When Do We Live?

if.... (1968)

Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan’s celebrated
tussle in the extraordinary if…

THE time-honoured British Boarding School subgenera has been a stock scenario since the 1930s; explorations of how our hero - a potentially recalcitrant individual - could be brought to accept the wisdom of an Empiric value system. But it wasn’t just in actual boarding house narratives that public school values found cinematic expression. From the 1950s, headmaster-like commanding officers exerted stern benevolence; indeed, this pervious ethos enveloped anything from horse-play (“come chaps, off with their trousers!”) in THE DAMBUSTERS, to the exclusive girls school in the endearingly abysmal gothic LUST FOR A VAMPIRE. Winner of the 1969 Palme d’Or, and a loose remake of the Jean Vigo short ZERO DE CONDUITE, Lindsay Anderson’s if…. is one of the most stimulating and visceral of all British films. Scripted by David Sherwin, it introduced Malcolm McDowell and featured a veritable repertory company of distinguished actors (among them Arthur Lowe, Graham Crowden and Mona Washbourne) who would subsequently inhabit two further Anderson/Sherwin films headlining McDowell as wily Everyman Mick Travis - the horrors of big business in O LUCKY MAN!, and the critique of Thatcherite healthcare BRITANNIA HOSPITAL.

Released in the wake of actual revolution in Paris, where students challenged the authority of De Gaulle and the French State, if…. is a blueprint for future anarchy that might take any number of contrarian forms: participating in public demonstrations, starting an underground newspaper, or simply buying a copy of The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man. The film plays like a lighter version of Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, with the mischievous and always watchable McDowell as the protagonist in both films. The actor already radiates his mix of arrogance and compassion here, which would be honed and forever etched into Kubrick's lead droog. It is in if…, however, that you understand more fully why McDowell's character is the way he is, your frustration and rage growing until you're relieved and horrified at the same time by its climax. if…. may, at times, display an overt fascination with the sadism it sets out to challenge, but its condemnation of the meaningless, colonialist rituals of a minor public school is utterly convincing. Tradition is only as good as those who maintain it, and Royston Lambert’s 1974 written survey of boarding school life, The Hothouse Society, offers ready evidence that Anderson’s work is closer to documentary than many critics would allow.

A publicity pose of Noonan, who plays if….’s enigmatic heroine. It's such an odd role and the actress - short and solidly built beneath a curtain of black hair - seems a decidedly non-ethereal person to have been cast, but she lays absolute claim to it.

The character of The Girl (Christine Noonan) first appears as a waitress, where she communicates with Travis through sight and smell. Venting their passion like a pair of tigers, they roll violently on the floor, all teeth, claws and flailing limbs; suddenly there is a change that cements the sequence as one of the most memorable in British cinema: the two wrestlers are suddenly naked, The Girl baring her teeth and sinking them into Mick's arm.With her taking part in their vicious final assault, the climax becomes more fanciful; she's an inspirational image, like the magazine clippings adorning the dormitory walls. The presence of The Girl in this final sequence helps to coalesce the rebels into an alternative family, fighting for righteousness and brotherhood. All these years later, she retains her uncanny ability to provoke and encourage our vestiges of revolutionary spirit, and there are those of us who will always love her for it.

if… is a great film because it both loves and hates Britain. It captures the wing collars and tailcoats, "whips" (prefects) and "scum" (fags), crusty masters and militaristic padres, chaotic feelings and quasi-fascistic discipline. Yet at the same time it cherishes the friendships and loyalties of an all-male school, including the moments of kindness - and the crushes. For many who were fortunate enough to see the film on the threshold of adulthood, it became a true rite of passage. On the surface a seething, surrealist tirade against the hypocrisies of The System, the film (which was largely shot in Anderson’s old haunt of Cheltenham) uses its setting to explore more universal issues, such as society’s refusal to conduct itself in accordance with the morals it professes to hold. This fundamental question is posed in the history class scene: were the atrocities of the past the fault of lone dictators, or the collective result of the population? Ultimately, we create our own Hitlers and Hungerford’s.

Rocks Off

CHARLIE IS MY DARLING (1966)
COCKSUCKER BLUES (1972)

Mick Jagger on the cover of the July 6, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone.

WITH A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, The Beatles became pioneers of the showbiz Beat Boom band. Under the wing of RADA dropout Brian Epstein, The Fab Four performed with the likes of Tommy Cooper and Alma Cogan. The Rolling Stones, on the contrary, had no pretensions to follow in such a luvvie tradition; their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, memorably came up with the catchphrase “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?,” at once instilling a surly attitude that separated them from the fresh-faced pack.

CHARLIE IS MY DARLING follows The Stones on their two-city tour of Ireland in 1965. More a 51-minute montage than a documentary, it's a jagged collection of grainy, handheld fragments, with songs and commentary starting and ending just as abruptly; the lack of synchronized live sound to match the concert footage, however, is the film's greatest drawback. They're still kids here, playing relatively small auditoriums jammed with hysterical, screaming fans. Brief interview segments show Charlie Watts to be virtually incoherent, uncomfortable, and unimaginative, while Bill Wyman claims he's not a musician, he just plays in a band. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were clearly the brash media players and court jesters even then, while Brian Jones comes off as the band's sensitive soul, never more so than with the eerily prescient, "Let's face it: the future as a Rolling Stone is very uncertain."

The cover of the discontinued Australian DVD of CHARLIE IS MY DARLING.

With the release of their definitive album 'Exile on Main Street', The Stones sought to document a developing self-mythology by hiring photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank for their 1972 North American tour. There was much anticipation for the band's arrival, with them having not visited the United States since the 1969 disaster at Altamont, but the resulting movie - with scenes of debauchery, lewdness and assorted hangers-on shooting up - was never released, and plays like CHARLIE IS MY DARLING’s evil twin brother. The Stones quickly forbade the work, for the obvious reasons of off-stage excesses, but also for the monotony, loneliness and tedium of their life on the road it so accurately captured. Frank fought The Stones' decision, and after a protracted legal battle, it was ruled that the film could only be shown once a year, and then only when the director was in attendance.

COCKSUCKER BLUES was shot cinema verite, with several cameras lying around for anyone in the entourage to pick up and start shooting. The ultimate irony of that technique, however, is that there was really very little to film. In one scene, Jagger, Bianca Jagger, and a soundman film each other simply standing in a hallway, too bored or stoned to do anything more. Frank's mixing of grainy black-and-white footage with Super-8 colour makes it impossible to tell what time it is at any point; the light is always the gray that could be dusk or dawn, and the band's sobriety is no sure measure of the time of day. The result is a feeling of timelessness, of being trapped in a continual waiting game between shows, played out in hotels and concrete-walled dressing rooms. It is worth mentioning, however, that the nastiest behaviour belongs to the roadies; but Mick and Keith do stand by and offer encouragement as their crew ravishes two marginally willing women aboard their private jet.

This police mugshot of Jagger occurred when the singer was arrested on charges of assault after getting into a brawl with a photographer during the ‘72 tour. Keith Richards and three others were also arrested.

