Drama – Page 23 – The Magnificent 60s

Age of Consent (1969) ***

Reputations were made and broken on this tale of a jaded artist returning to his homeland to rediscover his mojo. Director Michael Powell had, in tandem with partner Emeric Pressburger, created some of the most acclaimed films of the 1940s – A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) – but the partnership had ended the next decade. Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom (1960) was greeted with a revulsion from which his career never recovered. Age of Consent was his penultimate picture but the extensive nudity and the age gap between the principals left critics shaking their heads.

For Helen Mirren, on the other hand, it was a triumphant start to a career that has now spanned over half a century, one Oscar and three nominations. She was a burgeoning theatrical talent at the Royal Shakespeare Company when she made her movie debut as Mason’s muse. It should also be pointed out that when it came to scene-stealing she had a rival in the pooch Godfrey.

You would rightly be concerned that there was some grooming going on. Although 24 at the time of the film’s release, Cora (Helen Mirren), an under-age nymph, spends a great deal of time innocently cavorting naked in the sea off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. But there are a couple of provisos. In the first place, Cora was not swimming for pleasure, she was diving for seafood to augment her impoverished lifestyle. In the second place, she was so poor she would hardly have afforded a bikini and was the kind of free spirit anyway who might have shucked one off.

Thirdly, and more importantly, artist Bradley Morahan (James Mason) wasn’t interested. He wasn’t the kind of painter who needed to perve on young girls. An early scene showed him in bed with a girlfriend and it was clear that he was an object of lust elsewhere. Morahan, fit and tanned, obsessed like any other artist about his talent, and was in this remote stretch not to hunt for young naked girls but to find inspiration. As well as eventually painting Cora, he also transforms the shack he rents into something of beauty.

Morahan is vital to Cora’s self-development. The money he pays her for modelling goes towards her escape fund. Her mother being a useless thieving alcoholic, she has little in the way of role model. And the world of seafood supply is competitive. She is lost in paradise and the scene of her buying a tacky handbag demonstrates the extent of her initial ambition. Although her physical attributes attract male attention, it is only on forming a relationship with the painter that Cora begins to believe in herself. There’s not much more to the central story than the artist rediscovering his creative spark and helping Cora’s personal development along the way.

Morahan is a believable character. He is not an impoverished artist. Far from being self-deluded, he is a questing individual, turning his back on easy money and the temptations of big city life in order to reinvent himself. He isn’t going to starve and he has no problems with women. And he is perfectly capable of looking after himself. A more rounded artist would be hard to find. Precisely because there is no sexual relationship with Cora, the movie, as a film about character development, is ideally balanced.

The movie is gorgeously filmed, with many aerial shots of the reef and underwater photography by Ron and Valerie Taylor.

What does let the show down is a proliferation of cliched characters who over-act. Nat Kelly (Jack McGowran), sponging friend, ruthless seducer and thief, leads that list closely followed by Cora’s grandmother (Neva Carr-Glynn) who looks like a reject from a Dickens novel. There’s also a dumb and dumber cop and a neighbor so bent on sex that she falls for Kelly. It’s not the first time that comedy has got in the way of art, but it’s a shame it had to interrupt so often what is otherwise a touching film.

At its heart is a portrait of the artist as an older man and his sensitive relationship with a young girl. In later years, Powell married film editor Thelma Schoonmaker and after his death she oversaw the restoration of Age of Consent, with eight minutes added and the Stanley Myers score replaced by the original by Peter Sculthorpe.

Unusually sensitive screenplay from Peter Yeldham who, as my readers will know, is more usually associated with Harry Alan Towers productions like Bang! Bang! You’re Dead / Our Man in Marrakesh (1966), based on the novel by Norman Lindsay.

Intriguing, occasionally moving, superb debut from Mirren plus it works.

Model Shop (1969) ***

Surprising number of similarities to The Appointment (1969), including the aura of seediness, but lacking that film’s inherent tension or style. Lola (Anouk Aimee) is another model pursued by a another man who catches a glimpse of her in the street as in the Lumet affair. But it turns out a “model shop” is a tacky dive where men pay to take photographs of semi-naked women rather than anything to do with haute couture.

Lola is as depressed as Carla in The Appointment and for the same reason, abandoned by her boyfriend, who has gone off to gamble in Las Vegas. But new lover George (Gary Lockwood) is the antithesis of the successful Omar Sharif. You are inclined to give him a free pass because he’s got the draft hanging over him.

If he was disaffected, that could explain it. But he’s just bone idle, sponging off everyone in sight, musician friends and more ambitious girlfriend Gloria (Alexandra Hay), an actual model, though more in the commercial line than high fashion, but bringing in enough to pay his bills.

You might feel sorry for him that “the man” is trying to repossess his car until you see it’s an MG coupe that an unemployed guy could not afford and that when he does get enough cash to pay the outstanding payment he comes up with another excuse rather than parting with the money. He studied architecture but hasn’t the gumption to make his way in the adult world whereas Gloria accepts she might have to sit in a bathtub naked for a potential client if she wants to get on.

