Lord of the Flies set in a sprawling London Victorian mansion. At its best when kids give rein to vivid imagination, not so strong when melodrama intrudes.
After the death of her invalid mother and dreading being sent to an orphanage, eldest child Elsa (Margaret Brooks), who has been with the help of a maid running the house anyway, determines that she and the rest of the brood will pretend their mother is still alive. They bury the body in the garden, manage financially after Jimimee (Mark Lester) discovers an aptitude for forging their mother’s signature on the monthly cheques she receives from a trust fund, and hold séances in the shed to commune with the deceased one.
To maintain the pretence, they get rid of the nosey and querulous maid Mrs Quayle (Yootha Joyce) and come up with all sorts of reasons to explain their mother’s absence to school teachers and neighbors. Child fears run rampant as they visualize the terrible lives they would lead in an orphanage. But the generally tolerant community lifestyle is disturbed by the dictatorial rule of Elsa, determining that Gerty (Sarah Nicholls), for example, must have her long hair sheared off for innocently breaking a house rule and, in keeping with their mother’s fundamentalist beliefs, refuses to call a doctor when the girl falls ill. But the séance takes on a creepier aspect, Elsa the one in communion with her mother and therefore using the supposed other-worldy presence to enforce her will.
So far, so Lord of the Flies, and excellent in its depiction of a world ruled by children according to their fears and beliefs and without adult intercession. But it loses its grip when melodrama takes hold.
Their mother’s dissolute husband Charlie (Dirk Bogarde) returns, romancing Mrs Quayle, and, initially, spoiling the children, who are delighted to see him. He soon reverts to form, spending all their money, getting Charlie to forge his mother’s signature on the house deeds, planning to pocket the proceeds and dispatch the kids to an orphanage. Worse, he breaks the spell their seemingly devout mother had over their children, informing them that their mother’s conversion to religion only came after a life of debauchery and that, in fact, every single one of them is illegitimate and not his offspring. That’s too much for Diana (Pamela Franklin) who kills him with a poker.
Too many twists for sure and by diverting a fascinating dissertation of childhood into adult melodrama robs the film of much of its power.
Director Jack Clayton had been here before with The Innocents (1961) but, there, less was spelled out. Dirk Bogarde (Justine, 1969) is surprisingly good as the charming rough layabout with an eye to the main chance but it’s the children who captivate especially Pamela Franklin (And Soon the Darkness, 1970) and Mark Lester (Oliver!, 1968). The children’s innocence in any case would have been despoiled as they challenged Elsa’s rule and it would have been more satisfying to go down that route.
It was based on the bestseller by Julian Gloag and for anyone wondering what happened to Haya Harareet (Ben-Hur, 1959, and The Secret Partner, 1961) she married Clayton and is credited with the screenplay of this along with Jeremy Brooks.
Unhappily married and childless salesman Steve (Rod Steiger) begins an affair with kooky promiscuous hitchhiker Ella (Judy Geeson). A free spirit in control of her life – no VD and on the Pill – and happy to drift from mundane job to mundane job, Ella ranks her many lovers on their sexual performance. Steve has just moved into a new house on a dreary new estate, perhaps in the hope of revitalizing his staid marriage to Frances (Claire Bloom).
While Steve is away on business, Ella turns up at his home where, revealing, without implicating Steve, that she is pregnant, she convinces Frances to let her stay the night. Naturally, it is Steve’s baby, but Ella plans an abortion. Steve wants the baby and so, too, still unaware of the father, does Frances, seeing adoption as the solution to their marital woes. And so a love triangle, or more correctly a baby triangle, plays out, with a few unexpected twists.
Like most of the marital dramas of the 1960s, especially in the wake of the no-holds-barred Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), this is riddled with outspoken protagonists who have no idea how to find real happiness. Based on the book by Andrea Newman and adapted by Edna O’Brien, who both have previously marked out this kind of territory, the picture shifts sympathy from one character to the next. While no one is entirely culpable, none are blameless either. Yet there is an innocence about Steve and Frances in the way they fling themselves in the direction of unlikely salvation. They are not the first couple to find themselves in a marital cul de sac, nor the first to do nothing about it, hoping that somehow through a new house or job promotion things will right themselves.
