Over-long, over-hyped and over-cast. Pretty much an early example of virtue-signalling, exposing corruption in a dictatorship (Haiti), but offering more through the singular self-deception of the main characters. An element of sleight-of-hand is also practiced on an audience enticed by four big stars “above the title” comprising three Oscar winners and one multiple nominee. Luckily, the ironic in-joke of naming characters with traditional English names – Smith, Jones and Brown – would probably pass most people by.
Brown (Richard Burton), a hotelier, is present throughout but Major Jones (Alec Guinness) appears only briefly at the beginning then disappears until late on to spike the plot. Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), the adulterous love interest, pops up sporadically as does her husband Ambassador Pineda (Peter Ustinov). There’s not much of a story, Brown, cynical about the dictatorship, is friendly with a rebel leader, Jones is an ineffectual arms dealer, and missionary couple the Smiths (Paul Ford and Lillian Gish) offer comic relief until barbarity rears its head.
Great play is made of naivete but the film suffers from the Hollywood curse of only being able to examine foreign politics through the prism of a (white) American or Englishman. At the time it might have been shocking to see brutality so convincingly dispensed, and there is, also, in Mondo Cane fashion, too much time spent on strange ritual, but at the same time, of course, the U.S. was inflicting its own barbarities on the Vietnamese.
On the other hand, Brown is exactly the kind of foreigner who believes things must improve because, damn it all, he’s British and bad things can’t happen to a Brit in a strange land. He is convinced he will be able to sell a hotel located in a war-torn country, persists in believing Martha will abandon husband and son, and convinces himself he is the very man the rebels have been looking for.
Jones mistakenly believes everyone is taken in by his hail-fellow-well-met routine and his tales of heroism in World War Two jungles, thinks he is in with a chance with Martha and that his gun-running activities will avoid detection. The ambassador thinks his wife will not leave him as long as he turns a blind eye to her affairs. And Martha, probably wondering why she married such a buffoon, can’t work out to dump him. Everyone who has much to lose appears to be continually on a precipice and it’s hard to see what they could gain from their actions.
They are all misfits, “comedians,” stuck in the rut of their own destiny, unable to change.
Nobody is more gullible than those who dupe themselves and the film comes into its own when it sets personal delusion against political naivete. In narrative terms Jones is the most obviously unmasked but the others are no less shown to be foolhardy in their expectations.
This had all the hallmarks of a prestige picture, initially planned as a roadshow, around $2 million spent on the above-the-line cast, another chunk on buying the rights to the Graham Greene bestseller and assigning the author the screenplay, location shooting in Dahomey.
Don’t expect oratorical fury from Richard Burton (The Bramble Bush, 1960) nor outbursts of angst from Elizabeth Taylor (Secret Ceremony, 1969). There’s something almost comically homely in their deception and in the outwardly confident Brown perceiving Jones as a love rival. Alec Guinness (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) is the big treat, an upmarket con man, his boisterous voice and mannerisms far removed from his more usual introspective performances. Peter Ustinov (Topkapi, 1964), a bit too fidgety for my liking, nonetheless attracts sympathy as the man who is batting above his weight in snaring a trophy wife he knows he cannot hold onto.
Burton was the odd one out in the Oscar rankings. Despite five nominations by this stage, he had never taken home the statuette. Elizabeth Taylor, by contrast, had won twice, for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Guinness once for Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Ustinov also twice Spartacus (1961) and Topkapi.
However, in some senses if you remove the star turns, you are left with a rawer picture, and director Peter Glenville (Becket, 1964) captures much of the personal intensity of the novel. Taylor, in particular, misses the mark. Although playing a German, she never once bothers attempting an accent. Had Burton been the sole star, the movie would have worked much better since his low-key playing would not have been so much at odds with other actors.
There’s a host of striking turns from supporting stars, ranging from silent film star Lillian Gish (The Unforgiven, 1960) to Roscoe Lee Brown (Topaz, 1969), James Earl Jones (The Great White Hope, 1970), Raymond St Jacques (Uptight, 1968) and Cicely Tyson (Sounder, 1972).
Avatar: The Next Generation and the Rescue Marathon. Not sure about that, Jim, lacks punch. How about Avatar Meets Moby Dick? Hmm. You got a MacGuffin? Yep, the Earth is dying and the bad guys need to wipe out everyone on Pandora before they ship out the emigrants. And more Impossibilium? You’ll like this, this time we’re extracting anti-ageing serum from whales, worth $80 million a pop. And there’s also Avatar Meets The Titanic, seemed a shame to waste a ship going down.
So we don’t see as much of Sam Worthington this time round, is that right? Well, we’ve got to introduce his four kids, all approaching the rebellious stage, plus Spider, who’s maybe the son of the Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who was cloned before he died, plus the kids of the water king and of course all the kids squabble and make up and squabble again – you get the picture.
So how many rescues, exactly? To be honest I’ve lost count, but basically when A gets captured he needs rescued by B who then also gets captured and needs rescued by C who also gets captured and then…Yes, we get the picture.
Sigourney Weaver? Kate Winslet? Blink and you’ll miss them. But great for the marquee, right?
So, you see, with all these complications, you’re darned lucky I can manage to cram everything into a three-hour-plus running time.
Yep, it’s a bit of a mess, but the good news is while I might have been irritated by the narrative repetition I didn’t walk out. It certainly looks amazing. And you can’t top James Cameron for extended battle scenes. And there’s an emotional twist, starts out Jake protecting his family and ends up with his kids and wife saving him. Plus if you want woke, there’s a ton of Gaia-style philosophy.
My greatest hits, if you like. I can hardly believe that I’ve turned out so many books or that a publisher has been willing to take them. I have two publishers. McFarland in America prefers works on a Hollywood theme while the British publisher, Baroliant, is happy to print tomes which target a smaller potential audience. I should point out that McFarland publications are more expensive though they are in a bigger format.
All of my books are available on Amazon/Kindle. The ones below are all available in print editions.
If you have problems getting hold of any title let me know.
