Brian Hannan

Sinful Davey (1969) **

Major disappointment from a director of the caliber of John Huston. Granted, the quality of his output during the decade had been variable but this marked a new low and the suspicion lingers that he only took on the gig to spend time in Ireland – the movie was filmed there – where he had set up a home in the grand manner of a country squire. Equally odd is James Webb as screenwriter. Having chronicled the American West via How the West Was Won (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Webb had turned his attention to British history, beginning with Alfred the Great (1968).

But where that had at least historical reality to guide the narrative, here Webb relies on the dubious autobiography of the titular subject, resulting in an episodic, picaresque, sub-Tom Jones (1963) and even sub-Where’s Jack? (1969) tale set in the Scottish Highlands. And much as John Hurt later achieved considerable recognition for his acting, the role, as played, could have been handled just as easily by any number of rising male stars, since, beyond being able to affect two accents – broad Scots and upper-class English – little is required.

In fact, the director clearly couldn’t distinguish between the Irish and the Scottish accent as among the joblot of accents, none more than serviceable, there is many an Irish lilt. As if to make the point that he couldn’t care less, you will also discern on the soundtrack a refrain from “Danny Boy.”

Beyond that it made a good scene, quite why Davey Haggart (John Hurt) decided to announce his desertion from the British Army in such ostentatious manner is difficult to understand. He’s a drummer, marching along, banging said drum, when he takes it into his head to jump off the nearest bridge into the nearest river, complete with drum, only to find himself headed for a mill. In possibly the best line in the script, seeing the mill wheel blocking his escape, he mutters, “Who put that there?”

From here on it’s a tale of pursuit – two actually. Lawman Richardson (Nigel Davenport) leads the merry chase but he’s also got childhood sweetheart Annie (Pamela Franklin) on his tail to ease him out of scrapes in the hope that he’ll reform. Beginning as a pickpocket, he switches to highway robbery and piracy, rarely with particular success. Loaded down with booty on the carriage he has stolen, for example, he loses control of the horses and is left at the side of the road, as poor as when he started.

He’s certainly inventive but contemporary audiences will recoil from the notion of using the head a height-challenged man aloft another’s shoulders to test the rotting rafters inside a jail, leading not to escape but to a home-made pleasure parlor, since it provides entry to the female jail above where our hero establishes himself as a pimp.

But that’s as inventive as this picture gets and in the manner of Cat Ballou and Where’s Jack? you know that whenever a hero heads towards the gallows you can be sure the hanging will be thwarted. The period setting – the 1820s – offers little assistance, as the picture could be set any time before the invention of steam, and could as easily have taken place in a galaxy far far away long long ago called Brigadoon for all the period authenticity shown.

This didn’t lead to instant stardom for John Hurt and possibly just as well as he’d have been wasted in a series of ingenue roles. Pamela Franklin (And Soon the Darkness, 1970) doesn’t have much to do beyond trying to master a Scottish accent. Nigel Davenport (Play Dirty, 1968) was in his element playing yet another frosty authoritarian figure.

John Huston (Night of the Iguana, 1964) did prove one thing – that he lacked the knack for comedy.

Suspect / The Risk (1960) ****

Marvellous long-forgotten character-driven espionage drama exploring the twin themes of guilt and duty. It would appear to be stolen by two supporting actors, Ian Bannen and Thorley Walters, but in fact both play roles that have significant bearing not only on the narrative but on our understanding of the most important characters. Not only do we have the main plot, but we also have two well-worked sub-plots, one concerning disability and the other of more sinister relevance – a 1984 Big Brother theme.

Basic tale concerns a laboratory that has discovered a bacteria that can cure plague. Hopes of a celebratory drink all-round and academic kudos on publishing his paper for top boffin Professor Sewell (Peter Cushing) are dashed when the Government in the shape of the pompous Sir George Gatling (Raymond Huntly) steps in, steals the discovery and makes the staff sign the Official Secrets Act.

*Romance No 1 – Virginia Maskell and Tony Britton in the lab*.

While the revered professor takes it on the chin, colleague Bob Marriott (Tony Britton) is outraged so vocally in public that he attracts the attention of the shady Brown (Donald Pleasance) who suggests to the dupe that there is a way of getting the information out to the wider scientific community, especially to plague-ridden countries.

However, don’t let Sir George’s pomposity fool you. He doesn’t trust this bunch an inch and puts the Secret Service on their tail to assess “the risk” and we dip into the dark kind of web (not that kind of dark web) and the mundane business of deception and betrayal shortly to be explored by the likes of John Le Carre (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, published in 1963) and Len Deighton (The Ipcress File, published a year earlier).

Rather than this outfit being headed by a version of the prim George Smiley, Mr Prince (Thorley Waters) has a lot more in common with the unkempt Jackson Lamb of the Slow Horses series. His incompetence is an act to make visitors to his shambles of an office under-estimate him. But he’s got that Columbo knack of asking the most important question just when an interviewee thinks the interview is over.

