Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

Director: Arthur Crabtree
Writer: Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel, from their original story
Stars: Michael Gough, June Cunningham, Graham Curnow and Shirley Anne Field

Index: 2016 Centennials.

I was rather shocked to find that I hadn’t seen Horrors of the Black Museum before. I grew up on this period of British horror movies, watched on my sister’s TV late at night after I was supposed to be asleep, and I’ve seen most of them, including the other couple of pictures in what David Pirie called in his book, A Heritage of Horror, the ‘Sadian trilogy’ of horror thrillers from Anglo-Amalgamated: Peeping Tom and Circus of Horrors. That’s an interesting trio, very different in style and approach but with a common theme of cruel violence, and there’s plenty of that on offer here. Being British films from the tail end of the fifties, they’re polite and courteous in their aberrance and so they occupy a curious midpoint between the amoral excesses of the Grand Guignol and the twisted torture porn of today. In doing this, they were massively influential and it’s fair to say that, without them, we may not have had Vincent Price in eight Edgar Allan Poe adaptations from American International, who coughed up half the budget for this picture.

In fact, Herman Cohen, in his role as producer of the film rather than that of a co-writer of the script, wanted Price in the lead, or at least Orson Welles, but Anglo-Amalgamated successfully lobbied for a British actor, partly because of cost and partly because of the Eady Levy. This was a tax on the box office whose proceeds were divvied up between exhibitors and qualifying British movies; the aim was to support the British film industry by keeping money within it. To qualify for such funding, administered through the newly formed British Film Fund Agency, at least 85% of a picture had to be shot in the United Kingdom or its Commonwealth and there could only be three foreign salaries. Cohen took up one of those slots already, so hiring a British lead avoided an immediate second; Michael Gough was born in Malaysia, but it was British Malaya at the time. He’s a fantastic choice for the role of Edmond Bancroft, the arrogant and quite deranged journalist and author of books on true crime. He would have been one hundred today.

Johnny O'Clock (1947)

Director: Robert Rossen
Writer: Robert Rossen, from an original story by Milton Holmes
Stars: Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes

It’s ironic that the title of this film is never fully explained. It’s a catchy one, especially when compared to the relentlessly generic titles that were usually given to films noir, and it sticks in the brain. It surely contributed to my choice of this picture, which I had not seen before, to remember the career of Evelyn Keyes, its leading lady, on what would have been her one hundredth birthday. Yet, beyond being the current name of its lead character (he has others, for reasons never explained but clearly dubious), it never finds a real purpose. Mostly it just serves to keep time in mind, as do the superb opening shot of a man checking his watch against the large clock above him and the importance of a pair of expensive watches within the story. The title is much catchier than the movie itself, a lot more memorable and, arguably, of a higher quality than the material it advertises. After all, it did a great job of suckering me in, as I’d heard it before often and so sought it out for this project.

I’m happy that I watched Johnny O’Clock though, because it’s an important and interesting film, even if the importance is mostly in the presence of Robert Rossen as writer and director; he wrote the script from an original story by Milton Holmes. He was already known as a writer, having penned a host of screenplays for Warner Brothers in the 1930s, including Marked Woman, Racket Busters and The Roaring Twenties; his greatest up to this point may have been A Walk in the Sun. However, this was his first time to sit in the director’s chair and, while he would never be prolific there, his ten films as a director include classics like All the King’s Men and The Hustler, both of which landed him Oscar nominations for Best Director; the former won three from its seven nods, including Best Picture, but Rossen lost to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives. I wonder how much of a learning experience this was for him, given that he was firing on all cylinders later in 1947 with Body and Soul, a film which he directed but did not write.

To my mind, Rossen is the weakest link here. While he (and perhaps Holmes) deserve great credit for the quintessential film noir dialogue which fills the script to bursting, this is methodical direction of a methodical script and there’s just no passion in it, even when the actors do their best to generate some. Methodical works well for Lee J. Cobb who, as the capable Inspector Koch, drives everything through his investigations of the various deaths that pepper the story. It doesn’t work well for Dick Powell as Johnny O’Clock or for the other key characters: his partner, his assistant and the three ladies with important parts to play in proceedings. Each of them, in different ways, feel like they’re bridling at the steady pace which Rossen forces onto them and aching to break out of it and into their own momentum. Two of the ladies want to speed things up while the third wants to slow it down. Johnny wants control just because, while his partner is alternately active and passive. None are happy with the pace as it is.

That’s not to say that the script isn’t cleverly written. The first nine minutes are spent at Johnny’s hotel in only two scenes: one in which Charlie, his personal assistant, wakes him up and another in which Harriet Hobson and Insp. Koch, separately but together, meet him downstairs. In other hands, this would be throwaway material but, in Rossen’s, everything has a purpose. They set the stage with a murder, establish the characters of five important people (one of whom we haven’t even met yet) and set in motion the events that will constitute our story, the latter from a number of different perspectives. It’s textbook stuff and the only issue is that it misleads us to believe that the core of the movie will contain a man named Chuck Blayden. Blayden is a dirty cop, one who has just shot a gambler as he supposedly resisted arrest. Johnny knows Blayden (and the gambler as well), Harriet loves him (and wears the bruises to prove it) and Koch wants him off the force (and Johnny to help make that happen).

Another clever aspect to the script is what meaning is brought by the three ladies of importance. Harriet is the first of them, a girl who checks hats and coats at the club which Johnny helps to run. She’s a lovely little thing, played to glorious effect by Nina Foch. She’s always reminded me of a more angelic, less Teutonic Marlene Dietrich but that works especially well in this film as Harriet is a simple girl, both in outlook and, perhaps, in mind too. ‘Old enough. Not smart enough,’ explains her sister. She’s a good girl, but she loves a bad man and can’t stop loving him. That leads to her suicide which, of course, isn’t any such thing. She can be seen as the present for Johnny O’Clock, clearly a man of dubious history who is nonetheless doing an honest job with a clean record. The film noir genre, perhaps more closely associated with black and white than any other, never saw things in anything but shades of grey. Most characters here are straightforward, but Johnny is fashioned from quintessentially deep film noir complexity.

If Harriet is his present, a moment in time where he’s a good man doing honest work, Nelle Marchettis is his past. She’s the trophy wife of Johnny’s partner, Guido (pronounced Geedo), a more traditionally slimy businessman who may or may not be operating in isolation from organised crime. Given that actor Thomas Gomez was 42 and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, but vivacious actress Ellen Drew was a decade younger and reminds of both Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth, it’s hardly surprising that Nelle has a thing for Johnny instead, who buys a fresh flower every morning for his buttonhole and is played by the dapper Dick Powell, who doesn’t look a year older than Gomez even if he was. I don’t believe that it’s ever said outright but it’s certainly firmly hinted that Nelle and Johnny had a relationship in the past and her attempts to restart that are so overt that it’s difficult to believe that her screen husband doesn’t realise it. That’s one reason why Guido acts like he’s Johnny’s boss but we never buy it.

Our birthday girl, Evelyn Keyes, arrives just shy of a third of the way into the film. She’s Nancy Hobson, Harriet’s elder sister, who flies into town after her death to take care of affairs. She meets Koch first, who’s ahead of everybody else throughout, but falls for Johnny. While the ‘club’ he runs with Guido looks much more like a casino, he tells her that he’s no gambler. ‘Gambler’s a guy who takes a chance,’ he says, though he soon takes a chance on her. Nancy’s first scenes hint at her being a femme fatale, but that role is much better played by Nelle Marchettis. Really, she’s the future in this triptych, the possibility of one for Johnny that’s entirely above board. They’re quick to fall into romance, perhaps much too quick, but we can buy into it happening and the various things happening around it that flavour it in film noir terms. Nancy isn’t the looker that Harriet was but she’s hardly bad on the eyes and she has the depth that was denied her screen sister. Keyes played a substantial character, if not a substantial part.

Keyes was a capable actress who successfully avoided typecasting but failed to escape her most famous role; it eventually found its way into the title of her autobiography, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood. The affairs documented within it include those with three of her fellow 2016 centenarians: Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden and Kirk Douglas; though none of those featured amongst her four marriages, she did wed film directors Charles Vidor and John Huston. It’s debatable as to whether her life eclipsed her career, but the latter didn’t take off to the degree it deserved. Her favourite of her own films was Mrs. Mike in 1949; given that she plays the Bostonian wife of Dick Powell’s Mountie in the remote north of Canada, it’s not difficult for the more romantic among us to see that as an alternate future to Johnny O’Clock. Certainly, it would be tough to argue against the ending of this picture being weaker than the events which led up to it.

While many of her career highlights were in lead roles of B-movies, she did good work in some major films too. After playing that supporting role of Suellen O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she landed a contract with Columbia, who had her play an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan and the female lead in The Jolson Story, amongst others. Personally, I’d call out The Face Behind the Mask, a dramatic crime story from 1941 with a tinge of horror, in which she gives great support to an even better Peter Lorre. Her versatility is ably highlighted by this film noir coming right after The Jolson Story and right before The Mating of Millie, a comedy in which she played the title character. She retired in 1956 after playing Tom Ewell’s absent wife in The Seven Year Itch, but she never really quit acting. Her final film role was as a witch in Wicked Stepmother, also a final film for Bette Davis, and she still had a third appearance to come on television’s Murder She Wrote, playing different characters each time out.