Audiences, accustomed to seeing Steiger (In the Heat of the Night, 1967) in morose roles, might have been shocked to see him happy and he manages to present a more rounded character than in some previous screen incarnations. In burying herself in domesticity, Claire Bloom (Charly, 1968) essays a far from fragile character, whose resilience and pragmatic character will always find a way forward. Geeson is the surprise package, at once knowing and in charge, and at other times completely out of her depth, and to some extent enjoying the chaos she sparks. The exuberant screen personality she presents here is almost a grown-up more calculating version of the character she portrays in Hammerhead (1968).
Director Peter Hall (Work is a Four-Letter Word, 1968) generates more universal appeal by ensuring the movie is not so obviously grounded in the 1960s that it would quickly become outdated and the snatching at last-minute fantasy to avert marital disharmony will still strike a note. The performances are all excellent, including a turn by Peggy Ashcroft (Secret Ceremony, 1968) and bit parts from British character actors Paul Rogers (Stolen Hours, 1963) and Elizabeth Spriggs in her second movie.
Due some unexpected reverence after being chosen by Quentin Tarantino for his inaugural eponymous festival that kicked off at the Dobie theater in Austin, Texas, in 1996. I thought I’d throw that in since my opinion alone may not have swayed you as to this film’s merits. Ken Annakin (Battle of the Bulge, 1965) wasn’t first choice as director. It was initially on the slate of Jack Cardiff (The Girl on a Motorcycle, 1969) and should have also made waves as the first big British-Indian co-production. After his World War Two tank epic, Annakin’s career unexpectedly stalled.
He backed out of a project to make a Las Vegas version of Grand Hotel (1931), another, the $1.5 million The Fifth Coin, written by Francis Coppola and to star George Segal, got snarled up on the starting grid. He balked at Texas Across the River (1966) – when the females leads were going to be Shirley MacLaine and Catherine Deneuve – due to concerns about the schedule. He actually shot half of The Perils of Pauline (1967) with Terry-Thomas, Pat Boone and Pamela Austin, wife of super-agent Guy McIllwhaine, before being fired, for reasons that were unclear. Still, he remained in demand and was immediately off to Italy to shoot Raquel Welch heist picture The Biggest Bundle of Them All – not released until two years later as explained in my Behind the Scenes blog on that movie.
However, before jetting off to Italy, he had been sounded out by British producer Sydney Box who had a commitment from Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard to star in the $3 million The Long Duel being financed fifty-fifty by British studio Rank and fourteen Indian investors taking advantage of a tax-shelter deal. Annakin was in line for his biggest-ever fee. For Rank it was a brave new world. The British studio after years of relative inactivity was back on the production front foot, initially in co-production deals with American majors and British investment outfits like the National Film Corporation. It planned to invest $12 million in eight pictures. Initially, its stake in The Long Duel was limited to 60 per cent at a time when the movie was budgeted at $2.3 million. This was “particularly surprising because it came at a time when Britain was caught in a severe economic freeze” although the surprise success of the Bond pictures suggested the country’s movie industry was, in contrast, riding the crest of a wave.
Things turned sour on the location scouting trip to India. A “bottomless pit” of laborers was on standby to build a rope bridge across as soon as the money came through. Timber had been ordered to build a fort on a plateau with stunning views of snow-capped mountains, but nothing would arrive until money changed hands. While Rank had committed three-fifths of the finance with the rest coming from the release of blocked rupees guaranteed by a Maharajah, without any immediate cash and with the stars on pay-or-play contracts, there was no option but for Rank to pick up the entire cost and seek out alternative locations. That meant it was the single biggest British production financed domestically without a foreign partner.
Matters worsened when producer Sydney Box suffered a heart attack, triggering his departure from the business, in which he had been a mainstay for 33 years, movies ranging from The Seventh Veil (1945) to Accident (1966). In addition, Annakin was negotiating to make a permanent move to France while his wife was at home in England dealing with an adopted new-born baby. Annakin – acting also as producer for the first time – gambled on shifting the movie to Spain.
After the success of Doctor Zhivago (1965), Spain was fast being viewed as an ideal terrain, Custer of the West (1967), Camelot (1967), Fathom (1967) and The Bobo (1966) jostling for space. Having made a couple of movies there, Annakin assured the backers, the terrain was “not dissimilar” to the locations he had viewed in India. “I believe we can make Spain into India, so long as the crowds are dressed as Indians, which will cost quite a lot more because it means providing all the costumes whereas in India they already exist,” he explained. He had three weeks before the actors were due.
Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard would have seemed best buddies by now, having appeared in three films together over the past two years – Morituri (1965), The Poppy Is Also a Flower (1966) and Triple Cross (1966). Brynner’s career had revived thanks to Return of the Seven (1966). He was considered poor box office in the U.S. but made up for it with his global marquee appeal. Howard had been on an unexpected box office roll following Father Goose (1964), Operation Crossbow (1965), Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and The Liquidator (1965).
Annakin turned to the Sierra Nevadas to double as the Himalyas, located the rope bridge in a ravine near Ronda, the villages transplanted to the dusty Andalusian plains, and found sufficient horse-riding extras among the gypsies of Dacoit country. The Alhambra was called in to action for part of the Indian palace. A steam train of sufficient vintage was found.
Brynner supplied his own motor home, one of the most luxurious on the market, but required considerable assistance to move it around, especially on narrow country roads linking locations. Over 300 horses were required, with complications when the animals had to be moved in the dark. The major scenes required extensive lighting and nobody had taken into account the fierce winds which nearly blew everything away. The dancing bear was supplied by Chipperfield Zoo near Windsor, England. In the scene where Brynner returns to find his tribe massacred, the bear is also a victim. But, when the bear was knocked out by an injection, it didn’t wake up again. Cast and crew were so shocked that filming was abandoned for the day.
Howard’s alcoholism was another issue, liable to leave the actor so disoriented during the shooting of dangerous scenes that his close-ups were often shot at a later date, though, eventually informed of this accommodation, the veteran sobered up. If you felt when watching the movie that the female stars were out of place, you wouldn’t be far wrong. In the original tale there was no significant female role. But acceding to the demands of studio and distributor required various love interests. Suzanna Leigh (Subterfuge, 1968) turned down the lead, providing Charlotte Rampling (Three, 1969) with a worthy role.
Convinced it was onto a winner, Rank took out adverts in the trades claiming “all signs point to it being…among the greats” and it took the bold step of launching it in roadshow at the Odeon Marble Arch simultaneous with continuous performance at the Odeon Leicester Square in London’s West End.
SOURCES: Ken Annakin, So You Wanna Be a Director (Tomahawk Press, 2001) p186-189, 197-206; “Sydney Box $10-Mil Prod Program,” Variety, January 26, 1966, p14; “Rank Now Measuring Up,” Variety, July 27, 1966, p25; Advert, Variety, August 24, 1966, p27; “$3-Mil Rank Duel May Be Costliest British Film Ever,” Variety, October 26, 1966, p5; Advert, Variety, November 9, 1966, p27; “Sydney Box Quits Film Posts,” Variety, August 7, 1967, p2.
Agatha Christie tales were in a mostly B-movie limbo in the 1960s, despite Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and would have to wait another decade before glorious all-star resurrection in Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974). In the meantime, audiences made do with Margaret Rutherford’s Miss Marple in an MGM quartet – all directed by George Pollock – that ended with Murder Ahoy!
Rutherford did not enjoy the national treasure status of the likes of Maggie Smith and Judi Dench these days, but she had been elevated to late-career fame by winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The VIPs (1963). But she never quite made the cinematic impact anticipated after Blithe Spirit (1945) and was mostly seen in roles that called for eccentricity or determination, characteristics associated cinematically with Christie’s second most famous sleuth (although, in reality, the author was furious with her impersonation). And this had nothing to do with any published Christie work, just borrowed the character.
The title had led me to expect a picture set on a liner or a cruise ship. Instead, this being a cheaply-made British black-and-white feature, we are limited to sojourn on a sail training ship which remains moored at all times. Nonetheless, Miss Marple (Margaret Rutherford) is resplendent in naval attire and disports herself as if she were the captain.
Her excuse to get on board is the sudden death of a member of the committee overseeing said ship just before he makes an announcement. Miss Marple relies on a good deal more than Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells and through laboratory experiment determines the man died from strychnine poisoning. Among her other hidden talents are signaling mastery and dexterity with a sword and she drops popcorn on corridor floors to warn of imminent arrivals when she invades cabins.
