Love and Liberty

7/7/77 – who could resist launching a James Bond film on double double sevens? The Spy Who Loved Me opened 43 years ago tonight. Though it’s the first Bond I remember seeing advertised – kids at school had the car-submarine toy! – I was much too young to see it on the big screen. We finally did three years ago, in a UNICEF Benefit double bill with For Your Eyes Only (the first Bond I did see at the cinema) celebrating the life of Roger Moore. They made an unexpectedly successful pairing. When we got in from our night at the Greenwich Odeon, I typed up what I thought about each, and both, and the bits that each film might do better swapping between them…

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s a strange choice. Why not The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker? Because that would be like having a massive chocolate gateau followed by an even more massive chocolate gateau. No, scratch that – it is, apparently, World Chocolate Day and that’s making me hungry. I’ll start again. Because that would be like watching the same film You Only Live Twice in a row. Tonally, these do interestingly different things (though I reckon one’s more successful in what it sets out to do). Neither is my favourite Roger Moore Bond film, but they’re the massive success on its own terms, and the critical success that shows his range. And there’s something else: at our showing, the trailers before the double bill were all late middle-aged dreary, and we weren’t interested in any of them. Then, I remember… The very last one starts. Rey’s hand on a rock. John Williams’ music. Into my head comes the thought, ‘Every member of the audience is sighing, “Finally!”’ just as I, too, breathe out with relief. And at that exact moment, Luke Skywalker says, “Breathe.” But the even better trailer came at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me: “James Bond Will Return in For Your Eyes Only”. And for that one night only, he did.

Spoilers follow.

To Begin With…

The Spy Who Loved Me stars Roger Moore as James Bond. Barbara Bach is the Bond woman, KGB Major Anya Amasova, Bond’s competitor and one of the few who’s a proper opposite number. Curd Jürgens is the megalomaniac villain, Karl Stromberg, lurking in his (usually) underwater base, Atlantis. And Richard Kiel is Jaws, the giant hench with the steel teeth. With bonus Lotus submersible car, previous James Bond (voice) George Baker and Doctor Who’s Space James Bond star Edward de Souza. Russian and British nuclear subs have vanished, swallowed by Stromberg’s supertanker with the even bigger jaws in a plan to start World War III… The poster’s justified in saying this is the big one – everything you expect from a Bond film and Moore, with a massive world-spanning plot, sets so huge they had to build the world’s biggest stage, and the biggest, most outrageous ski jump in cinema history, they threw everything into Bond to see if it could still be a blockbuster: they doubled the previous film’s box office.

For Your Eyes Only stars Roger Moore as James Bond. Carole Bouquet is the Bond woman, crossbow-wielding Melina Havelock out to avenge her murdered parents. But which gangster is the villain? Could it be, as first appears, cheery Columbo (Topol)? Or will it be, in a twist, Kristatos (Villainous Julian Glover)? It’s definitely not Ernst Stavro Blofeld, whatever the pre-titles sequence might suggest. With a more interesting role than usual for Walter Gotell’s KGB General Gogol and an early one for Charles Dance. On the surface it’s a Cold War plot chasing a sunken British nuclear submarine ATAC targeting device, but deeper down it’s about the local catspaws, the people who get caught in the crossfire and who’s out for revenge on who. This one gets the critical praise for being the sober, serious Bond film. In theory…

The Spy Who Loved Me

“Just keeping the British end up, sir.”

The pre-credits adventure grabs your attention as we’re introduced to new Bond regular General Gogol, the KGB chief who brings charisma and ambiguity to the series as the Cold War comes back (though more often than not with Britain and the USSR in uneasy alliance). Points for the film’s first twist: Gogol calls in his top agent – not Michael Billington’s sexily hairy sub-Bond, who turns out merely to be Major Amasova’s lover. Add sexual innuendo (“something came up”), corniness (“But James, I need you!” “So does England”), a ski chase to great music and an incredible jump off a cliff with a Union Flag parachute, and the movie’s off to an unbeatable start even before the song cuts in.