You might also be interested to know that I have contributed lengthy articles to Cinema Retro magazine on films as diverse as The Dirty Dozen and La Dolce Vita and every issue have a column devoted to box office.
Intellect can present as powerful a sexual magnetism as wealth. And for young women, unlikely to come into the orbit of powerful movie magnates or wealthy businessmen, they are most likely to experience abuse of power in academia, especially in top-notch universities like Oxford and Cambridge or Harvard and the Sorbonne.
Young students, unsure of their place in the world, depend on praise for their self-esteem. To be on the receiving end of flattery from a renowned scholar, a young person (males included) might be willing to overlook other unwanted attention. For young women and men accustomed to being assessed on looks alone this might be a drug too powerful to ignore.
The British system ensured that potential prey was delivered to potential predators. As well as attending lectures, each student was allocated a tutor and could spend a considerable amount of time with them in private in congenial surroundings behind closed doors. And since essays marked by tutors played a considerable element in an overall mark, there was plenty of opportunity for transactional sex.
And it was easy for women to think they wielded the sexual power. I once employed a woman who boasted that she had seduced her university tutor, little imagining that that took any opposition on his part, and that, in reality, she was just another easy conquest.
So you might be surprised to learn that when this movie about inappropriate behavior in a university of the caliber of Oxford appeared, nobody gave a hoot about the grooming and exploitation of young Austrian Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) by two professors, Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker).
The story is told in flashback in leisurely fashion. Hearing a car crash outside his substantial house in the country, Stephen finds inside the vehicle an injured Anna and her dead boyfriend William (Michael York). Then we backtrack to Anna’s arrival in Oxford, and how the love quadrangle is created. The presence of William suggests Anna has predatory instincts, but there is no sign of sex in their relationship, rather that he is forever frustrated at being kept on a leash and clearly suspecting he is losing out to others.
Stephen, a professor of philosophy, no higher calling in academe, endless discussion on the meaning of life manna to every student, has a purported happy home life, wife Rosalind (Vivien Merchant) pregnant with their third child. He’s no stranger to infidelity, reviving an affair with the estranged daughter Francesca (Delphine Seyrig) of a college bigwig (Alexander Knox).
But he can’t quite make his move on Anna, despite idyllic walks in the fields and their hands almost touching on a fence. The uber-confident Charley, novelist and television pundit in addition to academic celebrity, has no such qualms and seduces her under the nose of his friend and sometime competitor.
When opportunity does arise for Stephen it does so in the most horrific fashion and, that he takes advantage of the situation, exposes the levels of immorality to which the powerful will stoop without batting an eyelid.
The web Stephen is trying to weave around his potential victim is disrupted by William and Charley and if any anguish shows on Stephen’s face it’s not guilt at the grief he may cause or about his own errant behavior but at the prospect of losing a prize.
Director Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony, 1968) sets the tale in an idyllic world of dreaming spires, glasses of sherry, tea on the lawn, glorious weather, punting on the river, old Etonian games, the potential meeting of minds and the flowering of young intellect. The action, like illicit desire, is surreptitious, a slow-burn so laggardly you could imagine the spark of narrative had almost gone out.
Stephen is almost defeated by his own uncontrolled desire, taking advantage of his wife entering hospital for childbirth, the children packed off elsewhere, to have sex with Francesca, not imagining that Charley will take advantage of an empty house.
And the young woman as sexual pawn is given further credence by the fact that at no point do we see the events from her perspective.
Anguish had always been a Dirk Bogarde (Justine, 1969) hallmark and usually it served to invite the moviegoer to share his torment. So it’s kind of a mean trick to play on the audience to discover that this actor generally given to playing worthy characters is in fact a sleekit devious dangerous man. Of course, the persona reversal works very well, as we do sympathise with him, especially when relegated to second fiddle in the celebrity stakes to Charley and humiliated in his own attempts to gain television exposure.
Stanley Baker (Sands of the Kalahari, 1965) was the revelation. Gone was the tough guy of previous movies. In its place a charming confident winning personality with a mischievous streak, a far more attractive persona when up against the more introspective Bogarde.
Jacqueline Sassard (Les Biches, 1968) is, unfortunately, left with little to do but be the plaything. There’s an ambivalence about her which might have been acceptable then, but not now, as if somehow she is, with her own sexual powers, pulling three men on a string. In his debut Michael York (Justine, 1969) shows his potential as a future leading man.
You might wonder if Vivien Merchant (Alfred the Great, 1969) was cast, in an underwritten part I might add, because husband Harold Pinter (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) wrote the script and Nicholas Mosley, who had never acted before, put in an appearance because he wrote the original novel.
Losey, a critical fave, found it hard to attract a popular audience until The Go-Between (1971) and you can see why this picture flopped at the time despite the presence of Bogarde and Baker. And although it is slow to the point of infinite discretion, it’s not just a beautifully rendered examination of middle class mores, and a hermetically sealed society, but, way ahead of its time, and possibly not even aware of the issues raised, in exploring abuse of power, a “Me Too” expose of the academic world.
The acting and direction are first class and it will only appear self-indulgent if you don’t appreciate slow-burning pictures.
In the days before computerised box office figures and the internet permitting easy access, fans of the sport had to make do with the weekly tallies in the “New York Showcase” section run every week in Variety. The “Showcase” was an early version of the wide release but instead of the 3,000-4,000 cinemas involved today in an opening week launch, movies would hit the Big Apple in 23-60 theaters. No matter the low theater count, it was still considered the most accurate prediction of how a movie would fare nationwide.
Some films opened straight into the showcase format, others ran day-and-date with a glossy opening on Broadway or a prestigious arthouse, and for a few this was the first step in general release after a roadshow run.
The same rules applied as today. A movie was retained for a further week only if the picture hit the target. Long runs were rare, two weeks the standard. As we shall see, some were movies making their 1969 debut while others were going wide after opening the previous year, the delay accounted for by holdover success in first run or Oscar recognition.
Just over 200 theaters took part in the showcase splurge, divided into five main strands generally through circuit or distributor affiliation plus one that brought together suburban arthouses. Not all the streams were in full-time operation, some weeks saw four new releases others six. Movies could count on losing theaters after the first week.