The suspects include Capt Rhumstone (Lionel Jeffries), Sub-Lt Eric Humbert (Derek Nimmo), Lt. Compton (Francis Mathews) and Commander Breeze-Connington (William Mervyn) while Dr Crump (Nicholas Parsons) is described in double entendre fashion as “brisk.”
Naturally, there is more murder, and the subplots include burglary, secret romance involving Matron Fanbraid (Joan Benham) and thwarted romance with Shirley (Norma Foster). However, nothing can deter Miss Marple and she soon puts the world to rights.
The first in the series.
It’s an engrossing enough little film, the resolution a surprise, and Rutherford has skill and charm enough to almost trademark the role. At one time in the 1960s in the USA the Marple pictures were revived as double bills but generally in Britain treated with less regard.
Although you could argue that MGM could have bolstered the standards of production, much of the merit derives from the quaintness and the quintessential English lives portrayed. Of course, Margaret Rutherford steals the show but he is ably supported by Lionel Jeffries (First Men in the Moon, 1964), Derek Nimmo, strangulated mannerisms from later BBC’s Oh, Brother not in evidence, William Mervyn (Hammerhead, 1968) and Nicholas Parsons (ITV game show Sale of the Century.)
As a bonus there are moments of well-observed comedy and a very inventive score from Ron Goodwin (633 Squadron appeared the same year). Directed by George Pollock (Kill or Cure, 1962) from a screenplay by the team of David Pursall and Jack Seddon (The Secret Partner, 1961).
Taken in the spirit it was intended and acknowledging the low budget, not bad.
“Murder is good for business,” declares magnificently callous circus boss Monica (Joan Crawford). And so is nostalgia. Interrupting the action every ten minutes or so with the kind of circus act – courtesy of legendary British ringmaster Billy Smart – that you couldn’t see these days is probably going to win more viewers than seeing Joan Crawford in late vintage nastiness. Roll up, roll up for the elephants ridden by glamorous lasses, death-defying (or not so much) high-wire acts, prancing horses, knife-throwing, cutting a woman (and who better than a sequined Diana Dors) in half, and “intelligent” poodles (is there any other kind?).
Step aside John Wayne (Circus World, 1964), whose magnificent showmanship has nothing on circus master Monica, calling the shots and not just in the ring. She rides roughshod over business partner Albert (Michael Gough), pushes back into his box newcomer Frank (Ty Hardin), and packs daughter Angela (Judy Geeson) off to boarding school to shut the book on maternal instinct in case it gets in the way of running the show.
Throw in a good few hapless coppers, including a toff – Monica being such a big noise it requires the involvement of a Commissioner (Geoffrey Keen) and a Superintendent (Robert Hardy) – who pop up sporadically and show surprisingly little skill for detection beyond standing over a corpse or murder implement and making a pronouncement. Naturally, such an atmosphere is riven with jealousy and it doesn’t take much to start a cat fight, no surprise to see Matilda (Diana Dors) in the thick of it.
When her star act dies (murdered) on the high wire and Monica looks around for a replacement, she happens upon pushy Frank (Ty Hardin) who not only walks across the tightrope blindfold, but operates without a safety net and should he fall will land on a series of nasty spikes. He wants to share her bed and her business, but has some dodgy backstory, hints of some incident in Canada seven years ago.
So just as Monica reckons the thrill of possibly seeing death occur in front of their eyes will pull in the punters, that could be (though I doubt it) an ironic nod at the cinema audience since, as in all serial killer pictures, viewers are calculating who will be killed next, and not so much who the murderer is, but who will survive at the end. Luckily, this is British and made in times when the censor exerted a tighter rein, so you can be sure nobody’s going to meet a sticky end just because they’ve had illicit sex.
As if her employees were scary beasts, Monica beats them into submission, though, in fact, outside of Frank, nobody’s got the guts to challenge her. And it being the 1960s and forensics not much in evidence and, frankly, the producers not much interested in rounding up any suspects, you just sit back and wait to see who will be next. Will someone scare the prize elephant into misplacing a foot and crushing to death the beauties lying on the ground so that it can daintily step over them? Will the knife-thrower miss his marks or the spinning wheel containing his human target be rigged to go awry?
My money was on the poodles attacking their mistress for making them jump over a skipping rope. I hadn’t quite seen coming Albert being foolish enough to lean against a post with his head positioned exactly beside a hole so that from behind someone could hammer a spike into it. That should have made Monica a suspect because he wanted out of the business, except she has stolen and burned their contract and not a single soul in the entire circus appears to know that he even was her business partner.