When you think of James Bond, perhaps it’s the action, the quips, the women, the cars, the villains? For me – well, yes, it’s the villains – a major part what I think of any Bond film is in the music. Give me a bold belter of a theme song with an acid edge, then a brassy, gorgeous score that says ‘What a fantastic vista’, ideally by John Barry. But the music takes a definite swerve for both of these films. Now, you might think, ‘Hit song, but no John Barry, and that’s your problem’. Well… Not quite. The strange thing about The Spy Who Loved Me is that Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better is a massive hit, while Marvin Hamlisch is more disco than the strident, insistent traditional Bond score, but I prefer the score to the song. The pulsing disco of Bond ’77 races along with some serious energy, the eerie, bubbling approach to Atlantis is a great new direction, and this is a composer who gets it – as you might guess from the Bond music documentary in which he was the one who said of Goldfinger’s “Wah wahhh-wah!” opening, “If you’re dead, you wake up for that.” Whereas Nobody Does It Better is a statement of intent with great knowing confidence, but it doesn’t have the bite for me and only lets rip towards the end. The title sequence that goes with it is the first to feature Bond himself, again the statement of intent, though the Maurice Binder naked goose-stepping Russian ‘girlies’ and guns are even more sexist than it sounds.

Odd things I’d never noticed until seeing the film on the big screen: a young, slim Kevin R McNally rushing about on a sub; Stromberg’s underwater-and-sometimes-looming-over-the-water base Atlantis initially being a disappointment, as it should be city-sized but the bigger the picture, the smaller it seems when we first see it rising from the depths. But later, when we get snap-round camera moves and forced perspectives, I believed.

The movie’s other massive special effect – Jaws – is hugely effective. And pretty huge. And though inspired by the book that they weren’t allowed to use (and not allowed to use SPECTRE either, a film that’s so very definitely present but built on absences), he’s part of the pop-culture riffing that’s especially there for the first half (and the Bond film riffing for the whole thing). We see a shark – reference to hit movie Jaws – and a horrible kill. Then we get not the shark but the man named – Jaws. Then he goes up against the shark. And wins! This is Bond saying ‘We are the blockbusters.’ Though even this film’s box office success was nowhere near Jaws’, it’s got the same chutzpah as Nobody Does It Better: enormous confidence in itself after following fashion for two movies, yet never tipping into arrogance, and utterly winning. While after Christopher Lee last time, here we’re really doing a vampire bite. And a massive figure, haunting the pyramids in a big horror movie sequence. He’s Jaws-Frankenstein-Mummy-Dracula!

Disconcertingly, one of the attractions has a voiceover from Charles Gray, as if the film’s haunted by the spectre of SPECTRE – exorcised from it by legal action. “I’m not interested in extortion”; context makes Stromberg’s line funnier. On top of being You Only Live Twice and its threat to the whole world (though closer in plan to Doctor Who’s Warriors of the Deep – which must have been thinking of this, later), I’m getting Goldfinger, too, in the Bond’s Greatest Hits: the amusing car, the obscenely wealthy villain, the memorable hench, the woman who’s impressive in her own right… It really does succeed in what it aims to do, doesn’t it? Because after Goldfinger, this pretty much is the car, the hench and at least one of the best roles for a woman, though not one of the most charismatic actors (Caroline Munro steals it by still flirting as she tries to gun Bond down from a helicopter, and he gives her the feminist compliment of actually killing her as he would any other hench). And a lot of films have tried.

The plot has a deliberate feel of the Sean Connery movies, and firmly underlines Moore as the same Commander Bond after Live and Let Die in particular introduced a different man. For all that, this is also the definitive tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore. It couldn’t be anyone else. It’s all done with great verve, with amazingly huge sets from genius designer Ken Adam, a villain with glowering presence who wants to destroy humanity for nihilism (rather than the ’60s exploiting the Cold War for profit), and while it’s not the most creative Bond, much of it’s great fun, much of it’s a bit crass, and it is indeed “Bond – and Beyond!” I enjoyed it immensely, and though my head says to give it 007 out of 10, the whole experience swept me up to an 8.