And, as with now, while overall receipts were the main factor, the per-theater gross could also offer up some indication of future performance.
The best single week’s take in 1969 was achieved by Dustin Hoffman comedy The Graduate which took $760,000 from 43 houses (per-theater average: $17, 674) followed very closely by Ali McGraw debut Goodbye, Columbus with $757,000 from 44 ($17, 204 per theatre). Steve McQueen thrill-ride Bullitt nabbed $684,000 from 45 ($15,200). In fact all three pictures placed twice in the single-week top ten.
Others flying high, at least for one week, were: Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice ($540,000 from 48), True Grit ($531,000 from 49), Joanne Woodward in Rachel, Rachel ($522,000 from 42), psychedelic outing The Trip ($520,000 from 49), sexploitationer Fanny Hill ($506,000 from 42), The Boston Strangler ($481,000 from 38) and I Am Curious Yellow ($480,000 from 40).
By contrast, at the other end of the heap, Marlon Brando in Night of the Following Day could only manage $125,000 from 31, The Assassination Bureau scraped up $82,000 from 22, Elliott Gould in Ingmar Bergman’s The Touch hit $48,000 from 26 while Michael Caine performed abysmally, Play Dirty knocking up just $91,000 from 24, The Magus $80,000 from 20, The Battle of Britain tumbling stratospherically from $366,000 from 32 one week to $101,000 from 27 the next.
But the showcase system also breathed life into arthouse hits attempting to break out into a wider marketplace. John Cassavettes’ Faces rocked up $469,000 in three weeks, Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour $329,000 over the same period, Brian De Palma’s Greetings $263,000 in a fortnight while one week of Robert Downer Snr.’s Putney Swope registered $205,000.
Reissues were also prime fodder to stoke up a distribution system creaking at the seams due to lack of new product. Gone with the Wind (1939) was the plum, $658,000 in three weeks. Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson (1960) chopped down $418,000 in two and Clint Eastwood pair A Fistful of Dollars/For a Few Dollars More – both released Stateside in 1967 – $279,000 in a fortnight. More usually, reissues lasted just a week, filling a gap in the annual program.
Even so, they could pull in some decent numbers: Peter Pan (1953) grossing $300,000, Sidney Poitier double bill Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)/To Sir, With Love (1967) $272,000, perennial favorite The Sound of Music $230,000, Rosemary’s Baby (1968)/The Odd Couple (1968) $215,000, James Bond dualer Goldfinger (1964)/Dr No (1962) $162,000, another Eastwood pair The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1967)/Hang ‘Em High (1968) $155,000 and a lengthy coupling of Planet of the Apes (1968)/ Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) $115,000.
The overall winner in the annual New York Showcase stakes was The Graduate which over a five-week run grossed $2.24 million. Bullitt was the runner-up with $1.99 million over six weeks, though the last sally was in a double bill with Bonnie and Clyde. Goodbye, Columbus came third with $1.95 million over four weeks. Romeo and Juliet lasted a record eight weeks to pocket $1.69 million. Fifth was Swedish sensation I Am Curious Yellow on $1.28 million after five weeks.
After playing first run for the best part of six months Rachel, Rachel hit the showcases following an Oscar nomination for Joanne Woodward, bringing in $1.08 million over three weeks. Another anomaly was I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, such a flop the previous year it was ranked 78th in the annual box office race, but now emerging as a showcase front-runner with $1.03 million over five weeks.
Eighth spot went to The Boston Strangler ($932,000 in three weeks) followed by Charly – Oscar win for Cliff Robertson – on $910,000 for six weeks. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was tenth with $900,000 in two weeks – the western had launched at the tail end of the year and did so well it ran for another five weeks in 1970 to capture an extra $1.5 million.
Filling out the top twenty were, in order, Easy Rider, Ice Station Zebra, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, The Wild Bunch, Popi, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, True Grit, Oliver!,Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice and Fanny Hill.
In general terms, New Yorkers response to showcase releases was mirrored throughout the country. The majority of the high-flying films mentioned ending up in the annual box office top 20. But there were some anomalies. Rachel, Rachel had finished the previous year in 37th place in the annual chart, hardly suggesting it was prime candidate for an exceptional showcase run. The Night They Raided Minsky’s came only 32nd in the 1969 chart. Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice did not earn enough around the country to qualify for inclusion on the annual chart. And, frankly, I’m mystified as to why I Love You, Alice B. Toklas did so well.
By contrast Paul Newman racing picture Winning performed so indifferently in the New York showcase that for the final two weeks of its three-week run it was bolstered by John Wayne oil adventure The Hellfighters, yet it ran out 16th for the year. Three in the Attic (18th in 1969) and Support Your Local Sheriff (20th) failed to match expectations in New York.
I rarely feel inclined to dig around the two streamers – Netflix and Amazon – available to me what with a vast backlog of 1960s DVD/VHS still to plough through and interest in contemporary cinema sated though a weekly visit to the multiplex. It’s rare that I can sit through more than five minutes of the movies funded or picked up by streamers, so poor is their quality control. So this came as a surprise.
The acting’s not the best and just when you are beginning to run out of patience suddenly the real twist kicks in and it makes terrible, terrible sense and a situation that has spiralled out of control ends up in a bottomless pit. I say the real twist because I had guessed the first twist, an obvious consequence of the set-up of these kind of films. But the real twist is much darker and eminently more savage.
So, the basic story is rock musician Jay (Peter Sarsgard), estranged from wife Rebecca (Mireille Enos), takes teenage daughter Kayla (Joey King) to dance camp and on the way picks up her best pal Trini (Dani Kind) and somewhere in the middle of an ice-bound wilderness said friend needs the toilet. Kayla and pal go off but only Kayla returns, admitting she has pushed friend off a bridge into icy river.
Jay’s now got to decide how to protect his murderous daughter, hide any evidence of Trini being in the car etc. He confides in Rebecca, and protecting their daughter brings the couple closer together. Meanwhile, Kayla is acting as if what’s all the fuss about. This is dysfunctional on the rocks.
