"May Be My Treasure or the Price I Have to Pay"

Now that I've read the magnificent original novel, the 1965 adaptation of She is even more frustrating. But it wouldn't be frustrating if there weren't things I like about it and top of the list is Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins.

All three of the male leads are well cast, actually, and could've been excellent playing closer to the original characters. Cushing as Holly isn't as brawny or as ugly as the character in the book is said to be but I think a little weight lifting and some makeup could've fixed that. There's not a thing wrong with Cribbins as Job the valet. John Richardson is bland and handsome but so was his character, Leo Vincey, in the book.

Strange echoes of their original relationship are retained in the film. In the book, Holly was a professor and foster father of Leo, who was bequeathed to him by a colleague along with mysterious artefacts. Job was Holly's servant. In the movie, the story has been moved to 1918, at the end of World War I (the book was published in 1887). Holly, Leo, and Job are soldiers, deciding how to return to civilian life. Job announces his intention to be a valet, Holly wants to go back to being a professor. The three in no way seem like soldiers, despite Peter Cushing's amusing attempt to be rowdy with a few topless dancers.

This also deviates from Holly in the book who's terribly awkward around women and whose lifelong unrequited romantic needs are an important part of the book's subtext. Cushing could've played that beautifully, alas, but he and Cribbins are wonderful as a sort of Frodo and Sam in the desert.

JOB: "I'm glad I'm not an educated man, sir, if that's what makes you go off on a damn fool search for lost cities."

HOLLY: "Isn't that exactly what you're doing, Job?"

JOB: "Well, yes, sir, but I'm too ignorant to know any better."

The changes were obviously made in the interest of condensing the story. They weren't good decisions, not just for putting the characters in roles they don't act like they're in anyway. It also loses a lot of the novel's mysterious build-up. Worse is the fact that Leo meets Ayesha, the She of the title, almost immediately, in a house in Palestine where she gives him a ring and a map to her hidden kingdom of Kuma. In addition to losing the mystery, it also doesn't make much sense for her to ask him to come find her when she's standing right in front of him.

Ursula Andress is appropriately beautiful though she wants an air of authority. One of the extraordinary things about the novel is how Ayesha came off as truly brilliant, capable of considering strategy and adept at judging character. Andress just seems like a petulant teenager.

Christopher Lee and Andre Morell are fine in supporting roles. Rosenda Monteros as Ustane, Ayesha's unexpected rival for Leo's affections, is perfectly fine, though Ayesha's treatment of her is another thing that lacks the nuance of the novel.

As flawed as it is, I can still see myself watching this movie again. I'm amazed it's so hard to find and it appears never to have had a blu-ray release, despite having been one of Hammer's greater box office successes.

Twitter Sonnet #1720

Evaluations sever glitter ties.
Misfortune chopped the business man to meat.
Reduction cost the bull a dream of lies.
The people's prank deflowered Mary's seat.
Some thirsty desert troops have wrecked the bar.
For phantom queen, the golden cub embarks.
Her sweaty dream was near but miles far.
His train assays a list of vain remarks.
Emerged again, the floating damsel paints.
We walk to wharves without the grace of paws.
And look, the lonesome lady quickly faints.
In beauty's sky were eyes and feudal laws.
With brazen praise, the goddess lines the cliff.
The beach below belongs beyond an "if".

Comus at the Window

A young woman moves into her new husband's enormous ancestral estate and is almost immediately beset by a malevolent supernatural force. It's 1973's And Now the Screaming Starts, and it certainly does, and recurs at every opportunity. Despite the cheesy title, director Roy Ward Baker establishes a wonderfully effective gothic atmosphere in this film from Amicus. It's also a film with an argument about traditional class structures, presented as a dialogue with John Milton's masque Comus. It doesn't make a particularly profound argument but its presence helps bring a sense of personality to the supernatural menace.

Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, and Patrick Magee get top billing but most of the film centres on the young woman, Catherine, played by Stephanie Beacham--Cushing doesn't turn up until halfway through the film and Lom is mostly there only in portrait form, playing Sir Henry Fengriffin, the grandfather of Catherine's young husband, Charles Fengriffin (Ian Ogilvy). As she tries to figure out why she's seeing spectral hands reaching out of portraits and a leering face with its eyes gouged out peering at her through windows one might suppose this is a movie belonging to the gaslighting genre. Though if any of the phenomena she's witnessing are merely illusions meant to drive her mad, they're certainly very good illusions and don't explain why everyone else is terrified to talk about Charles' family history.