As a versatile actress of consistent quality, it’s perhaps appropriate that she’s consistently good in this film, even in support of an actor who has a little more trouble with his role. There are points where Dick Powell is nuanced and perfect, but others in which I wasn’t convinced he understood his character (or the script’s take on it). Perhaps he had trouble being the lead but not the driving force behind the film; that’s Insp. Koch all the way. Johnny is one of those hardboiled characters who sits back and lets things be as they must be, but usually those characters were pulling strings behind the scenes and he isn’t. For half the film, I imagined Johnny as being rather like Rick Blaine from Casablanca as played by William Powell; that’s not quite as palatable as it is intriguing and he’s not given the grounding. Powell is great while standing up to Koch and delivering fantastic film noir dialogue, whether talking to cops or ladies. He’s less believable during emotional scenes, where he’s too cold, or during the end, where he’s out of character.

That ending is a down point. As carefully as the plot is constructed, it’s not complex enough to mask whodunit and why. The finalé needed more than the solving of a crime but what’s provided doesn’t feel satisfactory. Mostly it’s the writing and I can understand if the acting errors came from that. There are a number of other details that don’t feel resolved either. Clearly Johnny wasn’t born an O’Clock but we’re never given his real surname or any reason why he chose this particular one, especially as it screams to have meaning. Perhaps it was just one of many elements to focus on a theme of the passage of time, which was promptly written away from without the due diligence done in clean up to avoid misleading us. That leads us back to Robert Rossen, an established writer of screenplays who debuted here as a director. I wonder if the best of this picture was due to his experience as the former but the worst was due to his lack of experience as the latter. Certainly it works best as a starting point to his career.

The Dark Eyes of London (1939)

Director: Walter Summers
Writers: Patrick Kirwan, Walter Summers and J. F. Argyle, from the novel by Edgar Wallace, with additional dialogue by Jay Van Lusil
Stars: Bela Lugosi, Hugh Williams and Greta Gynt

Looking back just over three quarters of a century on, the big name here is that of Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian actor who emigrated to the United States via Germany and found his future in 1927, appearing as Count Dracula on the Broadway stage. Adapting that role to film for Tod Browning and Universal in 1931, he revitalised the Universal horror movie for a new decade and became the first true heir to the throne of Lon Chaney. The Dark Eyes of London, however, came eight years later, at a time when horror films were being reduced in number at the major studios, and so Lugosi was finding himself mired in B-movies of decreasing quality. Even though it would be released Stateside by Monogram, this British picture, made by Argyle Productions and shot at Welwyn Studios in Hertfordshire, must have felt like a break for him. Certainly he sailed out on the Queen Mary to star in it, a holiday on the way to work. Perhaps he’d also enjoyed making The Mystery of the Marie Celeste in the UK a few years earlier for Hammer.

As much as Argyle were keen to capitalise on Lugosi’s legendary performance as Dracula in their advertising for the film, he was not the biggest star associated with the project, that honour surely going to Edgar Wallace, who had written the novel upon which the film was based. Sure, the script was adapted by three screenwriters, one of whom was the film’s director, Walter Summers, in a much more gruesome style than the original novel, but it was an Edgar Wallace picture nonetheless and that’s hard to miss. The success of Wallace, whose name is hardly remembered today, cannot be understated. In 1928, it was joked, believably, that one in four books being read in the UK came from his pen and he churned out material at an amazing rate, even for the pulp era. By the time he was done, he had written over 170 novels, 18 stage plays and almost a thousand short stories, reaching 50 million sales in the process. Over 200 films have been based on his works, though he’s mostly remembered today for creating King Kong.

Having read some Edgar Wallace, this rings mostly true to his novels even though it’s much more horrific. Wallace helped to shift British detective stories away from private investigators like Sherlock Holmes and towards policemen; the string of river murders is investigated here by Det. Insp. Larry Holt of C.I.D., the Criminal Investigation Department of the British police force. There are many scenes that explore the routine of police work, including the projection of crime scene photographs and tests run on a body to ascertain stomach contents. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for Bela Lugosi, who plays a double role well enough that it doesn’t even seem like a double role for the longest time. Monogram released the film in the States as The Human Monster, and while that title surely includes a nod to the morality of Lugosi’s character, Dr. Feodor Orloff, it really shifts the focus of marketing to Jake, a supporting character played by Wilfred Walter, though a few years later it would surely have been given to Rondo Hatton.

I’m watching today, however, for Greta Gynt, a Norwegian actress who lived in the UK as a young child and moved back again as her acting career got under way. She was a regular face in British films of the forties, often playing the female lead; she retired in the early sixties on a high note, playing the lead in The Runaway. She would have been a hundred years old today and, to celebrate, I chose one of the two films she’s best known for. While she was certainly not typecast in genre film, she’s remembered mostly for Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, with Tod Slaughter, and The Dark Eyes of London, often cited as the first film to be awarded the H for Horrific certificate by the British censor. That’s not strictly true but it ought to be, given what goes down at Dearborn’s Home for the Destitute Blind, an agreeable cover for the sordid goings on of Dr. Orloff. Most H for Horrific films are released as PG today, but this one still carries quite a punch because of that setting and what goes on there.

Gynt doesn’t appear for quite a while, as the story gets established through a number of plot strands. At Scotland Yard, the C.I.D. wonder if five missing persons showing up drowned in eight months is a coincidence. They’ve found no connections thus far but ‘the Home Office is kicking’. Three of those five were on Det. Insp. Holt’s watch, as the Commissioner is happy to point out, so he’s eager to break the case. Elsewhere in London, Dr. Orloff loans Henry Stuart $2,000 under the banner of the Greenwich Insurance Company. He trusts him, he says, because he can read it in his eyes. Meanwhile, on his way back from the States is a forger called Fred Grogan, being extradited and delivered into Holt’s custody. Bringing him is Lt. Patrick O’Reilly of the Chicago P.D., who will follow Holt around to study the methods of the British police. He’ll become the film’s comic relief, even if the Commissioner has a deliciously dry sense of humour. ‘I’ll attach him to you,’ he tells Holt, ‘so he won’t learn anything.’

So far, this feels very much like a detective story, the sort of thing that someone like, hey, Edgar Wallace might write, but there’s an edge that gradually grows as the picture runs on, one that’s quintessential early American horror. It reminds us that there are people out there in our world, not somewhere far away like Transylvania but right here in our town, that are not like us. They’re usually seen as sinister just for being different and the best movies that tread this territory use it as a means to examine what it is to be human. Lesser films merely conflate physical deformities with mental ones, suggesting that anyone different from us must be a monster, but the real classics like Freaks and Island of Lost Souls, highlight that the freaks can be more human than those we’re conditioned to see as their superiors, regular able-bodied folk who can be and often are the real bad guys. The Dark Eyes of London isn’t of the calibre of those two classics but it does try and it succeeds more often than not.

It helps that the ‘deformities’ are mostly ones that we don’t see in a horrific light any more. Orloff supports Dearborn’s Home for the Destitute Blind, where Rev. or Prof. Dearborn, depending on the source, blind himself, tries to rehabilitate the blind by giving them food, shelter and work. Having them shuffle around like zombies isn’t realistic but it certainly contributes to the freaky tone that’s being cultivated. Maybe they’re all newly blind and so haven’t yet found the sixth sense Dearborn suggests will develop. No, I don’t believe that in the slightest but maybe the scriptwriters did. Blindness isn’t the only lost sense here, as Orloff’s secretary is surely mute, as is Lou, the blind violinist who plays in the street outside Orloff’s office and delivers notes for him to Dearborn’s. At the home is Jake, who is not only blind but also looks like a cross between a werewolf and an acromegaly case. After the war, actor Wilfred Walter would have a leg amputated, highlighting in real life the difference between ‘physically different’ and ‘monster’.

The scam that’s going on behind all this isn’t hard to figure out and we follow the details of it through Henry Stuart, the imminent victim that will break the case for Det. Insp. Holt. His eventual death scene is fantastic, the abstraction required in 1939 adding to the effect. Jake looks rather like Leatherface as he lifts his apron, Stuart turns to run and Orloff closes the door on both him and us so that the scream echoes at us from the other side. The cinematography was by Bryan Langley, who had a decade behind him; he had co-shot Number Seventeen for Alfred Hitchcock in 1932. There are a number of highly effective and varied shots, including one shot through an archway and another through a doorway, both of which focus our attention magnificently. Some of the scenes at Dearborn’s are gorgeous too and they make the film often feel reminiscent of Bedlam, which wouldn’t be made for another seven years. Nicholas Musuraca’s camerawork there is legendary but I wonder if he saw this as an influence.

What breaks the case for Holt is the fact that Stuart has a daughter, Diana, something that Orloff hadn’t factored into his plans at all. Through the time honoured art of coincidence, she’s already on her way home from America and Holt actually treads on her foot when she alights from the train right before Fred Grogan; he’s immediately smitten and will have plenty of contact, starting at the morgue as she comes to identify her father’s body. Greta Gynt doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time but she does get to do quite a lot with it, because the role takes her through a variety of situations rather quickly. One minute she’s a potential love interest, the next she’s called on to deliver dramatic reactions, before being sent undercover in a police investigation. I enjoyed her performance but it’s not as consistent as it could be and would have benefitted from more screen time to allow Gynt to find her feet in each scene. When she gets that, she’s great and she’s a fun damsel in distress; without it, she’s not as good.

Lugosi makes the best of his double role, which is surely one of the best such performances of the era. As Orloff, he’s overdone in the traditional Lugosi style, hypnotising with his eyes and going all moody and dangerous when things don’t go to plan. However, his other role, which I won’t name to avoid spoiling the film for you, is thoroughly different and the costume is simple but neatly effective. To be fair, the biggest reason he gets away with it is that the voice of his alternate persona is dubbed by another actor, because Lugosi’s accent was not something he could switch off at a moment’s notice, but he lip synchs very well. Hugh Williams is the actor unenviably tasked with playing the routine, albeit talented, character in a film full of grotesques and so isn’t particularly memorable as Det. Insp. Holt, even though he does exactly what he needed to do. It’s always the case that the outrageous roles dominate in pictures like this and there are a whole slew of outrageous roles stealing those scenes.