For Your Eyes Only

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“That’s putting it mildly, 007.”

This was the first Bond film my parents let me see at the cinema, and I have to separate a lot of baggage from it. The longest-carried is that I had dearly wanted to see Moonraker, for lasers! But was judged too young (though we’d been allowed to watch Bond films on TV). Four decades later, I probably prefer this to Moonraker, but when I was nine the lack of lasers was a cruel disappointment. But that’s only the start. What I expected, what it isn’t, what it does with the lead villain, and right from the beginning, the pre-titles sequence and, oh, dear, the music…

Where The Spy Who Loved Me wanted to be a big hit and aimed – and squarely hit – You Only Live Twice with a splash of Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only always feels to me like it really wants to be the taut Cold-War-to-one-side-seen-through-third-country-rivals thriller From Russia With Love, but without the thrasos, as Columbo would say, while it somehow can’t stop casting its eyes to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The pre-titles sums this up and sums up the film’s tonal dissonance. Roger Moore is terrific throughout the movie, less commanding than in his imperial The Spy Who Loved Me but stretched beyond the innuendo and charm to disturbingly psychopathic flashes of chilling coldness and, opening, quietly underplayed grief. He visits Tracy Bond’s grave in one of the most solemnly introspective moments in all of Bond, then is kidnapped by a remote-controlled helicopter which he in turn hijacks in order to drop contractually not-Blofeld, babbling about delicatessens, down a factory chimney. Even when I was nine and tonal dissonance was not the foremost term in my critical vocabulary, that felt like whiplash. Reading the endless backstory of court cases, it feels like a massive ‘Up yours’. Quite literally. Someone’s suing you to make a rival Bond film with Blofeld and defector-Connery? Erase Connery’s last movie and go back to the Telly Savalas incarnation (ish) so they can chuck him in the bin after, and there is no subtle way to put this, using the landing prop of the helicopter to f—k him in the arse first. This does not set the tone most of the film is aiming for.

If you’re having a really frustrating time in court, wouldn’t therapy be cheaper?

Sheena Easton’s For Your Eyes Only was another big hit song, and though it’s terribly unfair, again it’s one that I only quite like, and this time with the double let-down of not just what it is but what it isn’t: it isn’t Blondie. It’s not bad, and it opens with a certain mysterious longing tone, but it’s a little bland and sugary next to the best Bond themes. Bill Conti first approached Blondie, who turned them down when it turned out he only wanted Deborah Harry, not the musicians, and she wasn’t going to be allowed to write the song, just pout for him. Worse news for Sheena Easton: Blondie wrote and recorded their own song on their album The Hunter, and the film’s theme is no match for the punchy challenge sung from a female Bond counterpart with, in Debbie Harry, the most icy-cool voice in pop. But that’s only the second most famous factoid about the title song. The most famous is that, for the first time, the singer appeared in the main titles, Maurice Binder having taken a fancy to Sheena Easton. But, as her lips were to be in a fifty-foot close-up on cinema screens, the famous tacky titles obsessive made one small demand. She could only do it if he could fix her entire head in giant clamps to stop her moving a millimetre. And she did! She looks terrific in the clamps, but I’m afraid I still find myself thinking ‘But she hasn’t got Deborah Harry’s cheekbones. Or voice. Or song.’

