown.
Dead of Night is the classic British horror film, indeed the classic horror film. No expense was spared making it; obviously, film was, at one time, considered an essential industry over here. This is a portmanteau film - that is, it consists of a series of different short stories connected by linking episodes. In some films of this type, the stories are all directed by the same person; in this instance, there are five cautionary tales and four directors. With one exception - a golfing anecdote based on a short story by H.G. Wells - they are all tales of horror and mounting fear.
The Terminator is a 1980s L.A. science-fiction film. It has all the necessary elements of the sub-genre: punks, policemen, chases down alleys, tracking shots through the cop shop, an obsession with guns. What raises it above the level of the ordinary is the script and the Bad Man, who gets star billing. The script is credited to James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd, respectively director and producer. This is a little misleading, since the real source of the story is an old episode of The Outer Limits called ‘Soldier’, the story of an assassin sent back in time to kill someone and change the future. This was written by Harlan Ellison.
The Honeymoon Killers is a genuine classic cult film. It is a rarely seen docu-drama about two ‘lonelyhearts murderers’ - Nurse Martha Beck and Ray Hernandez - who together killed several of Ray’s wives and girlfriends in the 1940s. At one point in the film, we are told the year is 1951, but there is no attempt at period verisimilitude; working on a tiny budget, the film-makers used cars from the late 1960s, and locations that always look the same whether we’re supposed to be in Alabama or New York. The film was shot in black and white by Oliver Wood. It bears a striking visual resemblence to Night of the Living Dead, the other cult masterpiece made in Pittsburgh at around the same time.
In 1954, Burt Lancaster played an American Indian in a psychological western called Apache, directed by Robert Aldrich. Eighteen years later, Lancaster appeared in another western by Aldrich which also dealt with the Apaches: Ulzana’s Raid. Apache had been made when the US cinema was re-evaluating its view of the American Indian, who in the bad old days of cowboy films had been generally portrayed as a villainous savage prone to the most hideous extremes of cruelty and violence. Ulzana’s Raid was made at the neight of the Vietnam war, and uses the American Indian for very different ends. As with Soldier Blue and Chato’s Land, Ulzana’s Raid depicts the west as a battleground between white people who basically had no business beig there and savage Indians prone to the most hideous extremes of cruelty and violence. By going to war with those they believe are ‘savages’, the 'civilized’ people in each film turn out to be exactly like them.
The Loved One is based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. The script is by Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern, both of whom had had horrible experiences in Hollywood from which they drew for the film’s opening scenes. The transition from the movie business to the cemetery trade is seamless - after all, they’re pretty much the same thing. Richardson had already directed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Tom Jones, and this was his first American film. It has an all star cast: James Coburn is a customs inspector, Liberace sells caskets, John Gielgud and Robert Morley are members of the loathsome Santa Monica British Colony.
An American Werewolf in London is part of a very honourable cult genre: the werewolf/vampire film. The rules of these films are standardised. Vampires are blood-drinking, living corpses whose mere bite can make you one of their number. Werewolves are people who turn into wolves, or wolf-like humanoids, at every full moon, and their bite turns other humans into werewolves. Vampires can only be killed by fire, removal of the head or a stake through the heart. Werewolves can only be killed by a silver bullet or the SAS.
Yojimbo is a samurai film made by the greatest of all film directors, Akira Kurosawa. If the story seems familiar, it may be because it was remade, in 1964, by Sergio Leone with the title A Fistful of Dollars.
Robert Altman, the director of A Wedding, was one of the top names in American cinema in the 1970s. He directed M*A*S*H, The Long Goodbye and McCabe & Mrs Miller, which I would offer up as his best films. Not all of his were great of course: he was also the director responsible for the interminable Quintet and the truly awful A Perfect Couple. But at his best, there was no other film-maker like him. He was a master of the big ensemble film, much of which appeared to be improvised or scripted by the actors. His most complex extravaganzas were the brilliant Nashville and A Wedding.
The Phenix City Story was directed in 1955 by Phil Karlson, who also directed the 1962 Elvis Presley remake of Kid Galahad as well as From Hell to Eternity and the rat movie Ben. It’s an example of that much-loved cult genre, the exposé film. Other examples are Reefer Madness, I Was a Communist for the FBI and Midnight Express.
The script for Walk on the Wild Side was written by John Fante, an American author of some cult renown, from a book by Nelson Algren (author of The Man with the Golden Arm). It is a total melodrama, about a naive farm boy in love with a sculptress who has become a prostitute. The farm boy is played by the English actor Laurence Harvey, who played upper-crust Americans in a number of films, most notably in The Manchurian Candidate. In Walk on the Wild Side, Harvey is supposedly from Texas, although his accent is more that of a southern gennelmun…
Sergio Corbucci was also the director of the cult western Django, which was banned in Britain for many years. Although The Big Silence is his best film, it has never been shown publicly here or in the United States. It’s easy to see why. The film, like most Italian westerns, is incredibly bleak and pessimistic; but worse, it has the most horrible ending of any film I’ve ever seen. It was considered so strong that the producers asked Corbucci to shoot another. Apparently, that version played in certain Middle Eastern countries, where action films are popular but they have to have a happy ending.
A Bullet for the General - original title: Quien Sabe? - was directed in 1966 by Damiano Damiani, a politically oriented director who intended it to be a commentary on United States intervention in Latin America.
Clint Eastwood made three films with the Italian director Sergio Leone, and five with the American Don Siegel. He parted company with Leone in 1966 and with Siegel in the seventies, and since then has been pretty much his own director; though he leaves the actual director’s seat to someone else, he hangs on to the reins, so to speak, producing all the films in which he appears. Certain movies for certain reasons he directs himself: most of these show substantial debts to Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. Leone and Siegel were top-of-the-line action directors in their respective countries. Leone collaborated with Robert Aldrich on Sodom and Gomorrah and directed Eastwood in three millenial spaghetti westerns. Siegel, who had begun life as an editor, graduated to top-flight B-movies such as Riot in Cell Block 11 and The Killers.
Vamp is the perfect Moviedrome film. I don’t mean the perfect film artistically - Vamp is not a perfect film by any means. But it is the perfect Moviedrome film: a rarely seen cult exploitation movie with irrelevant actors, average direction, a daft script borrowing from other, equally daft movies, and guest appearances by such cult luminaries as Grace Jones and feminist body builder Lisa Lyon, plus original furniture by Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.
