(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.
(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.
(2012, US, 100 min) Dir Eric Ceder. Cast Rob Morrow, Brent Briscoe, Laura Regan.
Bizarre Randian horror movie that spitballs the unrest of the Occupy movement into a society wide uprising that targets the innocent one per cent that are safeguarding our society. Our hero here is Alex Forster (Rob Morrow, possibly prepping for his role in Atlas Shrugged Part 3), a stockbroker titan unlike anything seen in The Wolf of Wall Street – he himself would totally never do anything bad ever and has a loving family that apparently exists in a perpetual sunbeam. The supposedly expensive but cheap-looking walls of his world come tumbling down one day when the unwashed drug-crazed hippies protesting outside his office move indoors and begin exacting their revenge on the money men. Thus begins a discount apocalypse in what is essentially a filmed play with CGI inserts and crowd scenes of mass riot that only work if your definition of the word ‘crowd’ bottoms out at two dozen. It’s baffling to conceive as to who this film is aimed at as it seems designed to offend and angry anyone not rich enough to own a gold toilet but, at the same time, is so cheap and stagey in its execution to betray the fact that no self-respecting wealthy person would put their money near it.
(1976, Jap, 76 min) Dir Taku. Cast Mitsuo Ibaraki, Gen Otori, Anna Shimura.
Japanese biker gang movie cashing in on the rise of bōsōzoku subculture in Japan in the seventies. Hideo is a gawky, nerdish young man with a small motorbike that’s more like a scooter. He has a big dream though – to cast off his studies and become a member of the legendary criminal biker gang the Black Heart Bandits. One night, by sheer coincidence, he meets their leader – the cool, black clad and perpetually sunglasses wearing Ichi – and of course he uses the opportunity to beg for a place among the crew. Ichi – who isn’t one for charity I’m guessing – says yes, but only when he has passed his initiation. His first task is running the gauntlet of the local girl gang, the Pink Heart Bandits, which ends with him at the wrong end of a chain whipping coupled with a zealous helping of sexual humiliation. His trials escalate to drug smuggling and murder, the film ending with his gruesome demise at the wrong end of a stick of dynamite. The first in the six entry series revolving around the gang and as psychedelic, flimsy and comically sadistic as the rest. A great theme tune too.
Imaginary Film Guide 