Also in the background, coming more increasingly into the foreground, is an unusual love triangle between colleagues Bob and Lucy Byrne (Virginia Maskell), who kiss and hold hands in the cinema, and Lucy’s flatmate, the disabled war vet Alan Andrews (Ian Bannen). The fact that Lucy and Alan live together at a time when such a relationship was frowned upon and would be career death in certain circles and that they were once engaged to be married gives it an edge. That Alan has lost an arm and a hand so needs to be cared for – fed (as in food spooned into his mouth), washed (you can guess that aspect), cigarette lit and removed between puffs, dressed – suggests significant intimacy for an adult.

Obviously, she’s the kind of lass who couldn’t abandon him to the welfare system, and he’s the kind of man who broke off their engagement so she wouldn’t feel tied to him for the rest of her life. But he also hates what he’s become, his desperate reliance on her, what he’s lost, and that’s turned him into not just a bitter individual but a particularly cunning one, who has developed the trick of torpedoing any nascent romance. “You can’t compete,” he gloats to Bob, “because you can’t make her feel good.”

*Romance No 2 – Ian Bannen and Virginia Maskell.*

But when that doesn’t work, he befriends Bob and surreptitiously eggs him on to betray his country and in so doing, hopefully, kill off the romance.

Mr Prince is a delight. Accorded the best lines, he makes great use of them. When his subordinate Slater (Sam Kydd) abrasively brings Dr Shole (Kenneth Griffith) in for questioning, he reprimands him with the rather coy, “Oh, you haven’t been rough again.” To Dr Shole (Kenneth Griffith), the most susceptible of the professor’s acolytes, he warns, “Tell him (Sewell) not to be a fool or you’ll smack him on the backside.” Though Dr Shole has a superb retort, “We’re not exactly on those terms.”

Professor Sewell appears mostly on the back foot. While quietly seething at being denied his professional day in the sun, he accepts duty. Even so, he’s smart enough to outwit Prince when the traitor is caught.

The background of the wheels-within-wheels of Government, the silent overseeing of ordinary lives, the authorized level of spying, comes as something of a shock, since despite George Orwell’s best efforts Big Brother was seen as a clever fiction that could not occur in this most democratic and upright of countries where “fair play” was the rule. Visually, this is well done, we see eavesdroppers in mirrors in pubs and, as I said, Prince seems the least effective of operatives but with the kind of personality that you could easily have built a series around.

Disability from war was a constant of post-war British pictures, most often demonstrated by a character with a limp, as with general dogsbody Arthur (Spike Milligan) here. The Oscar-winning The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was the most effective at dealing with the physical after-effects of the Second World War. But there, the worst-affected soldier, had prosthetic hands. Here, Alan does not, so the scenes of him being tended to by Lucy are emotionally more powerful.

She tends to his emotions, too, and will embrace him and kiss him on the mouth though he’s not dumb enough to read true romantic commitment into those demonstrations of affection. Clearly, there is emotional residue from their engagement, from which you guess she will ultimately be unable to entangle herself, unless he can find a more brutal way of helping her out of the dilemma.

The lab aspect is surprisingly well done. We don’t get any real information on the scientific breakthrough. Mostly, what we view is the grunt work, the laborious checking of thousands of samples for another experiment. At one point Bob thrusts his arm into a contraption packed with buzzing flies as if he was a competitor in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.

Ian Bannen (The Flight of the Phoenix, 1965) is the standout but character actor Thorley Waters (Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, 1962) runs him close. Tony Britton (better known later for television comedy) has the least interesting role, but Virginia Maskell (Interlude, 1968) has too much to do without dialog to demonstrate her dilemma. Peter Cushing (The Skull, 1965) is solid as always and Spike Milligan provides light relief.

Joint direction by the Boulting Brothers (The Family Way, 1967), Roy and John. Screenplay by Nigel Balchin (Circle of Deception, 1960) based on his own novel.

Exceptionally solid stuff. I was very much taken by the unusual approach, the themes and the acting.

Worth a look.

A Home of Your Own (1964) ***

The phrase “classic silent British comedy” isn’t one that naturally trips off the tongue. Add in “of the 1960s” and you can guarantee furrowed brows. Thanks to the boom in recycling Hollywood silent classics in the early 1960s there was a subsequent mini-boom in what were called “wordless” pictures, as if using the term “silent” was blasphemous. The oddity is that so many emerged from Britain, primarily in shortened format – not more than one hour long – as the second feature in a double bill.

Blame for this development lay in the hands of producer and later writer and later still director Bob Kellett, Britain’s unsung comedy king.

A Home of Your Own is beautifully structured, following the mishaps in building a block of new apartments. A credit sequence covers the stultifying bureaucracy involved, so that what was a pristine site at the beginning of the endeavor turns into a waterlogged dump before the first brick is laid. Sight gags and slapstick abound with mostly everyone getting in each other’s way, or not, the traditional approach of the work-shy British builder being to provide an audience for someone else to dig up a road or a trench.

