Category Archives: Imaginary British Cinema

Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#48 – Will O The Wisp

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(1973, GB, 105 min) Dir Eric Conway Bryce. Cast Mark Eden, Virginia Wetherell, Patrick Magee.

A decent entry in the ‘rural horror’ genre from a Hammer stable on the wane. Madge and Patrick move to a nice little house in the country, all ivy up the walls, roses in the garden and vast spooky mist-shrouded marshes behind the garage. It’s the marshes that keeps Madge awake at night with the blue plumes of the titular spectral light that dance outside the bedroom window. Of course Patrick hasn’t a trouble sleeping at all but soon enough notices how strangely his wife is behaving and how tickled the locals are at their living by the marshes. “How’s the light, friend?” they ask in their unfriendly way, laughing around their rotting gums, “Keeping you up at night?” Then one night in the local tavern, at the end of his tether at the actions of his distracted wife, he is taken in the confidence of a local historian with huge sideburns who tells him all about the house’s prior owner, the so-called ‘Black Judge’ of the local court, who sentenced more men to hang than any other in the country. He points with his pipe to the portrait in the corner of a foul faced and beetle browed man. He died one night, says the man, when he wandered alone into the marshes. What is it that lies in this dark and sinister marsh and will it claim his Madge as well? Sturdily shot by perennial also-ran Bryce (also on the wane at this point in his career), it’s the shoestring budget and wooden actors that drag the film down but it’s spooky fun regardless.

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Black and White, Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#44 – Claws of the Damned

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(1946, GB, 100 min, b/w) Dir Alberto Cavalcanti. Cast Elisabeth Welch, Miles Malleson, Frederick Valk.

A worthwhile addition to the horror subgenre of killer kitties, Claws of the Damned features Elisabeth Welch in a rare lead role as Rose, the maid hired to work at the decrepit Howe Hall without there seemingly being anyone to serve under save a couple dozen black cats roaming the house. It teeters into rote mystery solving by the end with dread family secrets and all that but what the film has to offer in spades is atmosphere – thick, eerie atmosphere. Those who have seen the film (few and far between they may be) all talk in hushed tones of the scene in Rose’s dark bedroom as she finds herself drifting off to sleep. The camera becomes her eyes, the hazy darkness of her lids opening and closing slower each time. With each blink the room grows darker and with each dial down of the darkness the room, it seems, becomes populated more and more with the black cats of the house. The genius of it is like that of The Innocents where the viewer, like the protagonist, is never quite sure of what it is they’ve seen. Of course she wakes with a jolt and, fumbling with the light, gets the room illuminated to find that the cats aren’t there. Just about finished when Cavalcanti left Ealing under a cloud this didn’t receive the kind of a release that it should have and was reportedly disowned by the director too. A truncated version from a scratchy print is up on YouTube for the curious and uninitiated.

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Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema, Romance

#43 – Buried Hearts

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(1985, US/GB, 105 min) Dir Alastair Hirst. Cast Jessica Lange, Julian Sands, Denholm Elliott, Hugh Grant.

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.

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Comedy, Imaginary British Cinema

#34 – ’68

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(1982, GB, 102 min) Dir Michael Apted. Cast Alfred Molina, Paul McGann, Alexi Sayle.

British film about a young man called David (a scouse Molina) trying to hitch from Liverpool to Paris in the year of the riots so that he can join in with the revolution but it takes him half of the film to get to Dover. Along the way to Paris he meets a young actor who thinks that he’s Jesus, “the original revolutionary” (McGann), an Italian opera singing truck driver (Sayle, who co-wrote) and, once he gets across the channel, a car filled with a nervous French family, at which point we realise that along with the handicap of his naïve politicking, that the young man speaks no French. Of course by the time he gets to Paris the rioting is done and the cobblestones are back in place – not that that stops him being brained by le flics he annoys with his ranting and being tossed into the nearest cell along with a terrifying young bruiser called Phillipe (a young Denis Lavant). A film that looks back at the person it was before and being embarrassed about it whilst simultaneously reminiscing wistfully on the subject. An interesting film of its time about the time before that forms a kind of a hall of mirrors of cultural self-regard.

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Black and White, Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#33 – Ghost in the Floor, The

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(1962, GB, 95 min, b/w) Dir Eric Conway Bryce. Cast Denholm Elliott, Janette Scott, Martin Stephens, Freda Dowie.

Superior chiller, like an MR James story for Christmas that was never written, and impeccably shot by Freddie Francis. Victorian schoolteacher Reginald Benway (Elliott) is assigned to Oldgrey’s college in the moor bound village of Hampton. The reception, as one would expect in such a film, is chilly. That night, as he sits on his bed, his head in his hands in despair, he makes out what seems to him to be a face in the floorboards made from the whorls in the wood’s grain. As time goes on things improve – he makes friends with one of his pupils, the lonely and awkward Alec (Stephens), and a relationship is tentatively begun with his fellow teacher, Miss Devonshire (Scott). Of course everything goes wrong after that, with false rumours being spread about his relationship with the boy and even Miss Devonshire begins to keep her distance. As his troubles mount each night the face in his bedroom floor changes and grows larger… This all plays out at a superbly measured pace, all leading to an end that’s all the more terrifying for its inevitability.

