Shot for the BBC and set in 1983 Malcolm’s film, as the title might suggest, takes as its starting point Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 speech to hypothesise a right wing anti-immigration victory in British politics and what that would mean for Britain. This gritty docudrama crosscuts between footage of the Dover camps in 1983 as shot by a news crew of the time where West Indian and Pakistani deportees are interviewed and talking head sections where historians and politicians detail the mechanics of racialist policies both historically and contemporaneously. Notable by his absence, unsurprisingly, is Powell himself. Malcolm found himself following in his compatriot Peter Watkins’ docudrama footsteps in more ways than one with his film as it was not broadcast in the year of its making (an election year with a Tory win) but was instead “shelved indefinitely”. It has only been seen since as part of film festivals or retrospectives but, as of writing, has never screened nationally or been released on DVD or video. That could all change and were it to be belatedly released it would underline it’s continued relevance now that immigration has once again come to define British politics.
(1978, WGer, 120 min) Dir Hans Berg. Cast Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jürgen Prochnow.
Named after the non-fiction book by psychiatrist Karl Berg (no relation to the director) about the life and crimes of notorious serial killer Peter Kürten who had previously been immortalised on the screen as the inspiration for the killer played by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M. The film begins as a two-hander between Kürten (Trintignant) and Berg (Prochnow) as the former details his life to that point. Trintignant is impeccable as Kürten, betraying no emotion on the surface, his excitement at recounting his terrible deeds manifest as nothing more than a dull glint in his eye. The only distraction to his performance is the imperfect dubbing which occasionally serves to flub the odd dramatic moment. The flashbacks are the model of restraint, with Kürten’s words painting the picture and not the camera which makes it all the more absurd that the film spent six months being banned in it’s home country before an outcry saw this decision overturned. This was the first film that showed the future promise of director Berg – he was previously known for two entires in the awful Dieter film series about a dictatorish child but would go on to have a distinguished career in the decade ahead.
(1990, Fr, 129 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Daniel Auteuil, Jean Rochefort, Emmanuelle Béart.
French thriller about famed neuroscientist Paul Mauchard (Auteuil) who has the unfortunate habit in his downtime of killing women and secreting their corpses in the space between the walls of his country house, all while his wife (Beart) and two children live there unknowing. Aging detective Fandeur (Rochefort), meanwhile, is trying to track down the missing Valerie Cassin who we have seen lured to Mauchard’s house and killed in the film’s extended opening. The two storylines play out side by side, converging and separating in nail-biting fashion as Fandeur picks up clues and finds the trail to his missing person, all the while not knowing that he’s on the trail of a serial killer. The whole thing is glacially paced and shot at the expected remove by Sacher, the camera coolly watching over the players without giving away a thing. This all means that when the expertly handled tension breaks out in the film’s latter half it will be an impossible watch for viewers without nerves of steel. An American remake has been mooted since the original was released but here’s hoping that if that comes to pass it’s not the slick, shallow interpretation that fans of the original have been dreading.
(1983, GB, 82 min) Dir Adrian Fisher. Cast Jim Patrick, Alison Patrick, Tony Cousins.
Another slice of magic realist life from the long lost Adrian Fisher, director of Creepy Crawlies and By the Light of the Blood Moon. If Terry Gilliam and Ken Loach got together they would come close to Fisher’s films. Jim and Alison – a real life brother and sister aged eleven and nine respectively – play brother and sister Jim and Alison. The two of them apparently live inside the bonfire that sits on the green of a Liverpool housing estate with their friend, the Guy (voiced by Cousins). The Guy is a kind of a father figure to the children, telling them stories at night about when he was a merchant seaman, the places he went and the things he saw – all of which is animated like a magic lantern show, or like the cut-out figure films of Lotte Reiniger. Every day the kids tour the depressed streets with their Guy in a wheelbarrow, petitioning for coins. Of course the finale of the film is Bonfire Night and of course their house is burned with the Guy atop it but this isn’t a tragedy, it’s portrayed more like this is the natural end for all of this and indeed the final scenes of the film show Jim piling what wood he can find on the blackened ground of the fire, his sister putting some old clothes into their wheelbarrow for the new Guy. An odd film for sure with great, naturalistic performances from the children.