No paddle goes unsplashed, mud only exists to drench people, and in pursuit of comedy gold most of building materials end up misused. The gatekeeper’s main job is to make tea and there is naturally a union official whose chief task is to obstruct.

Pick of the gags is Ronnie Barker’s laying of cement, delivered with exquisite comedy timing, followed by Bernard Cribbin’s stonemason delicately chiseling out a plaque only to discover at the end in a laugh-out-loud moment that he has misspelled one word, and the carpenter who appropriates the closest implement with which to stir his tea. Some of the jokes grow legs – the morning tea break, a ham-fisted carpenter, the pipe-smoking architect arriving in a sports car, and a patch of ground on the road outside constantly being dug up by different contractors representing water board, gas, electricity.

Once the building is complete, the job taking long enough for the aspiring apartment-owner, a mere fiancé at the outset, to lift his wife over the threshold accompanied by three kids. Any sense of personal accomplishment – the British thirst for owning property quenched – is undercut by problems the young couple now face thanks to the workmanship we have witnessed.

All this is accompanied by a very inventive Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron, 1964) score which provides brilliant musical cues. As a bonus, the film features a roll-call of television comedy superstars including Ronnie Barker (The Two Ronnies, 1971-1987), Richard Briers (The Good Life, 1975-1978) and Bill Fraser (Bootsie and Snudge, 1960-1974). Peter Butterworth and Bernard Cribbins were Carry On alumni. Janet Brown achieved later fame as an impressionist while Tony Tanner hit Broadway as the star of Half a Sixpence before expanding his career to choreographer-director, Tony nominated for Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

A Home of Your Own went out as the support to the Boulting Brothers’ comedy Rotten to the Core (1964) which gave a debut to Charlotte Rampling. Despite being effectively a B-film, primarily made to take advantage of the Eady Levy (a cashback guarantee for producers), A Home of Your Own was surprisingly successful. “Will delight arthouse patrons” commented Box Office magazine in America (“Review,” October 4, 1965, p160) as British comedy films in those days tended to end up in the arthouses. In part, this was because it was the official British entry to the Berlin Film Festival. It was distributed there by Cinema V in a double bill with Rotten to the Core and launched in what was misleadingly called a “world premiere engagement” at the prestigious Cinema 1 in New York.

Jay Lewis (Live Now, Pay Later, 1962) directed and co-wrote, along with Johnny Whyte. Kellett continued in this enterprising vein with the 55-minute San Ferry Ann (1965) – which he wrote – about a group of British holidaymakers going abroad and the 49-minute Futtock’s End (1970) – which he directed – featuring a bunch of guests descending on an ancient country house owned by Ronnie Barker.

Television stars showcased in these two featurettes included Wilfred Bramble (Steptoe and Son, 1962-1974), Rodney Bewes (The Likely Lads, 1964-1966), Warren Mitchell (Till Death Do Us Part, 1965-1975) and Richard O’Sullivan (Man About the House, 1973-1976). Ron Moody composed the Oscar-winning Oliver! (1968) while Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor made their names in the Carry On series and theatrical knight Sir Michael Hordern appeared in Khartoum (1965) and Where Eagles Dare, 1968.

Though disdained by critics, Kellett went on to become by far the most influential British comedy director of the 1970s. His output included the Frankie Howerd trilogy Up Pompeii (1971), Up the Chastity Belt (1972) and Up the Front (1972), as well as The Alf Garnett Saga (1972). He was well ahead of his time with the transgender comedy Girl Stroke Boy (1972) and female impersonator Danny La Rue in Our Miss Fred (1972).

Fun.

Two for the Road (1967) ***

This film had everything. The cast was pure A-list: Oscar winner Audrey Hepburn (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) and Oscar nominee Albert Finney (Tom Jones, 1963). The direction was in the capable hands of Stanley Donen (Arabesque, 1966), working with Hepburn again after the huge success of thriller Charade (1963). The witty sophisticated script about the marriage between ambitious architect Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) and teacher wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) unravelling over a period of a dozen years had been written by Frederic Raphael, who had won the Oscar for his previous picture, Darling (1965). Composer Henry Mancini was not only responsible for Breakfast at Tiffany’s – for which he collected a brace of Oscars – but also Charade and Arabesque. And the setting was France at its most fabulous.

So what went wrong? You could start with the flashbacks. The movie zips in and out of about half a dozen different time periods and it’s hard to keep up. We go from the meet-cute to a road trip on their own and another with some irritating American friends to Finney being unfaithful on his own and then Hepburn caught out in a clandestine relationship and finally the couple making a stab at resolving their relationship. I may have got mixed up with what happened when, it was that kind of picture.