Luckily, it turns out Trini has a record of running away and her dad Sam (Cas Anwar) has a terrible temper and may be abusing her so it’s relatively easy to get the police to consider him the main suspect, especially as he’s very lax in reporting the child missing. Plus, Rebecca seems to know her way about the police and Sam makes the mistake of causing a scene in the street.
But, of course, nothing goes according to plan, the situation gets worse, as the innocent parents try to fabricate something that will make the police go away. There’s a lot of other subtle stuff that complicates the situation. But essentially it’s two parallel stories diverging along psychological lines.
With those malevolent eyes, Peter Sarsgard (The Batman, 2022) has some difficulty passing for innocent, and of course his character is not exactly saintly, so that muddies the waters, as I guess is the intention, while the casting of Mirielle Enos (best-known as the detective in the U.S. television adaptation of Nordic hit The Killing, 2011-2014) also suggests the director is hoping to mislead the audience.
Joey King (Bullet Train, 2022) is so sulky and petulant from the outset that you wouldn’t be remotely surprised that her teenage hormones could escalate into murder and then for her sit back and enjoy watching her parents try to deal with the consequences.
And you might nitpick and wonder exactly what kind of town this is when there’s not a single neighbour to appear at the sound of an argument or a fight or a car accident, and no cameras on the streets. But generally, this is a tight mostly three-hander with tension quietly building, wrong decisions taken by people who think they are cleverer than they are, a finely balanced pyramid of parental attitudes to children and vice-versa and throwing out the one question every parent hopes to avoid: how will your react if your beloved child commits a heinous crime? What lengths will you go to protect them?
So in the context of the shattering ending, everything makes far worse sense.
A very neat thriller and almost a made-for-streamer feel about it, in the old made-for-television sense.
Writer-director Veena Sud (The Salton Sea, 2016) keeps a keen grip on a tale that is a remake of German picture Wir Monster (2015).
I have given in to entreaty. Demand might be too strong a word. Or you could say, using a phrase that I hope is consigned to the past, I have responded to “constructive criticism.”
I have been contacted by a goodly number of my readers wondering, to save them trawling through what is now close on 750 reviews, whether there was another, simpler, way for them to pore through the collection. If there was, in other words, a way of putting the collection together in a manner that could be accessed in one fell swoop.
Fortunately, I came up with a solution. I could publish them in book form, both in Kindle and for those, like myself, who prefer to hold a physical object, as printed material. Unfortunately, it would not be possible to put the entire set of reviews in one book. I’m not saying it would bust the Internet, but a book over 500,000 words long would be a very sizeable undertaking in either format. I should know, I got into trouble with my American publisher McFarland for delivering a book that totalled 250,000 words (Coming Back to a Theater Near You, in case you’re interested.)
So I’m publishing the works in stages and as two separate publications, although the titles, I have to admit, and the covers as well for that matter, are similar.
1960s Movies: Behind the Scenes Volume One does what it says on the tin. It’s a collection of the first 30-odd articles examining what went wrong or right in making particular movies during the decade. It ranges from Battle of the Bulge (1965), Dr No (1962), The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and now, officially, the greatest western ever made Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) to Operation Kid Brother (1967), Secret Ceremony (1969) and The Ipcress File (1965) plus the Alistair MacLean quartet of The Secret Ways (1961), The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Satan Bug (1965) and Ice Station Zebra (1968).
In addition, there is a sampling of two other popular features of the Blog , “Book into Film” and “Pressbooks,” – a couple of interviews and various articles on developments that affected the industry during the decade. There are illustrations throughout.
1960s Movies Redux Volume One is a companion piece featuring over 100 movies, including many of the pictures covered in the Behind the Scenes book, roughly presented in the order they originally appeared in the Blog. Ideal if you’ve still got a lot of catching up to do and don’t want to battle through the Blog to the beginning.
The content of this book varies from The Swimmer (1968), The Bedford Incident (1964), Point Blank (1967) and The Venetian Affair (1966) to The Blue Max (1966), Ocean’s 11 (1960), The Fox (1967), The Lost Continent (1968), Pharaoh (1966) and Moment to Moment (1966). But “varies” is an understatement as it swings at random through every genre.
There is no particular logic to my selection of movies to review, just what happens to be handy or something I’ve taken a notion to see. Again, there are illustrations throughout.
Skip back a decade and you’ll come to my third book Paisley at the Pictures, Part III: 1952. As the title suggest, this is in fact a sequel. In fact, it’s a sequel to a sequel as the previous book in the series Paisley at the Pictures, 1951 embodied the word “sequel” in the title.
Paisley, in Scotland, in case you didn’t know, is a large town, only a few thousand bodies short of qualifying as a city, and at the time eight cinemas served a population of 93,000. Seating capacity for the octet was just over 13,000 so on a Saturday night -. given that moviegoing was hugely popular especially before the advent of television – there was no guarantee you would get a ticket to the movie of your choice.
Six of the picture houses showed first run and two second run. Few movies ran for six days, most theaters operating on a split-week basis, one program running Mon-Wed and another Thu-Sat. (Films only ran on a Sunday if it was a charity fund-raiser.) Most programs were double bills. But over 1200 films were screened. And since Paisley was way down the movie distribution food chain it was mostly showing pictures that were months or possibly years old. There was, in any case, no such thing as the global wide release seventy years ago and only in very rare instances anything approaching day-and-date.
Historically, the year was significant for it marked the introduction of the X-certificate and the Eady Levy, a form of tax rebate to encourage film production. Sci-fi boomed. B-pictures could still be guaranteed an audience, as could serials. And cinemas began to welcome, on occasion, foreign fare.
The top films of the year in Paisley were: An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Show Boat (1951), Ivanhoe (1951), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The African Queen (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), The World in His Arms (1952), Laughter in Paradise (1951) and Jungle Jim in the Forbidden Land (1952).
Except for the latter these chimed with the top movies shown that year or in 1951 in the rest of Britain and, for that matter, excepting the British-made movie, the United States.