Most obvious, of course, is Wilfred Walter as Jake, who would become the focus of the American marketing campaign. If Dr. Orloff is a human monster in a moral sense, Jake is certainly a human monster in the physical one. That’s his visage on the poster, under Bela Lugosi’s name; I wonder how many American filmgoers were confused when they saw The Human Monster in 1940 and found that Lugosi wasn’t playing Jake. While Walter is spot on as the lumbering assassin, I was impressed by Arthur E. Owen as Lou and Alexander Field as Grogan. The former initially seems like a throwaway character, but he keeps finding moments of importance, eventually writhing around on a hospital bed like he’s become Renfield. The latter nails the feel of polite disrepute that Leonard Rossiter epitomised much later on. He’s making the most of his fame, as dubious as it is, lording it over the cops who never fail to be in charge. He gets a memorable final scene too, which I also won’t spoil.

For a 75 minute B-movie that relishes its gruesome inventiveness, this is surprisingly effective and stands up well today, both as a detective yarn and a horror flick. Bela Lugosi had made some incredible movies in the thirties but he’d also made others that were horrific in ways that they never intended. I haven’t seen everything he made after this but I have seen the vast majority and it’s a rare one indeed that’s better than this. It could be argued that there are only two, The Wolf Man and The Body Snatcher, making this an important film in his career, the last of his good work of the thirties. I wonder if part of that was because this was a British film; while that meant that it didn’t have to cater to the American Production Code, the British censor was notoriously tough on horror and I’m honestly surprised this crept through their net. Destroying the hearing of a blind mute and then murdering him in front of our bound heroine is brutal and not what would be allowed at a time other than when the H certificate was brought back in.

Carry On... Up the Khyber (1968)

Director: Gerald Thomas
Writer: Talbot Rothwell
Stars: Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Roy Castle, Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw, Peter Butterworth, Terry Scott, Angela Douglas and Cardew Robinson

It’s hard to explain to anyone not brought up in the UK just how much of an institution the Carry On team were and still are, even if they haven’t made a movie since 1992 or a decent one since at least 1975. It’s especially hard to explain to Americans how they got away with that sort of material in the 1960s, when the Hays Office routinely stripped out dialogue that had to do with sex, but they even had Christmas specials on television in the UK. You see, Carry On movies are a mixture of double entendre and dirty joke, the seaside postcard brought to life, and they’re a uniquely British thing, a descendant of the music hall. There were 30 original Carry On movies made, plus a 31st that’s new material wrapped around clips; there were also four Christmas specials, a thirteen episode TV show and three stage plays. All were produced by Peter Rogers and directed by Gerald Thomas. The majority were written by two writers: the first six by Norman Hudis and the next twenty by Talbot Rothwell, who would have been one hundred today.

How Rothwell got involved with the series almost sounds like the script for a Carry On movie. He was a Royal Air Force pilot in the Second World War; after being shot down over Norway, he was imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe-run officer camp that was made famous by the films The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape. He started to write as a POW, for concerts that aimed to both keep up morale and drown out the noise of tunnel digging. He befriended actor Peter Butterworth in the camp and partnered on those concerts; he would later introduce him to the Carry On series, in which he would become a regular, appearing in 16 of them. Rothwell wrote a spoof of this sort of thing, Carry On Escaping, but it was never made. Having held ‘respectable’ jobs like town clerk and police officer before the war, he turned to writing as a career in the fifties, penning comedy sketches for TV shows featuring established comedians like Terry-Thomas, Arthur Askey and Ted Ray. His first feature film scripts were dotted around the mid-1950s. However, he didn’t write Carry On Sergeant in 1958, or the next five films in what became a thematic series; Hudis did.

Carry On Sergeant was intended as a standalone film. It was adapted from a play by the historical novelist, R. F. Delderfield, and stars the first Doctor, William Hartnell, and Bob Monkhouse, so it’s hardly what the series became. If anything, it’s a 1958 Police Academy, merely with conscripts into National Service rather than policemen. However, the cast list did include Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Terry Scott and Hattie Jacques, who all became regulars in the Carry On films that were spun out of this film’s success. The first four were still around for this sixteenth film in 1968; Jacques appeared in fourteen between 1958 and 1974 but not this one. At that time, Carry On movies tended to throw respectable professions into a comedy framework, following quite closely the formula of the first, such as Carry On Nurse, Carry On Teacher and Carry On Constable. However, they would soon begin to take on British institutions, traditions and tropes, especially after Rothwell replaced Hudis as the series writer.

While Rothwell wrote the eighth film on spec, Carry On Jack, it was made after Carry On Cabby, which he hadn’t written as a Carry On film at all; he’d submitted it to Peter Rogers as a standalone picture, Call Me a Cab. Rogers liked his work and brought him on for the series. To my mind, it took him a while to warm up, Carry On Spying and Carry On Cleo being overrated entries in the series, even if the latter did feature what has been voted the greatest one-liner in movie history, which Rothwell admittedly borrowed from the radio show, Take It from Here. Kenneth Williams, portraying Julius Caesar, shouts out, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’ To me, Rothwell hit his stride in 1966 with Carry On Screaming!, a spoof of Hammer horror movies, because the next half dozen are great bawdy fun. Personal favourites of mine include Carry On Henry (about Henry VIII’s wives), Carry On Dick (about highwaymen) and Carry On... Don’t Lose Your Head (about the French revolution).

While fans argue about which is the worst feature in the series (many vote for the last, Carry On Columbus, released fourteen years after its predecessor to tie in to the 500th anniversary of Columbus reaching America, but I’d suggest either of the two that came before it, Carry On England or Carry On Emmannuelle), it’s almost universally agreed that Carry On... Up the Khyber, is the best. In fact, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the 100 greatest British films, in 99th place just above The Killing Fields. It’s hard to argue against it being the most quintessential, partly because it featured most of the series regulars in some of their best roles but partly because it focused around subject that were ripe for ridicule in 1968: the colonial era of British expansion, in which we waltzed into other countries and proudly proclaimed that they were ours, and the Kipling-esque adventures that glorified it, like the 1939 version of Gunga Din. The time was right, the people were right and the end result was hilariously right.

We’re in India in 1895, with the British in charge but the natives restless. Her Majesty’s governor of Khalabar, in the northwest of the country bordering Afghanistan, is Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, in the form of the irrepressible Sidney James, so good at playing a dirty old man with an even dirtier laugh. His foil is Randy Lal, the Khasi of Khalabar, the local rajah, played by Kenneth Williams. It’s worth mentioning here that the humour is thoroughly English, to the degree that many jokes will fly over the heads of those from other countries. For instance, ‘khazi’ is military slang for a toilet and the film’s title, in addition to referencing a real location, is an example of Cockney rhyming slang, in which a word is obscured by shortening a phrase with which it rhymes. For instance, ‘use your loaf’ means ‘use your head’ because ‘head’ rhymes with ‘loaf of bread’. Of course, this is often used to obscure words not usable in polite company, such as ‘cobblers’ from ‘cobbler’s awls’ or ‘balls’ and, here, ‘Up the Khyber’ from ‘Khyber Pass’ or ‘arse’.

Rothwell defines the state of affairs perfectly at a polo match. The Khasi tells his daughter that Sir Sidney is the British governor, ‘whose benevolent rule and wise guidance we could well do without.’ Why does he smile at him so favourably? ‘Because in these days of British military supremacy, the Indian must be as a basket: with two faces.’ Meanwhile, Sir Sidney tells his wife, Lady Joan, that the Khasi would like to massacre him and ‘every other Britisher in India’. Why does he smile at him like that, then? ‘Because as a top-ranked British diplomacist, I’m as two-faced as he is.’ They do say that the best comedy is based in truth and there’s much truth here, not least in the final scene, in which the native Burpa tribe attacks the Governor’s Residence and, while the men fight outside, the Governor sits down to a black tie dinner, with orchestra, and everyone ignores the battle, even with the room being destroyed around them. This is the most ridiculous yet still truest example of ‘stiff upper lip’ that has ever been filmed.

But how do we get there? Well, Sir Sidney’s province is defended by the 3rd Foot and Mouth Regiment, colloquially known as ‘the Devils in Skirts’ because they are said to wear nothing under their kilts. Rothwell suggests that this is the primary reason why the natives have not revolted. In the words of the Khasi: ‘Think how frightening it would be to have such a man charging at you with his skirts flying in the air and flashing his great big bayonet at you!’ But the local warlord Bungdit Din, surely the best role for the 6’ 7” Bernard Bresslaw in 14 Carry On movies, flashes his scimitar at the cowardly Private Widdle who promptly faints at the sight. Because it’s so important, he looks under the man’s kilt to discover that he’s wearing large underpants beneath it. He takes them to the Khasi, who sees the possibility and, sure enough, it soon escalates to the point where he can convince the Burpas that there is nothing to fear from men who wear such garments under their skirts and a native uprising begins.

This set-up is perfect for a Carry On film and it’s aided by a host of fortuitous circumstances, because budgets were never high for Carry On films. This one cost a mere £260,000, even with a dozen or so regular cast members; even the biggest stars, like Kenneth Williams, were only paid £5,000 per film. Rogers planned Carry On Dallas in 1980, a spoof of the TV show, but had to ditch the idea when Lorimar Productions wanted twenty times the entire production budget as their royalty fee. Carry On Cleo was the greatest beneficiary of circumstance within the series, able to use expensive costumes and sets created and built for the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra but abandoned when production moved to Rome. However Carry On... Up the Khyber also lucked out, as all the kilts were re-used from the Alec Guinness film, Tunes of Glory. The Governor’s Residence is Heatherden Hall, a Victorian country house located within the grounds of Pinewood Studios. The Khyber Pass scenes were shot on Mount Snowden in Wales.