A linear narrative might have helped, but not much, because their relationship jars from the start. Mark is such a boor you wonder what the attraction is. His idea of turning on the charm is a Humphrey Bogart imitation. There are some decent lines and some awful ones, but the dialog too often comes across as epigrammatic instead of the words just flowing. It might have worked as a drama delineating the breakdown of a marriage and it might have worked as a comedy treating marriage as an absurdity but the comedy-drama mix fails to gel.

It’s certainly odd to see a sophisticated writer relying for laughs on runaway cars that catch fire and burn out a building or the annoying whiny daughter of American couple Howard (William Daniels) and Cathy (Eleanor Bron) and a running joke about Mark always losing his passport.

And that’s shame because it starts out on the right foot. The meet-cute is well-done and for a while it looks as though Joanna’s friend Jackie (Jacqueline Bisset) will hook Mark until chicken pox intervenes. But the non-linear flashbacks ensure that beyond Mark overworking we are never sure what causes the marriage breakdown. The result is almost a highlights or lowlights reel. And the section involving Howard and Cathy is overlong. I kept on waiting for the film to settle down but it never did, just whizzed backwards or forwards as if another glimpse of their life would do the trick, and somehow make the whole coalesce. And compared to the full-throttle marital collapse of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) this was lightweight stuff, skirting round too many fundamental issues.

It’s worth remembering that in movie terms Finney was inexperienced, just three starring roles and two cameos to his name, so the emotional burden falls to Hepburn. Finney is dour throughout while Hepburn captures far more of the changes their life involves. Where he seems at times only too happy to be shot of his wife, she feels more deeply the loss of what they once had as the lightness she displays early on gives way to brooding.

Hepburn as fashion icon gets in the way of the picture and while some of the outfits she wears, not to mention the sunglasses, would not have been carried off by anyone else they are almost a sideshow and add little to the thrust of the film.

If you pay attention you can catch a glimpse, not just of Jacqueline Bissett (The Sweet Ride, 1968) but Romanian star Nadia Gray (The Naked Runner, 1967), Judy Cornwell (The Wild Racers, 1968) in her debut and Olga Georges-Picot (Farewell, Friend, 1968). In more substantial parts are William Daniels (The Graduate, 1968), English comedienne Eleanor Bron (Help!, 1965) woefully miscast as an American, and Claude Dauphin (Grand Prix, 1966).

Hepburn’s million-dollar fee helped put the picture’s budget over $5 million, but it only brought in $3 million in U.S. rentals, although the Hepburn name may have nudged it towards the break-even point worldwide.

An oddity that doesn’t add up.

Sweeney! (1977) ****

The two-fisted trigger-happy cops that had changed the Hollywood landscape since Clint Eastwood burst onto the scene hadn’t found much correlation in the small-screen. Television producers were particularly averse to violence and even a new generation of sleuths were only a tad above the cosy crime of previous decades. Since James Bond easily covered the random killing aspect in British movies, there seemed little room for anyone else.

Sweeney! (1977), a speedy spin-off from a successful British independent television series, proved them wrong, the movie censor permitting considerably more leeway on the violence front. These cops are just itching to lay a hand on gangsters and, as if transplanted from Chicago, bring baseball bats and pistols to a fight.

The action only slows down when the subplot gets mired in delivering a political message about big business and corruption or when one of the characters has to take time out to explain the meaning of the title. Turns out there’s a sneaky high-end operator Elliott McQueen (Barry Foster) who runs a string of high-class sex workers to hook politicians like Charles Baker (Ian Bannen). When Baker’s girlfriend Janice (Lynda Bellingham) ends up in the mortuary – suicide the official verdict – McQueen applies pressure to get an oil deal done.

Baker’s gals are expert in what these days would be known as providing the “Girlfriend Experience” though the blokes they service aren’t the ones paying. But a police informant, soft on Janice, believes she was murdered and calls in Detective Inspector Jack Regan (John Thaw) to informally investigate.

When Regan treads on McQueen’s toes it triggers a spate of violence. First the informant is blown away by a machine gun from thugs disguised as coppers. Then a nosy journalist (Colin Welland) is blown up. Then Regan is stitched up and suspended from duty. Naturally, Regan persists with a surreptitious investigation. But the thugs aren’t so covert and he interrupts a gangland hit on Bianca (Diane Keen), another of the “girlfriends” who knows too much.

Not much detection required, really, when the criminals are so open about their criminality and even the most high-ranking politician or sanctimonious cop is going to find it hard to let machine-gun-toting gangsters roam through London. So there’s plenty bloody action and quite a clever pay-off.

The rampant violence in British cinema earlier in the decade had been confined to the gangsters of Get Carter (1970) and Villain (1971) and to pictures wrapped in halos of critical protection such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Straw Dogs (1971). Sweeney! ushered in a new era, when cops could adopt the same methods as criminals.

Regan was the rumpled cop, his sidekick Det Sgt Carter (Dennis Waterman) theoretically the more handsome, except his boss had as much success with women. What both were best at was riling superiors and arguing with everyone. You’d need a good grasp of the various policing departments to keep up – here we have Special Branch and The Flying Squad (The Sweeney) and ordinary coppers.