Angela, when she turns up accompanied by a headmistress, appears to be a chip off the old block, turfed out of yet another school for “causing trouble.” Monica looks as if she was born to be trouble, and you can imagine the machinations that led her to owning a circus. There’s a surprisingly tender mother-daughter reunion and the daughter is soon enrolled in an act.
The ending seems straight out an Agatha Christie novel, take the least likely contender and make them the villain, with psychobabble as justification.
I have to say that I enjoyed this, as much for the circus acts as for seeing noir queen Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce, 1945) returning to the tough-as-they-come persona of Johnny Guitar (1954) rather than the theatrics of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). A pre-lugubrious Michael Gough (Batman, 1989) and a non-blousy Diana Dors (Hammerhead, 1968) add to the treats. Maybe Sidney Sweeney (Immaculate, 2024) consulted the Judy Geeson (Prudence and the Pill, 1968) playbook in assessing the career value of appearing in a horror movie. Ty Hardin (Custer of the West, 1967) is miscast, especially in his high-wire wobbles, though anyone thinking they can act Ms Crawford off the screen should be taken away and locked up.
Jim O’Connolly (Vendetta for the Saint, 1969) directed from a script by the team of Aben Kandel and producer Herman Cohen (Black Zoo, 1963).
Cracking British heist film prefiguring titles as disparate as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Heat (1995). Superb opening scene shows the lid coming off a manhole cover and after a short pause to avoid being drenched by a municipal street cleaner a man in a dinner suit emerges and makes his way to his Rolls Royce. Say hello to Lt-Col Hyde (Jack Hawkins).
Don’t be fooled by early reviews that tabbed this this an “action-comedy,” the humor is only incidental, while serving the important purpose of cutting the grandiose down to size, and not in the vein of, for example, Beverly Hills Cop (1984).
A group of ex-WW2 officers receive a mysterious parcel containing a pulp novel and £50 in notes torn in two, the other halves redeemed if they turn up for a meeting at the Café Royal in London. The opening section is almost a riposte to the recruitment sequence of The Magnificent Seven, out the same year, which strived for effect, and zipped along with one-liners.
This gang are all down-on-their-luck, any courage or leadership displayed during the conflict counting for nothing in peacetime. The sequence is surprisingly risqué for the period, virtually all the characters engaged with disreputable women. So, we have Major Race (Nigel Patrick) running some gambling scam with easy-come-easy-go confederate Peggy (Melissa Stribling), Lt Lexy (Richard Attenborough) a garage mechanic with a sideline in fixing the odds on one-arm bandits and inclined to steal other men’s girlfriends, and Captain Porthill (Bryan Forbes) a pianist playing in seedy dives and living off a middle-aged woman whom he cheats on.
Barely getting by emotionally or financially are Major Rutland-Smith (Terence Alexander) whose glamorous wife (Nanette Newman) takes a string of lovers while ritually humiliating him and Captain Mycroft (Roger Livesey) running a chaplain racket and selling erotic magazines. Hyde lives on his own in a mansion, his absent wife described as “the bitch.”
There’s an undercurrent here that’s barely explored of soldiers who have lost their way, but at the time it could remain underutilized because audiences would be filled with men whose post-war experiences chimed with these characters. Hyde has come up with a stunning plan to relieve a bank of close on a million pounds, the cash split equally, using the various skills his team had acquired through war service.
It’s a bold and, even if carried out with military precision, frankly terrifying exercise that intends to use machine guns and smoke bombs to scare the living daylights out of anyone who dares intervene, bringing New York-style gangsters to the streets of peaceful London. First stop is an army training where, in a ruse similar to that of the later The Dirty Dozen, Mycroft impersonates a commanding officer, inspects troops and deals out humiliation at the drop of a hat. Without doubt, this is an amusing sequence, especially when his superiors in the enterprise, Hyde and Race, are forced to eat disgusting Army slop, but it fulfils the same role as in the Robert Aldrich picture, the least likely soldier allowed to strut his stuff, tension undercut.