But that was not the case for the most popular stars.
The Top Ten stars in Paisley were: Randolph Scott, Virginia Mayo, Roy Rogers, Rod Cameron, Humphrey Bogart, Doris Day, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Errol Flynn, and in joint tenth position Glenn Ford and Susan Hayward. These rankings might come as a shock to anyone who takes the annual top tens published in the trade press as gospel. But I suspect there were as many local variations on the national scale elsewhere as here. The annual charts tended to flatten out local differences and favor stars who were more popular in bigger cities.
An appendix lists all the films shown in Paisley cinemas that year, by month and by venue. There are over 120 illustrations, some very rare, many drawn from my collection of Pressbooks.
Now, down to the sticky matter of cost. You’ll be delighted to hear that both the 1960s books cost, as they say, less than a cup of coffee. On Kindle both are priced at $2.99 (£2.34 at current exchange rates for British readers and the equivalent for other countries). Printed copies cost £10 (around $12). And if you want your printed copy signed, that can probably be arranged. Both are available on Amazon, Kindle and enlightened bookshops.
Due to the huge number of illustrations – over 120 – the Paisley book is not available on Kindle, only in book form and costs £10 (about $12). But I’m working on a Kindle edition that reduces the number of illustrations,
If you are not interested in buying the books themselves I would be grateful if you could, nonetheless, circulate the information.
But, of course, I probably don’t have to point out that they will make ideal Xmas presents.
The headmaster of top English public school Harrow and the owners of upmarket emporium Grieves probably didn’t realize what they were letting themselves in for when they agreed to participate in this British version of Mondo Cane (1962), the movie that turned documentary into box office gold by the simple device of concentrating on the sleaze.
In truth it’s a bit of bait-and-switch, although anyone seeking titillation in those more repressed times when nudity was forbidden by the censor would be rewarded by the sight of three women topless, an anomaly explained by such nudity appearing in a non-sexual situation and my guess that the movie’s producers pointed to the stage loophole which permitted it as long as the women did not move. (That reasoning was explained, should you be interested, in Mrs Henderson Presents, 2005.)
The nudity occurs in the context of life classes, one organized by a bunch of beatniks as a means of funding their lifestyle, which includes eating baked beans cold and snacking on cat food, rebels that they are; when business is poor, they resort to taking snaps of the girls for Soho magazines. The other is the post-dinner entertainment in an upmarket restaurant where the customers sketch drawings of the undressed immobile models.
There’s an expose of clip joints, where elderly men are duped out of money by unfulfilled promise, paying extortionate amounts for non-alcoholic beverages, and a behind-the-scenes look at a strip club (nudity concealed behind nipple pasties) and a sex worker, the narrator making the point that while it’s not illegal for that woman to ply her trade indoors, a beggar playing a penny whistle in the street could be arrested. The strip club has the dingiest of entrances.
But in the main it’s a rather snippy examination of contemporary mores as staid London, at this stage not quite Swinging London, undergoes dramatic change. A health club enters the frame and there’s a gory piece on male hair transplants, a bloodier experience than audiences might expect, and a trawl round various unusual, but harmless, place of entertainment: an Irish pub with a horde of singers, an amateur Jewish theater, disco dancing at the renowned Whiskey-A-Go-Go, German students congregating for a slice of home at the Rheingold Club, the casino at Churchills, and cabaret.
“Bold! Brazen! Bizarre!” boasts the trailer and while that might be typical hype, audiences in those tamer times may well have been shocked especially when the camera focuses on two elements rarely discussed at that point in polite society: homelessness and drug addiction. Even so, it does find, as with the rest of the movie, unusual aspects of both. For example, the homeless lace their methylated spirits with milk. A director with an eye for dynamic composition could not have hit upon a better idea than contrasting the white contents of one bottle with the blue contents of another, the mixture being consumed in tea cups.
And I, for one, did not know that drug addicts were treated far more sympathetically in Britain than in the United States. That may well have been because the numbers were low, only 600 registered addicts compared to 47,000 across the Atlantic, though the degradation was no less pitiful, female abusers taking to the streets to pay for their addiction.
As a slice-of-life it’s less exploitational than the posters – or title – suggest and so falls into the historic category of The London Nobody Knows (1967), although less compelling, and it’s perhaps more interesting for the personalities involved, several of whom became significant figures, one way or the other, in the movie business.
Making the biggest later impact was Michael Klinger who went on to produce Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac (1966), drama Baby Love (1969), gangster classic Get Carter (1971), Gold (1974) and Shout at the Devil (1976). Co-producer Tony Tenser went on to found Tigon, the horror outfit that challenged Hammer. Stanley Long turbocharged the British sexploitation industry with numbers such as Groupie (1970), The Wife Swappers (1970) and Eskimo Nell (1975).
But it didn’t open many doors for director Arnold L. Miller who managed only a handful of features such as Frustrated Wives/Sex Farm (1974) which was banned by the British censor. Uncredited co-director Norman Cohen later made The London Nobody Knows.
Interesting for the most part and buy it if you want to play your part in upholding the British Film Institute which has rescued this from the vaults in the hope of making a quick buck.
Not a great movie by any means but I am drawing attention to it for other reasons. While entering familiar small town soap opera territory with malice behind every curtain and the repression rampant a century ago, it’s a fabulous exploration of character.
The narrative drive is slim, young couple coming undone by circumstance. But that is more than compensated by the preoccupation with their actual characters, marital bust-ups for no reason, insecurities to the fore, a daring sexual overtness that for the time it was made does not stoop to the lowest common denominator, and without doubt the best performance in the career of Yvette Mimieux (Dark of the Sun, 1968) here taking center stage rather than as was more usual a mere appendage to the leading man.
Not sure what the rival picture was. any ideas?
The story is told primarily through the eyes of Anna (Yvette Mimieux), a poor uneducated homely girl who falls for dashing virile law student Carl (Richard Chamberlain), both of Irish descent, who, against parental wishes, run off to get married.