The predilection for selective use of Cockney rhyming slang was a feature of the British crime picture. Flying Squad translated as Sweeney Todd and was then truncated to The Sweeney. Oddly enough there was no rhyme for Special Branch and Scotland Yard, despite the advent of The Shard, has not made its way onto the rhyming dictionary.

British studios had increasingly turned to television as production levels tumbled, but generally in the comedy genre, Up Pompeii (1971), On the Buses (1971) and Steptoe and Son (1972), plus vaious sequels, registering the biggest box office.

John Thaw and sidekick Dennis Waterman proved to be long-term stalwarts of British television, the former heading up Redcap (1964), The Sweeney (1975-1978), Inspector Morse (1987-2000) and Kavanagh QC (1995-2001), the latter following The Sweeney with Minder (1979-1989) and New Tricks (2003-2015). Diane Keen starred in The Feathered Serpent (1976-1978), The Cuckoo Waltz (1975-1980), Rings on their Fingers (1978-1980), Foxy Lady (1982-1984), You Must Be the Husband (1987-1988) and various others. Lynda Bellingham, in a bit part as a naked corpse, would become a favorite through a long-running commercial.

By this time Britain had also produced a core of strong supporting actors, not of the quality of the previous generation of Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud, but with a considerable portfolio behind them, Barry Foster second-billed in Frenzy (1972), Ian Bannen Oscar-nominated in The Flight of the Phoenix (1966).

Directed with huge enjoyment by David Wickes in his movie debut from a screenplay by Ranald Graham (Shanks, 1974) and Ian Kennedy Martin (Mitchell, 1975).

Gotcha!

A Study in Terror (1965) ****

Excepting Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), the world’s most famous fictional detective had been absent from the big screen for over two decades so it seemed an inspired decision to set him on the trail of the world’s most infamous serial killer. The result is high-class comfort food, classic deduction coupled with barbaric murders in a fog-bound London replete with cobbled streets, Dickensian urchins and sex workers apop with cleavage and corset. Throw in sensitivity towards the abject poverty of the period, female exploitation and a nod towards an upper-class cover-up and you have a movie with a surprisingly contemporary outlook.

This is a tougher Holmes, handy with his fists, sporting a spring-loaded blade in his walking stick. The investigation draws in the Prime Minister (Cecil Parker) and the Home Secretary (Dudley Foster) as well as Sherlock’s pompous brother Myron (Robert Morley) and the ubiquitous Inspector LeStrade (Frank Finlay).

Pretty quickly it is Suspects Assemble. Due to a scalpel being the murderer’s instrument of choice, doctors are immediately implicated, the most likely candidate the philanthropic Dr Murray (Anthony Quayle) who operates s soup kitchen. Publican Max Steiner (Peter Carsten), with a sideline in blackmail, is another possibility. And there is the mysterious disinherited son of a lord, Michael Osborne, who has married sex worker Angela (Adrienne Corri).

As ever, the plot is complicated by red herrings and sleights of cinematic hand. But the highlight of a Holmes picture is the sleuth’s mastery of deduction based on clues missed by the ordinary mortal and every now and then the story grinds to a halt to allow time for the detective to demonstrate genius. Occasionally he dons a disguise. And thoroughly enjoyable these scenes are before he gets down to the main business of uncovering the killer.

A Study in Terror introduces social depth to the Holmes saga. When the crimes focus the media spotlight on Whitechapel Dr Murray draws attention to the constant “murder by poverty” ignored by the state. Female exploitation is of course the norm in the sex worker business and small wonder that such women are easy targets for the Ripper and although that is an overdone trope in this case a different angle comes into play.

Shakespearian actor John Neville (Oscar Wilde, 1960) handles the main character with considerable aplomb with Donald Houston (The Blue Lagoon,1949) as his often baffled sidekick Watson. Robert Morley (Genghis Khan, 1965) is a splendid Mycroft although Anthony Quayle (East of Sudan, 1964) fails to nail down his Scottish accent.

The considerable supporting cast includes Judi Dench making her second film appearance, Barbara Windsor of Carry On fame, John Fraser (Operation Crossbow, 1965), John Cairney (Jason and the Argonauts, 1963), Peter Carsten (Dark of the Sun, 1968), singer Georgia Brown (Nancy in the original stage production of Oliver!), Edina Ronay (The Black Torment, 1964), Corin Redgrave (The Girl with the Pistol, 1968), former British leading lady Kay Walsh (Oliver Twist, 1948) and future television comedy writer Jeremy Lloyd (Are You Being Served?, 1972-1985).

The picture was unusual in that it was not drawn from the existing Holmes stories but as an original devised by Derek and Donald Ford (The Black Torment), the former going onto a more extensive career as a director of British sexploitation pictures such as Suburban Wives (1972). Production company Sir Nigel Films had been set up to exploit the Holmes legacy.