Does the rest of Bill Conti’s score make up for losing Blondie? It does not. Far, far too many early ’80s porno funk guitars (though the Bond Theme survives one arrangement here, another makes even that cheesily near-unlistenable) and piping little ‘pah pahs’ instead of proper brass. Of all of the films, the music for this one has dated horribly. Close your eyes and just listen to the score, and you imagine people dancing on ice in neon-toned legwarmers. Open them, and discover to your horror that it’s not far from the truth. All right, there are some swirling strings when Melina shoots someone with her crossbow and more nice strings with a sinister bubbling fade after the ‘Countess’ dies. But, on the whole, I’d’ve preferred the film entirely re-scored by John Barry, and I’d love to have heard what he might have added to the Blondie song, too. Of all my For Your Eyes Only baggage, the heaviest may be that, while the music boosts several of the weaker Bonds, it drags this one down.

That’s a shame, as much of this is rather good in a low-key way, but even the subdued elements aren’t always well-judged. There’s a feint between two potential villains that partially works, but Topol’s exuberant character comes over rather more strongly than the usually magnificent but necessarily underplayed Julian Glover. Famously, Julian Glover was cast as the villain after producer Cubby Broccoli saw him as Count Scarlioni in Doctor Who – City of Death. That is a fantastic performance. Urbane (“My dear, it was not necessary to enter my house by – well, you can hardly call it stealth – you had only to knock on the door”), deadly on an extinction-level scale, gorgeously dressed with a splash of green. if ever there were an audition for the perfect Bond villain, that was it. Julian Glover might just be my favourite actor. He’s one of very few for whom, on meeting him at a convention, my mask of confidence collapsed into an incoherent babble of it’s Julian Glover!! Doctor Who, Star Wars, Blake’s 7, Quatermass, Indiana Jones, Game of Thrones, four-times-over guest star Villainous Julian Glover in The Avengers – an extraordinary career of all your favourite things. I should be so pleased to see him in this as Kristatos. And I am. Ish. I’m ashamed to say it, but he is a brilliant actor giving a mostly subtle, double-edged performance that isn’t called on to give the rip-roaring, showboating, flamboyant, let’s face it, what I miss is massive ham villain that would probably have been much less interesting to play but, I confess, this feels a bit of a waste. It’s like a reverse Diamonds Are Forever: where Charles Gray gave his usual villain performance, which is an ideal Bond villain but not remotely Blofeld, Glover is given a subdued character part with an accent so, while naturally superb here because he’s a brilliant actor with range, if anyone had charismatic posh perfect ur-Bond villain potential, it was Villainous Julian Glover. Yes, I know: now I’m criticising this film for not being crass enough. I can do tonal dissonance too.

Even the villainous twist they go with lacks oomph. While Julian Glover’s been understated as the fake Bond ally setting up Topol as the bad gangster who Bond must eliminate, there’s not quite been anything bar a bit of music on the beach to suggest wrongness in that, and then – Topol just spills the whole truth, and after a moment of doubt, he shows thrasos and Bond believes him, so rushes in shooting on his behalf. Well, I can believe Bond taking a leap of faith after sizing a man up, but it kills the spy thriller ambiguity stone dead. It’s never ambiguity – just a switch from one state to another. So Kristatos gets one scene where he gets to laugh like a Bond villain, the keelhauling, which is fine, but that’s next to nothing. I enjoy his slipping around the blond idiot hench to grab the goods and make his exit at the end, but that’s a bit of business, not a proper climax. I want the two old smuggler rivals fighting – there’s only a smidgeon of that, and not much drama. I suppose they don’t want to take the attention from Bond, but it means the thing lacks a heart save Melina, and she’s not driven it as much as those two.

The two best lines are both Bond found with priests: the opening, sober, “Some sort of emergency” / “It usually is” followed by the eerie blessing at the graveside and then, as established, ‘with hilarious results’, and the not at all sober but very entertaining reversal of “Bless me, father…” later. As if seeking absolution for the opening chimney dropping on Tracy’s headstone, traces of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service keep glimmering. The exciting ski-and-bobsled-and-extra-bike-chase is more original and more in your face than I’d remembered (marred by truly ghastly music), while Columbo comes across as another take on chummy gangster Draco (and to be fair, Topol is way better in the role), and there’s even a ‘down to earth’ version of the swanky Piz Gloria turned much less glam old abbey for the mountain climax. Bond’s climb is new to the series and very tense – even pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