(1985, Swe, 100 min) Dir Tomas Kinnaman. Cast Stefan Gustaf, Harald Solberg.
Another animal-centric film from Kinnaman, following the international success of When I Was Born a Canary with this similarly contemplative but more expansive film. Mild mannered Peder travels to Svalbard to study the seabirds there (his favourite being the long tailed skua) and staying at the Norwegian station. Much of the film is without dialogue, following the characters as they traverse the vast empty spaces of the island – if you get the opportunity to see this on a cinema screen you should jump at it just for the landscapes. There’s a particularly deadpan Scandinavian sense of humour at play here too – you can see it in the way the camera pans from the flocks of birds on the beach to the gathered scientists watching them, huddled together in the brightly coloured jackets that identify them by the country they’re from, Peder in his yellow Swedish jacket by himself on the edge of the frame. The drama of the film is handled in a similarly removed fashion. While on their way back to the station in the coming night Peder and his Norwegian friend Ole are attacked by a bear. There’s nothing heightened in the moment, no music or close up or anything like that – you can see the bear coming from the distance and Peder readying his gun. He shoots it, it falls to the ground and that’s it. You can’t see nature loving Peder’s face in the scene as he’s facing away from the camera but Ole can and his placing his gloved hand briefly on his friend’s arm speaks volumes.
(1938, GB, 42 min, b/w) Dir Albert Clock. Cast Albert Clock, Samuel Teats, the Workers of Yew Street Pot Factory.
By 1938 the film world had been taken over by sound and even holdouts like Japan had been converted. The islands of resistance were few. One such island was that of Northern Irish auteur Albert Clock who quietly produced sixty films from his base in the city of Belfast from 1910 to 1942, all of them silent. “Sound perverts the purity of the medium,” he once said and while the ideal is shared by many, it seems unusual for Clock to be invoking the notion of purity when his films are of the quality he achieved. Albert Clock was the last in the line of the once great Clock family who sold his inheritance so that he could realise his dream of becoming to Belfast what the studios were for Hollywood. The only difference was that while the studios made films made by lots of different people, Clock’s studio had only the one artist – Albert Clock himself. On the one hand Clock had a firm grip on the medium technically, deploying all the tricks that would have Griffith revered but lacking the populist touch for sure, being that all of his films depicted usually made up tales from Clock family history. In Captain Clock & Co his grandfather (played by Clock) is portrayed fighting the Zulu (local pot makers in blackface) at the Battle of Blueford (which is made up). Despite the variable quality of the acting and the fact that the battles take place mostly on the beaches of Murlough Bay (for the sand, presumably) it’s stirring stuff with the kind of grit and realism that would be commendable were it in the service of actual history.
(1915, US, 65 min, b/w) Dir Rudolph Henry Barrett. Cast Thoda Deane, Thomas Meecham, Alice Batt.
One of only six films made in the space of eighteen months by the unknown Thoda Deane who was being positioned by upstart company Star Film Productions as a ‘vamp’ rival to the likes of Theda Bara, Valeska Suratt and so on. Unlike the other five The Lodge-House was a success, even inspiring a minor craze in ‘cat’ collars (although I’m not sure what these are exactly). Unfortunately for Deane that success didn’t transmute into popularity for herself and soon enough she was, like so many others, tossed aside for the next in line. With all prints lost pretty much everything we know about The Lodge-House comes from posters and lobby cards that survive and there aren’t many of those. The most substantial source is an issue of Film Explosion found in a Long Island coal bunker in 1982 which includes a summary of the plot as such: “Mean Deane is at it again and this time she has Meek Tommy Meecham in her sights. Can he resist? Can YOU? Sweet Alice Batt will have to fight for her man in the ‘Lodge-House’ of SIN that she calls HOME! She demands PEARLS! She demands DIAMONDS! She demands THE WORLD!!” As you’ll admit, that’s some pretty vague stuff. The pictures show a pretty boilerplate melodrama of the day enlivened by the striking Deane with her slim face and big, dark, cavernous eyes and the set of the Lodge-House itself, which looks like an Orientalist’s opium nightmare.