He won’t marry Gloria or give her a child so she’s full of empty threats to leave him but doesn’t carry that out until she discovers photos of Lola that he’s left lying around. There’s not much going on. It’s certainly a downmarket world. George and Gloria lived in a rundown suburb of Los Angeles with a pumpjack drilling for oil outside their front door.

A good chunk of time is spent on the road, not “out along the highway looking for adventure” as in Easy Rider (1969) and not in the great outdoors, but mindless drifting, or tailing Lola, around L.A.. There’s some kind of deadline on their romance – she’s headed home to France, his call-up is immediately imminent so unless there’s some expose of the seedier side of the city going on there’s not much else, just two people who lost their way finding brief solace in each other.

Anyone attracted by Anouk Aimee’s top billing is going to be disappointed, not in her performance, which reveals a markedly vulnerable gal beneath the glam (though she does dress haute couture). But Gary Lockwood (They Came to Rob Las Vegas, 1968) is front and central; she doesn’t turn up until about a third of the way through and only has a handful of scenes thereafter. So it’s that kind of slice-of-life movie, what the British used to term a “kitchen sink” picture, and takes place over a short time-span.

Gary Lockwood is excellent but he’s not asked to do very much, and you kind of get the impression he’s just being his charming self. Aimee seems to have cornered the market in playing “degrading” women, accused of being a sex worker in The Appointment and loaned out to high-class friends of her husband in Justine (1969). In some senses, bringing out the character behind the tawdry image appears her forte. Alexandra Hay (Skidoo, 1968) is equally good, the grit behind the glam, not just a pretty face.

But just nothing happens. The background – the draft, potential Vietnam peace talks, the occasional joint – is scarcely a visceral snapshot of America at the time. European director looks at America and doesn’t much like what he sees, but less obviously a commentary on society along the lines of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point the following year or even the home-grown Medium Cool (1969).

And lacking the style of Demy’s previous outing, the exuberant musical The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and you keep on expecting – hoping – the characters are going to burst into song. Oddly enough, it suffers from an unexpected culture clash. Relocate the same characters and the same story to Paris, speaking French with subtitles, and it would have worked better no matter how slight the story because it would automatically be infected by Gallic charm and even the poorer streets there would be interesting.

Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) a.k.a. Adrien Joyce contributed to Demy’s screenplay. Members of rock band Spirit appear in the film and provide several tracks but there was no soundtrack album to take advantage of their involvement.

You might be interested to know that Harrison Ford was at one time up to play the lead. Hay was a starlet under contract to Columbia who financed the film. Equally oddly, it was not sufficiently arthouse to appeal to the cognoscenti and it was little surprise that the studio eventually chose to promote the seedier aspects in the marketing.

The Appointment (1969) ****

You can see why MGM dumped this. Just as easily as you can see its attraction for star Omar Sharif, his boldest-ever role, completely against type, burying the romantic hero in one fell swoop. It wasn’t just the arthouse pretensions – the absurdly long, by Hollywood standards, long shots held for an insanely long time and the greatest aerial shot, almost to the moon and back, ever devised – that made the studio cut and run faced with the impossibility of selling Omar Sharif as a creepy, repressed guy who drives his wife to suicide.

Luxuriant moustache trimmed to look like a ramrod British colonel, often bespectacled, unmarried middle-aged lawyer Federico (Omar Sharif) takes a fancy to the withdrawn Carla (Anouk Aimee), fiancée of legal buddy Renzo (Fausto Tozzi). She works as a model in a high-class fashion house.

So Federico is shocked to discover that Renzo has dumped her after discovering evidence, somewhat circumstantial it has to be said, that she moonlights as an equally high-class sex worker who takes occasional assignments from antiques dealer Emma (Lotte Lenya). Now that Carla is unencumbered in the marital stakes, Federico undertakes to discover whether the accusation is indeed correct. If not, then he reckons, she might well fall for him, if only on the rebound, after all he is very successful and, despite the geeky haircut and moustache, a handsome dude.

It’s left to your imagination whether Federico actually has sex with the young woman – who “could pass for 17” and arrives clutching schoolbooks – for whom he pays 100,000 lire (around $1,000) but my guess is he does, getting her to pretend he’s her Latin schoolmaster. So that’s the Omar Sharif romantic persona killed off right there and from then on it’s hard to muster any sympathy for the character, every bit as obsessive, say, as James Stewart in Vertigo (1958).

This has a Hitchcockian aura, an atmosphere of stealth and secrecy and chill. He ends up marrying her, turns into a control freak, refuses to let her go out to work, complains about her make-up, asks where she’s been. He gets it into his head that she’s back to her old tricks and rekindles the investigation. She becomes more withdrawn and eventually commits suicide. The ideal ending, the arthouse ending, would have left Federico forever puzzled, not knowing whether he had married a hooker or not, whether, for all his caution, he had been duped. But that’s not the way with what you would otherwise describe as a psychological thriller – calling it a big-budget arthouse picture from a major studio by a relatively unacclaimed (outside of The Pawnbroker, 1964) mainstream director would not be an option – so we get a twist at the end.

This isn’t your usual Italy either, it’s not set in a sun-drenched land with impeccable beaches and ladies wandering around with cleavage abounding. This is the Italy of traffic jams and rain and wind and huge brown waves battering the shore and buttoned-up women.