One effect of the largely subdued tone is that the film runs short on memorable set-pieces. The climb near the end is gripping, but at the beginning they throw away the terrific ‘hi-tech boat’ lost scene that’s more ‘real’ and even more tense than Spy’s, and the murder of the Havelocks, which they should have got over their urge to stick it to Kevin McClory’s lawsuit and positioned as the pre-credits sequence (it doesn’t help that the script jarringly makes James Villiers, probably the poshest actor in any Bond movie and a nob who’d know, call Sir Timothy “Sir Havelock”). I rather like the aftermath to their murder that sees Gonzales going into his own pool with a bolt in his back, then Loque not only taking the briefcase payment back, its owner no longer able to spend it, but that his henchman meanly snatches back the bundle of notes tossed to one of the women! Unfortunately, that’s followed by the exploding car. It was, I imagine, intended to be symbolic of not relying on gadgets. So it’s ironic that the ‘We’re realistic!’ statement is one of the silliest in all the movies: a car ‘security device’ that blows it up when anyone so much as touches it.

Daniel Craig is, like Timothy Dalton, often seen as a backlash against the ‘silly’ Bond before him (now I’ve got Graham Chapman in my head as M saying, “Stop that, it’s silly,” with Terry Jones as Moneypenny. You couldn’t have John Cleese as Q, though. That would never work). Watching For Your Eyes Only, it’s clear that so is Roger Moore a backlash against the ‘excesses’ of Roger Moore: not only in his underplaying but that his use here of anything to hand to wallop people prefigures Craig’s Bond. The Bond women and his relationships with them are interestingly characterised this time, too: he turns down too-young Bibi; he’s got proper chemistry with Melina, as she genuinely laughs at one of his one-liners and there are a few ‘touristy’ scenes where, unusually, they seem to enjoy each other’s company; and the Countess, closer to his own age, is rather lovely, as both relax and let each other know they’re play-acting. Like – again – OHMSS, but played at high speed, they go from a brutal fight on a beach to tragedy, which in turn leads to Moore’s coldest yet most feeling kill, Loque’s “no head for heights”. Though the Countess’ death creates a jarring note with Topol’s Columbo, charming and scene-stealing as he is, because he’s so jolly that he doesn’t seem to give a toss about his lover. Merely one line where he’s marginally less expansive, quickly over.

Roger Moore is the best thing in this, and holds the film together even when he is unexpectedly being the serious, dangerous part and all around him panics at the thought of getting too heavy. That’s what I have to make of the way that For Your Eyes Only is a meditation on destructive vengeance that before saying “First dig two graves” opens on Tracy’s grave just to set up the Blofeld-McClory revenge gag, or that despite Bond’s impressively ruthless moments and the thoughtful spy thriller elements, it’s hamstrung by a lack of verve and of nerve, edging away from its darker places with crudely ill-judged mickey-taking instead. The exploding car might just be a statement that went wrong, but the film closes on more panicky slapstick that simply undermines the mood. Geoffrey Keen’s grumbling minister gets on my wick in each of his Bond films, but especially this one, where he appears to have defected to Mrs Thatcher’s government. Yes, Mrs Thatcher. The film’s last scene features a parrot saying rude things to a Margaret Thatcher impersonator, and it’s shoddy beyond belief. Finishing on an innuendo makes me smile, but somehow that ending has always put me off the film.

The James Bond Double Bill

Watched in one night as a follow-up to The Spy Who Loved Me, I don’t think I’d ever appreciated For Your Eyes Only more. The two films have a lot in common, but a very different feel, so they made remarkably good companions. Though, first, an aside on the bearers of the bad news: I love Graham Crowden. Another of my favourite ever actors, amazingly tall, especially on a cinema screen, and his gravitas on “Not deep enough, I’m afraid” is so perfect on so very little (no, it’s not a critique of what the film is attempting). But just this once, in the second underwater Bond of the evening, I look to Noel Johnson next to him and my Doctor Who brain exclaims, ‘F—k me! It’s the King of Atlantis!’ [Graham Crowden starred in a differently fabulous Doctor Who take on Greek Myths.]