This includes Patrick Magee who finally shows up in a minor role as a doctor who attends to Catherine after she becomes pregnant. When things get too weird for he or Charles to handle, Magee sends for an expert, much like Van Helsing was sent for in Dracula, and accordingly Peter Cushing shows up playing a sort of proto-psychologist named Dr. Pope.

As the film's set in the 18th century I wondered if maybe Cushing's character was named for Alexander Pope but there's nothing in his personality to suggest it, being much a straight forward detective character, Van Helsing without belief in the supernatural. Cushing's good as always, leaning back in his chair playing with a snuff box, pondering as Catherine tells him her troubles. It's a literary giant of the 17th century the film explicitly references; John Milton, whose 1634 masque, Comus, Catherine is shown reading, the camera deliberately focusing on the title though it's never discussed in dialogue.

Any confusion as to whether or not this is Milton's Comus and not some other work about the being from Greek myth is cleared up when Charles later checks what Catherine's been reading and scoffs bitterly at this passage:

Comus was originally called A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, a masque being a sort of play typically presented in a court setting where the players are in a sense the audience. Comus is about three noble siblings, two men and a "Lady", who become separated in the woods. The Lady encounters Comus, described in the masque as the son of Circe, who endeavours to seduce her. The passage above is a quote from one of the brothers as he tries to think of reasons their sister is probably perfectly fine, wherever she is. These guys prove not to be the sharpest tools in the shed.

It's thought that the masque was partly intended to indirectly bolster the reputation of the Earl of Bridgewater and his family, the residents of Ludlow castle (some of them participated in the masque), as a countermeasure to the scandal surrounding a family relation who'd been tried and executed for rape and sodomy.

This becomes relevant in And Now the Screaming Starts once we get a proper flashback of Herbert Lom's character and just what he'd gotten up to that brought on the curse Catherine's now suffering from. Milton may have sympathised with the film's indictment of an abusive and debauched hereditary authority but the plot's a little broad to be worthy of Milton. As a horror film, it whittles things down to a pretty bleak proposition and there's something generally insubstantial about it. But it has plenty of that Amicus/Hammer atmosphere that makes you just want to live in this place for a while. If only Cushing and Magee had more screen time and some better dialogue.

Tangled Voices in the Empty School

After suffering a nervous breakdown, a young woman is attacked by a man with a prosthetic arm at the beginning of the 1972's Hammer horror film Fear in the Night. The assailant isn't caught--and her friends seem to harbour doubts he even existed--but her new husband encourages her not to worry because they're moving to a remote country school house to live with Headmaster Peter Cushing and his game hunter wife Joan Collins. What follows is as about as juicy and delightful as you might imagine a psychological horror movie with that premise could be.

Written and directed by Jimmy Sangster, the plot is a little convoluted--Wikipedia quotes one critic as saying the film's little more than a retread of Taste of Fear, a Hammer film from eleven years earlier, also written by Jimmy Sangster. While Taste of Fear is a much better film, Fear in the Night has a plot that resembles Taste of Fear on only a few superficial points.

Judy Geeson plays the protagonist, Peggy Heller, with the right amount of vulnerability and perpetual nervousness. We're led to wonder along with her if the attacks she suffers from a mysterious one armed man are the products of her imagination but the film doesn't stick exclusively with her point of view. Point of view is complicated in a subtle, intriguing way in the film's best scene, when Peggy meets the headmaster, Michael (Cushing), in the deserted school where she inexplicably hears the voices of boys learning lessons.

Cushing takes full advantage of the fact that the audience is keenly watching him along with Peggy to determine what his character's role might be. He does so in a way that plays brilliantly off of what we do eventually learn about him in what turns out to be a highly improbable plot. But it works because he clearly accepts the reality of it and you can see in the way his eyes stay on her that he has an agenda of his own as well as a painful restraint he must exercise.

Somewhat less complicated but also very entertaining is Joan Collins' introduction, armed with a shotgun she's just used to murder a rabbit Peggy had been trying to make friends with. It's immediately clear there's nothing innocent about her on any level.