Rothwell’s scripts were generally written with series regulars in mind for specific characters, which is why Roy Castle’s one and only appearance is in a role clearly intended for Jim Dale, but this one features what are arguably the best roles for many of those regulars. Sid James was top billed in 17 of his 19 Carry On appearances and Kenneth Williams was the most regular of the regulars, appearing in 25 of the 30 films, but these are quintessential roles for them. Beyond Bresslaw as Bungdit Din, I’d suggest that Joan Sims, Terry Scott and Peter Butterworth never got better roles either as the common-as-muck Lady Joan Ruff-Diamond, the gruff Sgt. Maj. MacNutt and the lecherous missionary, Brother Belcher, respectively. Other regulars, such as Charles Hawtrey, Angela Douglas and Julian Holloway, are also well cast and Cardew Robinson is perfect in his sole series appearance as an inept fakir. The consistent quality of these actors and Rothwell’s scripts are the two primary reasons why this series did so well.

And Rothwell was never better than here. Some jokes are truly awful but perfect for the moment, such as when Brother Belcher, horrendously disguised as a Burpa chief, carries on with a harem girl in a jewelled bra. ‘Are those rubies?’ he asks her. She replies, ‘No, they’re mine.’ When the British prepare to defend against the natives, Capt. Keene issues the command to fire at will. Brother Belcher comments, ‘Poor old Will! Why do they always fire at him?’ As the ceiling falls in on Lady Joan during the native uprising, she laughs it off. ‘Oh dear, I seem to have got a little plastered!’ Some are mildly rude, such as an exchange in which the Governor politely receives the Khasi’s compliments with succinct responses, which lead to, ‘And may his radiance light up your life!’ ‘And up yours!’ Many are dirty jokes indeed, like one during the introductory conversation at the polo match. Talking about the Khasi, Sir Sidney tells his wife, ‘I wouldn’t trust him an inch,’ to which she saucily replies, ‘Neither would I.’

Some jokes are situational, such as when Private Widdle paints a thin red line across the courtyard of the Governor’s Residence, a reference to the Battle of Balaclava when a thin line of red shirted Highlanders scared off a Russian cavalry attack, ‘the thin red line’ becoming a symbol of British stiff upper lip. Having the Khyber Pass, ‘the gateway to India’, be a traditional British sheep gate with ‘Please shut the gate’ on it, is priceless. More topically, the Khasi is dismissive when one of his men announces the arrival of Sir Sidney by sounding a gong, uttering the line, ‘Rank stupidity!’ This film was distributed by the Rank Organisation, whose ident is a similarly dressed man sounding a gong. Ultimately it all comes down to the final scene, when Sir Sidney and his officers ask the ladies if they can leave the dinner table, after the natives finally breach their gate. They saunter outside to the battle and treat the whole thing as a polite game. ‘Permission to have a bash, sir?’ asks Maj. Shorthouse, before leaping into the fray.

These final scenes are the Carry On series in microcosm. We British are always good at laughing at ourselves and that pervades the history of our humour. It was a rare Carry On film that didn’t target a traditional British institution, from Hammer Horror films to the National Health Service, from caravan holidays to Brits abroad, from the armed forces to the trade unions. The British Empire was a logical target, but it allowed Rothwell to really hone in on what it meant to be British. These final scenes both celebrate and lampoon the heart of the British mindset. We’re brave, we’re cultured and we’re cool under pressure, but we stand on ceremony, we make a ritual out of everything and we take things to ridiculous extremes. I can’t say that this movie is perfect: not every joke hits, there are slow bits throughout the middle and the plot could have been tighter. However, as a proud Briton who wears a kilt every day, this is part of who I am. It’s an institution in itself, just like the entire Carry On series.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

Director: Terence Fisher
Writer: John Elder, from the novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore
Stars: Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain and Catherine Feller

Horror movies have often focused on duality, not only in obvious examples like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In folklore, both vampires and werewolves sprang from the same concept of duality, though not just to highlight good and evil in a moral sense but also on a deeper level, comparing man with his God-given soul with the savage beast without. Such thoughts were surely fresh in the minds of producer Michael Carreras and director Terence Fisher after they had made The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll in 1960. A year later, they found themselves in need of a new script, because they’d built substantial sets for a film set in Spain. Some sources say that it was going to be about the Spanish Civil War but the co-production deal fell through, while others suggest that it was about the Spanish Inquisition and the script was rejected by the censors. Either way, Hammer had sets but no story to flesh them out at a time when they had just successfully resurrected Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy (in 1957, 1958 and 1959 respectively).

So, in addition to shooting sequels, they expanded their repertoire of famous monsters: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll in 1960, The Curse of the Werewolf in 1961 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1962. Of course, all these had antecedents in the Universal horrors, but their sources were in public domain novels so there was little likelihood of being hauled up for copyright infringement. Well, except for this one, because Universal’s The Wolf Man was based entirely on an original script by Curt Siodmak. Hammer therefore sought out a different source, transplanting the action of the 1933 novel, The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, from France to Spain. They also eviscerated all its historical and political subtext and crafted it into what is surely as archetypal a werewolf movie as the one it was so careful not to copy. This one is slow and short on werewolf action (we don’t even meet the grown up werewolf until halfway in), but it handles the dual nature of man and beast impeccably. From that angle, it has perhaps not been surpassed.

Almost every key moment in the film is the result of the bestial nature of man and it all begins with the Marques Siniestro, a name which translates from the Spanish as ‘sinister’, a word derived from the Latin for left-handed, so playing up duality from the start. It’s a public holiday in the Spanish town of Santa Vera and all the townsfolk are ‘rejoicing’; the Marques is getting married and he’s literally ordered them to rejoice. The reason they’re not happy about it is because they’re footing the bill for the wedding and the lavish feast at the castle, to which none of them are invited. The beggar who walks into town on this day tries his luck there, only to find cruelty instead. The Marques invites him in and torments him in front of everyone. When his bride asks him to stop as she sees him as a man not an animal, he suggests that she keep him as a pet, flinging ten pesetas at him as the purchase price. He plies him with wine but refuses him food, making him dance and fall over for the entertainment of those assembled.

This is a blistering scene, not only because it sets the stage for the entire film to come, but because it’s performed by two perfectly cast actors. Because this is a British film, even the ragged beggar, who becomes more ragged after being thrown into the dungeon and forgotten, is a Shakespearean actor, Richard Wordsworth, the great-great-grandson of the poet, William Wordsworth. It’s an appropriate choice, because this beggar has no skills and has to resort to oratory to persuade folk into parting with their money. A better foil could not be found for him than Anthony Dawson as the Marques Siniestro. Dawson was a Scottish actor whose greatest role thus far had been the man paid to murder Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This was a fantastic opportunity for him even if his part is over relatively quickly, and it surely helped him land his next role, as Professor R. J. Dent, the geologist working for Dr. No in the film of that name. He would be a hundred years old today.

The tormenting of the beggar and his abandonment in the dungeons is the first example of many a bestial act which begets a cycle of evil. Years later, now a recluse, the Marques has his jailer’s mute daughter thrown into the same cell for not speaking to him. It can’t be too surprising that the beggar, driven insane by years of isolation, promptly rapes the girl who had fed him through those years. Released the next day to ‘entertain’ the Marques, she murders him and escapes into the countryside. Her own bestial act is punished by the fact that the rape resulted in pregnancy and, to make matters worse, the child is born on Christmas Day. ‘For an unwanted child to be born then,’ suggests the housekeeper of the man who rescues her, ‘is an insult to Heaven!’ That the mother dies in childbirth surely can’t help. Just to drum home where we’re going, we hear a wolf howl right before we hear the newborn cry and a wolf’s head seems to appear during the child’s baptism, though it’s really the reflection of a gargoyle in the font.

And so we have a werewolf who was cursed rather than bitten, even if that was partly due to the censors thoroughly rejecting the idea of a werewolf rapist, and a curse can be lifted while a bite can’t be undone. It helps that this orphan is raised by loving parent substitutes: the man who found his mother, Don Alfredo Corledo, and his housekeeper, Teresa. However, his nature will manifest itself soon enough, even if young Leon seems to be a perfect child. He’s such an animal lover that when Pepe, the nightwatchman, takes him out shooting, he can’t bear to shoot a squirrel; when Pepe kills it instead, he tries to kiss it better, tastes the blood and finds it very much to his liking. This adds the bodily changes wrought during puberty to the various metaphors for lycanthropy in this film, though the curse remains paramount. Clearly Leon is the young wolf who’s responsible for the string of deaths of local goats, not least because he gets shot at one point for his troubles, but he doesn’t know it himself; he thinks he’s merely dreaming.

The Curse of the Werewolf is a great movie in many ways but it’s also a very flawed one and the most obvious flaw is in its pacing. I’m on board with that long opening scene at the Marques’s castle, but we continue with drawn out scene after drawn out scene all the way until the halfway point. Only then does the young Leon, looking rather like a vampiric version of Damien from The Omen, stop his bestial attacks on the local wildlife, partly because he can’t break through the bars that Don Alfredo has installed on his window and partly because he’s being brought up in a loving household that weakens the curse until it appears to be completely nullified. Only then does the grown-up Leon appear, ready to set out on his own and find his place in the world. Within two minutes, he’s at the gates of Gomez Bodegas, Don Fernando’s winery, where he finds work in the wine cellar, bottling and labelling the product. It has to be said, with a sly wink, that this job was perhaps inevitable, given that the grown-up Leon is played by Oliver Reed.