George Romero is, of course, the director of The Night of the Living Dead and its numerous sequels. This was his first non-horror film. Knightriders centres around a peculiarly horrible American phenomenon, that of the ‘renaissance fayre’. This is an opportunity for American anglophiles, of whom there are unfortunately many, to dress up in quasi-Elizabethan costumes, eat hamburgers, watch jousting, buy leather belts and engage in other supposedly medieval pursuits. In this case the jousting tournament takes place on Japanese motorcycles. Why not? Americans, coming from a very young country, seem extremely anxious to establish their place in history. Hence their interminable rambling about geneology, and their tendency to purchase spurious family trees and to build Tudor-style mansions in the Arizona desert and in Beverly Hills.
Jonathan Demme is an American director from the Corman School, a sort of work-study film programme run in Los Angeles by the benevolent entrepreneur and former film director Roger Corman. (Actually he’s not a former film director any more, having recently directed Frankenstein Unbound.) Other graduates of the Corman School were Joe Dante, Jack Nicholson, Francis Coppola and Monte Hellman. The Corman School produced very low-budget action and horror films. Demme directed several women-in-prison movies and Crazy Mamma before graduating from Corman’s august academy, and heading out to seek his fortune in what is sometimes called the Real World.
Carnival of Souls is about a cynical church organist who… I can’t tell you any more about the story. You have to see it for yourself. It’s really strange. It was directed by Herk Harvey in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1962, featuring himself and a number of his neighbours and friends. (Mr H. plays the head zombie.) The only professional performer is Candace Hilligoss, who plays the organist. It was Mr Harvey’s only venture into the exciting career of film director, unfortunately. Not only did he direct the film and act in it, he also paid for it. I think he ran a Chevy dealership. All the cars in the film appear to be Chevies, anyway. Lawrence, Kansas, is also the home of William Burroughs, author and adventurer.
Badlands is that near-impossible thing: a great American movie that was both an artistic triumph and a box-office success. It was the first starring feature role for Martin Sheen, an actor who up until then had been popular in TV movies but had little success in feature films.
Joseph Losey was born in 1909. He abandoned medical studies to work in the theatre, becoming a stage manager at Radio City Music Hall and later a director. In 1935 he attended film classes given by Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, and after serving his country in the Second World War he became friends with Bertolt Brecht and directed a famous stage production of Brecht’s Galileo, starring Charles Laughton.
Performance was made in Britain in 1968, immediately shelved by the studio that paid for it, then re-edited by seven different editors and released in 1970. It was co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg. Cammell also wrote the script; Roeg photographed it. Some say this film is the product of Roeg’s genius, others that it’s all down to Donald Cammell - as if it was some sort of contest rather than a collaboration. For the record, Donald Cammell has also directed the computer slasher movie Demon Seed and the cult slasher White of the Eye. Roeg has made too many great films to mention.
At Close Range is based on a true story, that of the Johnson Gang, who in the late seventies made a healthy business out of stealing tractors in Pennsylvania. It stars Sean and Christopher Penn, features an appearance by Kiefer Sutherland, and has a script written by Nicholas Kazan, who wrote the excellent courtroom drama Reversal of Fortune - all sons of the great and good in Hollywood, though this is of course pure coincidence. The younger Kazan actually steps in father’s footsteps here, by having his hero inform on his villainous dad to the Grand Jury. Nicholas’s father Elia, having busted several of his friends for being Communists, went on to make the popular On the Waterfront, whose proletarian hero undergoes a severe moral crisis before informing on a villainous racketeer.
The Duellists is the story of two French Hussars who engage in a series of affairs of honour at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was produced by David Puttnam, the man the Reader’s Digest called the father of British cinema, so naturally it stars two Americans, Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel, in the principal roles. It’s great to look at, as you might expect, because Scott - here directing his first feature film - was one of the so-called ‘Renaissance’ directors, a group of British TV commercial chaps who moved to Hollywood in the late seventies to make feature films. Other members of this august clan include Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and Ridley Scott’s equally talented brother, Tony.
Cape Fear is a film of some notoriety. When it came to Britain in 1962 the censor was aghast. He demanded six minutes of cuts before granting the film an ‘X’ certificate. The problem wasn’t with anything that happened on the screen so much as with the character played by Robert Mitchum, Max Cady. Cady is a sex offender who turns up in a small Florida town and proceeds to terrorize the local barrister (played by Gergory Peck), his wife (Polly Bergen), and their twelve-year-old daughter, who wears a push-up bra.
Ken Russell is, according to the conventional wisdom, the Baddest Boy of British Cinema. It is fashionable, among the critical and productorial élite, to deride Our Ken and treat him as a finished old madman from a bygone age. This in spite of the fact that just in the last two or three years he’s made at least four feature films. And in spite of the fact that any video shop you go into is bound to be a veritable trove of Russell films. The list of his important films is really long: The Devils, Tommy, Savage Messiah, Women in Love, The Boyfriend, Valentino. Even his bad films - principally Altered States - have pretty interesting stuff in them. And his more recent work in Salome’s Last Dance and The Lair of the White Worm show no significant dimming of Russell’s unique flair.
If you ever go out to the pictures, or even if you only watch television programmes about the pictures, you can hardly fail to have heard about a film called Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme. It’s the story of hideous but charming serial murderer named Dr Hannibal Lekter, played by Anthony Hopkins, and an FBI agent, played by Jodie Foster, who uses the incarcerated Lekter’s homicidal instincts to track down another serial killer currently at large.
The production manager and the director of photography of this biker movie, Paul Lewis and Laszlo (under the Anglicized pseudonym ‘Leslie’) Kovacs, went on with Jack Nicholson to make Easy Rider the following year. Easy Rider was directed by Dennis Hopper. It was the film that broke the conventional biker-movie mould - a mould set by Marlon Brando’s The Wild One in 1954.
While directing One from the Heart, Francis Coppola received a letter from a class of schoolchildren in the American Midwest. The children said, since he was such a good director (they had all enjoyed Apocalypse Now), would he please consider tackling their favourite literary work, a book called The Outsiders, by the children’s author S. E. Hinton. Coppola agreed. While shooting The Outsiders, Coppola decided to make a second film back-to-back with it - a smaller, more personal work. The result was called Rumble Fish, and it, too, is based on a book by S. E. Hinton.