And audiences have rarely been presented with such a depressing insecure female character. You get the impression she wears fabulous clothes to hide, not glorify, her body. She might come across as playing with Federico, pretending to be asleep when he comes to bed during a romantic weekend on a remote island, the woman way out of his league who wants to keep him at a distance while she makes up her mind. But that interpretation would only be from Federico’s perspective. Otherwise, an attendant viewer would note that she doesn’t seem at all comfortable with life, and that abandoned by one lover without finding out why she can’t risk losing her heart to another.

Had this been made by Visconti or Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966, went down a similar suspicious route) it might have been acceptable as a distribution vehicle for MGM (after all, they did pump millions into Zabriskie Point, 1970). The odd thing was, the arthouse mob didn’t like it either, showing disdain in the most publicly humiliating manner possible, audiences at Cannes booing it off the screen.

But once you accept the odd premise and equally fall in with the seedy character depicted by Omar Sharif, you begin to feel its power. The daring camerawork is exceptional, some of the scenes in extreme long shot contain as their essence elements of intimacy, and the world’s greatest aerial shot pulls away from the picture’s most romantic scene, as if giving indication of what is not well, rather than enveloping the characters with the usual background of nature at its most rapturous. And it’s pretty much silent, a John Barry theme dips in and out, but scarcely swells when it does, on a rare occasion, appear, so this plays out without much in the way of musical nods to the audience.

Outside of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), this is easily Omar Sharif’s greatest performance. His gamble in parlaying his box office marquee and universal romantic appeal (he appeared in Mayerling, the ultimate romantic tale, the same year) to take on this unappealing role showed a commitment to expanding his screen persona that went unrewarded. Anouk Aimee, anointed one of the screen’s biggest female romantic leads after the unexpected success of A Man and a Woman (1966), is also playing against type.

Sidney Lumet went through a distinctly lean period between The Pawnbroker and his 1970s output – The Anderson Tapes (1971), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – and while The Pawnbroker presented an equally disaffected character he was crying out for your sympathy. You could almost view The Appointment as an exercise in style and the director trying to see, in terms of narrative and character, what he could get away with, and to become the director stars would trust when they wanted to shake up their screen persona – witness Sean Connery as a criminal and Al Pacino as a gay bank-robber.

Critics have avoided this like the plague – three reviews on imdb, only one on Rotten Tomatoes – so if that’s not a sign of being under-rated I don’t know what is.

It’s different for sure but that doesn’t make it any less worth seeing. And it would certainly fit in with the expectations of a contemporary audience.

C.C. and Company (1970) *

Just terrible. Not even the presence of Ann-Margret (The Swinger, 1966) can save this. Scarcely a single redeeming feature and nothing that might lend itself to shift it into the So Bad It’s Good category. In fact, you would probably put it in a lower class, the So Bad It’s Worse Than You Can Possibly Imagine strata. Little seen for over half a century, and small wonder.

And, boy, did Ann-Margret need a hit after a three-year self-imposed exile in Italy, where she earned big bucks for pictures that hardly got a sniff on the U.S. release circuit, putting an almighty dent in her marquee value. In theory, she should have returned home with a bang, as female lead in a Stanley Kramer production, R.P.M. (1970), the most prestigious picture she had ever been associated with, and easily the best director. But that, riding the counter-culture wave, was a big flop.

This was her second attempt at counter-culture. Motorbike sagas were bankable after the success of Easy Rider (1969) and even as B-pictures had attracted decent audiences for the likes of The Wild Angels (1967) and Run, Angel, Run (1969).

But this was saddled with a terrible star in Joe Namath, and a terrible script by Roger Smith (The First Time, 1969), Ann-Margret’s husband-manager, that puts the wild boys of the highways in a motocross competition, swapping their high-powered bikes for the much smaller Kawasaki engines used in that sport.

If you were American, Joe Namath was a god. If you were foreign, he was a nobody. One of the country’s greatest American football (not soccer!) players, he had made his movie debut in another flop, Norwood (1969). My guess is Ann-Margret was there to help out her husband, also the producer, and beef up the marquee.

But C.C. Ryder (Joe Namath) looks more like an overgrown schoolboy, hulking though he is, than a Hell’s Angel. For the lack of believability he invests in the role you would have done as well with pop star Fabian (Ten Little Indians, 1965).

Anyway, on with the barmy story. So, fashion director Ann (Ann-Margret) has the bright idea, as fashion directors did in those days, of setting up a shoot against the backdrop of a motocross event, kind of like Zabriskie Point (1970) but with bikes. On the way, her car breaks down. The two passing bikers who come to her rescue have something else in mind and she is only saved from rape by the intervention of Ryder.

He belongs to a biking troupe headed by Moon (William Smith), the misogynist’s misogynist, who slaps his women around and sends them out to prostitute themselves on the highways because unlike the enterprising chaps from Easy Rider he’s not got the brains to set up a drugs operation. Then he gets the inspired notion of picking up easy money by sending his guys to compete in the motocross competition because, surely, them being serious motorbike freaks they can beat the hell out of any professional motocross rider who does this for a living.