Of course, some gems are caught using this angle; Mick films himself masturbating in a mirrored hotel ceiling, and Keith theatrically throws a television off a hotel balcony (an act that earns him a "TV Repairman #1" end credit). Aside from these moments, the band seems genuinely ill at ease anywhere but on stage. When The Stones aren’t performing or in impromptu jams, they seem tired and uninterested; in other words, like Charlie Watts has looked every day since 1963.

Everything is Permitted

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968)
PERFORMANCE (1970)

The cover of Fabulous Films/BFI’s 2006 DVD release of SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL.

WHEN Jean-Luc Godard came to London in 1968, fresh from the Paris student riots, he intended to make a pro-abortion movie, but this was abandoned after a change in legislation. The French new wave director then turned to The Rolling Stones for his subject matter, which happened to be their feature film debut. Alternatively boring and mesmerising, SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL would later be re-edited by Godard as ONE PLUS ONE, after being angered by the producer’s attempts to commercialise the work so much, he punched him at the premiere. It is the director’s title version, however, that makes clearer its intention – to put together two discrete elements, rock and revolution. But these do not directly interact, nor do they sit comfortably; the black-power commune, with its eerie passive white female victims covered in blood, and a crazed, Buster Keatonesque final sequence, for example(s), are mixed with footage of the Stones working on 'Sympathy for the Devil' from its ballad beginnings to its final samba-driven form. What most strikes one about SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL is its expressive flatness; Godard’s cameras simply look at things, as though he’d rather not intervene in time’s flow at all. The filming of the Stones, meanwhile, seems to be almost autistic, as if the camera is simultaneously baffled by and unconcerned about what is going on. It doesn’t really work as a piece of cultural politics either, and has always been regarded as a lesser work in the Godard canon.

Quite where the Stones fitted into this scheme must have been beyond them. Their footage is undoubtedly fascinating, containing in itself a separate double-edged sword: the evolution of an infamous song and Brian Jones’ self-destruction. A first-person commentary from a suave and sophisticated Lucifer, 'Sympathy for the Devil' is a song that cemented fears that the band were indeed devil-worshippers and a corrupting influence on youth. It should be noted, however, that one interpretation of this song is that The Devil is in fact mankind. The lyrics are a brief history of some of the most notable atrocities committed by man against man, including wars of religion ("I watched with glee while your Kings and Queens fought for ten decades for the Gods they made"), the 1917 Russian Revolution ("I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change, killed the Czar and his ministers"), and WWII ("I rode a tank, held a general's rank while the blitzkrieg raged, and the bodies stank"). In that light, the song would appear to be a criticism of the immorality of mankind. Jones’ estrangement from the group as the song unfolds is unforgivingly portrayed, with him spending much of his time inaudibly strumming behind a sound partition. Indeed, the most uncomfortable moment of the entire film is when Mick Jagger attempts to explain to Jones a basic chord progression, as if humouring a slow child.

Mick Jagger’s androgynous, iconic presence
on an Italian lobby card for PERFORMANCE.

Jagger would attempt to become a fully-fledged movie star in PERFORMANCE, a haunting meditation on human identity from co-directors Donald Cammel and Nicolas Roeg. This controversial film is an example of the peculiar effects generated when avant-garde or experimental practises are integrated into the Hollywood mainstream, with its innovative use of montage and mirror shots being imitated by a generation of film students. It is the story of Chas Devlin (James Fox), a sadistic petty gangster who has trouble fitting in, even with his cohorts. Chas clashes with boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) after he carries out a murder for personal - as opposed to business - reasons, and hides out in the Notting Hill basement of "retired" rock star Turner (Jagger). Turner has secluded himself in the house in order to lament the loss of his powers of "incantation," which seems primarily to mean that he indulges in a lot of drug-taking and sex with two female companions, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (the omnisexual Michele Breton). Soon, Turner – whose name can be taken somewhat literally - senses a connection between Chas’ brutally violent nature and his own dried-up creative powers, and he draws the young hood into his world.

Famously characterised by Cammell and Jagger as about "a perverted love affair between homo sapiens and lady violence," PERFORMANCE remains as provocative as ever – and one of the few truly visionary films made in the UK. The explicit sex and brutal violence was a breakthrough for British cinema, such as Chas’s oddly sexualised whipping at the hand of Maddocks (Anthony Valentine). At the time, Fox was Britain’s freshest rising screen star, but was so disturbed by his experiences here that he failed to act again for nearly a decade. Furthermore, 20th Century Fox rejected the film, delaying its release, then ordering a drastic re-edit. As Turner explains, "The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, is the one that achieves madness."

Executives sneered that even PERFORMANCE’s bath water was dirty. At least here, Jagger, Michele Breton and Anita Pallenberg save on some.

Jagger’s portrayal of Turner reinforces his stage image without copying it, and is a comment on his own life and style. Submerging himself with such a hedonistic existence, and surrounding himself with a cloying assortment of Eastern artefacts, almost every shot in his apartment is aimed past incense and tapestries. This is not the environment your everyday white-collar gangster feels at home in, but Fox’s Chas is a character who struggles to feel at home anywhere. The identities of the two men become blurred; in Turner, Chas sees his own desire for adulation, while in Chas, Turner sees his own demon, the violence needed to restore a creative impulse. When he sings Memo from T, Turner brings the two worlds of violence and the cult of rock music together, in a way much more effectively than Godard’s pretentious posturing. This song – which can claim to be the first fully-formed music video – is a sleazy post-modern blues, with Ry Cooder’s slide guitar uncoiling like a predatory snake behind Jagger’s mannered delivery of what was, for him, an unusually Dylanesque lyric, packed with references to characters we’ve never met, including a "misbred grey executive" and a "faggy little leather boy."

In the wake of PERFORMANCE, Roeg directed a number of acclaimed motion pictures, while Cammell’s career appeared to stall. The themes illustrated here – of masculinity in crisis, transformation and extreme violence – would re-appear throughout Cammell’s later work. Indeed, the artist spent four decades in the film business, but his director’s credit only appears on three further films – DEMON SEED, WHITE OF THE EYE and WILD SIDE - all of which were made in America. In their 2006 book Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side, Rebecca and Sam Umland paint a picture of a life in such sexual excess that it may have been that this limited output was because professional considerations seem to take a very second place. PERFORMANCE is a scream against the hierarchy and repression that links the ruling class and the underworld that is Old England; the puzzling fact that Cammell took out French citizenship in the 1960s, and spent most of his later life in Los Angeles, perhaps starved a creativity which produced its best work under the acute observations and groundings of a society he turned his back on.

Blighted Blighty

CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

28 WEEKS LATER (2007)

The Americans make London their 51st state, and prove
as dangerous a threat as the ‘infected,’ in 28 WEEKS LATER.