The director Robert Aldrich has contributed more films to Moviedrome than anybody else. Baby Jane is the story of two sisters, the eponymous Baby Jane Hudson, a former child prodigy billed as the ‘diminuitive dancing duse from Duluth’, and the neglected sibling, Blanche. A ghastly accident has put an end to Blanche’s career and now she and Baby Jane inhabit a house somewhere in Hollywood, where the events herein described take place.
Solaris is a Russian science-fiction film, based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, who was at that time the Soviet Union’s major science-fiction writer. It’s the story of a mission to the remote planet of Solaris, to find out what happened aboard a space station whose crew have disappeared - or almost disappeared, for there are a couple left: Snauth, a cybernetics expert who has turned to drink, and the biologist Dr Sartorius. Also on board the space station, it turns out, is the hero’s late wife, various dwarfs, and other eerie manifestations of a planet which is really a… ah, but that would be telling.
Mishima is in Japanese. It is not, however, a Japanese film. The distinction was made very clear at the Cannes Film Festival, where the celebrated Japanese director Oshima said: ‘I was told that this was a controversial film. It is not controversial. It is merely bad.’
Mad Max II is one of the last gasps of the once proud Australian cinema. Mad Max I, you may recall, was a low-budget, science-fiction action thriller which introduced Mel Gibson to the agog world. Mad Max II is that rare thing, a sequel that is actually better than the original. The only other instance I can think of is For a Few Dollars More, the sequel to A Fistful of Dollars. Interestingly in both cases the director remained the same. Leone of course went on to make an even better sequel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
F for Fake is Orson Welles’s quasi-documentary about various forgers and fakers, made in 1973. It was the last Welles film to be released. He actually completed two other movies, The Deep and The Other Side of the Wind, which for obscure financial or legal reasons have never been distributed.
A Canadian biochemistry student who switched to English language and literature, David Cronenberg can legitimately be described as the most original director currently working on the North American continent. His films, which are always shot in Canada - Canadian cities doubling for New York or Marrakesh - fall generally within the horror genre. They deal with secret scientific experiments that go wrong, cannibalism, sexual mutation and epidemic disease. Depending on your point of view, Cronenberg is either a maker of sick exploitation movies or an ascetic prophet of the modern age.
Rabid is one of the finest cult films of all time. David Cronenberg is, of course, the director of The Fly (remake) and Shivers and The Naked Lunch and Scanners and The Dead Zone - an unsurpassed roster of cult horror movies. Not Wes Craven, nor Tod Browning, not Mario Bava, not Dario Argento, not John Carpenter, not even the ineffable James Whale, made as many genuinely weird and unsettling horror films.
Sam Peckinpah is an American director who came out of television in the fifties. He directed some memorable episodes of The Rifleman before embarking on a series of features which included some of the best westerns of all time: Guns in the Afternoon, Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch.There have been so many bloodthirsty adventure films made in the last 20 years that one tends to forget what a shock wave The Wild Bunch made when it came out in 1969. It was both condemned as violent pornography and lauded and at least one journalist - Alexander Cockburn - was so incensed that he got into a fist-fight in the cinema. In retrospect, The Wild Bunch - with its random cruelty, its senseless massacres, high-tech killing and gangsters dressed as US soldiers taking hostages and murdering old ladies - seems to be an early feature about Vietnam.
Wes Craven’s splendid The Serpent and the Rainbow is a story of voodoo and black magic filmed in mysterious Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Craven is the director of various successful low-budget and cultist horror movies, including The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and People Under the Stairs. Like George Romero and Dario Argento, Craven is an exponent of the modern horror genre: he also bears a striking resemblance to a tall Edgar Allan Poe.
Les Diaboliques is a horror film, it’s in French, with subtitles, but please don’t be put off! You will not be disappointed. This film is at least 15 times more frightening than Friday the Twelfth Part Fourteen or any of the other inane sequels you can rent down at the newsagents. This is a real film, directed by a real film director. And it is really frightening. If you watch Les Diaboliques all the way to the end, you will be scared. Guaranteed.
Bernardo Bertolucci is an Italian director, the son of a film critic, whose first job was as assistant to Pasolini. In 1964, he directed Before the Revolution, and published an emotional critical diatribe against the French New Wave director Godard, called ‘Versus Godard’. In 1968, he directed Partner and wrote one of the first drafts of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.
This is one of the more disappointing John Carpenter films. Carpenter is the director of a series of horror and science fiction films, the most famous and commercially successful of which was Halloween. His first film, in some ways still his best, was a science-fiction comedy called Dark Star, about surfers in space. Dark Star was written by one Dan O'Bannon, who later wrote Alien, which, in spite of a much larger budget and the inimitable chocolate-box photography of Ridley Scott, is essentially the same story (mad alien aboard space ship, picking off the crew) minus the very funny humour of Carpenter’s original, super-low-budget film.
Alligator is a film based on a modern myth. Modern myths are a very popular cult species: there are films about flying saucers, about the Loch Ness monster, Bermuda Triangle, all that sort of thing, although as yet there hasn’t been a movie about ‘the poodle in the microwave’. Here, John Sayles and Lewis Teague offer us the oft-told story of the pet baby alligator flushed down the toilet, which takes up residence in the sewer and grows to be 100 feet long.
Q is one of those films with a confusing plethora of names. In the United States, it was first known as The Winged Serpent. Later it was retitled simply Q (short for Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god who was half reptile, half bird); in Britain, it was known more formally as Q - The Winged Serpent. The director Larry Cohen is a famed writer/director/producer of exploitation films, among them Demon, It’s Alive! and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Q was his most ambitious film, a combination of slasher movie and King Kong. In fact, Cohen goes one better and sets his monster’s roost, not in the Empire State Building, but in the attic of the Chrysler Building.
Wise Blood was John Huston’s first film after Fat City, and while likewise set in small-town America, it’s completely different in tone. Fat City was about boxers in Stockton, California: resolutely naturalistic with great performances by Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrell and Stacey Keach. Wise Blood is set in the South - it was filmed in Georgia, though the original novel is set in Tennessee, and it is anything but a slice of dramatic naturalism. Brad Dourif, a very fine actor who seems to appear exclusively in cult movies, plays one Hazel Motes, an atheist determined on setting up a Church Without Christ.
Matthew Hopkins was a British Joe McCarthy type who in the seventeenth century claimed to have the ‘Devil’s List’ of all the witches in England. Just as Tailgunner Joe’s list of 160,000 Communists, or homosexuals, or whatever it was, shaped the domestic policy of his nation, so Matthew Hopkins made a thriving living chasing down witches and to a lesser extent warlocks in East Anglia 300 years ago.