No doubt audiences will be rooting for the amateurs the way they do for the young kids in other movies that need to put on their own show to save an orphanage or the like.

Naturally, Ryder falls for Ann. Equally naturally, Moon doesn’t like that one bit. And so kidnaps Ann, ensuring Ryder comes to the rescue. Cue a showdown. No doubt we’ll see an almighty battle with chains and wrenches and surely there will be a flashing blade or two as this pair roll around in the dust.

Nope! Let’s just find a handy football stadium and race round the athletic dirt track. That’s bound to be more exciting. You would get more excitement watching goldfish in a bowl.

Theoretically, the combination of Namath and Ann-Margret should have reached the incendiary levels of football star Jim Brown’s sexual tussle with Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles (1969). Nope. Namath has all the screen charisma of a beetle and there’s nothing Ann-Margret can do to help that. You couldn’t have wasted her first nude scene on someone less deserving.

As you might expect, Ann-Margret does get to dance, but for some reason the camera is more focused on Namath who is lacking in the shake-your-booty department.

There is one decent scene and one interesting shot. Unfortunately, the only good scene is the opener, giving a false sense that this might be an interesting picture. It involves Namath “grazing” his way round a supermarket, making up a sandwich from easily available ingredients, even stealing a tissue from a box to wipe his lips. What a rascal, no wonder everyone would be terrified of such a biker. And in the climactic race one of the bikers hits a fence that collapses concertina style.

But that’s it, a 94-minute vanity project that killed off Namath’s movie career and nearly put the kibosh on Ann-Margret’s. You can’t really blame television director Seymour Robbie (Marco, 1973) for failing to improve the material or the stars.

Sometimes being a completist (in this case following Ann-Marget’s career) has its down side.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED IN THE BLOG: Ann-Margret in State Fair (1962), Viva Las Vegas (1964), Kitten with a Whip (1964), The Pleasure Seekers (1964), Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965), Once a Thief (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Made in Paris (1966), The Swinger (1966), Stagecoach (1966), Appointment in Beirut/Rebus (1968), Criminal Affair/Criminal Symphony (1968).

Shock Corridor (1963) *****

Sam Fuller’s (The Naked Kiss, 1964) masterpiece, targeting every conceivable taboo subject – incest, sexual abuse, racism, the atomic bomb – under the guise, as with the later Shock Treatment (1964), of a sane man entering a mental asylum with the aim of uncovering criminality. In this case, uber-ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), with his eyes on a Pulitzer Prize, undergoes training from psychiatrist Dr Fong (Philip Ahn) to pass himself off as insane in a bid to find the killer of an inmate called Sloane.

Apparently, in those days in the U.S., incest, while viewed as sexual deviation, was also considered a mental illness. So when Barrett’s girlfriend, stripper Cathy (Constance Towers), turns up at a police station masquerading as his sister and complaining of sexual molestation, he is packed off to the nearest asylum. That he passes muster is not only down to his acting (or over-acting) but to the release of his own inner demons.

Tormented by jealousy and insecurity, he imagines Cathy, dancing as a demonic miniature in his dreams, her mouth a “lush tunnel,” will abandon him for another man or just play the field, no shortage of unsuitable suitors in her line of work. For her part, Cathy finds it hard to maintain the pretence, and clearly starts to crumble under the pressure, almost giving the game away, and soon enough almost compelled to do so after seeing the impact of incarceration – and its various treatments including electric shock therapy – upon her lover.

But what a difference a director with an agenda and a knack for stunning imagery makes. While Denis Sanders with Shock Treatment (1964) and George Englund in Signpost to Murder (1964) take the melodramatic tack to mental illness, which robs the subject matter of some of its power, Sam Fuller takes a two-fisted approach. Sure, there are shades of noir in the lighting, and the internal corruption of personality, but this is a world twisted upside down, filled with intentional and accidental malevolence, often from people who don’t know the difference.

The simmering violence can explode from a minor tiff over vitamin pills, or from the wrong man entering the female quarters at the wrong time, or from deep-seated hatred, while torture is visited upon inmates from the best of intentions as psychiatrists attempt to subdue or quell the worst instincts. Best of all is the depiction of obsession. People are only committed to an asylum because they are a danger to themselves or others, in other words when what is going on in their minds has got out of control and they can think of little else but the thoughts that consume them and are condemned to play out again and again perverse versions of reality.

So we have the patient constantly singing opera who likes to stab inmates with his hands and stuff their mouths full of chewing gum, another obsessed with hide-and-seek, a third with the Civil War, yet another who steals pillowcases in order to turn them into Ku Klux Klan masks. Mental warping renders some relatively harmless and others lethal. But there are also those with nothing left on the surface, reduced to catatonic state, arms stretched out, bodies draped over a bed or a chair, and you can guess that those who still act out will eventually end up silent, helpless and rigidly comatose.

Soon you realize, as Barrett clearly does not, the futility of attempting to carry out an investigation under these circumstances. He has three witnesses to pursue, none of whom a prosecutor would ever consider putting into the witness box in a court, and eventually of course Barrett does find the murderer – the victim killed for threatening to expose an attendant preying on female patients – but by that point his mind is so jumbled up by a combination of treatment and his own psychiatric problems that he either can’t locate the name in his memory or finds himself struck dumb and hallucinating.