IRONICALLY, Danny Boyle’s 28 DAYS LATER – an energetic blend of THREADS and George A. Romero’s THE CRAZIES – actually lead the so-called zombie renaissance even though it’s monsters were living, shrieking, blood-vomiting ‘infected.’ It can be argued that Boyle’s masterwork spawned the wave of undead viscera that shows no sign of abating. From the social breakdown of Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, to the political quagmire of Joe Dante’s MASTERS OF HORROR: HOMECOMING, the standard zombie diet has consisted of two delicacies: human meat – preferably intestines – and subtext; you are what you eat, and if you happen to eat people, there is anthropological gristle to chew.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 WEEKS LATER has an American-led NATO force resettling British civilians on an Isle of Dogs safe haven – a metaphor for Baghdad’s Green Zone - after the ‘infected’ from the first film have starved to death. This War on Terror, like its real counterpart, is similarly self-destructive in its bullying authority figures, demoralised combat divisions and fractured family units, a stillborn Iraqesque commentary that sees the Americans smugly declare the war against infection over. But when the situation quickly reaches Code Red they fittingly shoot at will, firebombing city blocks and releasing biological weapons. Here, fear of the ‘infected’ is a horror clearly working closely to the terror of protocol.

This UK preview poster for Fresnadillo’s sequel to 28 DAYS LATER draws heavily from the symbolism of the vastly superior virus movie THE CRAZIES.

28 WEEKS LATER lazily rehashes the first film’s ideas; the only addition to the virus Rage’s cannon is the hint that the ‘infected’ may be undergoing a kind of memory-recall that Romero’s zombies have long since taken for granted. London suggests a decimation of civilisation in general and heroes are hard to find; the two most sympathetic people, Don (a wizened Robert Carlyle) and his naturally immune wife Alice (Catherine McCormack), set the new outbreak in motion in a world of relenting doom. In fact, the film rolls in like a poisonous dust cloud of nihilism. Fresnadillo presents 28 DAYS LATER’s trademark shutter-strobe jump cuts even more frenetically than the original, adding only to the confusion. The director makes the fatal mistake of believing that chaos equals fear, and while he may have been trying to purposely disorient his audience, in reality, all he does is frustrate, equating the whole premise to that of a Rage victim: quick, loud and with little control.

Alfronso Cuaron’s CHILDREN OF MEN is a BLADE RUNNER for the 21st century, telling of a dystopian future where mass infertility has led to a world without children. Unlike Stanley Kramer’s comparable ON THE BEACH – where Australians await killer radiation with good-humoured stoicism – here the Londoners of 2027 respond to the apocalyptic sterility with a howl of self pity, which is embodied in a quasi-fascist democracy of riot shields, caged refugees and feral gangs ("The world has collapsed, only Britain soldiers on.") Beautifully filmed in battle-scarred colour drained hues, the film climaxes in a Hadean vision of Bexhill-on-Sea which most closely resembles war torn Bosnia. In this existence of rubble, Cuaron comments on the problems society faces today: racism, terrorism, government-inspired paranoia and decaying infrastructures.

Theo (Clive Owen) and Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) hold the future of humanity literally in their hands in CHILDREN OF MEN. This scene has warring factions stunned into immobility by the sight of a baby.

Non-British filmmakers, who observe the strangeness of this land with the empathy of an outsider’s eye, direct both of these releases; they also add to the grand tradition of British horrors that turn familiar sights into killing fields. Romero’s American Living Dead movies, a quartet of films spanning four decades, saw its zombies become powerful metaphors for racism, consumerism, vivisection and class. Yet there is something particular about phantasms that are placed within familiar British sites, a juxtaposition that has long been exploited by purveyors of the uncanny. Ever since Bram Stoker brought Dracula across the waters from Transylvania to Whitby, and H.G.Wells deposited his extraterrestrial invasion on the outskirts of Woking, these tales seem more credible when played out against the down-to-earth, uptight backdrop of Britain. The United States can use its landmarks to startling effect – one need look no further than the climax to PLANET OF THE APES – but it doesn’t have Britain’s deep, dark ocean of history, and perhaps it is because of this abyss which makes such scenarios resonate more subconsciously.

Layer upon layer of London soil reveals burials from prehistoric and medieval times; the city is one giant grave, from plague pits by The Houses of Parliament to St Paul’s foundations built upon remains of previous eras. One particular location – the brooding labyrinth of the London Underground – has come to embody the morbid groaning of horror’s repressed psyche. DEATH LINE surely inspired John Landis when he let his AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON loose at Tottenham Court Road station. It's here that an unsuspecting passenger is stalked and savaged in a film which trades heavily on the distinction between English locations (Yorkshire pubs, West End porno theatres, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge and London Zoo) and lycanthrope fantasy. More recently, V FOR VENDETTA ran into unexpected controversy when its tube-bound finale chimed too closely with the real-life horrors of the July 7th bombings. Its fitting that the multi-lined network has such appeal; after all, the reason why the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington is because it was impossible to excavate through skeletal catacombs.

Horror Hospital

GARTH MARENGHI’S DARKPLACE (2004)

Unlikely defenders of the Earth: from left to right, Matt Berry as Lucien Sanchez, Richard Ayoade as Thornton Reed, Matthew Holness as Rick Dagless and Alice Lowe as Liz Asher.

FILMED in the 1980s, DARKPLACE has earned a cult reputation as one of the most terrifying and radical television programmes. Considered too subversive and scary, the show was suppressed for over twenty years – although it did enjoy a brief run in Peru - until it finally surfaced on Channel 4 in 2004. The brainchild of best-selling horror author Garth Marenghi – the writer of such chillers as The Ooze ("can water die?") and Black Fang ("Rats learn to drive!") - Marenghi not only scripted and directed the episodes but also starred as the lead character, Dr Rick Dagless MD, a maverick physician battling evil forces lurking beneath a post-apocalyptic Romford hospital. The series was produced by Marenghi’s publisher and business associate Dean Learner, who plays shotgun-toting administrator Thornton Reed in the show, together with devilishly handsome and velvet-voiced Todd Rivers as Dr Lucien Sanchez, and Madeleine Wool as psychic Dr Liz Asher.

In reality, the show is a razor-sharp parody of 80s TV from Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness, adapting the pretentious horror writer from their Perrier Award-winning GARTH MARENGHI’S NETHERHEAD. Marenghi (Holness) is painted as a super-egotistical Stephen King who happens to write like Guy N. Smith or Sean Hutson. He’s a man’s man, speaking in a constant husky whisper, and wearing leather jackets over dark shirts. One often thinks of THE EXORCIST director William Friedkin when looking at Marenghi, who is inadvertently self-incriminating (at one point he boasts that he’s written more books than he’s read).

DARKPLACE's dynamic duo: Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness.

Suitably ham-fisted, appallingly acted and badly written, DARKPLACE’s not so special effects adds to the cheesy fun as the characters battle everything from Scotch Mist to cosmic broccoli. Fashions, music, film stock and punchy audio are all captured with expert aplomb. The episodes themselves are funny enough, but the "new" framing interviews provide the real meat. Reminiscing about the show, Marenghi is presented as a blinkered genius and still thoroughly convinced that the show is a masterpiece; he adopts a highly defensive stance, aggressively justifying the material and the sub-texts behind it, while Rivers (Matt Berry) is portrayed as a washed-up theatre actor, whose experiences on the show have left him with an alcohol dependency and a hazy memory; a glass of whisky constantly in his hand, Rivers alternates between praising his own performance and having no recollection in actually starring in them. Learner (Ayoade), meanwhile, with his oddly-angled beret and extensive cigar, is the picture of a sleazy tycoon.