Lolita is the story of a lecturer in French literature and his amour fou for a pre-teenage nymphet. The film, of course, is based on Vladimir Nabokov’s book, which was generally considered unfilmable until a young American director called Stanley Kubrick took it up. The script is by Nabokov, and it’s very good - although, surprisingly, not overtly literary. Nabokov was born in Russia; English was his second, or maybe even his third or fourth language, and perhaps not surprisingly he became a master of the idiom what we speak. If you ever yearn for literary indulgence, I would urge you to check out his book Pale Fire, a brilliant parody of epic poetry with an insane sub-plot running through the footnotes.
Play Misty for Me is the first feature directed by Clint Eastwood. As has been more than once observed, Eastwood’s directorial style was greatly influenced by the directors of his most successful movies, Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. Leone was a manic sadist, a misogynist, and one of the great film makers. Siegel was a former editor, and a successful director of action films like Riot in Cell Block 11 and Dirty Harry. Eastwood’s second feature as a director, High Plains Drifter, has often been mistaken for a Leone film. Play Misty for Me bears many of the hallmarks of Don Siegel - creative editing and use of sound, mixed with routine exchanges of close-ups and familiar dramatic tension in the Psycho mould.
Walker is an American film made in Nicaragua. It was written by Rudy Wurlitzer, the author of Two-Lane Blacktop, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Candy Mountain. Wurlitzer has recently worked on a story about the Buddha for Bernardo Bertolucci. Walker is portrayed by Ed Harris, an outstanding American actor who specializes in half-charming, half-psychotic anti-heroes. Harris has also appeared in Under Fire, To Kill a Priest, Alamo Bay and The Abyss. He also played the astronaut John Glenn in The Right Stuff.
Henry Jaglom was one of the editors of Easy Rider. Today he is best known as a director of genteel, moderately bawdy comedies such as Eating and Sitting Ducks. These films tend to feature the talents of his brother, Michael Emil. For this reviewer, this type of movie is the equivalent of that French film where the two aesthetes sit around digesting a big meal and endlessly jawing: but there is no doubt that as a sub-genre, or genre, or whatever it is, the witty, sitting-around-talking kind of movie has its constituency. But…
For an industry as self-congratulatory as Hollywood, you would expect there to be a plethora of movies showing the film business in a glowing light. Strangely enough, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Of all the movies made about the film industry, the only one I can think of that treats the business well is Day for Night, in which the romantically-inclined French director François Truffaut did his best to convince us that making a film is a process full of sweetness and light.
Robert Aldrich is an old favourite; he has more films on Moviedrome than any other director. On this occasion we don’t see so many of his stock company since the cast is quite small and there is only one setting - the mansion of a narcissistic Hollywood movie star. As you might deduce from the above, The Big Knife is based on a stage play - fortunately a good one. It takes us deeper and deeper into the twisted history of its protagonist and the studio’s increasingly vicious machinations. Its author was Clifford Odets, who also wrote None but the Lonely and Sweet Smell of Success.
Sam Raimi was also the director of The Evil Dead - you probably recall the controversy surrounding that low-budget 1980 horror picture. In the cold light of day it’s hard to see what all the posturing was about - Evil Dead was a good, competent, cabin-in-the-woods horror flick, certainly not a cause célèbre worthy of all the anguish and outrage that surrounded its release on video. Raimi’s bigger-budget Crimewave (1985), was considerably less successful, but Evil Dead 2 (1987) was a tremendous film, full of all sorts of manic originality. Manic originality is less in evidence in Sam Raimi’s first studio picture, Darkman.
House of Games is a tale of confidence tricksters. It’s the first feature directed by David Mamet, the noted playwright and screenwriter who wrote Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and penned the screenplay for de Palma’s The Untouchables. It’s a complex story, involving a series of consecutive and concurrent scams which I will not ruin by relating to you here. Certain parts of the plot, if you think about them, don’t entirely convince - but why think? It’s a movie that’s cleverly constructed and very well acted. Joe Mantegna is outstanding as the principle conman. The dialogue is great and the tension winds down only in the slightly stagy action scenes.
Since we’ve already exhausted the standard reference works and databases, to say nothing of your gentle ears, with information about Siegel and Eastwood, I propose instead to talk about the second feature player of this almost all-male cast, Patrick McGoohan.
Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is based on the true story of André Devigny, a French officer who was imprisoned by the Germans and the Vichy collaboration government at Montluc jail in 1943. Bresson is a former painter and scriptwriter who was himself a prisoner of war from June 1940 to April 1941. Perhaps for that reason A Man Escaped is quite unlike Escape from Alcatraz or any other film in this familiar genre.
The Hill is a rarely seen drama set during World War II. Sidney Lumet is an American director, most famous for his urban dramas like Network and Dog day Afternoon. It was made in 1964, the year after Lumet’s tense nuclear war drama Failsafe, the year before he made the sensational Pawnbroker.
Cry-Baby is the eighth film of John Waters, the cult director from Baltimore. Waters once said, according to the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film that having someone vomit while watching one of his movies was like getting a standing ovation.
Lenny is the story of the comedian Lenny Bruce. The director, Bob Fosse, was a dancer and a choreographer who began his directorial career with the 1969 musical Sweet Charity. Thereafter he directed Cabaret, which made his reputation; Lenny; All that Jazz, a quasi-autobiography which prefigured his own death; and Star 80, the story of the murdered Playboy bunny Dorothy Stratten. No other short career, except perhaps Terence Malick’s, has produced so many outstanding films.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that rare thing, a remake that is as good as the original. There have been countless lousy and incompetent remakes - Stagecoach, for instance, or Father of the Bride. Sometimes they are so bad they have to be concealed under a different title: the remake of Out of the Past was called Against All Odds. Off hand, I can think of only one other genuinely good remake, and that was William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, a truly inspired retelling of the French classic Wages of Fear. Sorcerer was a great film based on a great film; it was also a monumental failure at the box office. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a good film based on a good film.