Reed was a force of nature far more than he was an actor. It has been said that he’s the only British film star who never worked on stage before transitioning onto the screen, becoming what a National Portrait Gallery show in 1980 called Britain’s ‘only pure film actor’. However, he was a hugely important film star who was responsible for a whole slew of firsts. In 1966, he starred in I'll Never Forget What's'isname, a Michael Winner film infamous as the first mainstream movie to use the F word. It was also denied an MPAA seal of approval because of an implied sex scene; Universal’s choice to distribute it through a non-MPAA subsidiary helped to end the Production Code. In 1969, he wrestled Alan Bates nude in front of a fireplace in Ken Russell’s Women in Love, the first time that full frontal male nudity featured in a mainstream film. In 1972, he starred in Sitting Target, apparently the first British movie to be rated X on the grounds of violence alone. This film was a first too: Oliver Reed’s first starring role.

He’s a force of nature in this film too, both literally and metaphorically. The cast is consistently strong, from the top-billed Clifford Evans as Don Alfredo, through Reed to the various other recognisable faces further down the credits list. There’s one scene where one famous British sitcom actor berates another; that’s Peter Sallis from Last of the Summer Wine as the town’s mayor, Don Enrique, complaining to Warren Mitchell from Till Death Us Do Part that his nightwatchman, Pepe, isn’t keeping the wolves away. The catch, of course, is that they’re all English and it has to be said that this is a notably English Spain. It’s not just the accents (Dawson could get away with that as the believably foreign-educated Marques, but Mitchell can’t; Spaniards called Pepe just shouldn’t sound like they’re from Norfolk), but the attitudes. Leon falls for his employer’s daughter, Cristina, who’s to be married to a quintessentially English toff. ‘Oh I say!’ simply isn’t a line that helps set a provincial Spanish mood.

Even if we can forgive the Englishness of this film, Reed still stands out above his peers. Only Evans really matches him, because he has the internal fortitude to match Reed’s external vitality. He seems to be in the vibrancy of youth and the best of health, which is good not only for the ambitious young man but for the beast he becomes. Though he loves Cristina and Cristina loves him back, his friend, Jose Amadayo, talks him into visiting a local brothel. That’s when his bestial side returns, because the morality that governs lycanthropy in this film suggests that love and kindness lessen the curse but sex and depravity heighten it. What’s more, distance is a factor: with Cristina, Leon can control himself, but when he’s separated from her, he can’t. And, two murders later and Leon in jail, the endgame is quickly in sight, one that’s flavoured by repentance and sacrifice. Characters who have sex (even unwillingly) all suffer or die in this film, while those who remain chaste survive untouched. It’s slasher morality taken even further.

If Reed doesn’t appear as much as he should, he is at least a highly memorable werewolf. The script is ruthlessly chronological and quite a few early scenes should have been trimmed or cut entirely to make room for more scenes featuring him later, both in Roy Ashton’s excellent make-up and out of it. While this was his first lead role, it was his third film for Hammer and he’d go on to make another five. What he did after that is the stuff of legend, both on and off the screen. Hammer themselves thrived for another ten years before they started to struggle in the different cinematic climate of the seventies. While the decade arguably saw their most interesting pictures, their heyday was clearly behind them and their prominence had waned; they closed their doors after their remake of The Lady Vanishes in 1979. As for Anthony Dawson, our birthday boy today, he never quite found the career he deserved, his most important contributions to film coming in the fifties and early sixties.

Oddly, his most memorable moment on screen was in a film for which he wasn’t even credited. He started out uncredited in 1940, but that’s relatively standard for a new actor. By 1963, he wasn’t new any more and wouldn’t have expected that. He’d appeared in a string of solid if relatively unknown British films, such as The Way to the Stars, School for Secrets and The Queen of Spades, working his way up the credits list. He had strong roles in pictures as varied as The Wooden Horse, Dial M for Murder and Grip of the Strangler. He’d set this film off not only on the right note but in the direction his character defined, remaining memorable even though he’s killed only twenty minutes in. And he’d become a Bond villain, working for Dr. No. That movie’s director, Terence Young, cast him often, including as the first appearance of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in From Russia with Love. The character’s voice belonged to Eric Pohlmann but the body and the famous hand stroking a white cat belong to Dawson. There are worse ways to be remembered.

The Tattered Dress (1957)

Director: Jack Arnold
Writer: George Zuckerman
Stars: Jeff Chandler, Jeanne Crain, Jack Carson and Gail Russell

I’ve been very busy this week getting everything shipshape and Bristol fashion for the first annual Apocalypse Later International Fantastic Film Festival, which is tomorrow night in Phoenix, but I have another deadline to pay attention to. On 14th October, Jack Arnold would have turned a hundred years old, so I have a movie to review to celebrate his life and career. He began that career as an actor, appearing on and off Broadway in the late thirties and early forties, but made the switch to direction during the Second World War, after working under Robert J. Flaherty of Nanook of the North fame. His theatrical feature debut was the obscure Girls in the Night in 1953, but he soon found his niche, making some of the very best of all the fifties sci-fi movies: It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula and, above all, The Incredible Shrinking Man. I initially planned to cover the glorious comedy, The Mouse That Roared, for his centennial, but ended up going with this one instead.

It’s a film noir from that golden year of 1957 and it’s a neatly cynical one to sit alongside other cynical films like A Face in the Crowd, Paths of Glory and Sweet Smell of Success. If 1939 was Hollywood’s greatest year, then 1957 was the equivalent for world cinema, with The Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria and Wild Strawberries merely the pinnacle and The Bridge on the River Kwai, Throne of Blood and Night of the Demon nipping at their heels. Calling out world cinema doesn’t exclude Hollywood though, as it produced 12 Angry Men, 3:10 to Yuma and Witness for the Prosecution, amongst many other classics. Jack Arnold contributed to that great tally in no uncertain fashion; he began 1957 with The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson adapting his own novel to the screen, then continued on with three lesser known but fascinating titles starring Jeff Chandler: The Tattered Dress, Man in the Shadow and The Lady Takes a Flyer. That pictures as good as these appear way down most people’s lists just highlights how strong the competition was in 1957.

Chandler, an underrated actor at the worst of times, is in superb form here and he needed to be. The script by George Zuckerman, best known for Douglas Sirk dramas like Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, gifts him with an incredibly deep character, a challenge and an opportunity for an actor; Chandler seizes the former and proves up to the latter. He’s James Gordon Blane, a very talented New York lawyer who has achieved great success at the cost of his conscience. He wins a lot of cases but that only means that he’s got a lot of guilty clients off and put a lot of innocent people behind bars. He’s become rich off that practice but he’s lost his marriage in the process. We meet him on a train taking him out west to Desert Valley, 150 miles from Las Vegas, and he’s soon getting off briefly to say hi to his estranged wife and kids at a stop on the way; only when he gets back on the train does he realise that he didn’t bring anything for them. Clearly his conscience is alive, but hardly healthy and apparently not being fed.

He’s been summoned to Desert Valley to represent another guilty man, this one called Michael Reston. We know he’s guilty for we watched him murder a man in cold blood during the opening scenes. He’s angry when his trophy wife arrives home in the tattered dress of the title, ripped during a wild dalliance with a local bartender, so he bundles her back into her car, drives her back whence she came and shoots his wife’s lover in the back as he tries to run. None of these folk are prizes. Reston isn’t merely a murderer, he is a rather arrogant one to boot: he isn’t worried about jail because he knows precisely how good a defence his money can buy. The victim obviously knew he was sleeping with a married woman and, of course, she’s an unrepentent adulteress. ‘Are you a faithful wife?’ Blane asks her. ‘In a fashion,’ she replies.’ When he asks whether she wanted him to assault her, she answers, ‘Let me think about that.’ She’s low enough to hit on her husband’s new lawyer, even though he’s defending him for killing her last illicit affair.

As well set up as all that is, it would only make for a relatively routine film noir. This one elevates itself by going much deeper. We have to look at Blane too, the attack dog of a lawyer who defends the worst of the worst, just so long as they can pay him the large fees he commands. In the early scenes, he’s given the opportunity to show a positive side but he can’t seem to manage that. He fails with his family; he fails with Charleen Reston; he even fails with the journalist who built a career off his because, just as he’s asked if he’d consider taking on the case of a wrongfully imprisoned man, he distracts himself over to a random brunette who walks into the dining car on the train. Blane is very sharp in court, as talented as his reputation and his fees suggest, but he’s hardly a hero. If we had to conjure up a hero from these early scenes, it would probably be the Desert Valley sheriff, Nick Hoak, in the neatly jovial form of Jack Carson. He’s just the sort of sheriff a small town might want. Or at least so he appears at this point.

It doesn’t last. Blane destroys Hoak on the witness stand and wins the acquittal of Michael Reston but, as Blane celebrates another victory, Hoak arrests him for bribing a juror. It’s all a set-up, of course, perpetrated for revenge on a number of fronts, but it’s the real beginning of the film because now we have to wonder a great deal about where our sympathies lie. Are they with Blane, who is a good lawyer but a bad man, getting his at last even if it’s for something he didn’t do? Or are they with Hoak, who doesn’t only feel wronged personally for his treatment in court but also on behalf of the murder victim, Larry Bell, who was a protege to him? We come to realise that we feel for the plight of each of these two men but not for them personally. Instead our sympathies are with Lady Justice, whose own dress is tattered here, and we keep watching so we can root for her, hoping that the script can find some way in which she can be fair to each of the characters who wove this tangled web and each of those caught up in it.