The heist itself follows the normal template of planning and execution and it’s brilliantly done, although the crooks are undone by a minor flaw in the procedure. Except for the opening section, and when Hyde exposes, as perhaps community therapy, the criminality of his gang, we learn little more about them, except, as if revisiting the past, how they respond (or not) to the discipline and hierarchy of the Army model on which the group operates. Scoring points off each other, or rebelling, or meting out punishment for misdemeanors, it’s like being back in the Army.
Nobody’s seeking redemption as in The Magnificent Seven or The Dirty Dozen, but it’s still easy to sympathize with an odd bunch whose expectations have been dashed. The scene where Race witnesses Hyde’s stark living conditions, and then offers to wash up the plates piled up in the sink, tells you a lot about how lost some of these men are.
Excellent acting all round from, by British standards, an all-star cast. At one time the number one British star, Jack Hawkins was an occasional Hollywood pick, leading role in Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs (1955), major supporting roles in Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Ben-Hur (1959). Richard Attenborough (The Angry Silence, 1960) had been a top name for over a decade, Nigel Patrick top-billed in director Basil Dearden’s previous outing Sapphire (1959). Kieron Moore (Day of the Triffids, 1963), Bryan Forbes (better known as a writer and director) and Nanette Newman (The Wrong Box, 1966) were rising stars, and you might want to include Oliver Reed (Hannibal Brooks, 1969) in that roster as he makes a camp entrance in a bit part.
Basil Dearden (Khartoum, 1966) is in top form with a script by Forbes from the John Boland bestseller.
Approach with affection and you will be rewarded. This is third tier Hammer, way down the pecking order behind Dracula and Frankenstein and after attracting studio stalwarts Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing for its first venture into this territory (The Mummy, 1959) dumps them for the sequel. And in the absence of the CGI that transformed the Stephen Sommers version in 1999 – and triggered the misguided Universal Monsterverse – struggles these days to prevent audiences laughing at the special effects. The titular beast was little more than a bandaged version of the lurching creature created by Dr Frankenstein so chills were always going to be in short supply, especially minus the plague of scarabs that dominated the later proceedings.
More interesting is the backstory that drives the narrative, warring siblings in ancient Egypt, the death of the rightful monarch and a reincarnation curse that travels down the centuries. Throw in bombastic King Kong-style showman Alexander King (Fred Clark) determined to monetize an archaeological find, shift the story to London, bring in a damsel Annette (Jeanne Roland) infatuated with the villain, and you have the makings of a decent tale. Alternatively, if you’re of a different mind, that could all be to cover up shortcomings in the plot and the wrong reasons for delaying the appearance of said monster.
People tampering with Egyptian graves tend to get their hands chopped off, but that’s as much warning we get of evil afoot although there are hints of malignancy in the flashback that shows the murder of Ra-Antef, son of Rameses VIII. But triumphant returning Egyptologists John Bray (Ronald Howard), Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim) and Annette, daughter of famed Professor Dubois who died in the line of duty, are inclined to take no precautions.
Poetic license – the mummy just ain’t that big in the movie.
Until the mummy is let loose, much of the tale centres around the ruthless grasping King and a love triangle developing between Annette, her fiancé John and the newcomer Adam (Terence Morgan) she met on the voyage home. While John is kept busy by King arranging for the grand public opening of the tomb, Adam slips in to romance Annette, not letting on of course that he possesses the amulet that can revive the sleeping monster. The setting – sophisticated London rather than remote Transylvania – and the delay of the murderous onslaught ensures that most of the picture survives on intelligent conversation, motivations and characters set out in non-cliché manner, and no squads of villagers set up for a marauding.
The monster is pretty effective when he does deign to appear, bursting through windows, picking up the damsel in a pose that I’m convinced Oliver Stone snaffled for Platoon (1986), and making his way to the nearest sewer, unlikely locale for a climax. There’s a propensity for lopping off hands and when that loses its impact stomping on heads.
But it’s not camp, is well-acted and the storyline makes sense. It probably helps that it’s free of Cushing and Lee because with unfamiliar actors the audience has to work harder. Terence Morgan (The Penthouse, 1967) is the pick of the stars because he carries most of the mystery. But Fred Clark (Move Over, Darling, 1963) steals the show by making a meal out of his outrageously greedy businessman. Top marks to Hammer for making Burmese-born Jeanne Roland (You Only Live Twice, 1965 and Casino Royale, 1967) a professional – she is an archaeologist – rather than a cleavage-ridden damsel in distress. And for those of a nervous disposition you will be pleased to know that the monkey is not present just to nibble poison intended for one of the principals.