Romance of a Horse Thief is one of the oddest films we’ve screened on Moviedrome. It’s not really a cult film - there is absolutely no cult of fanatic admirers devotedly following this film around, for reasons which will rapidly become apparent. Nevertheless, it contains certain cult elements that seem to be commendable to your attention, namely Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. If you’re very, very old you may remember a time called the sixties and outrageous things such as Carnaby Street and the breakdown of the draft system in the United States. One of the cult or iconic items of that bygone decade was a single called ‘Je t'aime, moi non plus’, which got banned by British radio stations because it supposedly featured the sounds of the chanteurs making love. This was long before the similar row occasioned by Donna Summer’s 'Love to Love You Baby’. Aren’t you glad that I’m reminding you of all this important stuff?
Ken Russell is a highly talented and oft-maligned director who, as the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film observed, ‘refuses to make movies in the genteel British tradition.’ As such his oeuvre rarely finds favour with the critics, but is often highly popular with the unwashed mob of real people who intermittently attend the cinema. For a while, things got difficult for this original and therefore feared director. It looked as if he was going to get stuck in the United States, waiting years to direct not-good studio potboilers like Altered States and Crimes of Passion. But no! Russell came sailing back to these shores on the wave of video money which erupted in the mid eighties, when new companies - in this instance Lord Branson’s Virgin Vision plc - financed features on the basis of anticipated video and TV sales. This is how many films in the eighties were made, among them Company of Wolves, Empire State, Sid & Nancy and a whole string of madcap low-budget high-energy Ken Rus
The Navigator is a medieval odyssey from New Zealand. Released in 1988, it was apparently four years in the making, and attracted such attention that Moving Pictures made a documentary about the director, Vincent Ward.
Weekend was written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1967. Godard, you may recall, was one of the French New Wave’s enfants terribles. Starting his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, he directed his first and most intelligible feature, Breathless, in 1959. In general, intellgibility is not what Godard’s cinema is all about. Breathless was a relatively straight-ahead thriller about a gangster and his moll. Alphaville, which you may recall seeing on Moviedrome many moons ago, is an indescribable science-fiction film in which lightbulbs and domestic objects take on the same sinister high-tech mystery as the spaceship interiors in the Alien films or the monolith in 2001. His films (they cannot be called ‘movies’) are filled with alienation devices, narrative inconsistencies, loose ends, long monologues in which dustmen talk to the camera about Marxism. His films are usually quite cheaply made, partially because - according to a possibly apocryphal story - it’s hard to raise more t
You know that poster you see all the time? The one that’s a painting of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, all sitting in a diner? Maybe it’s not Elvis, maybe it’s JFK, but you know the poster that I mean - it has the Edward Hopperesque illumination and it’s called something like ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’?
A 200 per cent cult classic: you must remember 200 Motels. It was always playing at midnight on Saturday at the Scala, back when you were protesting against the Vietnam war and listening to Atom Heart Mother. That’s right - it’s that film. Probably you saw the advert in the paper or the Marquee. Equally probably you didn’t go and see it. Now you can.
Django is a great treat, a long-unseen spaghetti western. Sergio Corbucci also directed The Big Silence, another ‘missing’ film premiered on Moviedrome. This was the first western I ever saw where the bad guys win absolutely. It was so troubling that the producers actually had Corbucci shoot a happy ending too, which played in certain territories where the sad one was perceived as being too much. Django isn’t quite as doom-laden, but it comes close. It also benefits from an even madder plot and some extraordinary sets and costumes by Giancarlo Simi, who designed all of Sergio Leone’s films. The Big Silence took place in the snow; Django is set entirely in a sea of mud.
Grim Prairie Tales was made on a shoestring budget in the Mojave Desert in 1990. The writer/director, Wayne Coe, was an illustrator who designed the American campaigns for Out of Africa, Brazil and Back to the Future before deciding that he wanted to get involved behind the lens. He gives us an excellent example of why writer/directors shouldn’t be allowed to talk about their aspirations or their films.
The renowned cult director Sam Fuller was a former newspaperman and front-line infantryman in World War II - his style is described by the Virgin International Encyclopaedia of Film as characterized by ‘shrill anti-Communism, a protagonist who is a borderline psychopath, film noir sensibilities, bursts of graphic violence, unapologetic sentimentality, and fluid almost athletic camerawork’, along with a 'concern for identity, whether racial or national.’ Phew! O boy!
There’s plenty of moral purpose in Verboten!, which, like another Sam Fuller film shown on Moviedrome - Run of the Arrow - begins with a shot of dead bodies on the battlefield. It is the story of an American GI in World War II, who violates the non-fraternisation rule and falls in love with a German woman, played by one Susan Cummings. She, like Yellow Moccasin in Run of the Arrow, wants to know: ‘What is a honeymoon?’
The Long Riders is an American western about the famous James and Younger gang, as miserable a bunch of dry-gulching, back-shooting, terrorist assassins as ever walked the earth.
The Big Combo, as you will be immediately aware from its low angles, its high contrast, its impenetrable expressionist shadows, is a film noir, and a particularly good one.
Face to Face is one of three ‘political westerns’ by the Italian director Sergio Sollima, who sometimes operates under the pseudonym 'Sterling Simon’. The other two were The Big Gundown, an excellent bounty-hunter movie starring Lee Van Cleef and Tomas Milian, and Run, Man, Run, a rather worse-than-mediocre sequel involving the further adventures of Milian. They were 'political’ in much the same way as all the spaghetti westerns, setting up a rural/urban conflict in which the city dwellers are always insidious degenerates or usurous bankers, and the rural characters innocent exploitees, often championed by a glamorous social bandit. It’s a straightforward, simple-minded view that you can find even in supposedly sophisticated Italian films, the most lumberng example perhaps being 1900.
Sometimes also known as Kill and Say Your Prayers, Requiescant is a spaghetti western directed by Carlo Lizzani in 1968. Lizzani was a journalist and film critic who published a major survey of Italian film, Il Cinema Italiano, in 1953. He has written and directed a number of films, many of them social dramas ‘marred’ (in the words of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopaedia) ‘by the director’s overly dogmatic Marxist ideology on the one hand and by commercial requirements on the other.’ He is also a theatre director.
Pedro Almodovar is the premier director of the New Spain. Obviously I say that with a certain cynicism: being the premier director of the New Spain is rather like being the premier novelist of Milton Keynes. What Have I Done To Deserve This? is actually a pretty good Almodovar film: more slick than some of his other movies, with less plot, it is the everyday story of a dysfunctional family living among the horrible tower blocks of contemporary Madrid. It’s the first Almodovar film I’ve seen that doesn’t open with a scene involving a movie being dubbed. But the characters, as always, are writers and media people, prostitutes and junky kids, burnt-out housewives and funereally clad grandmothers.