I’m sure the double bill was chosen for how well both films showcase Roger Moore, but they do have themes that interestingly intertwine. Ski chases to pepper largely secrets underwater affairs and a McGuffin machine that compromises nuclear subs? Check! But it’s that McGuffin that compromises nuclear subs in both films which is the crucial element for me. For Your Eyes Only’s best bit of music comes approaching the St George wreck underwater. But here’s where we get one of the biggest plot holes, too. Kristatos has more resources and has had more time. Why hasn’t he got to the wreck already? There’s a line afterwards about Bond saving them the trouble of disarming it, but it seems like that was handy, not a plan, and a hell of a risk. Because why didn’t Bond destroy the ATAC underwater? There’s no reason at all in the plot. And that would have been that. Between us, walking home after the cinema, Richard and I came up with a simple fix: the British government want the data from the spy-ship’s mission. That’s why it was there. So Bond has been ordered to destroy it only as a last resort. That would only take a line. Or here’s another: the diving-suited killer attacks. Bond and Melina use the self-destruct bomb to kill him (in a Battlefield moment, when the suit blows he visibly starts to say “Shit!”). Just switch that around very slightly: they’ve armed the self-destruct; he attacks; they’re about to die; the only weapon they have is the bomb, so they have to make the choice, tear it free and use it to save themselves, but now need to take the ATAC and find another way of destroying it properly.

Why Bond doesn’t destroy the ATAC earlier in the film is a problem for For Your Eyes Only in isolation. And yet watching the two films back-to-back, the two devices prompted inspiration. Each would be more effective with a little swapped between them. In The Spy Who Loved Me, it’s hugely important that there’s now a device that can track nuclear submarines, but only for the first half of the movie. Then everyone forgets about it. But it should still be a critical Cold War game-changer, and for all that Q is blasé about the theory, should have been definitely finished off with Stromberg. The McGuffin seems more ‘real’ in For Your Eyes Only: an updated Enigma machine, or – one of my From Russia With Love echoes – a reverse-Lektor that the Russians want to get their hands on to compromise the British this time. And yet… Despite this ‘realism’, and being carried all the way through to the end of the plot as Spy failed to, its role in the climax would have made more sense if this machine was instead the machine they had last time. Spy’s device was something new that neither had and could tilt the balance: Bond destroying it would absolutely make his “Détente” line true. Except it isn’t. In this film, it’s not an irreplaceable third-party development but a British device the Russians want. The British keeping it from the Russians is… Actually a British victory and the whole point of the entire movie. Though Moore’s defiant charisma and the ambiguous smile from General Gogol still makes the (anti-)climax rather interesting, that’s the actors, not the script.

I enjoyed For Your Eyes Only on the big screen far more in May 2017 than little me did in 1981. But I still can’t help wanting to fix it. The Spy Who Loved Me thrilled me by succeeding in exactly what it wanted to do, while the second film just doesn’t have the confidence to follow through on its own instincts. I would love this to be the movie it so nearly is and give it 007 out of 10, but I can only say 6.

James Bond Will Return In Octopussy

Just to be contrary, my favourite Roger Moore Bond film is the next along – Octopussy. The title song is adequate but bottles out of using the title-word (“All Time High” swapping one hostage-to-fortune title for another, I fear). With a competing ‘Bond film’ that year, though, John Barry is back to do the score, and it’s terrific. Particularly the forbidding strings for the sinister twin assassins near the Berlin Wall, the rousing mix of Bondian and exotic for the balloon-led attack near the end, and most strikingly the bomb, where a deep, sinister circling beat builds from deceptively soft to powerful strings – all the more effective for saying ‘something big is in reserve’ while Bond is trying to disarm a live nuke. The other main element I love it for is the villain, or rather the villains – three key antagonists, each memorable and with their own agendas, though loosely allied. Octopussy herself is one of the most intriguing and powerful Bond women (with, unsurprisingly, hints of Pussy Galore, greatest of them all), deposed prince Kamal Khan is urbane-but-deadly, looking for money, power and the main chance and tossing out bon mots (“You have a nasty habit of surviving”), yet it’s still stolen by Steven Berkoff’s scenery-chewing Cold War hawk General Orlov (when I’m rushing for a train that I’m just too late for, I always have him shouting, “I must get to that train!” in my head).