When he is mauled by a pack of predatory females he can just about retain his dignity, but once he visualises water pouring in from the ceiling and almost drowns in the subsequent flood, and struck by imaginary lightning to boot, he has only a few shreds of his personality left.

This is brutal stuff and even now an incredible shock to the cinematic system so you wonder how it ever managed to get released. In retrospect, not so much an expose of the treatment methods in asylums as an insight into the power of mental illness once it exerts control on hapless humans.

You won’t forget the long corridor either empty or filled with individuals bent out of shape, or Barrett battered by torrential downpour or buried under a mob of savage women, or the African American white supremacist hunting for a victim or the agony of the outsider Cathy forced into playing this terrible game.

One of those films that creates its own visual grammar. I remember the rediscovery of Sam Fuller by the cognoscenti, a director whose work stood so far outside the accepted masters of cinema like John Ford or Sergei Eisenstein or Howard Hawks that he was the very definition of cult. Critics (Phil Hardy in 1970 and Nicholas Garnham in 1972) even had the temerity to write books about him as if he was fitting company for directors who produced acknowledged masterpieces and he was lionised, in the words of Peter Cowie, “by a posse of film commandos at the Edinburgh Films Society” who hailed him as a cinematic god.

All that acclaim, driven by the French New Wave, was hard to accept because his movies were impossible to find outside of a festival retrospective, unlikely to be screened on television and in the days before VHS and DVD just nowhere to be seen. But eventually, as the books and critical articles accumulated and the films became more readily available, the attraction was obvious.

Without much in the way of Stuart Whitman’s sensitivity in Shock Treatment, Peter Breck (The Glory Guys, 1965) delivers a stunning performance, perhaps all the more so because he is blatantly on the make at the start. There’s nobody to equal Lauren Bacall for ice-cold heart in the later film, but Constance Towers (The Naked Kiss, 1964) quivering with vulnerability runs her close. Special mention in the acting stakes for Hari Rhodes (Mirage, 1965) as Trent.

Ever the multi-hyphenate, Fuller dreamed up the whole thing.

A must see.

PREVOUSLY REVIEWED IN THE BLOG: Sam Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) and The Naked Kiss (1964); and Constance Towers in The Naked Kiss.

Shock Treatment (1964) ***

The Stuart Whitman (The Mark, 1961) retrospective sees another great performance as an inmate in a mental institution but perhaps put in the shade by Roddy McDowall (5 Card Stud, 1968) as a murderous gardener and Lauren Bacall, in her first movie in five years, as a psychiatrist in the Nurse Ratchet mold.

Though killing his wealthy boss earns Martin (Roddy MacDowall) a return to the mental asylum, the dead woman’s executor Harley Manning (Judson Laire) believes the gardener is faking it and has hidden a million dollars he says he burned. So Manning hires actor Dale (Stuart Whitman) to fake insanity, thus gaining entrance to the institution and finding out whether Martin is pretending.

Dale is pretty good at the mad act and appears initially to fool resident psychiatrist Dr Beighley (Lauren Bacall). On the other hand, he is sane enough to develop a relationship with another inmate Cynthia (Carol Lynley) whose rejection of men is equally an act.

Turns out Beighley is not fooled by either Martin or Dale. The former she takes under her wing, hoping to discover for herself the missing million bucks, the latter she had sussed out from the start, pointing to the obvious flaws in his role playing. She has a bunch of nasty medicines up her sleeve and when that doesn’t pipe Dale down she has the recourse of sending him in for electric shock treatment.

That doesn’t seem to go so far as the lobotomy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) but it renders our hero helpless, or put him out of the picture long enough for her to engage in her unscrupulous scheme of hypnotising Martin to get to the truth.

In reality, this isn’t so much an expose of the goings-on in mental hospitals so much as portrait of femme fatale going overboard. You might think Beighley would be better off getting treatment herself rather than dishing it out so deluded is she in convincing herself that Martin is sane. And there’s an absolutely fabulous pay-off in that department.

For the rest of it, she is the antithesis of the liberal psychiatrists we have mostly seen during this decade, the ones that try to find the good in their patients, helping them along to sanity, or at the very least getting them to understand the depth of their problems. That Beighley and Dr Fleming in Signpost of Murder (1964) conspire to give psychiatrists a bad name is an anomaly when mostly, as with The Mark (1961), they are of an encouraging rather than venal disposition.

Perhaps it was the very nature of the gentle psychiatrist as depicted in Hollywood that gave vent to movies that showed the darker side of the mental institutions where inmates are not only robbed of their freedom but are powerless to prevent being treated either as guinea pigs or being drugged to just shut them up or lobotomised to rid society of their unnerving instincts.

That said, seeing the patients strapped down in gurneys or incapacitated in other ways while the psychiatrist plays God is pretty strong stuff, even viewing it now nearly sixty years later. Some of the other inmates are cliché material, but by concentrating on the three characters with charisma, the enigmatic gardener, the actor attempting to put on the performance of his life and the charming duplicitous psychiatrist there’s enough meat for an entertaining drama with a powerful twist.