The slow-motion, ‘nekked’ schoolgirl shower-room fantasy in this movie is one of the distinctrive hallmarks of the cinema of Brian de Palma, director of Wotan’s Wake, Get to Know Your Rabbit, Phantom of the Paradise, Scarface and The Untouchables. De Palma is often described by film critics as the heir to Hitchcock, but though he may share certain misogynistic traits with the Master, the films that are mostly described as ‘Hitchcockian’ - Body Double, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out - seem to be ripped off not so much from Hitchcock as from Dario Argento.
A science-fiction double-bill, starting with The Andromeda Strain. A thriller based on a novel by Michael Crichton. The first such thriller, I think. It was made in 1970 in CinemaScope. This was the era of great experimentation in American film styles and The Andromeda Strain reflects this overtly in its use of split-screen sequences, as per The Boston Strangler and The Thomas Crown Affair. Tonight you’ll see Andromeda Strain in its original CinemaScope form. The three Michael Crichton films that I’m familiar with are Westworld, Jurassic Park and this one. And they all seem to have the same basic theme. In each film man creates a hi-tech, electronic and mechanical paradise which invariably goes haywire and turns on its customers and creators. The Frankenstein story applied to theme parks and government installations. In The Andromeda Strain, an American satellite returns to Earth with a deadly organism from outer space. A life-form which kills almost all humans on contact. While the scientists urge nuclear destruction of the affected area and politicians weigh up the likely consequences of incinerating select portions of the USA, a team of ace biologists and surgeons struggle to isolate the alien bacteria and find a cure. What’s really interesting about this movie is its matter of factness. There are no movie stars, no love interest, no action until almost the very end; there’s no music for the first hour of the film; the dialogue is often mundane and trivial, like the dialogue in that science-fiction masterpiece, 2001. Which is just as it should be, since the events in question: encounters with alien life, the possible annihilation of the human species, are so momentous. Ratchet it up just a notch, these could be Kubrick scientists with their animal experiments, their top secret government assignments and their obsessive cleanliness. Perhaps not surprisingly, Special Photographic Effects are by Douglas Trumbull who did the special effects on 2001 and later d
Next, a variation on the Andromeda Strain theme: Fiend Without a Face. Alarmed by a series of mysterious deaths, an isolated Canadian community blames an American military atomic experimental power-station, that’s situated nearby. Though set in Canada, Fiend Without a Face was shot right here in Great Britain by the producer’s associates in 1957. It was directed by Arthur Crabtree, who also made the infamous banned movie Horrors of the Black Museum; and the script was by Amelia Reynolds Long. Presumably it was set in North America in order to more effectively compete with the wave of American science-fiction films of a similar ilk. This was the era of the great Jack Arnold movies, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, This Island Earth and Them! In other words, pretty stiff competition. And how does our home-grown sci-fi hold up in comparison? Well, although there’s some good stock footage of aircraft, a la Dr Strangelove, this doesn’t really look like Canada to me. Or if it is, it’s a part of Canada that’s filled with surreal little English bungalows. The actors are rather like the second and third row of troops in Dad’s Army. And the only concession they make to being Americans is saying “labra-torry”, instead of “laboratory”. None of this applies to the extremely sexy Kim Parker in the role of Barbara Griselle, by the way. One place though where I think Fiend Without a Face does compete very favourably with its American contemporaries is in the monsters, when they finally appear. It takes a while for this to happen, because they are, like the killer plague in The Andromeda Strain, invisible. In fact, when I first saw the footprint or tail print of the invisible fiends, I thought ‘Oh no, this isn’t going to be any good at all. They did this much better in Forbidden Planet’, but no! I was deceived! Because when the fiend without a fiend actually ceases to be inviisible the result is absolutely horrible! And there isn’t
Talk Radio is a film by Oliver Stone, based on the true story of Alan Berg, an American radio phone-in host who was murdered by neo-nazis in 1984. As such it’s the perfect Stone vehicle. Featuring a tortured, maligned but righteous anti-hero, fighting fascism while trying to come to terms with his own male chauvinism and find a girlfriend. The source material was, as you might expect, a stage-play by Eric Bogosian, who also plays the lead role. Olly is of course a great director and a Great American. “Goddammit, he went to Vietnam, instead o’ smokin’ dope at Ox-FORD!” Or worse, protesting against the war. He’s one of the few American directors living - the other two who spring to mind being Spielberg and Woody Allen - who get to write their own ticket and do whatever the heck they want. His best films for me are Salvador and JFK. Talk Radio is a pretty interesting film. Stone is obsessed by pressing social issues: corruption on Wall Street, U.S. imperialism, the rise of neo-fascist groups, and above all the notion that the United States lost its innocence in the 1960s as a result of Kennedy’s assassination and the Vietnam War. This is of course what the Americans call “bullshit” and John Milius wouldn’t buy it for a second. But it’s a popular notion among wet liberals who like to view political assassination and out of control militarism as the exception rather than the rule. It’s the same sort of wishy-washy revisionism we get from David Puttnam, who tells us in The Killing Fields that the Americans bombed Cambodia by mistake and how they won the war for us in Memphis Belle. It’s all ludicrous, but it’s the ludicrosity of the limousine liberal and there are a lot of those in Hollywood; and vicious, betraying gangsters that these liberal studio bosses are, they solve their charred consciences by funding liberal social issue films like this one. Talk Radio is beautifully photographed by Robert “Bob” Richardson; the script by Bogosian and Stone is intermitten
Tonight, a classic film about angst-ridden middle-class middle-aged Americans. Carnal Knowledge. Carnal Knowledge was directed by Mike Nichols in 1971. Nichols is the doyen of directors of films about angst-ridden middle-class Americans. He made The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman, as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Catch 22.
From a cop escorting a prisoner to a cop escorting a vital witness. Tonight’s second film is The Narrow Margin, a noir thriller made in 1950. It stars nobody famous, it was made for $230,000 and it was a big hit.
Tonight on Moviedrome, the ultimate music-related non-rockumentary cult classic. The Saturday late-night show par excellence, The Harder They Come. Made in 1972 in Jamaica. The film, as you probably know, stars reggae genius Jimmy Cliff, in the role of Ivan. An aspiring young Jamaican musician who plans to make it as a reggae star.