"He whisked off her shoes and panties in one movement, wild like an enraged shark, his bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm. Mary’s body felt like it was burning, even though the room was properly air-conditioned. They tried all the positions: on top, doggy, and normal. Exhausted, they collapsed onto the recently extended sofa bed. Then a hellbeast ate them" – Extract from Juggers by Garth Marenghi.

The Stones on TV

THE ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS (1968)
THE STONES IN THE PARK (1969)

An attractive French DVD cover of THE STONES IN THE PARK.

IN December 1968, The Rolling Stones turned the Wembley Intertel studios into a real live circus for a BBC special never to be broadcast. Shelved and only released on video in 1996, then on DVD in 2004, THE ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS is a masquerade of dwarves, trapeze artists, fire-eaters and headlining musical talent, with Mick Jagger as the Ringmaster. Set on a tiny stage just barely sufficient to accommodate the bands, the show nevertheless captures the spontaneity and communal spirit of swinging London in the late 1960s, as well as a project that delightfully ridicules the variety show conventions to which the stars so obediently adhered to when they were rising young turks. The appearance of Jagger’s then muse Marianne Faithfull - sitting mannequin-like in a floor length evening gown - is the only conventional moment in an otherwise glowing piece of entertainment.

The Who’s alleged up-staging of The Stones with A Quick One While He’s Away is often cited as the main reason Jagger pulled the plug. Even though the song is hardly one of The Who’s best - a patchwork telling a puerile but strangely resonant tale of adultery and absolution – it gives the CIRCUS its most primal moment. It is evident that the group is perfectly in tune with themselves and their surroundings, especially Keith Moon, tossing drums over his shoulder once they’ve outlived their usefulness, his eyes forever embroiled in mischief. The other stand-out, in his first public musical performance outside The Beatles, is John Lennon, who triumphantly tackles Yer Blues with rock’s initial supergroup The Dirty Mac - Eric Clapton on guitar, Keith Richards on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Yoko Ono caterwauling her way into some private apocalypse on Whole Lotta Yoko.

‘Dirty’ Keith Richards introduces The Who and Lovely Luna and the Fire Eater for THE ROLLING STONES ROCK AND ROLL CIRCUS.

Today, one watches The Stones set and reflects that Jagger has been harsh on himself. Unlike the televised Beatles, Jagger has always acknowledged the camera, often stalking it like a cobra that might strike if the lens-eye pulled back or looked away, his grins and stares are both inviting and seductive – qualities of a great performer. But the appearance of Brian Jones is another story. Jones once gave The Stones glamour and their music texture; it was he, remember, who added sitar on Paint It Black and slide guitar on Little Red Rooster, but his failing was to be born without the steely ambition of Jagger and Richards. Consequently, the CIRCUS shows the Stones early leader reduced to an insignificant other; puffy-faced and looking totally defeated, it is only once – during a fine No Expectations - that he returns to the living.

When German actress, fashion model and alledged mistress of the black arts, Anita Pallenberg, left Jones for Richards, it created a mental shift within the Stones of which Brian never recovered. This also created musical changes, from the instrumental dandiness which epitomised Jones’ tenure, towards the rock and roll of the band’s first truly great album ‘Beggars’ Banquet’ and Richards' sulphurous brew of hard rock, pagan rhythms and badass writing. The Stones had been planning the free concert in Hyde Park to unveil Mick Taylor as Jones’ replacement, but Brian’s death only two days before overshadowed the event. Captured by a Granada Television documentary crew for THE STONES IN THE PARK, the gig is not a good one. In front of over 200,000 fans, Jagger takes to the stage in a white smock and releases hundreds of butterflies in honour of Jones, most of which are already dead through improper storage. The Hyde Park performance shows the group as woefully underpowered, under-rehearsed, and still in shock. It is obvious that Jones could not have survived within the Stones structure, but, as this film shows, perhaps they weren't quite ready for life without him.

He's Not the Messiah

MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979)

He’s got a very good friend in Rome...
Michael Palin’s star turn as Pontius Pilate.

IN July 1977, Mary Whitehouse – self-appointed guardian of national morals – won a blasphemy libel case against Gay News for publishing James Kirkup’s The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name, a poem which detailed a Roman Centurion’s homo-erotic meditations towards the crucified Christ. This had a personal resonance within the Monty Python camp, as Graham Chapman had helped launch the publication; yet both parties could never have foreseen the deluge when their paths would meet under similar circumstances two years later. The foulest-spoken yet best humoured Biblical epic ever, LIFE OF BRIAN shows that any subject can survive a sardonic tweaking, as long as it is done with intelligence and wit. Religion may be comedy’s last taboo, but the film does not lampoon Jesus Christ, his teachings or his importance as an icon. Less an attack on the Bible itself, it's more a scathing satire on mob mentality and cult ideology.

LIFE OF BRIAN captures the period in Python’s life when the group were at their happiest and most creative. Under the firm helm of Terry Jones, the picture is much more structurally sound compared to the troupe’s first "proper" theatrical release, MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, and therefore less faithful to the stream of consciousness spirit of their TV series. It isn't littered with Terry Gilliam animation or plot line tangents, and is a more serious attempt at linear comedy painted on a much broader canvas, with Gilliam’s inventive set design providing a constantly interesting backdrop. Brian Cohen (Chapman), the reluctant prophet, is a simple man constantly mistaken for the King of the Jews. From his birth in a manger right next door to Christ’s, to his unexplained rise as a spiritual emblem for Judea, Brian remains an incorruptible innocent; he is bemused by his contrasting Roman/Jewish ties, confused in love, and foiled by the very spirit of individuality he advocates.

Always look on the bright side of life;
the scene that cemented LIFE OF BRIAN’s infamy.

When LIFE OF BRIAN premiered in New York, the opening salvo in what would become a surreal war of words came from Rabbi Abraham Hecht, who said that the release was "produced in Hell." Hecht’s fear was that the film would weave a corrupting spell over the impressionable minds of young cinema-goers, leaving them with a contaminated view of religion. After the Rabbi’s denunciation, outraged religious leaders in America queued up to vent their spleen, from the Lutheran Council to the reactionary politics in the southern states of the Bible Belt. In Britain, the war against LIFE OF BRIAN was fought a little differently. The Nationwide Festival of Light - a watchdog association working in league with Whitehouse - lobbied the BBFC to refuse a certificate. When the film was passed, the Festival of Light, supported by the Church of England Board for Social Responsibility, began an insidious campaign, circulating anti-BRIAN literature and encouraging Christians to pray for the film’s downfall. When it opened across Britain, local authorities even exploited a loophole in the law through health regulations. Consequently, the film ended up being banned in Surrey, Swansea, Cornwall and East Devon (where councillors refused to even watch it, arguing that "you don’t have to see a pigsty to know that it stinks.")