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Documentary, Imaginary British Cinema

#31 – Is Your Life Worth Living?

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(1974, GB, 51 min) Dir Alan Foster. Cast Phil Farmer, Janet Bee, Oliver Basquit.

A strange bit of propaganda produced by Anthony Beckett, the head of the notorious Anti-Life Brigade prior their disbanding the following year. The film takes the form of a documentary following three people – Phil, Janet and Oliver – as they occupy themselves in their day-to-day life while being interrogated by an omnescient narrator as to the point of their existence, the pointlessness of their marrying and reproducing and so on. As a failed propaganda this would have come and gone and that would be that but following the demise of the ALB copies were passed about film societies in the UK and it was shown once or twice television too. Unfortunately for Beckett this interest wasn’t for the film’s philisophical arguments but for the comedy of every point the film’s leads come up with for living being rebuked by the narrator’s doomy stentorian voice, like a furiously depressed Christopher Lee. For example, from Phil: “Sometimes on a Sunday I’ll go to the pictures – that puts the time in.” Narrator: “In the life of the universe the time you spend on earth is so insignificant that you might as well not exist.” There are, so far as I know, no records of the film’s effectiveness.

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Drama, Imaginary British Cinema

#30 – Ghosts of the Caspian

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(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.

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Drama, Imaginary British Cinema, Science Fiction

#29 – Last Elephant, The

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(1972, GB, 89 min) Dir James Hill. Cast Ron Rifkin, Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna.

Environmental sci-fi from the Born Free director. It’s the undated future and through a combination of poaching and the environmental devastation caused by a limited nuclear war all of the elephants of Africa are now dead. American journalist Alan Finch (Rifkin) is sent to Botswana to follow-up on a tip-off of a sighting from conservationists Frank and Mary Beckett (Travers and McKenna). The first half of the film finds our trio travelling uncomfortably, Finch’s city-living type not cottoning on to the Beckett’s nature loving ways. After they find the elusive elephant the second half becomes a kind of dirge with their every attempt to help the sickly survivor failing. At the end the world’s media convenes on this dying elephant, filming it as it expires. Finch’s conversion is complete when he is asked by a newscaster what the big deal is – “We have elephants in zoos, right?” Finch shakes his head. “No,” he says, “This wasn’t an elephant in a zoo. This was the last real elephant there will ever be.” A heartfelt film with no embellishments in it’s vision of the future – no hover cars or ray guns – that would suggest either the film’s modest budget or that the story they’re telling is something less than allegory.

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Action/Adventure, Imaginary British Cinema

#23 – Fire in the Dunes

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(1979, GB, 102 mins) Dir Peter Hunt. Cast Roger Moore, Edward Fox, Barbara Carrera, Donald Pleasance.

In an unnamed oil-rich Middle Eastern country, aging guns for hire Moore and Fox are hired for a covert sabotage mission by the sultan’s envoy (Carrera) for reasons vague enough to give me pause, were I a mercenary, but doesn’t seem to faze these two. Of course it’s all a con and before long the hunters become the hunted. Though it’s a little sluggish in the opening stretch, director Hunt still betrays some of the panache of his sole Bond entry and before long gun battles, quips and explosions are ten a penny. Both leads seem to be enjoying themselves and Pleasance makes for an entertaining, if inexplicably German, adversary. The happy ending – where our heroes toast a successful mission that, as a side-effect, causes a massive oil spill in the clear blue waters of the gulf – seems a trifle odd to these eyes and not necessarily the cause for celebration but then perhaps this is why I’ve never succeeded as a cold-hearted mercenary. Enjoyable stuff for a Sunday afternoon but it’d probably be best to have disengaged the brain some first.

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Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#12 – Jaguar, The

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(1964, GB, 102 mins) Dir John Gilling. Cast Noel Willman, Eithne Dunne, Colin Blakely, Harry Towb.

In darkest Cornwall at the turn of the last century returns Doctor James Walker from his latest South American expedition, eagerly awaited by his wife. She suspects that something has changed in him since he’s been away and despite her protestations her haggard husband now spends all his time in his study with his expedition’s spoils, the centrepiece of which is his favourite, a gold statue of a jaguar . Before you can say ‘cursed idol’ the local villagers are being savaged by an unknown beast. Thankfully a renowned hunter of big game in Africa is holidaying nearby and is enlisted by the villagers to hunt down the beast which he, of course, spies as being a Jaguar. Mrs Walker suspects that her reclusive husband with his South American connection has some part to play in this but is compelled to protect him, thus setting the stage for an emotional finale. Despite the inevitability of it all this is a handsome and stately entry to the Hammer canon, shot atmospherically on location.

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