Salvador was directed in 1986 by Oliver Stone. Although it always features in his filmography as Stone’s first film as a director, it was actually his third or even fourth. For some reason his early triumphs are not referred to by critics earnestly intent on evaluating the great man’s work. Okay I’m being a bit facetious. The truth is, the worth of Stone’s other films apart, Salvador is a really great film. I first saw it at the Film Market at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the film’s first international screening and there were two other people in the audience. This was of course before the success of Platoon, also made by the Stone/John Daly/Derek Gibson team. For my money, Platoon is complete rubbish; a nasty bit of propaganda which suggests that if the poor, poor American GIs had only had better officers they would have won the Vietnam War. By Salvador however I was blown away. I was so impressed by and involved in the film that I couldn’t remember where i was. So strong was the
The People Under the Stairs was written and directed by Wes Craven, whose Serpent and the Rainbow you saw on Moviedrome a couple of years ago. It is, I’m pleased to say, a much better film. It’s also the film’s first screening on terrestrial television. It was generally viewed as a return to form by Craven, who had been highly regarded for his earlier horror film, The Hills Have Eyes. It’s unusual for a Craven picture, or for any horror film, in having non-white protagonists. In this case the impoverished black family, fronted by a little kid called Fool.
Tonight on Moviedrome the kind of film which should make everybody happy. A movie which was both a popular hit and a critical succès de scandale. Halloween. Halloween was directed in 1978 by John Carpenter. It’s one of the earliest and most imitated of that over-worked and seemingly endlessly popular genre: the serial killer/maniac stalker on the loose in pursuit of hapless teenagers movie. The kind of film where you know beforehand exactly what’s going to happen. Of course the teenagers are going to split up and explore the madhouse in total darkness in their underwear. What else would they do?
The Baby was directed in 1972 by Ted Post. Ted Post is probably not a name that most people conjure with, yet for me he was one of the best American directors for hire. Having made a very passable spaghetti western imitation with Clint Eastwood, Hang ‘Em High, and perhaps also the best of the Dirty Harry films; certainly the best of the Dirty Harry sequels, Magnum Force. Most film and TV directors are directors for hire, in fact; in the sense that they don’t initiate their own projects but direct whatever comes along.
Carny was directed in 1980 by Robert Kaylor. We will say no more about him, since he directs in a TV-movie style which is overlit and thoroughly predictable. Let’s talk instead about the second lead actor, co-author and producer of the film, Robbie Robertson. Robbie Robertson was the founder and songwriter of one of the seminal American bands of the ‘60s and '70s, The Band. I know that out there are adherents of all sorts of other sixties groups.
Tonight on Moviedrome, Naked Under Leather, or rather The Girl on a Motorcycle, as Jack Cardiff’s film became more chastely known. It forms the first half of our mad motorcycling double-bill. The second feature of which will be Psychomania. Girl on a Motorcycle is an Anglo-French co-production made in 1968. It stars Marianne Faithfull; and as you might expect, goes in for lashings of the old solarised images and weird colour and bizarre super-impositions, faithfully recreating the hallucinogenic experience, in order to prolong the travelogues and render the bunk-ups more artistic. It’s a nutty but highly entertaining film.
Now another deranged biker movie, this one made in England in 1972. There seems to be a French connection here, as well; because the script is by one Arnaud d'Usseau. Unless of course ‘Arnaud d'Usseau’ is actually a pseudonym. Wasn’t David Hare writing biker movies around this time in order to pay his way through Socialist Realism Polytechnic? I think we should be told. The film stars George Sanders and Beryl Reid, though both appear far too infrequently in my opinion. The bulk of screen time is devoted not to George and Beryl but to a biker gang appropriately named 'The Living Dead’. Appropriately since they are led by a deceased biker who has been buried astride his cycle.
…a pair of movies demonstrating the perils of road travel. The first is an odd, unusual horror film from 1975, Race With the Devil. Directed in Texas by Jack Starrett, author of Slaughter, Cleopatra Jones and A Small Town in Texas, Race With the Devil combines elements of the road movie, a counter-culture movie, a motor-home movie and Night of the Living Dead.
Next as part of the tastefully titled “Keep Death on the Road” double-bill, a strong-message film in favour of seat-belts and cordless telephones, Detour. Detour is an early film noir made in 1945. The director was Edgar G. Ulmer, who was born in Austria in 1900. Originally a production designer who worked in both film and theatre for such names as Max Reinardt and Alexander Korda, Ulmer came to the United States in 1931. He began his career as a director in 1934 on a studio picture, The Black Cat.
Tonight’s film, Rope, is a famous thriller by the director of so many famous thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock. In seven years this is the first Hitchcock film we’ve shown on Moviedrome and there’s a reason for that. While Moviedrome, in theory, is a selection of cult and weirdo type movies, Hitchcock is the epitome of the commercial director. His films were designed to be seen by the largest of mass audiences, in the United States, Europe and all over the World. Of all Hitchcock films, perhaps only Psycho and The Birds - odd uncharacteristic movies made late in his career - could be described as cult movies. Why then are we showing Rope? Because in addition to being a celebrated thriller, Rope is also famous as a cinematic experiment: an attempt to give the illusion that the film was made in one continuous shot.
Next in tonight’s double-feature of cinematic experiments is a little-seen Vietnam movie, making its terrestrial premiere. ‘84 Charlie MoPic’ is the name of the unseen cameraman, who is one of the characters in this film; making a continuous record for the US Army Motion Picture Division - hence 'MoPic’ - of a platoon on a highly dangerous patrol. It’s the first feature of director Patrick Duncan and it was made for very little money in 1989. While most Vietnam War films seem to get made in the Philippines, this one was shot in Southern California in Super-16mm. What’s principally interesting about it is its style: it’s all shot as if it were documentary footage of an actual event in progress. Unedited news-reel material, in fact. Thus, as long as we remember that the cameraman is a participant in the story, the film functions as a stylistic experiment such as Lady in the Lake: a film noir in which the camera was also the protagonist. The actor, Robert Montgomery, being glimpsed occasionally in mirrors during the course of the film. This was also to have been the style of Orson Welles’ first feature, based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In fact, Welles was to have appeared at the beginning of his projected but unfilmed production explaining to the audience that they were the eyes of the protagonist. Given Welles’ grandiloquence and lack of experience in the medium, perhaps it’s for the best that Heart of Darkness foundered and that he went on to make a more conventional film, Citizen Kane, instead. The concept of 84 Charlie MoPic is excellent and it’s often quite an interesting film. Its big failure is in the appearance of the actors, who no matter how desperate their situation always look as if they’ve freshly emerged from the bath and coiffure salon. Of course, the same can be said of Platoon or the Rambo movies, but they were at least shot in the tropics rather than in somebody’s back garden in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles. The style is so good, in fact,
This film is by the best of the black American directors, and one of the better directors of the modern American cinema itself. He is Charles Burnett. It’s very possible you haven’t heard of this film, and even more likely - unless you’re French or a devotee of Cahiers du Cinéma - that you haven’t heard much about Burnett, although he was a guest of the London Film Festival several years ago. To Sleep with Anger is Burnett’s third feature, made in 1989, and given a limited release in the United States the following year.