Of course, one of the tropes of any prison drama is that someone is innocent of their perceived guilt, and here only Dale really fits that bill, but equally since the rules relating to incarceration in this facility differ entirely from those of a prison, there is every chance that someone sane could be locked up for ever, especially if a powerful psychiatrist deems it so.

Stuart Whitman certainly plays around with his screen persona, the dandified actor entrancing a courtroom and police station with his performance, but fooling them proves easier work than duping the psychiatrist so there’s a couple of great scenes where he realizes this could be a trap of his own making – and there’s a twist in his tale, too. You might well accuse Roddy McDowall hamming it up, but actually, although he appears extrovert in fact he is introverted, concerned only with his flowers and plants, his violent side only emerging when that existence is threatened.

But Lauren Bacall (Harper, 1966) steals the show, cleverly concealing her true nature behind a convincing professional front and undone by greed.

Denis Sanders (One Man’s Way, 1964) directs from a screenplay by Sidney Boehm (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) based on the bestseller by Winifred von Atta.

Riveting performances drive this one more than the expose elements.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED IN THE BLOG: Stuart Whitman in Murder Inc (1960), The Mark (1961), Rio Conchos (1964), Signpost to Murder (1964) and Sands of the Kalahari (1965); Joanne Woodward in From the Terrace (1960) and A Fine Madness (1966); and Carol Lynley in The Cardinal (1963), The Pleasure Seekers (1964), Harlow (1965) Bunny Lake is Missing (1965); Danger Route (1967) and The Maltese Bippy (1969).

The Mark (1961) ****

Despite an exceptional and Oscar-nominated performance by Stuart Whitman (Rio Conchos, 1964) , I suspect modern audiences will take less kindly to this tale of convicted child molester trying to come to terms with his feelings. At least it’s considerably more honest than the creepier May December (2023) where the criminal steadfastly contended her innocence.

And I suspect, too, that Whitman’s square jaw and muscular physique got in the way of his attracting the parts for which the depths of vulnerability he was able to exhibit were most suited. He came to this straight after an action role, as the charming bad-good-guy of The Commancheros (1961) where, as far as audiences were concerned, what he did with his fists was more important that what he expressed through his eyes.

There’s a bit of a grey area that lends the convicted Jim Fuller (Stuart Whitman) the benefit of the doubt. He was found guilty of intent not of actual molestation and a goodly part of the picture is spend on examining why he went down that route, either in a group exercise in prison or one-on-one with a psychiatrist, chain-smoking Irishman Dr McNally (Rod Steiger) in both instances.

I’m not sure how the psychiatric evidence adds up, but basically, with a dominant mother who bullied his father, he grew up frightened of women, despite being attracted and attractive to them, and sought out someone with whom he felt more comfortable, less challenging, leading him to spend too much time watching children at play and eventually buying a young girl an ice cream and going out on walks with her.

It would have been too much for audiences of the time – as it even was with May December – to go into the technicalities of what he intended to do so we are left to trust his own word that he never intended to instigate anything sexual, though why kidnap a child in the first place. The second element that would fill modern audiences with alarm is that though he manages to begin a sexual relationship with a woman of his own age, secretary Ruth Leighton (Maria Schell), she is a widow with a young daughter. Most people would instantly come to the conclusion he was using mother to groom daughter.

However, the film takes the tack that he’s using the daughter to explore a normal relationship with a child, the joy of having a daughter, and the delight and happiness that a young person can bring into a dour repressed life. Dr McNally keeps on banging on that Fuller is “cured” but it’s a very uneasy watch trying to work out if he is or not.

In the event, the first time he’s alone with the girl he is photographed by a local journalist who sticks the photo on the front page, destroying the life Fuller has carefully rebuilt. He has found employment as an accountant with a sympathetic business owner Andrew Clive (Donald Wolfit), fitting in so well he is promoted, though at odds with another senior employee Roy Milne (Paul Rogers). He is chucked out of his accommodation, loses his job and although Ruth initially stands by him the minute she sees Fuller with her daughter her instincts are hostile.

There would be no point in an actor trying to gain sympathy for such an unsympathetic character by playing to the gallery with bouts of temper or floods of self-pitying tears, but even so, the vulnerable husk Whitman presents, his struggles with his self-contempt, his understanding of the feelings he must invoke, his determination to live as quietly as possible, almost in that determined English manner of never being heard nor seen, is what makes this film. Interestingly, he replaced Richard Burton, who pulled out at the last minute (as did Jean Simmons) and you could easily imagine with those trademark quick intakes of breath and deep growls how that actor would have played the part.

Whitman doesn’t go near any grandstanding. It’s just a heartfelt performance of a man who’s lost his way and knows he might never find his way back, haunted by his past, unable to trust himself, unable to believe that he is, in fact, cured. Probably, the biggest issue is that the movie comes down on his side, especially when he becomes one of the usual suspects in another crime involving children, though he did not commit that, and tries to suggest that a child molester will find salvation through living with a mother and child in the normal fashion. As I said, this is not my subject of expertise, thankfully, and that may be well what’s advocated rather than staying away from children altogether.