But marriage instantly brings financial calamity. As a married man, Carl is ineligible for college loans, and his wife is forbidden, following aspirational middle-class custom of the day, to work except for a bit of babysitting. Viewing Anna, coming from poorer stock, as a gold-digger, Carl’s father Patrick (Arthur Kennedy) not only withdraws financial support but demands repayment of loans.
So the pair struggle through. And that would be par for soap opera.
What brings this to the fore is the director’s fascination with character, allowing personality, with all its inexplicable whimsicalities, full rein rather than making that subservient to a more dramatic story.
If you think couples these days have difficulty communicating, imagine the situation a century ago where a man made all the decisions and expected obedience from his partner. And a wife so fearful of announcing a pregnancy for fear it would force her husband to abandon his studies. Beyond obvious worry, there is little problem-sharing or joint resolution of difficulties.
For all his charm, Carl is pretty gauche. His ardent inexperienced love-making borders on rough. He is so out of touch with his wife’s passion that he takes a job as a nightwatchman. He plays a mean trick on her in a communal shower. And although he refuses to cower to his father, in general he kowtows to authority.
The French have a word for it.
Anna is more feisty, challenging his father, ignoring patriarchal rules, almost pathologically opposed to using the word “Sir,” but full of compassion, befriending the gay florist, object of public ridicule, encouraging him in his writing, standing up, too, for the widow, forced by circumstance to become the mistress of a rich businessman (Oscar Homolka), taking money for the privilege.
Yet for all her outgoing confidence, she is insecure, so desperate to learn that she sneaks into the halls of the college to overhear lectures, a dictionary her constant companion. Sexually, she is conflicted, memories of stepfather abuse arising too often, and yet intensely physical, adoring the touch of a loving male.
Despite her homely beauty, she follows a more obviously attractive woman, copying the way she walks, swings her hips, flicks her hair. She wants a tight sweater when the fashion is to wear them loose. Unable to afford a hair salon, she has her blonde hair cut short enough in a barber shop so that it will bounce when she walks. Due to her deficiencies and in constant emotional turmoil, she is liable to snap at perceived insult.
The story could easily have gone down a more fairy-tale route, of Anna finding herself, espousing independence, becoming a writer, instead of – anathema to a contemporary audience – finding expression by supporting her husband. But that would not be true to the times. That she has hardly any home to look after, little in the way of furniture to polish, no cosy gang of housewives for coffee mornings, so her efforts at expanding her education would simply qualify as a sensible way to spend her day.
And while director Alex Segal (Harlow, 1965) does not trust her with the kind of soulful close-up accorded the likes of Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn, where one look into the eyes reveals everything, and restricts emotion to dialog, he does provide countless small moments that allow proper character development. Nor does he trust himself much, only two compositions of any singularity; snow falling on a house that turns out to be a storekeeper tipping icing sugar over a model of a home for a shop window Xmas scene; and a shadow suddenly appearing when the couple are about to make love.
And there is a role reversal of sorts. It’s television heartthrob Richard Chamberlain (Twilight of Honor, 1963) who regularly disports semi-naked rather than Mimieux. Chamberlain took the opportunity to boost his burgeoning singing career, crooning the movie theme song. Although the undoubted star, it was Mimieux, though lumbered with an Irish accent, who took the acting plaudits.
Sally Benson (a career stretching from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, 1943, to Viva Las Vegas, 1964) and Alfred Hayes (The Double Man, 1967) wrote the screenplay from the Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) bestseller. Features one of the lesser-known scores of Bernard Herrman (Marnie, 1964) but you will instantly recognize swelling strings that wouldn’t be out of place in an obsessional Hitchcock piece.
An enjoyable picture, batting above average, almost Tarantino-esque in concentrating on character at the expense of story. Sure, there’s no equivalent to foreign hamburgers, but there is some quirky dialog and it’s worth it just to see what Mimieux can do when given the opportunity.
Seems easier to get hold of the Richard Chamberlain album than the movie, but it must be on streaming somewhere, it was on YouTube at one point so may return there.
It could as easily have been Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments, 1956) in the director’s chair. And Yul Brynner (The Magnificent Seven, 1960) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim, 1962) as the stars.
The Barabbas tale had already been plundered before Swedish novelist Par Lagerkvist published his relatively short bestseller – only 144 pages – in 1950. An earlier novel of the same name by Emery Bekessy hit American bookstalls at the height of the mid-1940s religious cycle kicked off by Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St Mary’s (1945). DeMille – whose portfolio included Biblical epics The Ten Commandments (1923), King of Kings (1927) and The Sign of the Cross (1932) – was in competition with British producer Alexander Korda to buy the rights.
While that production never entered production, just to confuse matters a British film, Now Barabbas, based on a successful West End play and with no Biblical element, was released in 1949.
Swedish director Alf Sjoberg (Miss Julie, 1951), twice winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, turned the Lagerkvist book into a black-and-white film in 1953, the first Swedish picture to be dubbed into English.
A bigger-budgeted version, piggybacking on the success of Ben-Hur (1959), was the brainchild of Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis who had pacted with Hollywood studio Columbia on a four-picture slate worth $17 million, the bulk of which, $10 million, was to be spent on Barabbas “with a cast of thousands headed by some of the biggest names in motion pictures.”
“Hollywood on the Tiber” was producing movies at a record rate – topping 200 a year – and De Laurentiis, who had shot to fame with Bitter Rice (1949) starring future wife Silvana Mangano and Fellini’s La Strada (1954) was intent on gaining a foothold in America beyond the arthouse market. Producing King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956) for Paramount had not done the trick and the Columbia slate was a last-ditch attempt to break into the Hollywood game.
Hollywood had originally invested in Europe to take advantage of tax breaks or to access monies frozen by countries after the Second World War, but by the 1960s the continent had become more attractive as a cheaper production alternative. While Britain had been a substantial recipient of Hollywood largesse, Italy was fast catching up as the chosen locale for pictures as varied as Cleopatra (1963), The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
Director Richard Fleischer’s career was at a curious impasse. The son of world-famous animator Max Flesicher, creator of the Popeye cartoons, Richard had won critical acclaim for low-budget thriller The Narrow Margin (1951), followed up with a pair of stupendous action hits, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954) and The Vikings (1958), both starring Kirk Douglas, and a daring examination of the world’s first “thrill killing” Compulsion (1959) with Orson Welles.