Jessica Lange is the young American widow Ms Allison Fairley, the kind of person who one finds depicted in films as a ‘live wire’ or a ‘free spirit’ but that you, in real life, wouldn’t wish to be trapped in an elevator with. Since she has a lot of money from her late husband’s estate and a lot of free time Ms Fairley has decided to travel to Edwardian England to indulge herself in her latest hobby – the digging up of dinosaur bones. The reason she has her eye on England of all places is because of Sir Evelyn Pearson (Sands), the internationally acknowledged expert on all things paleontological. Of course he wants to have nothing to do with this forthright and crude American but she’s not easily put off – even if it means turning up at every one of Pearson’s digs she’ll get her man in the end. In the end, of course, she does but that’s not really a spoiler, is it? Produced by the estimable Merchant Ivory team though written and directed by TV veteran Alastair Hirst, this slight film seems at times to be trying a little too hard to out-Merchant Ivory the duo themselves. A young Hugh Grant adds value as Pearson’s flabbergasted student who is alternately appalled and besotted by the manic Fairley.
(1976, Fr, 111 mins) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Roman Polanski, Romy Schneider, Hans Neuber.
It’s plain to see what attracted Polanski to a rare performing role in Sacher’s second film – it’s the story of a man (Monsieur P, Polanski) under house arrest in his apartment in an anonymous European city where everyone speaks English who is spiralling into madness and is repeatedly visited and interrogated by a beautiful woman (Schneider). All three of the main points here – the enclosed space, the slide into insanity and the beautiful woman – tick the right boxes for the diminutive Polish auteur. There is a fourth thing too: oppression by unknown forces. Monsieur P wakes one morning to find a letter having come through his letterbox stating that until further notice he is forbidden to leave. He tries anyway and is confronted by Hans Neuber’s trenchcoat-clad goon waiting in the hallway. He calls his work but they already know about his arrest and request that he not contact them until the board have discussed the matter themselves. He calls his family but they are no longer there. What is happening to him? Why is his life falling to pieces? Then his interrigator arrives and with her the meat of the film too – a series of two-handers where the interrogator dissects every moment, every slight and folly of Monsieur P’s life. Filmed while Polanski was in Paris making The Lodger, it’s an interesting film for him to have made at that particular point in his life following his comeback with Chinatown and just prior to the arrest that would see his move to Europe made permanent.
(1985, GB, 120 min) Dir Richard Loncraine. Cast Art Malik, Brian Blessed, Omar Sharif.
Truish tale of the Iranian biologist Dr Tehrani (Malik) searching the north Iranian forests for evidence that the Caspian tiger may not be extinct in the mid to late Seventies, fighting on the way with loggers stripping the hills of their trees and the locals killing of the wildlife. A city bred scientist, his struggles with the privations of living rough are of great amusement to his experienced companions, which include Blessed’s Angelo Paxbury, former big game hunter turned conservationist, and Sharif’s local elder who is attempting to modernise his people. Of course Tehrani is unsuccessful and, when he returns home he finds that the revolution that has occurred in his absence has changed the country so much that he can’t settle back there and returns instead to the forest, like the tiger he seeks, never to be seen again. A heartfelt but never over serious drama, fantastically shot by Freddie Francis, that is only ever close to derailment in it’s opening straight with a cameo from Michael Palin as a lost butterfly enthusiast from the Royal Entomological Society, Lepidoptera Division, that seems beamed in from another planet.
Imaginary Film Guide 