If the film belongs to Jeff Chandler, Jack Carson matches him step for step. They’re two thoroughly different characters, one sleazy and vicious but the other quiet and folksy, but they share much because they’ve both sold their souls and don’t struggle too much with the knowledge. The game they play moves in both directions, so each of these two men gain the upper hand and lose it again. Having effectively two leads alternating between being on top and on the ropes gives the story a vast amount of depth and both of the actors plenty of opportunity to delve into their own characters and shine. I’ve talked often at Apocalypse Later of my difficulty appreciating films, from Gone with the Wind on down, in which there is simply nobody to sympathise with. It’s tough to stay focused on the characters in that scenario, rather than shift my appreciation to the actors or another technical aspect, like costumes, score or cinematography. Here, I was absorbed, not because I wanted to see anyone win or lose but to see if justice could be won.

Those in support receive less opportunities but they do precisely what’s needed in their more restrictive roles. Most are relatively familiar faces: Jeanne Crain and Gail Russell, Edward Platt and George Tobias. Russell is surely the best known of these, though her career was shorter than we might expect and she would be dead in four years at only 37, of a heart attack surely brought on by an abiding alcoholism. Ironically, given that she drank to combat stage fright, it’s her fear that shines brightest here. She’s one of the characters caught up in the grand game between Blane and Hoak and she’s very believably frightened for much of it. Crain, on the other hand, is quietly composed even when times are toughest. She loves her husband, even with what he’s become, and she’s the rock on which he gets to stand. I was especially struck by her eyes, which are limpid pools to dive into, but she’s worth more than that. She’s sharp too and she gets better and better as the film runs on, as her part becomes more substantial.

Platt is the film’s conscience as journalist Ralph Adams, which means he’s the quietest character in the entire film. However moral he is, he’s still benefitted from the travesties of justice that litter Blane’s trail, to the tune of a Pulitzer Prize for his writing on him. We can’t help but wonder how insightful he must be if he hasn’t yet twigged to the true impact of this lawyer’s career thus far. He either wears blinkers, in which case he’s not a good journalist, or he sees what’s going on, in which case he’s not the moral centre we think he is. Tobias is the film’s comic relief, as a professional comedian in Las Vegas who owes Blane big time because he saved him from both conviction and death row for killing his wife a decade earlier. He’s never particularly funny, but he carries a lighter touch to the material than anyone else in the cast and that’s more than welcome. Even Phillip Reed is spot on as Reston, but he’s a minor character, even if most films would have focused on his story and made him the chief support.

My discovery here was Elaine Stewart, the lady who plays his wife, Charleen. She smoulders her way through this picture with a knowing sensuality. She’s the shallowest character in the film, the beauty of the femme fatale without any of the bite. She’s good looking enough to hook any man she wants, and she’s clearly been doing that for a long time, but she has nothing beyond that at all. I’ve seen her before without realising it, stealing moments in films as varied as Singin’ in the Rain and The Bad and the Beautiful, but I’ll have to find something in which she was given more substance to play with and see if she was able to live up to that. She’s obviously a scene-stealer but she had scenes stolen from her here, initially by a great little gimmick rather than another actor. It’s the scene where she swaggers home in her tattered dress to be confronted by her husband. What’s neat is that this happens on the other side of a sliding glass door, so that we’re kept in the dark as to what specific words are hurled but voyeuristically in on what they mean. She goes in sassy, backed by a stereotypical sexy score, and comes out cowed; it’s a superbly set up scene.

I could easily see some viewers believing that the film lessens as it goes on. The later scenes could certainly be seen as being more predictable, more stereotypical or more emotionally manipulative, but I’m fine with them all. I see this script as taking a lot of the traditional elements of the film noir, the legal thriller and the small town drama, then throwing them all into a mixer to churn up a fresh story that digs deep into what role justice plays in each. Films of the era that looked at justice each tended to focus on one aspect, whether that be the jury in 12 Angry Men, the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident or courage in High Noon. This one looks at a whole slew of aspects and that’s what makes it special. Maybe Blane explicitly calling out the double meaning of the title in court was a bit too blatant but I can forgive that. This isn’t as deep or as wild as Touch of Evil, released a year later by the same producer, Albert Zugsmith, but it perhaps digs deeper than Anatomy of a Murder, released two years later with some notable similarities.

There were downsides for me, though I have to add a caveat to one. The cinematography felt very weak but, as this is still a rather obscure title never made available on home release, I had to make do with a VHS rip taped off the TV that was clearly re-formatted using pan and scan techniques that shatter the vision of the cinematographer, Carl E. Guthrie, who had learned on pictures as big as The Adventures of Robin Hood, working the first assistant camera, and became responsible for shooting others as gorgeous, if low budget, as House on Haunted Hill. Less explainable is the score, by Frank Skinner, which is much more stereotypical than the rest of the film. I won’t complain too much because it did a capable job, just a capably clichéd job. Perhaps that’s not Skinner’s fault or at least not entirely his fault, as the stock libraries were certainly plumbed to pad out the score and it may be that otherwise decent snippets by Henry Mancini are really the clichéd bits, spliced into Skinner’s score. I didn’t delve that far.

Like Guthrie, Jack Arnold moved on to wrap up his career mostly in television. He’d already dabbled in the medium, making four episodes of Science Fiction Theatre in 1955 and 1956, but it would become more frequent as the years went by. It somehow seems to be odd that a massively talented director who had elevated otherwise cheap material like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula and High School Confidential! would become better known as the director of 26 episodes of Gilligan’s Island, 15 of The Brady Bunch and 8 more of The Love Boat. I don’t want to demean classic American television but to go from directing some of the best genre movies of the fifties to episodes of The Mod Squad or The Fall Guy, let alone shows I haven’t even heard of like Make Room for Granddaddy, The San Pedro Beach Bums or Holmes and Yo-Yo, feels like a really bad call on the part of American culture. Maybe he elevated those too, but I’m not particularly interested in finding out. I’ll keep tracking down his more obscure movies of the fifties instead.

The Shiralee (1957)

Director: Leslie Norman
Writers: Neil Paterson and Leslie Norman, from the novel by D’Arcy Niland
Stars: Peter Finch, Elizabeth Sellars and Dana Wilson

I’m a sucker for Ealing films, so this was an easy pick for me to celebrate what would have been the hundredth birthday of Peter Finch. It was made halfway through his career, a long time after his early Australian films for director Ken G. Hall, such as Dad and Dave Come to Town or Mr. Chedworth Steps Out, but just as long before his Academy Award win for playing Howard Beale in Network. Until Heath Ledger won over thirty years later for The Dark Knight, Finch was the only posthumous Oscar-winner in a performing role. He was also the first Australian actor to win an Oscar, though that depends on how you look at nationality. Technically, Finch was British, born in London to an Australian father and a British mother. However, in his forties, he learned that his father wasn’t really his father; he was the result of his mother’s affair with an Indian Army officer who, with a name like Jock Campbell, surely hailed from Scotland. He grew up first with his grandmother in France and then his great-uncle in Sydney, Australia.

He arrived in Sydney in 1926, when he was ten years old; by the time he moved back to England in 1948, he had surely become an Australian in heart and mind. He toured the country as a stage actor and became a major name on radio, the first to portray Ruth Park’s Muddle-Headed Wombat. The Second World War interrupted his nascent film career, as he enlisted in the Australian Army, serving as an anti-aircraft gunner as well as an actor and director touring army bases and hospitals in 1945. He was also allowed to keep making films while serving in the army, many of them propaganda shorts, and he continued his screen career after the war, but he was sent to Britain by Laurence Olivier, who put him under contract; he built a name for himself in movies as varied as The Miniver Story (the sequel to Mrs. Miniver), Othello (opposite Orson Welles) and Father Brown (as the villain). His contract completed, he shot a number of films down under for Rank: parts of A Town Like Alice in 1956, then Robbery Under Arms and The Shiralee in 1957.

This is unmistakeably an Australian film, the vast spaces of that country depicted in beautiful black and white by cinematographer Paul Beeson, very early in his career and long before his Primetime Emmy nomination in 1974 for the mini-series QB VII. The local vernacular is put to good use, without ever seeming like someone from another country had simply borrowed words to make it all appear authentic, even if screenwriters Neil Paterson and Leslie Norman were Scottish and English respectively; the latter was the father of Barry Norman, the UK’s best-known film critic. They were adapting an Australian novel though, written by D’Arcy Niland from Glen Innes, New South Wales, and many of the cast were Aussies too, including the film’s only Aborigine, Gordon Glenwright, whose character is treated just like any other. Yes, people call each other ‘mate’ and ‘sport’ and the ‘real bonzer kid’ is ‘a bit crook’, but the line that spoke to me most was, ‘I wouldn’t touch them with a maggoty cat,’ an interesting phrase to google.

However, it’s really a British film which merely happened to be shot in Australia and that’s not difficult to see either. It feels like a British drama, even before we get to the well-enunciated Rosemary Harris, who was born in Suffolk and sounds like it. This is early for her too, only her second feature three decades before her most famous role as Aunt May in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man pictures. It plays consistently with the other Ealing dramas I’ve seen from this period, which comes close to the end of Michael Balcon’s era at the studio. Surely the most recognisable actor on screen is Sidney James, a British institution, the star of nineteen Carry On films and the top billed name in seventeen. Coincidentally, I introduced my better half to Carry On Dick, James’s last film, this week, as it had borrowed so freely from Doctor Syn, which I reviewed earlier this month for Margaret Lockwood’s centennial. I had no idea he would be in The Shiralee or that cinematographer Beeson also handled the camera for Disney’s version, Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow.