Director James Hill (The Kitchen, 1961) had won an Oscar for the short Giuseppina (1960) and was a year away from his breakthrough Born Free. Given the low-budget this is a highly watchable picture.

Where Were You When The Lights Went Out (1968) **

Of the 25 million stories you could have chosen when New York and the surrounding area was hit by an electricity blackout in the mid-1960s, you could have elected for something more interesting than this farce-style comedy that after the opening sections resembles nothing more than a stage play. But that’s because, somewhat surprisingly, it is based on a play and one concerning not the great fracas in the Big Apple but a similar occurrence in Paris almost a decade before. Once you know that, the farce element makes sense, but not much else does.

The three constituent parts that eventually coalesce into little more than a collage of double takes and startled expressions are: thwarted businessman Waldo (Robert Morse) making off with a couple of million bucks; Broadway star Margaret (Doris Day) finding architect husband Peter (Patrick O’Neal) in a clinch with journalist Roberta (Lola Albright); and impresario Ladislaus (Terry-Thomas), the most English-sounding Eastern European you ever came across, terrified Margaret is going to quit his play.

The lights going out malarkey is an ill-judged MacGuffin so that all except Roberta can end up in a classy Connecticut apartment and get into a quandary about who loves who and who’s cheating on who and career choices to be made. It’s pretty hard work all round to make all the pieces misalign and then fit. Waldo’s car has broken down so he has no real reason to be there nor to gulp down a beaker of alcohol that knocks him out without noticing that Margaret is fast asleep on the same couch after imbibing the same concoction.

Cue not much hilarity when guilty Peter turns up hoping to win back his wife, not expecting to find her unconscious from booze and once he discovers her bed partner convinces himself that she is as much of a cheat as himself. Meanwhile, Ladislaus tries to keep the jealousy pot boiling in the hope that she will divorce her husband and be forced to continue working.

I’m not sure I really cared whether it all worked out or not. Sure, comedies often pivot on bizarre instance, but this is just awful. More to the point, the structure doesn’t focus sufficiently on Margaret. The Waldo scenario seems wildly out of place and not enough is made of the chaos of the blackout. More to the point, with streets completely jammed and traffic signals not working, just how all four manage to get out of the city is beyond belief.

Sure, Doris Day grew up fast in the decade; at the start we worry about her losing her virginity; by the end it’s whether she’s going to embark on an affair. She’s always on the brink of the kind of sophistication that might tolerate an affair before drawing back in shock at such a notion.

The laffs are thin on the ground, even Doris Day drunk – one of her trademark touches – seems to lack punch. The best written scenes are those between Ladislaus and his cynical psychiatrist

Doris Day does her best but it’s far from the sparkling form of Pillow Talk (1959) that kicked off her very own rom-com subgenre. The quality of her male co-star had diminished over the years, from the peaks of Rock Hudson and Cary Grant to the acceptable Rod Taylor and James Garner but Patrick O’Neal (Stiletto, 1969) acts as if he is curling his lip and about to belt someone in the harder-edged dramas with which he made his name. Robert Morse (The Loved One, 1965) looks as though he’s still trying to work out what his character’s doing there. However, Terry-Thomas (Arabella, 1967) exudes such charm he’s always a joy to watch. Lola Albright (A Cold Wind in August, 1961) isn’t in it nearly enough.

The original French play by Claude Magnier was a sex farce, but casting Doris Day meant the sex angle was played down, inhibiting the movie. An unlikely vehicle for screenwriter Karl Tunberg – Ben-Hur (1959) and Harlow (1965) – who co-wrote with producer Everett Freeman (The Maltese Bippy, 1969). Director Hy Averback (The Great Bank Robbery, 1969) doesn’t come close to demonstrating the lightness of touch required to make such a ponderous effort work.

File under disappointment.

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1967) ***

Hooray for hokum. What should have been termed Tarzan: The Next Generation takes our hero temporarily out of loincloth but equips him with a hefty Browning machine gun and rudimentary grenade launcher, not to mention the neat tricks of repurposing a giant Coca-Cola bottle and bringing stalactites down on the heads of pursuers. Hardly surprisingly he’s toting such weaponry given he’s not just, as was more common, wrestling pesky crocodiles and punching the living daylights of any villain stupid enough to get in his way.

Sadistic evil mastermind Vinero (David Opatashu), has raided the Army Surplus stores for a World War Two M5A1 Stuart light tank, an M3 half track and a Bell 47 helicopter to augment his battalion of 40-odd mean-looking mercenaries. Though he hardly requires them since his favored device is an exploding watch.

Vinero has kidnapped a small native boy Ramel (Manuel Padilla Jr. who reputedly knows the way to an ancient El Dorado complete with Aztec pyramid. Yep, we’re in Mexico, which, incidentally, should screenwriter Clair Huffaker so require, does boast crocodiles as well as jungle. Tarzan is called in to rescue the lad.