However, from the outset it was destined for the lower half of a Hammer horror double bill, so the kind of budget that could do it justice was never in evidence. Studio boss Michael Carreras (Prehistoric Women, 1967) always gave the impression of over-extending himself but here as writer-producer-director he manages to keep the picture on an even keel long enough for the monster to do its worst.
Except for the interviewee being an obliging idiot, this could as easily have turned into an own goal by a BBC desperately trumpeting its values to an indifferent nation that has been wooed away by the streamers. When the top dog is indulged by having her own top dog, a whippet, sitting at her feet everywhere she goes in BBC HQ and the supposed news bosses believe a scoop is snatching someone else’s scoop you’re on a very sticky wicket indeed.
And it’s worth bearing in mind that this show only came about because the person who set up the interview Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) had a severe case of schadenfreude and believing she hadn’t been sufficiently well rewarded wrote a book about the episode and nabs a writing credit here.
There’s not really a sympathetic character in the whole feature, unless you count the 450 journalists being shown the door because the Government won’t let the BBC raise the licence fee to cover its running costs and the BBC refuses to lower the fees it pays its top presenters (who only stay out of the goodness of their hearts because of course they would get richer pickings on commercial channels) to achieve the same end.
The only person who comes close is the sad-eyed Royal PR guru Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), heart roasted by looking after spoiled man-child Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell in an ill-fitting face mask) – inclined to throw a tantrum should some housekeeper fail to arrange his battalion of teddy bears in the correct order – and clearly desperate to believe the prince could not possibly be at fault. However, the idea that you would let such a dope loose on Newsnight, facing one of the world’s toughest interviewers in whippet-lover Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson), shows remarkably poor judgement, especially when the prince just can’t see what all the fuss was about when he was doing the right thing by standing by his old pal, a convicted paedophile.
Anyone expecting proper investigative journalism or a thrilling narrative up to standards of All the Presidents Men (1976) or Spotlight (2015) – where the journalists actually do the hard work of the digging rather than just regurgitating a story that’s already out there, albeit with a bit more gloss, and the luxury of a one-hour time slot – would be looking in the wrong place.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had discovered just a little bit more about Bernstein and Woodward’s personal lives, whether they owned dogs or had girlfriends or maybe a sick mother, just to fluff out the story a bit, but luckily Alan J. Pakula had more to worry about than what clothes his Woodward and Bernstein had to wear when confronting their subjects.
The BBC high-ups, when not toddling off to sit in boxes at the opera, come across as up their own backsides. Sam is shown to be an outsider, who, unfortunately, dresses like she’s going clubbing, which gets everyone’s back up, but, red card here, seems surprisingly ignorant of the juicier details of the story she’s investigating.
Netflix has been on a roll with The Crown so presumably thought any story with a royal connection would be equally a ratings winner, not realizing that you still need interesting characters to snaffle the viewers and no number of angst-ridden people is going to cut it.
I can’t vouch for the truth of the impersonations of real characters, but while Gillian Anderson seems to catch the essence of Emily Maitlis, Rufus Sewell’s intonations are very much the actor’s own while the face mask seems to wobble from time to time. Billie Piper got the thumbs-up from Sam. I doubt if Amanda Thirsk would care for her worst PR moment to be dramatized but Keeley Hawes at least lends her gravitas.
Suicide by television is the best way to describe the prince, locked into a self-serving version of himself as charming war hero best suited to modelling Army uniforms glittering with medals. However, it struck me at the time and I was reminded of this omission here, that none of the investigative journalists have sought to investigate the small matter of the Pizza Express alibi. I would have thought it would be relatively easy to establish if Andrew was there on the night in question. Directed by Philip Martin.
This only goes to prove that not only can you lead a horse to water but without much encouragement you can get it to drown itself.
The original interview is better value than this. But we should perhaps thank Netflix for allowing its rival a moment in the sun.
The 1960s was awash with movie megalomaniacs, most courtesy of the spy vogue. You could also count on secret agents for trailing in their wake bevies of beauties. So no surprise then that criminal mastermind Fu Manchu (Christopher Lee) has his own gang, his “brides,” although they are hardly volunteers, being the kidnapped daughters of top scientists. His plan for global domination this time consists of transmitting energy as sound waves, using miniaturization, a sonic death ray, with enough power to destroy a city.