Despite the uproar, the work is anything but blasphemous; on the contrary, it is a statement which reduces the religious beliefs of our society on the hearsay of people two thousand years ago, and argues that freedom of thought is rare and precious. Above all, LIFE OF BRIAN is very much Pro-Christ, but anti-Church, standing as a beacon for the right to criticise religion. Whether it’s Brian’s unwanted disciples arguing over whether to follow the shoe or the gourd he’s left behind as he runs away, or the anti-Roman factions who do more damage to each other than the Empire, the film stabs at the heart of comedy’s favourite target, conformity. What's endearing about the Pythons is their irreverence; LIFE OF BRIAN is so cheerfully inoffensive that it's blasphemous to take it seriously.

Into the Unknown

Quatermass at the BBC (1953-2005)

André Morell, the definitive Professor Quatermass, in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.

THE stories of Nigel Kneale explore science, superstition and social issues. Although hating the tag "science fiction writer", his work, nonetheless, takes us through experiences that leaves us brighter and more aware, speculating on all the mysteries that remain to be clarified. He was one of the genre’s most illuminating humanists, a confrontational individual who used his writing as a metaphor for our problematic times. Kneale often painted cynical landscapes of our future and developed into a masterful satirist, whose tweaks at mankind’s expense proved just as prophetic as his works undertaken in a more sombre mood. His abundance of intelligent ideas tapped into contemporary fears and a succinct observation of human behaviour. Comparisons to H. G. Wells cannot be underestimated; Kneale was a genuine seer, predicting the disintegration of broadcasting and society, typified by his depiction of Reality TV in THE YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS.

Kneale’s arrival as a staff writer at the BBC coincided with television’s post-Coronation mass appeal. Early drama was dominated by unambitious stage and literary adaptations, and there is some justification in Mark Gatiss’ claim that the writer invented popular television. During the 1950s, Kneale wrote three serials featuring his most famous character, British Rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass. Each broadcast live, THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, QUATERMASS II and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT all made a lasting impact on the nation’s consciousness, and were also subsequently made into films by Hammer. Manned space flights were years away, but THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT presented them as near docu-drama; viewers were terrified by the realistic presentation of astronaut Victor Carroon (Duncan Lamont) returning to Earth in the grip of alien infection. Its sequel, QUATERMASS II, features a heavily guarded government refinery, supposedly a factory for synthetic food, but in fact an alien-breeding colony nurtured on poison gas and processed human blood. And in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, a capsule unearthed on a London building site is found to contain the remains of Martians and augmented ape-men, tapping into the dormant Martian mental faculties bred into Mankind and provoking a gigantic race purge. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is the most complex and bleakest in the trilogy, portraying the human condition as an irreversible alien experiment, and Kneale’s only remedy is restraint against the ancient destructive urges implanted in us. This last serial was shown at a time when newly arrived Caribbean immigrants – the so-called Windrush Generation – faced widespread daily abuse.

The Quatermass Memoirs were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1996. The series mixes a new monologue by Kneale - in which he discusses the genesis and development of Quatermass - together with archival material and a dramatised strand in which the Professor discloses his reasons for reclusion and discusses his demons with a persistent reporter.

THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT evokes the wartime blitz spirit, while QUATERMASS II tackles the threat of an Orwellian "enemy within." Unlike the bombastic spectacle of American horror films of this period, Kneale’s aliens use humans as involuntary symbiotic hosts as part their life cycle, or as a means of continuing their species. Consequently, the strongest emotion evoked by the Quatermass stories is one of disgust. The tales create images that allude to things that are universally repulsive: faeces, urine, rotting flesh, foul odours and deformed bodies, a literary technique used more by writers of horror and supernatural fiction. In THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, there is the physiological deterioration of Carroon whose arm resembles an exfoliating cancer, not to mention the gelatinous remains of the missing crewmembers, the slime the creature leaves in its wake, and the deformed bodies of those it has drained of life. Similarly, QUATERMAS II has foul-smelling gases and faecal aliens writhing in the excremental "food" inside pressure domes, and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT takes place almost entirely in a mud-filled excavation in which the decomposing bodies of the Martians are discovered.

In April 2005, BBC4 aired a new QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, the BBC’s first live drama broadcast since a series of lunchtime plays in 1983. Shown as the centrepiece of the channel’s ‘TV on Trial’ season – a re-evaluation of the medium from the 1950s to the 2000s - like almost everything involving Kneale’s character, the production is literally an experiment; it takes risks, suffers from underfunding but certainly is heroic. With only the first two episodes of the original series surviving, the idea of creating a two hour condensing of the writer’s scripts was a fine one, if only for the nerve of its staging and to have a more complete document for posterity. The setting is a notional present day via 1955, leading to an almost alternate feel to the 21st century in which there has seemingly been little space exploration and terms like "pressure suit" are still in use. Kneale’s references are only lightly updated, like casting Anglo-Indian actress Indira Varma as the astronaut’s wife, who delivers her 1953 dialogue without seeming as comically cut-glass as the original actress, Isabel Dean. And as a replacement for the Coronation-friendly Westminster Abbey, which saw the mutated Carroon’s demise in the original, the finale takes place at the Tate Modern Gallery, an inspired choice in finding an equivalent symbol of pride in an era where Royal association is forever receding. Not only does it provide a vast, shadowed space for Quatermass (Jason Flemyng)’s "casting-out" of the alien lifeform within its fabric and air, the Tate acts as a stringent metaphor in a cultural shift from religion to art.

Jason Flemyng is the Professor in BBC4’s rendering of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT.

Other changes, however, are less successful. In the year Christopher Eccleston became the new DOCTOR WHO, the casting of Flemyng as a younger Professor seems to appeal to the same primetime mentality. Flemyng delivers his high-tech speak as well as anyone, but being the same age as the actors playing the astronauts and his colleagues creates both a symbolic and plot problem. Most of his scenes are with seasoned performers as Adrian Dunbar, David Tennant and Mark Gatiss, over whom he cannot adhere to the same boffin-like authority of Reginald Tate’s Quatermass from the initial serial. Tate was undeniably in charge, but Flemyng is too often on the defensive, as if any of his co-stars could challenge his role.

Heavy Metal

DOCTOR WHO – THE INVASION (1968)

As iconic as scenes from THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH,
Cybermen descend the steps of St Paul’s in THE INVASION.

DEVISED by DOCTOR WHO’s unofficial scientific adviser Kit Pedler, and story editor Gerry Davis, the Cybermen personified one of Pedler’s own phobias – dehumanising medicine. The scientist foresaw a time when spare part surgery would reach such a level that people would become uncertain whether they were man or machine, including the notion that cybernetically enhanced brains would lose the capacity for emotion. The Cyberman, DOCTOR WHO’s second most dreaded enemy after the Daleks, are the embodiment of this detached, heartless, logic. Tending to invade by stealth, and often employing human agents, these silver giants would become the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton)’s most recurrent foe, take a long rest during the tenure of the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), and show up for token engagements with most subsequent Time Lords. Dubbed by the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) as "a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship" in their comeback REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN, their subsequent serials did little to make them more formidable, consigning the once persistent to also-ran. Plagued by inconsistent characterisation, by the time of THE FIVE DOCTORS the denizens of Mondas are reduced to cannon fodder, and in DALEK, a Cyberhead is mounted on display in a storehouse of alien technology, "the stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit."