Peggy's husband is played well enough by Ralph Bates and the film features some lovely very autumnal location footage.

Twitter Sonnet #1168

Enormous plants would tilt to hear the song.
The radio produced sustaining cries.
The theremin persists the evening long.
As morning breaks the water sprinkler sighs.
The collared stars were fain to serve the beach.
Transitioned drapes admit the dawning fish.
The speckled life of whales revealed the breach.
A growing branch fulfilled the sapling wish.
A line of yarn connects the panelled wall.
Inside the paper, lives were kept to watch.
In time with shining steps it built the hall.
A hour's arm would stick upon the notch.
The misty clues dissolve in thinning fog.
Saluting chorus sang from near the log.

Take Phibes

So you thought you'd seen the last of Dr. Phibes. 1972's Dr. Phibes Rises Again compels you to reassess that presumption. Gloriously campy with even less reservation than its predecessor, this sequel features Vincent Price again in the title role, now lusting for eternal life in an Egypt composed of flashy sound stages and second unit footage from Spain. The film is just as fun as it sounds.

I thought I'd watched the first movie a year, maybe two years ago, but consulting my blog I see it was in fact five years ago. Most of the cast who survived the first film return for the second with the notable exception of Joseph Cotten who, I'm guessing for legal reasons, is absent even from the recap at the beginning of the sequel.

Now instead of killing off the surgeons Phibes blames for his wife being stuck in suspended animation in a glass coffin he's murdering the associates of Darius Biederbeck (Robert Quarry). The already centuries old Biederbeck seeks to prolong his life with an elixir hidden beneath a mountain in Egypt. Phibes seeks the water to revive his wife, played once again by Caroline Munro, who actually has lines and moves around in other films--those who watched the revived season of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will remember her from the Star Wars knock off Starcrash.

Phibes is once again assisted by his mute, beautiful, robot assistant Vulnavia, now played by Valli Kemp, and he carries around with him a house band of robots, though there are fewer musical numbers in this film. The improbability of Phibes carting around all this stuff is matched again by the flamboyant intricacy of his murders. One man is beset by a harmless mechanical snake (that looks perfectly lifelike) to lull him into a false sense of security for the real snake before he's speared to death through the skull by a mechanism Vulnavia installed in his phone. Another gets caught in a golden scorpion statue and that's just the beginning of his troubles.

There are very brief cameos from Peter Cushing and Terry-Thomas (who played a different character in the first film) and a larger role for Hugh Griffith whose delivery of the one word line "Pity" when he discovers a giant bottle of gin is empty in itself justifies his presence. The police inspectors from the first film are back but with cornier jokes and Darius has a strikingly beautiful lover named Diana (Fiona Lewis) who's constantly pleading with him to give up this mad pursuit of she knows not what.

It's a good film, more relaxed than the first, though the first one had more exteriors. I kind of liked the minimal exteriors in the second film, though, it helps the thing feel all of a piece, a complete love letter to artifice.

Strange Case of Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake

The most accurate Jekyll and Hyde adaptation I've seen so far doesn't even have a character named Jekyll or Hyde. 1971's I, Monster was released the same year as Hammer's Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde and featured Hammer's two top stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, but came from Hammer's rival, Amicus. The box office was apparently not as kind to I, Monster but Amicus won in the long run with this film--a much more cerebral take that makes much--perhaps too much--of Freud's ideas partly anticipated by Robert Louis Stevenson in his work. It also has some great atmosphere and performances.

For some reason, the name of Henry Jekyll is changed to Charles Marlow and Edward Hyde is changed to Edward Blake--all other names remain the same as those in the source material--Lanyon, Enfield, Poole, and, most surprisingly, Utterson.

The protagonist of the novella, Utterson almost never figures in adaptations at all, much less in the prominent role he occupies here. And Peter Cushing is very well cast in the role--one can almost see him in the opening lines of the novella:

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse, backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow loveable.

Peter Cushing was born to hold a cat.

The film suffers, though, from missing what seems to me the crucial aspect of Utterson's character. The novella describes him as having "an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove." This is what makes him an appropriate adversary for Jekyll, whose object is moral purity. Utterson is a tolerant man who would sooner see the humanity he has in common with sinners than to try to purge them.