But he was at loggerheads with Twentieth Century Fox, to whom he was contractually tied, having turned down North to Alaska (1960) with John Wayne. As a result, he was relegated to lesser projects, Crack in the Mirror (1960), again with Orson, and The Big Gamble (1961), a picture with virtually no stars unless you count the questionable marquee value of Juliette Greco and Irishman Stephen Boyd trying to capitalize on his success in Ben-Hur (1959).
“Holdover” also meant it was not playing as a roadshow. In the roadshow exhibition situation, a cinema would be required to play a movie for an agreed number of weeks, generally a minimum of eight or thirteen. Non-roadshow films relied on box office performance for the length of their run, the engagement extended week-by-week.
He had been on Dino De Laurentiis’ radar before, approached to helm War and Peace, circumstances dictating otherwise, and a $10 million project, a 70mm roadshow, presented an ideal opportunity to resuscitate his moribund career. As Fleischer put it, “Even if I had loved Darryl (F. Zanuck, the legendary Fox producer of The Big Gamble), I would gladly have jilted him for this assignment.”
Despite the promise of the budget, the reality was off-putting. The De Laurentiis studio was housed in a “dreary industrial slum” and consisted of a two-storey wooden building housing the offices and “three decaying stages.” However, there was little downbeat about De Laurentiis, “an impeccably tailored bundle of raw energy,” according to Fleischer, “the impact of meeting him for the first time is something akin to sticking your finger into an electric light socket.”
The Italian producer possessed a quality that was appreciated in Hollywood, especially among old-school mavens. He was a showman. He could drum up publicity at the drop of a hat. His first publicity coup was hiring French star Jeanne Moreau, at the time considered one of the few foreign actresses who need not rely on buxom figure, as the female lead. Her arrival in Rome for pre-production prerequisites such as costume and make-up testing induced a flurry of front pages. A mob of about 30 reporters almost prevented any testing. “Even though the tests were purely mechanical, she became the character in the script the moment the camera turned,” observed Fleischer.
Unfortunately, De Laurentiis had no intention of hiring her, not when he had wife Silvana Mangano at home. The press reaction to Moreau might have suggested he was backing the wrong horse, despite Mangano’s own marquee appeal, but he appeared delighted to have achieved a publicity coup, no matter that he had manipulated and duped a great actress and the director.
De Laurentiis pursued Yul Brynner for the titular role, a suggestion with which the director was in accord. This was the real thing, attempted recruitment not just a publicity gag. Until Charlton Heston muscled in with Ben-Hur, Brynner was the go-to actor for historical epics, The Ten Commandments (1956) making him an instant star, a position solidified with an Oscar for The King and I (1956) and commanding a $750,000 payday, on a par with john Wayne and William Holden.
Brynner was initially disinclined to play the role but after a day in discussion with Fleischer they shook hands on a deal only to have it torpedoed by De Laurentiis.
Scriptwriters Christopher Fry, famed English playwright but novice screenwriter, Nigel Balchin (The Man Who Never Was, 1956) and Diego Fabbri (The Corsican Brothers, 1961) were recruited with De Laurentiis reporting that they were “currently at work after having studied the material at length.” Later added to the roster was Italian Nobel prize-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo. Not trusting the producer to stick to the text, Lagerkvist assigned his son as overseer, a tactic that singularly failed to work.
Still lacking a male lead, De Laurentiis announced the movie would start shooting on January 7, 1961, with French pair Jeanne Moreau and Simone Signoret (Room at the Top, 1958) in the top female roles, neither of whom were ultimately involved.
Despite two Oscars as Best Supporting Actor, Anthony Quinn (Guns for San Sebastian, 1968) had failed to reach the top echelons of Hollywood stardom, stuck in the rut of male lead to top-billed female or starring in lower-budgeted pictures. To rectify the situation, he had embarked on a project intended to provide a prestigious showcase for his acting skills. He had signed up to play opposite Laurence Olivier in the Broadway production of Jean Anouilh’s acclaimed play Becket.
He had to be prised away from the Broadway run by De Laurentiis who forked out $37,500 in compensation and guaranteed the actor time off halfway through the shoot to fulfil a commitment to Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In fact, Becket, while attracting good notices, was a Broadway flop, the production only going into the black as a result of the De Laurentiis pay-off.
The all-star cast never materialized. But there was prestige aplenty, three members of the cast Oscar winners, another trio nominees. Vittorio Gassman (Ghosts of Rome, 1961) was at best a rising star, marquee value restricted to Italy. Jack Palance (Shane, 1953), was better known in Italy than the U.S., having spent the previous five years in Italy and now attempting a Hollywood comeback as a director. He was signed to play the notorious gladiator intent on killing Barabbas in combat. Ernest Borgnine (The Vikings) was still clinging on to vestiges of stardom after unexpectedly winning the Best Actor Oscar for Marty (1955). His wife Katy Jurado (High Noon, 1952) remained a starlet. Despite a bout of Oscar nominations in the supporting actor category Arthur Kennedy (Elmer Gantry) and never-nominated Harry Andrews (Solomon and Sheba, 1959) were no more than character actors.
It would have been impossible to make Barabbas on the tiny studio De Laurentiis owned so, encouraged by tax breaks, he invested in hundreds of acres of cheap land to build a new state-of-the art studio. But when Fleischer first saw it, it was nothing but a barren wasteland. Even so it was in these empty fields that production designer Mario Chiari would construct the ancient world.
Over several hours, simply by pointing his finger in vague directions, the pair came up with over 100 buildings, and the sets for Jerusalem and the Praetorium. The movie already had its arena – the 2,000-year-old structure in Verona – which would double for the Rome Colosseum. The complicated gladiatorial spectacle was the first sequence to be shot, with a world-record 9,115 costumed extras, arriving on a fleet on 75 buses from nearby towns. The only obstacle to rolling the cameras: Anthony Quinn’s specially designed gladiator sandals had been left behind in Rome. A temporary pair were mocked up so the first shot could be completed before lunch.