THE INVASION, however, is a strong outing for the Cybermen. Arriving on Earth in 1975, the Second Doctor discovers that the component manufacturer International Electromatics have a grip on the world’s technology. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) is aware of unusual activity within IE, which is run by Tobias Vaughan (Kevin Stoney). Vaughan is, in fact, in alliance with the Cybermen, who are massing in the sewers below London, with IE technology set to paralyse the population. But Vaughan is developing the Cerebration Mentor, a machine designed to generate emotional impulses as a weapon against the invaders. While THE INVASION may not be your standard Cybermen story – they don’t even appear until episode four, and have only a couple of brief lines of dialogue – the idea of the Earth being attacked through its electronic equipment is perfectly in tune with the concepts underlying the creatures. Despite existing in the scriptwriting quagmire that so typified late 1960s DOCTOR WHO, at eight episodes it is easily at least two segments too long, but it is a serial that builds a future for the show. In many ways, it is a sequel to THE WEB OF FEAR, in which the TARDIS crew first encounter Lethbridge-Stewart and an embryonic form of the UNIT forces deployed here. In UNIT, the production team had found the key to continuing the Doctor’s adventures into the 1970s – by repeating invasion of Earth stories and consequently controlling the budget - making it a dummy run for the early part of the Third Doctor’s era.

For the 2006 release of THE INVASION on DVD, Cosgrove Hall Films created two animated episodes (with original soundtracks) to replace those missing from the BBC archives. This reconstruction of the famous St Paul’s Cybermen walk is from a trailer that was part of initial tests. The resulting animated episodes 1 and 4 – using differing shades to re-create the textures of black and white television – take the story in a striking noir direction, and play as achievements that can be enjoyed in their own right.

THE INVASION benefits from strong direction, outstanding performances, and distinctive incidental music. It has a true sense of scale, although we only really see London, Vaughan’s compound and the airfield housing UNIT’s temporary base. Vaughan is a superb Bond-like villain - his air of avuncular charm never quite masking the underlying threat he represents – and Troughton seems to relish having a single figure for the Doctor to pit his wits against. The contrast between Troughton’s slightly anarchic Doctor and his military friends is also rather charming, as he generally bumbles happily around whilst the Brigadier seems to regard him with a mixture of amusement and a respect established by THE WEB OF FEAR. Because of this, the Doctor need waste no time proving himself, which from a dramatic point of view allows him to play with helicopters and canoes with the aid of military backup, resulting in something of a romp.

James Bond Will Return

GOLDENEYE (1995)
CASINO ROYALE (2006)



Famke Janssen is Xenia Onatopp in GOLDENEYE. Larger than life and played with enormous zeal, the scenes between her and Bond feature the type of double entendres that were so much part of the Connery era.

JAMES Bond was born within the pages of 1953's Casino Royale, and not even its author, Ian Fleming, could have predicted that this modestly promoted thriller would be the catalyst for an international literary and cinematic phenomenon. Fleming had many traits in common with the hero he created – not least a love of action, exotic travel and beautiful women – and in post-war Britain, Bond gave the public much-needed escapism as the Empire continued to shrink. At least in the pages of novels time stood still, and a lone Englishman could still be counted on to save the world. In the 1990s, with the Soviet Union now a democratic state, and the Cold War officially over, alterations were needed at the box office for this very mid-century secret agent. Yet Bond is ageless and indefatigable; the world needs a hero just as much now as it did in 1953. Subsequently, Pierce Brosnan was installed as the new 007 for GOLDENEYE, a fine re-introduction and a massive financial success. Brosnan’s Bond is a return to the roguishly charming days of Sean Connery; impeccably cool (he merely flicks his head as bullets ricochet around him), defiantly sexist and as destructive as ever, it is a dynamic action entry in its own right. It's clear that this revamp, which features many new hands both behind and in front of the camera, including director Martin Campbell, is intent on giving the character an invigorating transfusion. Everything, including the wild conceptualisation of the action sequences (the tank chase is fittingly breathless), the impudence, the sexual pugnaciousness and the willingness to have a little fun, is pushed a bit further.

Although GOLDENEYE strives to keep up with the modern blockbuster, it also plays to subtler undercurrents. The film tells the story of a powerful satellite system that falls into the hands of a former ally-turned-enemy. The most unusual touch is the motivation for 006 (Sean Bean)’s treachery: treatment of Cossacks returned to Stalin after WWII, including his parents, an episode Bond freely admits was not "Britain’s finest hour." Such a reference to possible homegrown fallibility was previously unheard of in the series, as is reference to 007’s own parents dying in a climbing accident – this is taken from the novels, and the first time it’s been acknowledged on screen. Another welcome aberration is that women give him a hard time, and nearly all the exchanges are characterised by feisty sparring. GOLDENEYE neutralises any politically-incorrect feminist fallout - the female M (Judi Dench) condemning Bond in her famous "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" speech, and Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) knowingly parries sexual innuendo on an equal standing. And the film presents the franchise with an outstanding female foe, Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). Deliciously sadistic, Xenia assumes an almost unique position in the pantheon as a potential Bond girl gone bad. Onatopp is a killing machine who crushes her lovers like a praying mantis, and orgasms every time she pulls a hot machine gun trigger. A wonderful pulp creation, one scene has her stepping from an armoured train in a black-leather wasp-waisted outfit brandishing a cigar and bad attitude. She’s the sort of adversary that takes a sexist, misogynist dinosaur to handle.

Daniel Craig is the most talented actor to be assigned the prestigious role of James Bond, and is a revelation in CASINO ROYALE. Craig’s Bond seems happiest, perversely enough, in the infamous torture scene, where vampiric villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) ties him naked to a chair and whips his testicles.

Brosnan’s final Bond DIE ANOTHER DAY – following TOMORROW NEVER DIES and THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH - could have also been the last 007 movie. This quartet set financial high-water marks for the series that may not be matched again, but Pierce’s curtain call was a cynical, weary best-of concert, offering copious nods to the past without offering anything new. With CASINO ROYALE, also directed by Campbell, the casting of Daniel Craig comes closer to the author's original conception than anyone since early Connery. The film asks us to forget that there has ever been another Bond movie, while at the same time expecting the viewer to know its mythology. It's comparatively low-tech, with the intense fights mostly conducted up close and personal, and the killings accomplished by hand or gun. Bond is now more of a lone wolf, a deadpan executioner with a penchant for letting his guard down too quickly. "I have no armour left" he tells love interest Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), with whom he actually falls in love rather than merely lures into bed. And this Bond has little interest in living up to the legend: when a bartender asks him if he'd like his martini shaken or stirred, Bond shoots back, "Do I look like I care?" In that instant, it's as if the part had never been played by anyone else.

Civil Warlock

WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968)

WITCHFINDER GENERAL was released as THE CONQUERER WORM in the United States, as illustrated by Midnite Movies’ busy DVD case art. AIP had Vincent Price recite Poe’s poem The Conqueror Worm over the credits, in the aim to cash-in on their success with the Roger Corman pictures (note the totally redundant Pendulum motif).