More than anything, it’s an eye-opening portal into another era and I don’t merely mean that of the swagman, an Aussie word that we know from the unofficial Australian national anthem, Waltzing Matilda. Swagmen like Jim Macauley, the character Finch plays, were gentlemen of the road, like hobos and tramps. The opening narration explains that, while some are bludgers or scroungers, others are honest working men who prefer the freedom of living under the ‘friendly sky’, as Mac later puts it. I get the impression that Aussies have more romantic respect for swagmen than Brits do for tramps and perhaps Americans do for hobos, as walkabout is a quintessentially Australian concept, but it’s hard to find sympathy for Mac when we realise that his marriage has broken down because he’s only spent six months with his wife and daughter in Sydney in the five years since the wedding. When he finds a man with his wife, he beats him up, bundles his daughter under his arm and walks out, not saying a single word, and we’re in motion.

Buster is the difference between Macauley and other swagmen, an eight year old girl slowing him down and getting in his way. It’s not difficult to see her as a penance for his dereliction of marital duty, his ‘special cross’, his ‘burden’, his ‘shiralee’. The title really refers to the swagman’s bundle or pack, which we also know from the song as his matilda, but something that weighs him down is apt as a metaphor, especially early on when Mac has to carry Buster often. She’s a scene-stealing young actress called Dana Wilson and she debuted here in a powerful way. She would only go on to two more pictures, 1958’s A Cry from the Streets and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1959, before retiring at the ripe old age of ten. As great as Finch is in this picture, and the liner notes of my DVD suggest he later described it as his favourite role, I’m going to remember it as much for Dana Wilson as for him. She sells her part magnificently, bringing it to life through both little moments and the grand sweep of her performance.

Of course, the story is going to find a way for Buster to humanise her father at least to a degree, but I’m not going to spoil just how that happens. Let’s just say that it unfolds in a very believable fashion that avoids both Hollywood sentimentality and a Hollywood ending. Early on, we wonder why he even took her, given that he neither needs nor wants a child on the road. Certainly, he walks ahead of her as much as beside her and he isn’t exactly a beacon of conversation. ‘I like it when you talk to me,’ Buster says late on but that’s surely as much for the rarity of his speech as the content of it. These characterisations are deep, so there’s much debate possible about motivations but I presume that Mac took Buster as much out of spite as any of his wife’s notably spiteful and bitchy actions. Discussion about who creates this situation and who reacts to it, not to mention who has the right to act and react in such ways, renders The Shiralee perfect for anthropological studies as much as cinematic ones!

You see, Mac is very much a man’s man. He thinks of himself as a decent soul, someone who’s willing and able to work for a living; he often says that he ‘won’t scrounge off anybody’ and he lives up to his words. He’s no muscleman but he’ll stand up to anyone to further what’s right and scupper what’s wrong and, some pretty terrible choreography aside, can use his fists to good effect. He’s loyal and has a set of strong friendships that survive the infrequency of visits. Finch sells the physical side of this picture capably, believably a man who shrugs off the uncomfortable and walks on. He also sells how much Mac has excised the sentimental side of his character, to the degree that we wonder why he ever got married. Even things that could be read as sentimental really aren’t. When his daughter goes down with a fever and he spends an uncomfortable night breaking it, it’s because it’s a job that has to be done rather than because it’s his daughter. He doesn’t seem to know what love is, though the story shows how he learns.

A friend of mine talks about how America has changed over the last few decades because men nowadays aren’t brought up by men any more. He doesn’t say that to be macho or sexist; he’s just making an intellectual point that makes a lot of sense, especially with any political subtext removed. It used to be that boys were brought up outdoors, taught by their fathers how to do everything that we see boys doing in old movies: hunting, fishing and camping for a start but also, on a far deeper level, learning how to do things that aren’t safe. Buster is thrown right into this sort of upbringing and, with only a touch of sentimentality, enjoys the heck out of all the freedom that it involves. However, it’s glaringly obvious that this sort of thing would be difficult to put on the screen today. I’m not even talking about the naked butt of an eight year old girl in a shower scene or the lead rubbing eucalyptus oil on her chest when she’s feverish, things that would spark a debate nowadays because someone would interpret them sexually.

Talking about the film, my better half suggested that men would appreciate The Shiralee much more than women. I can see exactly what she means, because women watching today aren’t going to care about walkabout and swagmen and the romanticised road of freedom, they’re going to see Marge as a neglected woman and anything she can do to Mac as justified. However, the point of the story is to show this quintessential man’s man that there’s more to life than working and moving on, that emotions are important and that relationships aren’t just for buddies. Have we moved so far away in sixty years from this rough world of masculinity that the lessons Mac learns just aren’t enough any more? I haven’t seen the 1987 mini-series based on the same source novel, starring Bryan Brown as Mac, but it seems to reprise the same territory without any updates to cater to modern sensibilities and it was the most popular show of that year. Maybe in traditionally masculine Australia, this conversation is still active.

There are subplots to both keep things moving on and deepen the plot but I won’t spoil them. Suffice it to say that each character, each location and each scene has resonance that gradually and collectively builds into the force to change him just a little. It’s fair to say that, while Mac is the most masculine, stubborn and uncompromising male character, those properties are active in each of the others too. We’re really shown a scale of masculine behaviour and asked to figure out where the marker should be set. Mac is too masculine, apparently unable to truly love, so it should be shifted well away from him. However, it shouldn’t be moved as far as the opposite end of the spectrum, which is Donny, the successful coward who’s been having an affair with Marge while Mac is away. Should it be set to the helpful Jim Muldoon, the loyal Beauty Kelly or the charismatic Luke Sweeney? Perhaps it should be set to the honourable W. G. Parker, a successful working man who can lay down the law but also admit when he was wrong.

If we’re following that train of thought, we can ask the same question about the women. Marge may be a wronged wife but she’s a bitch with no apparent redeeming features beyond Scots actress Elizabeth Sellars looking rather pleasing to the eye. The opposite end to her may be Lily Parker, who is very much a woman though one who often acts like a man, making decisions and riding the range on horseback to herd sheep on her father’s ranch. There aren’t too many female characters in between, but one is certainly Bella Sweeney, who runs a bed and breakfast with her husband and rules the roost with her cheeky grin. As politically incorrect as their conversations often are, the Parkers are good people: loyal, caring and willing to speak their minds. ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea is a delight here as Bella and she was a discovery for me here, even if untold millions saw her as the other guest on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 that introduced America to the Beatles, the most watched show ever on American television at that point in time.

I really wonder how modern audiences would see this film because there are so many things that they’re not going to be used to seeing. The morality isn’t clear but not because the filmmakers wanted to go dark and moody but because it’s a slice of time and a starting point for discussion about topics like masculinity and femininity or freedom and responsibility. With our modern mindset, we often wonder who we should sympathise with, when the answer is everyone, just not all the time. Surely the most sympathetic character isn’t Mac, especially during the first half of the film; I’d suggest that it’s Buster, the title character, who is thrown into a tough situation at an extremely impressionable age but comes through it all with a smile. The biggest problem may be in just how free range she’s forced to be. Everyone watching today would rail at Mac’s choice to leave Buster fishing in a billabong with a poet while he goes looking for work in town. Things like this impact our ability to empathise, especially given what happens next.

Australia, of course, looks great here and the bush sounds just as enticing as it looks, even outside of any attraction of the simple if tough life that the swagman leads. I’ve long been a fan of the cinema of Australia and New Zealand, but little of what I’ve seen goes back to this era. I know the seventies and the eighties pretty well, especially in genre film, but should look further back, especially as Australia produced the first feature film ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, and was a prominent player in the 1910s, before falling prey to cheap American imports in the 1920s, a cycle of over-production and under-production that continued for a long time. One of its most enduring problems is that whenever it generates new stars, they’re easily drawn away by Hollywood. It happened recently with Mel Gibson, Hugh Jackman and Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchette, Nicole Kidman and Toni Collette, but that isn’t a new thing. Go back through the decades and it happened with Errol Flynn, Rod Taylor and Peter Finch.

The Bobo (1967)

Director: Robert Parrish
Writer: David R. Schwartz, from his own play, in turn based on the novel, Olimpia, by Burt Cole
Stars: Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Rosanno Brazzi and Adolfo Celi

Such are the dangers of selecting pictures that I haven’t seen for my centennials project! Today would have been the hundredth birthday of Rosanno Brazzi, an Italian actor who became a success in the English language too. His international fame was sparked by Three Coins in the Fountain in 1954, quickly followed by a lead role opposite Katharine Hepburn in David Lean’s Summertime. He made prominent pictures with prominent actors: South Pacific opposite Mitzi Gaynor, The Story of Esther Costello with Joan Crawford and The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Aiming more at interesting but more obscure titles, I thought about Legend of the Lost, in which Brazzi hires John Wayne to guide him towards a city of gold, but I’d heard bad things. He was the lead in Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, but I have a bunch of horror movies coming up. So I picked The Bobo, a Peter Sellers comedy, in which he co-stars with Sellers’s wife of the time, Britt Ekland. It’s a fascinating film to review, but Brazzi is hardly in it!

The script was written by David R. Schwartz, as an adaptation of his play of the same name, but the novel upon which it was based was called Olimpia, the name of Ekland’s character; she’s prominent early and often and is inextricably woven into the plot. Sellers plays the lead, of course, which role involves many scenes with his wife. Brazzi, however, third credited, gets less screen time than Hattie Jacques, Ferdy Mayne or Kenneth Griffith, who all languish down in the ‘with’ section of the opening credits. His part is also far less substantial than that of the remaining ‘co-star’, Adolfo Celi, who does at least drive the plot. Of all these, Carlos Matabosch of Matabosch Tractors, who is only in the film so that he can lose his new Maserati to Olimpia, is the easiest to lose and so Brazzi is the easiest to replace. He may be in the final shot, but that doesn’t mean that this is about him in the slightest. I’ll need to go back to his career and pick out a more appropriate title when I collate these reviews into book form at the beginning of next year.

