Look Not Beyond the Shroud

That's Roger Delgado, the original Master from Doctor Who, in brown face as the Arab villain in 1967's The Mummy's Shroud. Though Delgado's skin was pretty dark and all the actors were caked in layers of greasy foundation back in the '60s so maybe he wasn't in brown face at all. His father was Spanish so he may well have had Arabian ancestry.

Friday was a holiday here in Japan, the Emperor's birthday, so I spent the day being lazy and watched The Mummy's Shroud in the afternoon. Not considered one of the best Hammer films, it's nontheless better, in my opinion, than some of the ones that are considered among the best. The story's not wildly exciting but there's no real false step in it, there's no "Oh, come on" moments. Sure, it's cheap. The deserts of Egypt were clearly the same English quarries regularly visited by Doctor Who productions. The biggest star in the film is Andre Morell and he dies less than halfway through. But the movie does have surprisingly good cinematography. The lighting is creative without being as garish as it sometimes can be in Hammer films and the compositions are well constructed. I love the sense of awe and wonder the filmmakers try to convey as the explorers first uncover the mummified remains of the exiled young pharaoh.

The full movie is available on YouTube.

Arsenic on Her Hands

In 1857 Glasgow, a man was murdered by arsenic which led to the sensationalised trial of Madeleine Smith, his lover. Her trial concluded with the uniquely Scottish verdict "not proven", a conclusion the viewer may also reach from 1950's Madeleine, an adaptation of the story by director David Lean. Drenched in black shadows and shining surfaces, this fascinating film is more interested in the psychology of its central character than on whether or not she committed the crime.

Lean's wife at the time, Ann Todd, plays Madeleine, a young, unmarried woman of a wealthy, prestigious family. The film begins with her, her sisters, and her parents moving into an expensive terraced house in Glasgow and Madeleine claims a bedroom for herself and her youngest sister below street level. We soon see why as this enables her to make easy, clandestine meetings with her lover, a Frenchman named Emile L'Angelier (Ivan Desny).

She carries on with this affair even as her strict, class conscious father (Leslie Banks) arranges a suitable match for her with a kind gentleman named William (Norman Wooland). Madeleine promises Emile she will tell her father about him and marry him but for now she stalls, asking the amiable William not to tell her father that he had proposed marriage to her so that she wouldn't have to report that she'd turned the offer down.

Finally, at one late night meeting, Emile decides to force the issue and demands that Madeleine tell her father about him. This becomes the best scene in the film as Madeleine agrees and then Todd brings a series of changing expressions to her face that clearly show just how hard consciousness of what that means hits her for the first time. We see in her startled, and startling, reaction just how impossible it seems to her that the world where her father exists could ever connect with the one where Emile exists.

Lean had made it clear that Emile and Madeleine had a physical relationship. Earlier, alone on a hillside, the two overhear a country dance. Madeleine impulsively starts to dance and urges Emile to join her but he only stiffly participates, not knowing how to dance to the bagpipes. But she lies down anyway and waits for him--a cut to the lusty dancers indoors followed by a shot of Emile retrieving her forgotten shawl clearly enough communicates what had occurred in the interval. But it also shows that Madeleine's physical attraction to Emile is given priority over the lack of cultural and temperamental familiarity. It's sex she wants from him.

It's a relationship she'd entered instinctively when the opportunity arose and only too late does she consciously process the ramifications. And of course it turns out Emile won't accept elopement. He may really have affection for Madeleine but his own top priority is and always was her father's money and he's willing to use her letters as blackmail to get his way.

Lean cleverly avoids making it clear whether Madeleine deliberately poisons him or if some manner of accident occurs with arsenic in the kitchen. He does this without ever stepping away from her point of view so it's possible for the viewer to watch the film with either interpretation. Andre Morell appears as her defence council and makes plenty of very stirring and reasonable arguments as to why it couldn't be her. If she didn't want the letters found, surely she wouldn't have killed him without retrieving them--the timeline of her purchase of arsenic and his poisoning don't match up--the autopsy revealed the arsenic wasn't of the particular kind Madeleine was on record as purchasing for, she says, cosmetic use, believing arsenic to be good for her skin. But on the other hand, if she didn't kill him, who did?

But the film appropriately fixates more on the relationships that put Madeleine in this position. Murder obviously wasn't a useful solution but she was clearly in a bad, unfair situation. One might ask if the solution would be for a society to be more open about casual sex or if it would be healthier for people to be allowed to carry on private dalliances without fearing risk of exposure. Madeleine is available on The Criterion Channel.

Caesar in Dreams

All arguments between advocates for republics and enforcers of tyranny may be moot if all is controlled by capricious supernatural elements. The best part of Stuart Burge's 1970 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is its sense of the dreamlike and the fantastic, the very palpable influence the stars really do have on mortal faults. But it's got a great cast, too, and despite cutting too much from the text I really don't think this one deserves its bad reputation.