He only wears a suit long enough to dispatch an assassin who has dumped him in a football stadium. Once he smells the wild it’s into the traditional loin cloth. He teams up with a Dirty Quarter Dozen comprising chimp Dinky (recruited for his scouting skills, you understand, and his three wise monkeys impersonation), lion Major (specialty: human flesh) and the boy’s pet leopard who will lead our merry crew to the child.

Quite how Ramel was found wandering in the jungle is never explained though it’s perfectly believable that, once lost, he wouldn’t know his way back and would rely on that well-known human compass Tarzan to help him find the way.

There’s quite a lot of trekking one way or another, but, thankfully, that’s interrupted by spurts of sadistic behaviour, an entire village gunned down by Vinero’s henchmen and the big bad guy only too delighted to take time out to demonstrate his incendiary ability in despatching unworthy lieutenants.

To be honest, the jungle doesn’t provide much cover, helicopter ferreting out Tarzan with little problem, only to be downed by his inspired trick of throwing a home-made hand-grenade bolus at the aircraft.

You won’t be surprised to find there’s a fair maiden involved. Her task, unlike previous incursions into this kind of jungle, is not to be discovered deshabille swimming in a pool. Instead, she’s bait. It’s hard to get a precise fix on Sophia (Nancy Kovack) since for most of the picture she’s Vinero’s mistress. It’s taken her quite some time to become disgusted by his sadistic tendencies. Probably, her rescue is to demonstrate Tarzan’s inherently gentle nature, given he’s got to separate her from a deadly necklace that will explode, so we have been led to believe, by the slightest tremor.

When they reach the lost city – who am I to quibble that a pyramid that can be seen for miles around hardly qualifies as a valley – they discover it is of a distinctly pacific nature, the chief willing to give away all their gold rather than sacrifice a single life, the kind of attitude that conspires against the traditional Hollywood notion of collateral damage.

Chief’s not much trusting of Tarzan and Sophia either and locks them up. Oddly enough, there could easily be an exquisite zero-sum-game at work, a winners-take-all scheme where everyone is a winner, except Tarzan has no truck with the chief’s notion of letting the bad guys get away with as much as they can carry, and Vinero literally digs his own grave by insisting on taking more than he can carry (though I doubt if this is where the makers of Witness, 1985, found their silo death scene).

Mike Henry (The Green Berets, 1968) hulks up pretty well, Nancy Kovack (Marooned, 1969) – replacing Sharon Tate – adds to the scenery, David Opatoshu (Torn Curtain, 1966) underplays the villainy to good effect. Clair Huffaker (Hellfighters, 1968) sufficiently updates Tarzan to a James Bond world. Robert Day (She, 1965) – who had also directed Gordon Scott in the role – delivers the goods.

Enjoyable matinee fare.

Panic in the Year Zero! (1962) ****

While the release of Conclave and Juror #2 augurs well for the future of movies made for the more mature audience, it’s worth remembering that such fare was commonplace six decades ago, even in the lower-budget strata. Well-structured, well-acted drama was never hard to find. Since I stack my DVDs on their sides and make my selection based on the title on the spine, I rarely glance at cover art, and just as well here, because the poster, I realized, in the process of selling the movie, gave away too much.

Beyond a vague notion that it concerned the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust I had no idea whether this would lean towards the dystopian or the survivalist. And there’s little clue at the start. We open on a typical suburban family holiday scene – husband Harry (Ray Milland) flexing his fishing rod, wife Ann (Jean Hagen) complaining of being overburdened with the loading of the trailer, teenage daughter Karen (Mary Mitchell) and son Rick (Frankie Avalon) moaning about being dragged out of their beds at an unearthly hour.

Not long into the journey they see flashes in the distance and a mushroom cloud above Los Angeles. Harry is alerted to potential danger when he observes a pump attendant being slugged by a driver over four bucks’ worth of fuel. Harry’s clearly the reserved kind of businessman, happily married, still flirting with a wife who giggles at such overt attention. But when the roads are filled with cars speeding away from the disaster area and the radio clams up and telephone lines are down, Harry’s personality undergoes a dramatic change, much to the disgust of his wife.

If this had been made these days, it would focus on the kids as they came to terms with post-apocalyptic catastrophe and some militaristic domineering governing body getting in their way or trying to control them. Or it would be some musclebound jerk only too ready to battle his way out of trouble.

Instead we have a gentleman tugging on his inner tough guy. Harry knocks around a storekeeper (Richard Garland), gets the better of a trio of thugs, charges through a roadblock, carves a route through a busy roadway by setting fire to it, destroys a bridge on a rural road to prevent being followed, and is capable of shooting anyone threatening his family. He’s not gone rogue, though, careful to keep more trigger-happy son in line, warning against civilization going to ruin.

This is so well-constructed you don’t know what’s going to happen next, nor, despite ample warning, to discover that Harry is quite the adaptable survivalist, not just stocking up on supplies, but dumping the trailer in favor of holing up in a remote cave, not quite going back to nature given the quantity of provisions to hand. But, yes, they do wash clothes in a stream, cook on a camping stove, shoot game and sleep in uncomfortable beds.