We’re in Barcelona, Spain and Olimpia Segura is a piece of work. In the admittedly beguiling shape of Britt Ekland, she wears mini-skirts, drives fast cars and does a powerful job of keeping her many older, richer beaus at arm’s length. The friend of one describes her as ‘the most desirable witch in Barcelona’. According to Pepe Gamazo, he had ‘two ecstatic months together’ with her, but now she’s kicked him out of the apartment his grandmother left him and changed the locks. She drives his sports car and won’t let him anywhere near it. He’s a complete wreck and not only because Kenneth Griffith’s Spanish accent is far from pristine. She has such power over him that, before he knows it, he’s playing a journalist for her to blackmail another sucker, Silvestre Flores, into giving her that Maserati, a special order that took nine months to acquire for Matabosch and cost 800,000 pesetas. He does get a new key for his troubles, but it turns out that it doesn’t fit the lock to the apartment. What a piece of work she is!

Into town and into the cafe opposite Olimpia’s apartment, where Pepe Gamazo blubbers like a broken man, comes Juan Bautista, a matatroubadour as he puts it. ‘I am Spain’s greatest singing matador,’ he pronounces with authority, and he’s here to audition for Francisco Carbonell, the impresario who runs the local theatre, even if Francisco Carbonell doesn’t want him to. In a film with two thoroughly unsympathetic leads, I found Adolfi Celi’s portrayal of Carbonell the most traditionally enjoyable. He channels Sidney Greenstreet as a relatively static but highly characterful character and his expressions while a captive audience to Bautista’s song in the cafe are priceless. I even liked his office, given that his window is part of the vast billboard to his theatre. And it’s Carbonell who places our story into motion, even if he’s inherently absent from its development and returns only once it’s done to start the process of wrapping things up. I know Celi from Thunderball and Danger: Diabolik, but I’ll remember him from The Bobo too.

I should pause to attempt a definition of the title, which is never explained in the film beyond a supposed gypsy proverb quoted at the beginning that, ‘It is said in Barcelona, ‘A Bobo is a Bobo!’’ I doubt it’s real but know it isn’t helpful so I googled around to find a better explanation. Dictionary sites suggest that it’s ‘a member of a social class of well-to-do professionals who espouse bohemian values and lead bourgeois lives’, the word taken from ‘bohemian’ and ‘bourgeois’. In Ghana, it’s the name given to a child born on a Tuesday while, in the Philippines, it’s a fish trap made of bamboo. My better half knows it as a carny term for someone who uses insults to get customers to pay to throw balls at him, in hope of dunking him into something, but the web identifies that as a ‘bozo’. I know it as the pet name we had for my granddad, taken from my cousins playing peek-a-boo behind him. None of these fit, so I’ll go with the Spanish word that translates most politely as a ‘fool’. Why Sellers would name his yacht after that, I have no idea.

With that in mind, we wonder who the fool is in this film. Is it Francisco Carbonell, who is pressured into giving Bautista a chance at landing a week’s contract for 2,000 pesetas when he’s clearly told this matatroubadour to go back to his village? Is it any one (or even all) of the various men of means who Olimpia has so capably wrapped around her finger? Is it Bautista himself, who takes on the challenge of conquering such an unconquerable woman, specifically to remain in her apartment for long enough for the lights to go off and remain off for an hour? Is it Olimpia herself, who has no idea that she’s being used for someone else’s benefit just like she’s used so many others? Arguably, it could be applied to every character in the picture who has a line of dialogue, except only Eugenio Gomez, who runs the cafe. Al Lettieri, an Italian American actor playing very much against type, given that he portrayed so many villains and heavies in seventies Hollywood, may here play the only character who isn’t a Bobo.

I’d start talking here about the story finally finding its way, given that Sellers doesn’t even show up for ten minutes and Carbonell doesn’t issue his challenge until almost half an hour into the picture, but we’re about to be detoured into an odd diversion. Just as Bautista begins to win over Olimpia, we’re ripped away to watch a five minute chunk of flamenco. Patrick Boone, writing at From the Sidelines, ably describes the sudden prominence of Antonio Santiago Amador, known as La Chana, and Los Tarantos Flamenco Company, as a misstep we would see as ‘unforgiveable if it weren’t for how hypnotically fascinating La Chana’s staccato footwork is.’ I couldn’t tell if this Catalan gypsy was in severe pain or the heights of ecstasy, but she’s so magnetic that I couldn’t look away. Boone astutely points out that, ‘Unlike the filmmakers’, every one of her steps is executed with amazing power and precision.’ I’d second that, because there isn’t another magnetic moment in The Bobo unless we watch it not as a film but a layer over reality.

As she tells it, Britt Ekland was a fat and ugly Swedish child who used humour to get past her looks. After some travelling theatre and a brace of bit parts and walk on roles, she was cast in a small role in Guns at Batasi, which was shot at Pinewood Studios. Over at MGM British Studios, Peter Sellers was finishing up a fraught shoot for the second Pink Panther movie, A Shot in the Dark. The story goes that he saw her picture in the paper and knocked on her door at the Dorchester Hotel to invite her to his suite. Next morning, he took her to Kensington Palace to meet Princess Margaret and ten days later they were man and wife, a marriage which Ekland has said she should never have entered into. This was their third of three films together, after a TV movie called Carol for Another Christmas and After the Fox, but as riotously funny as the latter was, the marriage had found rocks almost immediately, crippled by Sellers’s jealousy and paranoia. Even when Victoria Sellers was born in January, 1965, things didn’t get better.

Like many comedians, Sellers was a highly troubled man and Ekland has suggested that he was bipolar. Certainly he clashed with many of his directors and fellow actors. He had trouble understanding Vittorio de Sica, the director of After the Fox and attempted to have him fired. He had trouble with his wife’s performance in the same film and arguments escalated to his throwing a chair at her. He left his next film, Casino Royale, before completing the shoot because of clashes with Orson Welles; he demanded that they never share the same set. Before quitting that film, he was honoured with a CBE but an argument the day before his investiture at Buckingham Palace required a make-up artist to cover up the scratches on his face from Ekland’s nails. Three weeks into The Bobo, according to Ed Sikov’s Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, he’d already had the script girl fired when he told director Robert Parrish, ‘I’m not coming back after lunch if that bitch is on the set.’ He was referring to his wife.

Kenneth Griffith, a friend of Sellers who played Pepe Gamazo, told Sikov that when he arrived on set, Sellers was directing rather than Parrish. Asking the latter how this had come to pass, he was told, ‘He just announced that he was taking over and I felt that I had a duty to sit quietly and be a servant to the film. You know, the number one job is to get this film finished.’ It cost a friendship and Parrish’s wife explains that they saw the film as ‘a disaster that we considered a death in the family and never mentioned.’ In such a light, it’s hard to hurl barbs at Parrish or his writer, David R. Schwartz, who was, after all, adapting his own play. Sellers is surely the appropriate person to take the credit or blame, depending on how you view the film. And, to focus back on my point, I found that this knowledge flavoured my take on the movie to the degree that its real value is neither as art or comedy but as the documenting of a powerful love/hate relationship.

I should note that I make no suggestion that there’s a parallel in how their relationship begins. Ekland told the Daily Telegraph that, ‘I was very young and he swept me off my feet. He gave me a puppy for God’s sake.’ She can’t explain why. ‘What was he thinking? And what was I thinking? You can’t bring up a dog before you’ve brought up yourself.’ Olimpia, on the other hand, is easily conned because her Achilles heel is so obvious: money. Her unashamed gold-digging heart visibly perks up when he unfurls words such as ‘royalty’, ‘wealth’ and ‘position’, while suggesting that his master, the Count of Something or Other wants to pay her to meet with him. No, it’s in how this real life couple interact on screen that the honesty shines past the fiction. In a scene at a romantic retreat, there’s real charisma between them, suggesting that they really cared for each other, but in another, an argument over a 275,000 peseta fur coat at Castillo’s, shows how much they also hated each other too. They divorced soon afterwards.

What makes these scenes so powerful is that they appear to be honest. Outside these moments, I never bought into Juan Bautista as anything but an act. Sure, Juan is lying through his teeth for most of the film, but I never felt like I saw the real character once, just Sellers putting on a Mediterranean tan and a dubious accent. The only times I bought into what I was seeing was when I was watching Peter Sellers rather than Juan Bautista and, to a lesser degree, Britt Ekland rather than Olimpia Segura. For all the great talent of the man, Ekland did the better job here for no better reason than I think she wanted to. And that said, both of them were easily outdone by Adolfo Celi, Hattie Jacques as Olimpia’s maid and Ferdy Mayne, whose own centennial I celebrated in March, as the car dealer, Silvestre Flores. Only when both these unlikeable and unsympathetic characters are taken down a peg or two are they really enjoyable to watch. I was fascinated for an hour and a half but I only really enjoyed Juan and Olimpia towards the end.

So, this is a really odd film. It’s not particularly funny, Sellers trying too hard without particularly getting anywhere. I felt like he was often flogging a dead horse with his dialogue because each explanation was so overdone. It succeeds much more as a tragedy than a comedy, the well-deserved come-uppances providing a belated grounding to the characters that was so sorely missing for so long. The sets are immersive, but most of them are obviously sets, this being shot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome rather than the memorable streets of Barcelona, regardless of how much of them we see behind the opening credits. The retreat, at least, is wild and wonderful, a grotto bathed in blue light until we pan over to lush red interiors. The music is forgettable and the direction no better, given that the film seems to exist primarily to let Sellers do his thing while his wife serves as decoration. No, this is much more interesting a film than it is enjoyable. Watch if you’re more interested in Sellers and Ekland as people than as actors.