While the approach might be considered a shade naïve at the same time it does examine issues surrounding reintegration and avoids the obvious trap of attempting some kind of character redemption.

Apart from Whitman, there are good performances all round. Maria Schell, whose career within a decade would go from roadshow blockbuster Cimarron (1960) to WIP epic 99 Women (1969), subsumes her normal more glamorous persona to play a believable working mother. With his chain-smoking, Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker, 1964) is allowed to fidget to his heart’s content but even such obvious scene-stealing only places more emphasis on the quieter Whitman. Donald Wolfit (Life at the Top, 1965), too, reins in his usual bluster.

Guy Green (The Magus, 1968) directed from a screenplay by Sidney Buchman (The Group, 1966) and Stanley Mann (The Collector, 1965) from the bestseller by Charles E. Israel.

In this instance, given the Oscar nom, Stuart Whitman could hardly be considered under-rated but over the years seems to have disappeared from sight.

Worth a look to see what he could do with the right material.

Madison Avenue (1961) ***

Surprisingly effective feminist angle. Unusual for the suave salesman to get his come-uppance from two vulnerable women, but that’s the case here, in an expose of the “build-up” (what we’d call “hype” these days) techniques of the public relations business, an area of advertising generally considered one step below the Mad Men of popular television. Fancy bars and cocktail dresses put in an appearance but, mostly, this deals with the grittier end.

This was pretty much the end of the mainstream Hollywood career for Dana Andrews. Still best-known for Laura (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and for some key film noir titles, this was his last major top-billed role. He wouldn’t make another movie for four years and anyone coming to him in this decade would associate him with supporting roles in the likes of The Satan Bug (1965) and Battle of the Bulge (1965).

So this is, possibly unexpectedly, a performance to savor, for he is hardly the hero, more the kind of character who might turn up in a contemporary movie, with questionable motives to go along with his decided charm (look no further than Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon). Though hardly murderous, he is ruthless and doesn’t care who he brings down in achieving his objectives.

After losing his job for purportedly (an accusation unproven but going with the territory) trying to steal the major client, Associated Dairies, of his boss, J.D. (Howard St John), top executive Clint (Dana Andrews) plans to get his revenge in rather sneaky fashion, by turning round its poorly-performing subsidiary Cloverleaf. He targets the dowdy owner, Anne Tremain (Eleanor Parker), of its failing advertising firm, promising her client a big editorial splash in a big newspaper courtesy of journalist girlfriend Peggy (Jeanne Crain).

Anne’s the first beneficiary of his PR skills, reinventing her as a glamorous, power-dressing, more confident advocate of the persuasion industry. He inveigles himself into her arms, at the expense of Peggy. He aids the idiotic owner of Cloverleaf, Harvey (Eddie Albert), who spends all his time in the office playing with model airplanes. (From today’s perspective, he’s something of a savant, predicting these machines – think drones – could one day form part of the delivery contingent.)

To show just how damn clever he is, Clint “builds up” Harvey into the kind of self-made-man that has politicians purring, and brings Clint back into the winners circle. Unfortunately, the only way to get right in is through deviousness, a bit of back-stabbing here and there, dropping anyone who’s outlived their usefulness. But he’s not as clever as he thinks, lacks the business acumen of Anne, who’s denied him a share of her growing business, and therefore any real power base.

The women take unkindly to being used, Anne now the one doing the tossing-aside. For her revenge, Peggy writes an article that digs the dirt on him. Neither of these women would fall into the femme fatale category, though once all glammed-up Anne could pass for one had she required violence rather than business dexterity to exact her revenge.

Though both, unusually for the times, hold top positions in their businesses – Peggy’s a high-flying journalist working the Washington beat – they are presented initially as easy meat for a man capable of exploiting their vulnerabilities. Clint keeps Peggy on the back foot by failing to turn up for dates or presenting Anne as a rival for his affections.

This is an era where, purportedly, all women wanted was a ring on their finger, and to hang with being landed with an unsuitable man. But both Anne and Peggy upend that stereotype, seeing through the creature who’s come calling. In a western, audiences would have the satisfaction of seeing this kind of despicable character being shot. Here, they get to see him cringe, and be humiliated by women who have come to their senses. Albeit there’s a “happy” ending, that only occurs after some begging by the predator.

It suffers from too many long sequences, and by its determination to go down the satire route in exposing the seamier side of the public relations business. But there are some classic moments, such as when Harvey, tumbling through a prepared speech, has to suddenly wing it and finds his real voice.

But watching Anne get the measure of Clint and seeing him brought to heel by both women suggests the kind of ahead-of-its-time come-uppance that sets this up as an early feminist venture.

Eleanor Parker (The Sound of Music, 1965) and Jeanne Craine (Queen of the Nile, 1961) are both superb as women coming to their senses and this is a quite superb last top-billed hurrah from Dana Andrews. This was also the final outing for director H. Bruce Humberstone (Desert Song, 1953). Former newspaperman Norman Corwin (The Story of Ruth, 1960) and Richard P. Powell (Follow That Dream, 1962) based the screenplay on the best seller by Jeremy Kirk.

Resonates on the feminist front.