WITH the exception of PEEPING TOM, no British horror film carries more critical baggage than WITCHFINDER GENERAL. Dubbed "the most persistently sadistic and morally rotten film I’ve seen" by Alan Bennett, rarely has movie violence been used so legitimately. Co-produced by Tigon – British exploitation’s most endearingly downmarket film company - and AIP, only Michael Armstrong’s MARK OF THE DEVIL suggests the same rural cruelty in the witch-torturing subgenera. Set in pastoral East Anglia during the Civil War between Cromwell's Roundheads and King Charles's Cavaliers, Vincent Price stars as pious opportunist Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed General who profited from the chaos by ‘discovering’ witches among the peasantry. The film has long been a cult item, in part because its talented 25-year-old director, Michael Reeves, died of an accidental barbiturates overdose shortly following release, but mainly because it is an extraordinarily bleak story of political evil.

Often described as a Suffolk Western, the film has a robust autumnal quality that perfectly suits its setting, and cinematically it bears the mark of the late 1960s - there's an overabundance of zooms, and an easy reliance on the brutality of brightly hued gore. The white-gloved Witchfinder is both implacable and terrifying, a distillation which is simultaneously unfathomable and, sadly, recognisable. With the character of Hopkins at its centre, WITCHFINDER GENERAL takes a despairing view of the human condition every bit as gruelling as the outbursts of violence which punctuate it. Reeves shows bloodshed as a communicable disease, engulfing everyone from young and old; when Roundhead Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy) tackles brutal henchman John Stearne (Robert Russell), and then hacks Hopkins to death with an axe, his initial boyish likeability seems like a forlorn memory.

The sinister figure of Matthew Hopkins casts a long shadow over horror fiction, folklore and history.

Reeves’ reputation quickened almost immediately after his death. Whether he was cinema’s Keats or its Ian Curtis, we are, however, in the same light-constricted forests, and under the low thatched ceilings, that are forever Terence Fisher’s Slavic Europe. Yet WITCHFINDER GENERAL equates the English Civil War with the culture clashes of the 1960s. Witchfinders are allowed to call victims’ perpetrators as part of a moral vacuum that exists on the ungoverned fringes of any unrest. Loitering military bands, and forgotten human carcasses decaying in the bracken, are both social consequences in the breakdown of the system, allowing starvation and criminal behaviour. There is no Evil Incarnate, only perpetual corruption.

No matter how well the director captures the atmosphere of 17th century religious upheaval and moral hysteria, the real Hopkins – and the social context in which he operated – remain less well known. Qualifying his actions through religion, and aided by Stearne’s boiling Puritan blood, between 1645 and 1647 it is suspected that Hopkins was associated with as many as 200 executions - if not by his direct "examinations", then by his murderous, and seemingly omnipotent influence. It can be said that Stearne was the adrenalin of Hopkins, but not the greed. One of the most significant contributions to the legend was Ronald Bassett’s Witch-finder General, a 1966 novel which posed as source material for the film, where Hopkins is portrayed as a middle-aged Ipswich lawyer who reinvents himself as "a black-winged Attila, leaving behind him a trail of gibbet-hung corpses." But Hopkins was not so much the leader of the movement as an adjutant. It took a lot of people to hang a witch – witnesses, magistrates, clerks, executioners et al – so the witchfinder gave confidence to act. To call Hopkins a vindictive monster is to refuse to understand the hazardous potential of his followers; the same could be said about Hitler and Osama-bin-Laden. It was only after his death that people slowly began to see the error of their ways. The undertones of misery and guilt pushed the Hopkins persona into a legendary rather than historic mindset; children’s fairy tales would take on characters with tall buckled hats, knee-length boots and long knotted staffs, manifesting into an incubus. One could even suggest that the Child Catcher (Robert Helpmann) in CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG has something of Hopkins about him.

In one of his most humourless roles, Vincent Price was never better as the screen Hopkins.

Price classically renders Hopkins here, romanticising the events around the character, but WITCHFINDER GENERAL is extremely accurate in its interpretation of the accusation, torture and forced confession. The General is unshakeably matter-of-fact as he hangs, drowns, burns and has needles pushed into his victims, his face and voice convey comparatively little, even the sexual subtext implied by his interest in Sara (Hilary Dwyer). Price’s performance is not so much restrained but stone cold, and it can be argued that Peter Cushing’s interpretation of the Hopkins character, as Gustav Weil in Hammer’s TWINS OF EVIL, is closer to the real-life person. Price, by 1968, was inseparable from carnival-host and Freudian-camp. Reeves, who had wanted the tyrant to be played by Donald Pleasence, felt that Price’s tongue-in-cheek approach to horror was wrong for the role. Exactly how Reeves achieved this radical shift in the actor’s tone is now legend. Clearly, he and his star did not get along, but the friction is attributed to various causes. One publicity photo taken on set shows the two antagonists together - Price in full costume clad in black, hunched over and solemn, and Reeves in a white polo-neck facing in the opposite direction - the impression is of two figures worlds apart.

Scoptophilia Now

PEEPING TOM (1960)

Director Michael Powell. Speaking of PEEPING TOM: "It vanished for twenty years, and I vanished with it."

MICHAEL Powell’s collaboration with Hungarian Emeric Pressburger – which gave the British film industry a string of hits such as A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, THE RED SHOES and THE TALES OF HOFFMAN – reveals strong elements of the fantastic. The work of Powell and Pressburger is often fragmented with emotional excess and hysterical behaviour, defying any classical sense of balance or order; their cinema is instilled with a magical and transcendent quality, in which the relationship between image and music is closely linked. In what Powell has called ‘the composed film,’ editing, dialogue, camera and actor movement all take on a strongly predetermined rhythmic and choreographed dimension. But the filmmakers also concerned themselves with documenting anxieties about the highly industrialised post-war British culture in which connections to the mythical and mystical past are suppressed or denied. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP is perhaps the richest example of the tendency for them in creating a film which is at once a highly stylised fantasy, an analysis of British culture, and a meditation on the meaning and construction of cinematic images.

Few releases have as strange and tortured a destiny as Powell’s PEEPING TOM. Made without the involvement of Pressburger, and scripted by Leo Marks, the film was unanimously savaged by critics – branded everything from "destructive" to "necrophilic." Powell's sympathetic portrait of mild-mannered serial killer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) was a bold and subversive risk that instantly destroyed the heralded director's career (this treatment apparently extended to Powell dressing the character in his own clothes). Mark ultimately emerges as a disturbed but very human figure, and such sensitivity was too much for the critics, who were unable to see past its foreground prurience and wicked humour. Today, thanks largely to a 1980 revival by Powell enthusiast Martin Scorsese, the film is rightly seen as one of the genre’s key achievements. Lewis, working as a focus puller, is the victim of a monstrously dominating father, who remorselessly subjected him to a campaign of constant monitoring during childhood in the name of scientific research. These experiences have turned Mark into a voyeur with an obsession with fear, and his killing is fed by a compulsion to capture on film the exact expression of his victims at the moment of death.