But the absence of this character trait may be related to the film's introduction of explicit references to Freud. In this version, Marlowe--Jekyll--is a sort of psychotherapist and we see him apply his concoction to two patients, for both having the effect of liberating their ids, allowing them to achieve catharsis by acting out repressed feelings.

This version introduces fewer female characters than other adaptations--Marlowe has neither wife or fiancee--but there is an effective scene early on where a female patient (Susan Jameson) comes across Marlowe's porn stash while he's in the other room.

No doubt it's her discovery of the doctor's repressed libido that partly inspires her when she's taken the drug to try to seduce him--but Marlowe is far too composed to take advantage of her. Christopher Lee is great in this and he seems to have an understanding of the role much like John Barrymore's--he plays Marlowe/Jekyll as an increasingly brittle mask for the reality of Blake/Hyde.

We don't see Blake lusting after women very much, though still more than we do in the novella. The man he kills in the novella is swapped out for a prostitute who rejects him in a tavern. Blake's assault of her later doesn't seem sexual--he beats her in the skull with his cane, as he does the man in the novella. And, as in the novella, the cane breaks and becomes a crucial piece of evidence but instead of it being a gift from Utterson its significance becomes its resemblance to a cane Marlowe describes his father owning and using to physically abuse him. So the filmmakers here have dialled the Freud up a bit higher. It's effective, too, suggesting Blake/Hyde is partly a manifestation of Marlowe/Jekyll's issues with his father.

I would have liked it if Blake didn't resemble Marlowe so much though Lee does a good job of creating an impression of a different person just through mannerisms and posture. He kind of looks like Terry Jones sometimes.

Twitter Sonnet #1102

Excessive feet delivered fast the bell.
The windward tack rewards with broken yard.
Escape refurbished spring with chilly Hell.
In leather pocket dwelt the horrid card.
A resting league surveyed a waiting rock.
By clouds and moon and watchful faces keeps.
A host below abides for nature's clock.
An hour hand composed of mountains sweeps.
The echoes of transparent hooves arose.
The time diminished marked in shrinking skies.
The pebbles fall above in ragged rows.
The land's receding now bereft of eyes.
A hardened net restrains relieving goods.
The endless grid of hedges grew to woods.

Intolerance can Swim

The question was always there but few have dared to ask it: what if Nazis could breathe underwater? This is the nightmare realised by 1977's Shock Waves. It's elevated from simple, entertaining schlock by cool locations and very good performances, particularly from John Carradine and Peter Cushing.

Carradine plays the captain of a small boat taking tourists sight seeing in the Caribbean. I love his character--the way he scoffs at the beliefs of the ship's cook (Don Stout) in paranormal phenomena at sea is so strident that you get the impression he knows all the stories are true but he's wise enough to know people are better off not believing. Carradine is just the right actor for this part, his aged face reflecting his depth of experience along with the tone of flawed authority that made him perfect as Aaron in The Ten Commandments and as preachers in John Ford movies.

Among the tourists, Brooke Adams as Rose is presented as the protagonist but mainly she's relegated to following along as the men make all the decisions or running in terror. A natural enough reaction when encountering water breathing Nazi zombies--as they do when they shipwreck on an island. Also in residence is Peter Cushing, sole occupant of a great abandoned luxury hotel.

He has top billing but not a lot of screen time. Playing a former Nazi commander about whom we learn little he's around long enough to make a monologue on genetically engineered, aquatic Nazi super soldiers sound gravely serious.

They're pretty menacing though the tourists' worst enemy, as is often the case movies like this, is their own foolishness, particular a couple of them who do really stupid things when they panic. But the best death in the film comes courtesy of sea urchins. This movie was a real pleasure to watch.

Twitter Sonnet #1092

A poacher's plate advanced along the Rhein.
Announcements fell beneath the azure cloud.
A pair of pumpkin eyes betrayed the mine.
It's thought the written note was something loud.
Entire bottles face a plot returned.
Away to office lunch a cable's sent.
A lesson stacked in woods was swiftly learned.
Occasion told antennae too were bent.
The alternating green accepts.
A face ingests the proffered wine alone.
Detect the taste of brain on clean forceps?
The vinegar and lemon *can* atone.
A citrus shoe delivers feet to C.
An hour shaved delivers time to sea.