On the second day of shooting occurred a Hollywood fairy story. Looking for good characters to focus on in the crowd “one face truly stood out, that of an eighteen-year-old girl of stunning beauty.” The daughter of an officer at a U.S. military base in Vicenza, her name was Sharon Tate. Shortly afterwards, she moved in with Jack Palance, and not too long after that she was on the Hollywood glory trail prior to her premature death.
Another mishap threatened to spoil the scene where Quinn and Gassman, playing prisoners in the sulphur mine, were going to be chained together. The location was the top of Mount Etna in Sicily. On hand were 500 extras dressed as Roman slaves. It was a Sunday since that was the only day the roads would be clear enough to transport so many people and all the equipment up the two-hour drive from Catania up the twisty route.
The weather was terrible, the sky so black, the volcanic cinder ground a perfect match, with barely enough light to get an exposure. The only section of the scene unrehearsed was the riveting of the chains. And that required charcoal. But someone had forgotten the charcoal. A race down the mountain to bring back the charcoal took till the afternoon. But just as the charcoal arrived there was a break in the clouds and a spot of perfect light. It lasted just long enough for the shot to be taken.
The solar eclipse was no special effect. It was actually taking place on February 15, 1961, and Fleischer had cameras in place to record the phenomenon, the only genuinely ethereal scene in a movie that was more concerned with realism. The burning of Rome was also filmed “in camera,” the sets consumed in one take in one night.
While there were other occasional production errors, Fleischer found the Italian crew as professional as he required. And as accommodating. One day he was informed the crew had to go on strike for one hour. But after consultation with the director, the crew was happy to strike during the lunch break.
Even with a schedule rearranged to include Quinn’s time away filming Lawrence of Arabia (1962), shooting went smoothly with no overages or budget-blowing.
The production faced other threats. The 1953 version, already conveniently dubbed, was being reissued. There was a television production called Give Us, Barabbas, and a new play was launched off-Broadway by Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, all of which could have stolen the limelight.
The movie followed an unusual distribution pattern. Launched in Italy at the tail end of 1961 to big box office it was another six months before it made a mark in London. In June 1962 it was the opening presentation for a new cinema, the Odeon Haymarket in London’s West End, a 600-seat underground emporium set up to take advantage of the demand for hard-ticket roadshow venues. The premises had not operated as a cinema since 1939 when it had been known for a short period as the Gaumont. It was only the second cinema built in London since the Second World War, the other being the Columbia in Shaftesbury Ave which had opened in 1959. In separate-performance advance-booking format, and tickets priced at $1.05-$2.80, Barabbas would remain at the Odeon for over six months.
It didn’t reach the United States – at the DeMille in New York – until October and even then was beaten to the North American punch by the 2,318-seat Odeon Carlton in Toronto, the largest cinema to enter the roadshow arena. And although available as a 70mm roadshow, in most locations it was more likely to be presented in 35mm minus the separate performances that were the hallmark of the prestigious hard-ticket presentation.
Columbia created some enterprising marketing concepts for the U.S. launch, including a touring exhibit by six well-known painters who had all used the film as the basis of artworks. A 41-foot high float including a 10-foot high revolving figure of Barabbas had been seen by 1.2 million people when paraded through Los Angeles. A special 190-page “making of” book was published in hardback. Six months after launch, the film was promoted as a “Special Lenten Presentation” in local cinemas with prices increased by 25 cents.
Although a huge success in native Italy and generally well-received at the international box office, Barabbas came up short in the U.S., rentals barely hitting $3 million, earning a lowly 35th place in the annual chart.
SOURCES: Richard Fleischer, Just Tell Me When To Cry, A Memoir (Carroll & Graf, 1993) p217-226; “Another Religious Picture May Be Barabbas Novel,” Variety, December 4, 1946, p4; “Now Barabbas Was A Robber,” Variety, June 1, 1949, p1; “First Swedish Picture Dubbed Into English,” Variety, June 23, 1954, p4; “Swedish Barabbas,” Variety, June 1, 1960, p4; “Lagerkvist, Nobel Winner, Assigns Son To Rome As Watchman on Barabbas,” Variety, December 14, 1960, p17; advert, Variety, January 4, 1961, p71; “Barabbas Budget over $10,000,000,” Variety, February 15, 1961, p3; “Dino De Laurentiis No 1 Indie Producer?,” Variety, February 15, 1961, p24; “Figure $17,500 for Off-Broadway Barabbas,” Variety, February 15, 1961, p71; advert, Variety, April 26, 1961, p71; “Becket Got 37½G On Quinn’s Exit,” Variety, May 3, 1961, p83; “Becket Folds As 40G Sleeper; Had Seemed Prestige-Only Flop,” Variety, May 31, 1961, p59; “Quinn Back To Work in Barabbas,” Variety, October 11, 1961, p17; “No Time To Fiddle in Rome,” Variety, November 15, 1961, p1; “To Write Barabbas Dialog,” Box Office, November 27, 1961, pW6; “Canada Coin,” Variety, March 21, 1962, p40; “Barabbas Exhibits Start Key City Tour,” Box Office, March 26, 1962, pE8; “Barabbas London Event: New York Date Oct 10,” Box Office, June 11, 1962, p14; “Barabbas Premiere Set For Oct 4 in Toronto,” Box Office, July 23, 1962, pE8; “Hard Cover Book to Ballyhoo Barabbas,” Box Office, July 30, 1962, p10; “Palance Back, Try Directing,” Variety, October 17, 1963, p3; “Big Barabbas Float,” Box Office, January 4, 1963, pA1; advert, Variety, January 23, 1963, p27; “Barabbas at Eight,” Box Office, February 18, 1963, pK2; “Lenten Angle for Barabbas Date,” Variety, March 13, 1963, p17; “Top Rental Features of 1963,” Variety, June 8, 1964, p37.
The Magnificent 60s 