It’s not an idyll because the storekeeper and the three thugs have chosen the same locale. The hoodlums murder the storekeep’s family, kidnap young women including Marilyn (Joan Freeman) and are always on the prowl for easy pickings, which includes Karen, triggering a climactic shoot-out.

Despite the poster promising orgies of various kinds, there’s no glorifying the violence, Harry more like the frontiersman or law-abiding citizen forced to take the law into his own hands. Ann, whose maternal instinct has focused on its gentler aspects, turns into a lioness defending her cubs. It’s a brutal awakening for all, except Rick who appears to thoroughly enjoy the experience even as his father is trying to steer him clear of such thoughts.

Made by American International on a minimal budget, Ray Milland, doubling up as director, shows just what you can do with a decent script and cunning choice of locale. British-born Milland, a big star for Paramount in the 1930s-1940s and Oscar-winner to boot for The Lost Weekend (1945), read the runes right for the following decade and excepting Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) and realizing his marquee value had tumbled, took to direction, beginning with A Man Alone (1955) and Lisbon (1956). He was top-billed in both, joined by Maureen O’Hara (The Rare Breed, 1966) for the second.

His last stab at direction was Hostile Witness (1968). But he only helmed five movies in all. While you wouldn’t say he was a natural stylist, Panic in the Year Zero! is something of a triumph, keeping audiences on edge with both narrative and character-led twists.

Apocalypse wasn’t even a sub-genre at this point, Eve (1951) the only previous example of any note. Timing didn’t help this picture, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring a few months after its initial release.

Milland makes the most of his gritty characterization, pop star Frankie Avalon (The Million Eyes of Sumuru, 1967) surprisingly good. Written by Jay Simms (Creation of the Humanoids, 1962) and John Morton, in his debut, from source material by Ward Moore.

Rewarding.

A Twist of Sand (1968) ***

Initially promising, ultimately disappointing thriller that proves you should not go to sea without a big budget. Because he is the only skipper to have successfully negotiated the Skeleton Coast off Namibia in South Africa, smuggler Geoffrey Peace (Richard Johnson) gets roped into a scheme to collect stolen diamonds by Harry Riker (Jeremy Kemp) and Julie Chambois (Honor Blackman).

Peace knows his way around this area thanks to World War Two submarine exploits and that particular expedition is recalled both in a flashback and its repercussions form part of a plot. Also on board the boat are the goggle-eyed knife-wielding Johann (Peter Vaughn) and Peace’s shipmate David (Roy Dotrice).

Peace has to navigate through the treacherous waters of the Skeleton Coast before the team embark on a trek through the desert to find the diamonds, hidden in the unlikely location of a shipwreck, itself in imminent danger of being buried in an avalanche of sand that could be triggered by sudden movement or sound.

On paper – and it has been adapted from the bestseller by Geoffrey Jenkins – it has all the ingredients of a top-class thriller, but it doesn’t quite gel. For a start, the flashback, where Peace has to hunt down a new class of German submarine and not only sink it but make sure there are no survivors, gets in the way of the action.

The sexual tension you might expect to simmer between Peace and Julie does not appear to exist, the bulk of the threat coming from the villainous-looking pair, Riker and Johann, the former already known to be untrustworthy, the latter too fond of producing a knife at odd occasions. The trek into the desert takes way too long and rather than increase tensions slackens it off and there is no real explanation as to why the ship was lost so far into the desert without entering Clive Cussler archaeological territory.

Extracting the diamonds is certainly a taut scene, with the sand dunes threatening to collapse any moment but the climax you saw coming a long way off and although there is an ironic twist it is not enough to save the picture.

On the plus side, Richard Johnson (Deadlier Than The Male, 1967) shucks off the suave gentleman-spy persona of Bulldog Drummond to emerge as a snarly, believable smuggler. But Honor Blackman (Moment to Moment, 1966) is wasted and this is one of the least effective bad guy portraits from the Jeremy Kemp (The Blue Max, 1966) catalog. Roy Dotrice (The Heroes of Telemark, 1965) is better value while Peter Vaughn (Hammerhead, 1968), menacing enough just standing still, overplays the villain.

Set up as a thriller very much in the Alistair MacLean vein, this shows just how good MacLean’s material was, how great a command he had of structure and not just of action but twists along the way. A Twist of Sand wobbles once too often in its structure and never quite manages to build up the necessary tension between characters. Although the Skeleton Coast sea-scene falls apart due to defective special effects, the other two sequences at sea are well done, the opening section where Peace is chased by Royal Navy vessels, and the underwater attack on the German submarine where murky water manages to obscure the effects sufficiently they appear effective enough.

Don Chaffey (The Viking Queen, 1967) does his best with material that’s not quite up to standard. Marvin H. Albert (Tony Rome, 1967) doesn’t do as good a job of adapting other people’s work as he does his own.