Le Mépris - alias Contempt - is Jean-Luc Godard’s version of The Odyssey. Or, to be more precise, his version of an American film producer trying to make a film version of The Odyssey with a French screenwriter at Cinecittà Studios outside Rome.
Tonight, Moviedrome presents Excalibur, the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Known during development and pre-production by a variety of titles, including Merlin, Merlin Lives and Knights, it’s held together partially by the character of Merlin the magician; portrayed by Nicol Williamson in a silver skull-cap. The Monthly Film Bulletin was scathing about Williamson, calling his performance “abysmal”, but I don’t really agree. He has a difficult job, holding together a vast array of unrelated and sometimes incomprehensible elements and I think he does it well. Apparently, Excalibur was conceived by director John Boorman as an alternative to his long-planned but never executed version of Lord of the Rings.
Nothing Lasts Forever was directed by Tom Schiller in 1934. Schiller was assistant prop-man on King Kong. It is he, covered in boot polish, who stands on top of the giant gates on Skull Island shouting “Kong! Konga! Kong!” as the giant ape comes looking for Fay Wray. The same year - 1933 - he directed the first of a series of docu-dramas about the lives of great pianists. Nothing Lasts Forever - the story of the concert pianist, Adam Beckett - is the second in his long series of piano-oriented films.
Tonight, as the first half of our south of the border, down Buenos Aires way double-bill, we proudly present a network premiere of Naked Tango. Set in the 1920s underworld and based on unpublished manuscripts by Manuel Puig - the author of Kiss of the Spider Woman - Naked Tango is a bodice ripper for the 1990s. The cinematic equivalent of those large chest-heaving novels by the likes of Barbara Cartland and Fabio.
Next in our down south way America double-bill, we present the network premiere of Apartment Zero. A British-Argentinian co-production made in 1988. Although it came as a surprise to President Ronald Reagan that South America was not one place but a variety of places - “Hey,” he observed, after a goodwill tour, “they got all different countries down there!” - it is to his credit that he recognised this. Argentina, where Naked Tango was also set, is infinitely different from Peru or Bolivia. Highly unlike Brazil, as well. Far from being a bunch of poncho-wearing pipe-playing indigenous peoples, the Argentinians pride themselves on being of European extraction. Buenos Aires is reputed to be the most European of Latin American capitals.
“Until the Apache is taken or destroyed”. These words form the coda of tonight’s Peckinpah western, Major Dundee. The film was shot in Mexico in 1964. It starred Charlton Heston and Richard Harris and was the big budget opportunity of a former TV director, Sam Peckinpah, who had directed two highly creditable low-budget westerns: Deadly Companions and the classic Guns in the Afternoon. The film is the thrilling story of an obsessive quest by Union Major Dundee (played by Heston), whose determination to capture or kill an Apache marauder forces him to enlist the services of a group of black volunteers and Confederate prisoners of war. The latter group under Captain Benjamin Tyrene, played by Richard Harris.
I saw tonight’s film - Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - years ago. And hated it. I saw it with a friend, Greg Hersov (now the Artistic Director of the Exchange Theatre in Manchester, I believe) and he was much more positive. But, for me, Alfredo Garcia seemed corny and a messy betrayal of the talent shown by its director Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch and Guns in the Afternoon. Twenty years later I must admit that I was wrong and Greg was right. What he knew instinctively I only figured out over the course of the years. Alfredo Garcia is an extraordinary film. Perhaps Peckinpah’s best after The Wild Bunch and certainly his most personal film. Hidden behind the sometimes dubious b-movie veneer. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is the story of Bennie, a worn out bar room piano player portrayed by Warren Oates. Bennie learns there is a large reward available for the head of his best friend, Alfredo Garcia. Since Bennie knows Alfredo is dead he volunteers to dig the corpse up and
Tonight we present the ultimate Moviedrome movie. A film that best embodies all the qualities that enable films to ascend to Moviedrome status. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, made in 1955.
Alex Cox introduces BBC Two's Forbidden Weekend
Alex Cox introduces Ingmar Bergman's The Silence as part of BBC Two's Forbidden Weekend
Alex Cox introduces Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter as part of BBC Two's Forbidden Weekend
Alex Cox introduces Edmond T. Gréville's Beat Girl as part of BBC Two's Forbidden Weekend
Alex Cox introduces Django Kills for BBC Two's 1997 Forbidden Season
Alex Cox introduces Django Kills for BBC Two's 1997 Forbidden Season
Alex Cox introduces Django Kills for BBC Two's 1997 Forbidden Season
Alex Cox introduces Django Kills for BBC Two's 1997 Forbidden Season
At the end of the 50s, by which time he had become an icon of rebellion, Marlon Brando founded a production company called Pennebaker. He wanted to make a Western and spent ages developing scripts. Then someone gave him Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Henry Jones about a bank robber called Rio deserted by his friend who has the Oedipal name of Dad Longworth. He immediately took to it and said at the time “our early heroes were not 100% brave all of the time. My role is a man who is tough and vain and childish”. Stanley Kubrick was to direct, and Karl Malden, who had been in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront with Brando, was to play the friend Dad. When Kubrick saw the finished script which was part-written by his long time collaborator Calder Willingham and Sam Peckinpah, he bottled out saying that he did not understand what it was about. Brando tried Sidney Lumet and Elia Kazan. Both refused so he decided to direct it himself.
Alex Cox introduces BBC Four's Five Westerns series which included Run of the Arrow, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagonmaster and The Searchers.
Alex Cox introduces the second part of BBC Four's Five Westerns series
Mark sits down with maverick director and ex-Moviedrome presenter Alex Cox to talk film curation.