Calpurnia's (Jill Bennett) dream sequence is terrific, for one thing, with pulsing fade ins and outs of footage of mobs, Caesar's bust actually bleeding in a dark void, and Christopher Lee as Artemidorus intoning his warning for Caesar about the conspirators. He never actually gets a chance to speak his warning in waking life in this version but it works a lot better as part of the dream. The echo effect on his voice and the soothsayer's ("Beware the Ides of March . . .!") reminds me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland in a very positive way.

It really emphasises the incredible number of portents in this play where soothsayers, birds, the weather, and dreams are constantly trying to talk to the characters. If, as Cassius (Richard Johnson) says, the fault really is "not in our stars but in ourselves," it's not for lack of the stars trying.

That famous line is rarely quoted in full, "The fault (dear Brutus) is not in our Stars but in our Selves, that we are underlings." The reason Cassius is typically portrayed as a villain is that he, unlike Brutus, is motivated at least partially by his pride but he really doesn't deserve to be played like Snidely Whiplash, which Richard Johnson kind of does here. A lot of what he says makes sense in light of the fact that Caesar is becoming a dictator in what has long been a proud republic.

Why should that name be sounded more then yours
Write them together: Yours, is as faire a Name:
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well:
Weigh them, it is as heauy: Coniure with 'em,
Brutus will start a Spirit as soone as Caesar.
Now in the names of all the Gods at once,
Vpon what meate doth this our Caesar feede,
That he is growne so great? Age, thou art sham'd.
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of Noble Bloods.
When went there by an Age, since the great Flood,
But it was fam'd with more then with one man?

There's a television production with Peter Cushing as Cassius I'd dearly like to get my hands on.

There are several Hammer regulars in this production too, though. In addition to Christopher Lee, Andre Morell, my favourite Quatermass, plays Cicero, though if you blink you'll miss him. All of his dialogue was cut, you just see him walk past the screen in one shot, his role reduced to a curiously overcast cameo. In the play, he has dialogue with Casca about the weather, maybe Burge felt the storm effects worked well enough on their own. But Cicero's line, "But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves," is a nice thing to keep in mind while watching the play. It speaks to the conflicting motives of the conspirators which itself reflects the potential faults in decisions made by a group of people against a single clear vision like a Caesar's. The famous scene where Mark Antony sways the crowd after Brutus has spoken over Caesar's corpse shows just how much readier a crowd is to believe in a person than a principle.

Which makes Brutus' faith in a Roman love for republic so tragic. You might say it should've been obvious Antony would win the crowd over when the spectacle of Caesar's corpse is right there in front of them, but it only goes to show how much belief Brutus has in his own reasons and the capacity for other people to reason. He forgets how people might "construe things after their fashion".

Roger Ebert considered Jason Robards as Brutus to be a big weak point in the film, calling him "wooden". He's really no better or worse than he is in Once Upon a Time in the West or Melvin and Howard; I think the woodenness Ebert talks about is Robards' deliberate decision to make Brutus seem dispassionate. Here's a man who would murder a man he loves for a principle. The contrast between his performance and the others', though, may have a lot to do with the fact that he's an American in an otherwise almost entirely British cast who deliver their lines with the creativity of inflection and love of the language characteristic of traditional British stage actors. But there are other Americans in the cast who fit in better, including Robert Vaughn as Casca and Charlton Heston as Mark Antony.

While Robert Johnson maintains a straightforwardly villainous portrayal of Cassius, Heston takes the opportunity of playing Antony to deliver a more morally ambiguous character than he often had chance to at this stage of his career. His grief is sincere on beholding Caesar's corpse but he also luxuriates in an opulent picnic on the battlefield. It's one of those things that makes Antony seem like Charles II and Brutus like Oliver Cromwell by contrast and, indeed, I found myself thinking of the movie Cromwell which was released the same year. Alec Guinness' portrayal of Charles I is pretty restrained and Richard Harris is more more fiery than Robards here but obviously the story has a lot of philosophical similarities.

The cast of this Julius Caesar also includes Diana Rigg who's very memorable in a brief appearance as Portia; Michael Gough as one of the conspirators, making the most of only a couple lines; and John Gielgud plays Caesar himself, solid as always.

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In crimson steam the chain redeemed an eye.
For climbing rocks the newt awards a bike.
In circuits placid tigers eat the pie.
Through cloudy paints will thinner lightning strike.
A hollow hit resounds from golden bells.
But lucky storms return the ship to port.
An octopus contrives galactic Hells.
The snow returns to take the hidden fort.
The only legs support the speckled fawn.
Beneath the candy screen a movie plays.
Enchanted keys collect the doughnut dawn.
The bobbing frigate cleanly missed her stays.
A sinking flag was winking over waves.
The ocean rears a canny brace of knaves.