Morgan! / Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) ***

While Hollywood was capable of dealing with mental illness head-on in pictures like Frank Perry’s David and Lisa (1962), Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) and Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964), the British were more inclined to take an alternative approach. The titular characters of Billy Liar (1963) and this film dealt with awkward reality by creating a fantasy world.

Morgan (David Warner in his first starring role), is a failed artist and virulent communist who cannot come to terms with being divorced by rich Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave) who is planning to marry businessman Napier (Robert Stephens). Morgan forces his way back into his wife’s house and attempts to win her back with nothing stronger than whimsicality and when that fails resorts to kidnap.

And it is clear that she shares his fancy for furry animals, responding to his chest-pounding gorilla impression with tiny pats of her own chest. For a slim guy, Morgan makes a believable stab at a gorilla, shoulders hunched up under his jacket, chest stuck out. And he has an animal’s sense of smell – detecting his rival’s hair oil.

The tone of the film is surreal. Had David Attenborough been a big name then you could have cited him as one of director Karel Reisz’s influences, such was his predilection for inserting wildlife into the proceedings, not just primates but giraffes, a hippo, a peacock and a variety of other creatures. Some are comments on Morgan’s state of mind but after a while it becomes monotonous. The film is clearly intentionally all over the place, the class struggle also taking central stage, but it’s hard work for the viewer. If you had stuck in some psychedelia, the fantasy would have made as much sense as The Trip (1967).

Having said that, towards the end of the picture there is an extraordinary image – possibly stolen from the opening of La Dolce Vita – of Morgan in a straitjacket hanging from a crane. Had that been the film’s starting point, it might have dealt more demonstrably with the subject matter. The whimsy is all very well but the focus on external animals does little to illuminate Morgan’s internal struggle and mental descent.

At this stage of his career, David Warner (Perfect Friday, 1970) exhibited a core instability, although later he was adept at ruthless villains. You could argue he is too charming for the role.

Vanessa Redgrave (Blow-Up, 1966), in her second film and her first starring role, steals the picture, winning her first Oscar nomination (in the same year as sister Lynn for Georgy Girl). She is made of gossamer. Still attracted to a man she knows will only bring her pain, she is far from your normal leading lady. There is a touch of the Audrey Hepburn in her ethereality but she portrays a completely genuine soul, not a manufactured screen personality. Robert Stephens (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969) adds a welcome hard core to the frivolity.

But Karel Reisz (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960) misses the spot. Distinguished British playwright David Mercer adapted his own BBC television work from 1962.

Could have done with taking a step back from the material and offered a more objective assessment.

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The Trip (1967) ***

Give any neophyte (word of the week!) independent film director a camera and a small budget ($100,000 in this case) and they might well have come up with something like this. Has the feel of being an advert for promoters of LSD who felt they had to play fair and show the potential downside. Meanwhile, they can jam in an absolute phantasmagoria of imagery and sit back and wait for Stanley Kubrick to rip off some of their ideas and give the whole head-spinning malarkey some credence for the conclusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If there’s a story, it’s as thin as they come. Commercials director Paul (Peter Fonda), trying to understand himself better, and why, for example, wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) has left him for another man, enlists the help of self-help guru John (Bruce) to guide him through an LSD trip. The notion that there are drug guides comes as a surprise to me, and this feels like the kind of the warning you get on the side of cigarette packets, although quite what guidance anyone can expect while under the influence is anybody’s guess. If you’re high as a kite, it’s unlikely you’re on an even enough keel to do what you’re told.

Anyway, off we go. And lo and behold, before you can utter the words “groovy” or even “psychedelic,” suddenly the screen is invaded with all sorts of images, coming so quick and fast that even the ones that might makes sense – i.e. indicating paranoia – get little time to settle before the next appear. Some of the images look like they’re offcuts from an AIP horror picture, haunted houses, medieval backdrops, torture, people being mummified or hanged or drowned or all three (maybe all at once).

And from there it’s an easy step into being dazzled by headlights or climbing a cliff or running through a desert or being chased by masked men on horseback and hearing high-pitched giggling. Some of the images, while dreamlike, remain realistic, such as topless body-painted go-go dancers. And the oddest image of a woman in curlers eating a chicken leg in a laundromat feels easily like something out of a bizarre dream when in fact it isn’t.

Some stuff you might expect. Items like an orange are experienced with more intensity. And Paul is disembodied when he observes people making love. Sometimes you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, other times it’s with grim clarity. Strobe lights, hallucination, add to the dreamy expressionistic quality. Not sure the movie had much to say except drugs can be fun – or not. But, inevitably, the imagery, instead of assisting with characterization, gets in its way.

Looks strange to see so many hippies with short hair. Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson (here only in his capacity as the screenwriter) would come together with greater effect in Easy Rider (1969). This resembles nothing more than an audition for the later film but directed by someone (Hopper) with a bit more sense, adding a proper narrative and cutting the tripping down to the minimum.

Roger Corman (The Secret Invasion, 1964) directed but Susan Strasberg (The Sisters, 1969), Bruce Dern (Castle Keep, 1969) and Dennis Hopper have such small parts they are almost only there to add marquee value. Not quite the ode to counter culture envisaged.

Shows how difficult it is to film the unfilmable.

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