There are subtle hints of Peter Lorre in Carl Boehm’s portrayal of serial killer Mark Lewis. The character approaches life like a director, suffering for his art and being a technician of emotions.

PEEPING TOM is the first meaningful monograph about the act of watching horror films. In her feminist essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey analyses the way movies tend to film women and argues, among other things, that the camera’s view point is rarely gender neutral, but usually has a "male gaze". Although it predates Mulvey’s essay by fifteen years, PEEPING TOM manifests many of the kind of criticisms she discusses, making it an exercise that also critiques the form and practice of movie making and spectatorship. The fact that Powell is implicating the filmgoers - along with Lewis - as voyeurs was not missed by the critics. As the blind alcoholic Mrs Stephens (Maxine Audley) warns - "all this filming isn't healthy" - Powell's own understanding of the motion picture impulse allows him to explore this idea, implicating the filmmakers, and his audience, in Mark's pathology. This ‘viewer-as-participant’ notion can also be attributed to Eli Roth’s HOSTEL, with the connection between the ticket-buying cinemagoer and the paying-for-torture of its narrative. But hostility for PEEPING TOM was further fuelled by the fact that Powell cast himself as Mark's sinister father, and his own son, Columba, as the young Mark. Brian Easdale’s racing, silent film style piano music intensifies these nightmarish home movies of systematised child abuse even further.

PEEPING TOM was released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, and signalled the start of horror films moving away from gothic mansions and monsters into a more contemporary world where evil is an aspect of the human psyche. In both of these films sex functions as a dirty secret, and it is possible to argue that Hitchcock’s commercial success at exploiting this secret despite initial critical disfavour was a crucial factor in determining the future sensationalism of sex and violence in American cinema, just as much as Powell’s commercial failure closed off a similar avenue of representation in Britain. The two films share certain thematic similarities - voyeurism, an unusually frank (for the time) treatment of sexuality - but the two leading anti-heroes, Mark and Norman Bates, are both timid, young, lonely men, who appear polite, tidy and reserved. Indeed, Mark’s awkward and childlike romance with Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) seems to have reverted to the only level in which Lewis can communicate with women without killing them. Metaphorically, the camera is portrayed as a phallic symbol. When we first see Mark’s camera it is held in his coat at waist level; later, when he is about to go out on a date with Helen, she tries to convince him to leave it behind, saying it is too much a part of him, "I though it was growing into an extra limb." Even the way Mark kills women is phallic: his weapon is a spike concealed in the leg of a tripod, which must be raised and then unsheathed before he can kill. Consequently, PEEPING TOM implicates that cinema itself can become an instrument of violence. Because of this, it is heartening that the film will, proudly, never be respectable.

Going Underground

DEATH LINE (1972)
CREEP (2004)

Franka Potente misses the last train in CREEP.

BY the early 1970s, Hammer was stumbling toward an open grave. This decline was illustrated by DRACULA A.D. 1972, a misguided attempt to lure back some patronage by locating the Prince of Darkness among the groovy Chelsea set. Placed alongside the burgeoning new wave of American horrors - socially relevant releases such as Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT – Hammer perished because of this inability to adapt to a world beyond Home Counties Transylvania. But British horrors also typically endured disastrous relations with everybody from their distributors downward. Two important UK releases – PEEPING TOM and WITCHFINDER GENERAL – were both badly mishandled on release, and vilified in the national press. 

Although labelled repellent by British critics, DEATH LINE nevertheless tapped into the new-style unpleasantness being perfected by the US independents. Directed by Chicago-born Gary Sherman - who would go on to helm DEAD & BURIED and POLTERGEIST III - the film is the tale of a lone cannibal stalking Russell Square tube station, as Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence), Detective Rogers (Norman Rossington) and Inspector Richardson (Clive Swift) uncover a truth that the authorities would prefer remain buried. The Man (Hugh Armstrong, in a role for Marlon Brando before his son contracted pneumonia) – riven by septicaemic plague and given to biting the heads off rats - is a sorrowful survivor of a race who have incestuously bred and fed on each other and hapless Londoners. A dispossessed spectre from a Victorian past, the only vocabulary at his disposal – “mind the doors” – is typical of DEATH LINE’s uncomfortable blend of pathos and black humour. 

One of the partially consumed cadavers suspended from a wall in DEATH LINE (affectionately released as RAW MEAT in the United States).

DEATH LINE’s political themes - collapse of Empire, class exploitation and high level corruption - were particularly relevant in the early 1970s. The humanity of the film’s aboveground characters is questioned from the outset: backed with kitsch striptease music, bowler-hatted civil servant James Manfred OBE (James Cossins) tours Soho and propositions women on platforms; we later learn that his luxurious home has closed-circuit TV to view any bedroom action. Pleasence is typically superb as the teabag-hating Calhoun, who initially dismisses the input from students Alex (David Ladd) and girlfriend Patricia (Sharon Gurney), and Christopher Lee’s cameo as Stratton-Villiers MI5 - complete with furled umbrella and Old Etonian tie - sneers at the proletarians. Conditions belowground are explored in the virtuoso 360-degree long, leisurely malingering pan of The Man’s den, culminating in his moaning over a dying companion (June Turner); the skeletal sets and fetid atmosphere clearly acted as a key inspiration behind Robert Burns’ design for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Christopher Smith’s modestly budgeted CREEP also held its own against the US independent releases of the early noughties. The eponymous Creep (Sean Harris) has played an involuntary part in a programme within a covert surgical unit beneath Charing Cross station. The Creep becomes a surprisingly complex character: the absence of light, language, and love has turned this pale boy into a feral freak. More animal than man, his speech consists mostly of inhuman screeching as he hunts, snares and tortures anything in his path. But he also retains an unusual curiosity - at times almost sportive, as if playing hide and seek with his quarry. When Creep straps a homeless female (Kelly Scott) to an obstetrician’s chair, he prepares to operate as would a child playing doctor; donning a gown and surgical gloves, he pretends to anaesthetise before one of the most unmitigated acts of violence ever committed to celluloid. Regrettably there are plot holes large enough to drive a train through, but CREEP is fast-moving fare which benefits greatly from its haunting perspectives of the tube's otherworldly look, focusing on ominous low arches, ambiguous sewage tunnels and oppressive crawlspaces.

Beast and beauty: Hugh Armstrong and Sharon Gurney in DEATH LINE.

DEATH LINE and CREEP both successfully adapt a particular legend to the screen. The subterranean tunnels of London are rich in urban myths - ghosts searching platforms for loved-ones, killer rats of phenomenal size, and walled-up trains with cargoes of skeletons - but its most famous story remains that of a race of Troglodyte dwellers. Viewing these films, we can appreciate the sensitive process that eventually manifests as local legends. By means of these myths, we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are, a romantic response to our perception of the London Underground that manifests a certain fear in contrast to what we can see and touch. As cinematic experiences, they are cannibal films with a conscience. Analogies between man and monster – and how far a man can degenerate and remain human – are not difficult to draw. Yet society is the real villain, the kind of capitalist state that abandons its disenfranchised children, and denying them their essence.