The result is good hokum, a thriller set in the 1920s with a cracking pace, plenty of action, explosions, burgeoning romance, and a plot that gets more complicated by the minute as a tribe of worthies try out to outwit the evil genius. There is a terrific lair – where the disobedient end up in a snake pit – a passable laboratory, chases, truth serums (“the dust that loosens tongues”), hypnotism, bait-and-switch tricks and decent special effects. Three stories race along in a parallel pell-mell: Manchu needs one more kidnapping to complete his complement of daughters, while the good guys headed by Fu Manchu’s old adversary Nayland Smith (Douglas Wilmer) are trying to locate the bad guy’s secret location while at the same time attempting to find out where he will strike next.
While Fu Manchu is indestructible – supposed dead after the previous film – his henchmen (and henchwomen) are all too human. It takes three attempts to kidnap Manchu’s next victim. They are easily identifiable by their giveaway cummerbunds and bandanas and their method of assault is not kung fu but brawling so a good solid British punch of the old-school soon sorts them out. Manchu’s daughter Lin Tang (Tsai Chin) is a chip off the old block, delighted at any opportunity to torment the brides.
The brides, in diaphanous gowns that might have been a job-lot from the set of She, are far from compliant, even rebelling at one point, and employing vicious fight tactics. Fans of director Don Sharp will find him every bit as inventive as in The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Bang, Bang, You’re Dead (1966) . It’s another Harry Alan Towers (written under his pseudonym Peter Welbeck) effort so that means an international cast.
Two television cops, British Rupert Davies (BBC’s Maigret) and German Heinz Drache (cop in a Francis Durbridge series), plus Francois Mitterand’s brother-in-law Roger Hanin, provide solid support. Not forgetting Burt Kwouk as a henchman. Brides of the year include French Marie Versini (German western Winnetou, 1963) and Rhodesian Carole Gray (Curse of the Fly, 1965). The film did not prove much of a jumping-off point for other brides such as Ulla Berglin, Danielle Defrere and Anje Langstraat, for whom this debut was as far as their careers went.
Christopher Lee, despite the dodgy moustache, is resplendent, exuding evil, and with a gift for rising again (just like Dracula) as he would do for another three films in the series.
Terrific, elongated, 20-minute pre-credit sequence sets up this brisk con-man thriller as the trio of Silas (Richard Attenborough0, his younger lover Liz (Alexandra Stewart) and apprentice Bob (David Hemmings) fleece a couple of greedy businessmen in New York. The action moves with military precision, the trio so appealing, the scam so well-worked, you want them to escape.
But when their next sting fails to come off, roles are reversed and it is floppy-haired Bob who takes charge, organizing the scheme, and making moves on Liz. Meanwhile, Silas is planning to double-cross them. The first and last schemes work a treat but the middle one sags, even allowing for cracks to appear in the relationships.
Attenborough is the pick of the bunch, switching accents and personalities, one minute a suave businessman, the next a nervous Lebanon banker, while at other times his stiff upper lip contends with his sergeant-major attitude. Hemmings’ accents are less convincing, all over the place at times, but the switch from junior partner to operation controller is convincing especially as he clearly enjoys putting Attenborough in his place, forcing him to shave off his moustache and giving him the name Longbottom.
And Stewart is never quite what she seems, willing to indulge either man to suit her purpose. Scottish actress Melissa Stribling, wife of director Basil Dearden, is a late addition to the crew and colder-eyed.
This was Attenborough’s first starring role since Guns at Batasi (1964) – Best Actor at the Bafta Awards – and although he had featured roles in Hollywood productions The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and The Sand Pebbles (1966) – his screen person was quite confined in those pictures. Here, it feels like he has been let free. Hemmings was coming off three heavy roles in Camelot (1967), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) and The Long Day’s Dying (1968) so it felt like he, too, had a spring in his step. This was a distinct mainstream jump for Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart, although she had small roles in Maroc 7 (19670 and Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968),
Basil Dearden slipped this one in between the more lavish Khartoum (1966) and The Assassination Bureau (1969). There is a slapstick chase reminiscent of the latter but, basically, he keeps to the story and allows character to develop. This being a British film, you might find some outdated British attitudes. This was bestselling author Len Deighton’s first stab at production.
The Magnificent 60s 