The most electrifying sequence does not involve any of the principal villains, but a pair of henches as the titles fade: it’s East Germany, and a clown – in truth, 009 – is running through the woods, only to run into knife-throwing twin assassins, to fantastic music. Mortally wounded, he staggers through the window of the British Ambassador, his outstretched hand (still with a balloon hovering above it) releasing a Fabergé Egg that rolls towards His horrified Excellency. The scene always makes the hairs rise at the back of my neck, and it’s like an Avengers episode wandering into John le Carré. 007, too, will dress as a clown for one of the most tense, gripping pieces of acting Moore ever does. This is not a critically acclaimed film, but like the circus that provides much of the backdrop, if you don’t like one act, another will be along in a minute to make you wide-eyed, and it never fails to entertain me.


This is the fourth of what might be a series of Fragments – not-quite-finished, not-quite-polished, from ideas I’ve written up over time and maybe I’ll share some of them anyway. If you’d like more, please let me know, and if you’d like to help, please ask me, ‘Have you at some point written something intriguing about Story / Series X, and could you find it, consider it and post it?’ You might suggest one that I can (TS;RM [Too Short; Read More]? Here). This one’s for Millennium.

Labels: Blondie, Debbie Harry, Film, For Your Eyes Only, Fragments, James Bond, Julian Glover, Music, Roger Moore, Star Wars, The Spy Who Loved Me

My beloved husband and I lurched to the cinema this afternoon to see Doctor Strange – a ‘put the clocks back day’ treat (all right, birthday, too). Always a risk. Happily, Marvel’s latest won us both over.

A few thoughts why…




Capes! Clocks! Consequences! Characters! Cumberbatch!

Most of all, I’ve always loved psychedelia. This gives you all the spectacle you could wish for, from Sixties trippery to far-out realms to folding cities. It is, very much, my bag. Though for ideal Blu-ray play we’re going to need a bigger telly. Or four. Or six. And a big room to experience them in as they line every side.




I never read a lot of superheroes when I was younger. But I did like weird s**t, and fantasy, and capes. And much as I’ve enjoyed many of the Marvel movies, a bit of me’s thought at times, ‘Meh – they keep holding back on the costumes because they’re too afraid people will point and laugh. Never mind leather muscles. I like big flowing capes. I’ll never take you seriously until you put on your cape.’

At last, the main hero has a cape, and not just any cape, but a massive flowing cloak that has its own credit. Just seeing that in the trailer had me sold. Richard had to give me one of those looks when I pointed and shouted joyously, “Cape!”




Mads Mikkelsen. Ten years after Bond, still an outstanding villain. Still with a reason. Still problems with his eyes.

Decisions have consequences. Even time catches up with you.

Chiwetel Ejiofor. Compelling. I’ve only read the graphic novel A Nameless Land, A Timeless Time, but fabulous as that was, I wasn’t expecting Mordo to have a character, too…

Everyone’s a b*****d. Everyone’s got a brain. Both of these surprise and delight me.

Tilda Swinton. Translucent. I don’t mean her character, and another superb performance, but: just to look at her you can believe she’s ancient and yet not aged.

“From a certain point of view” has always seemed like a reason to turn someone on the path to the dark side.




Benedict Cumberbatch. Now with American growl. I came out of the cinema with the thought that it’s his reaction to a future he once thought averted (if you remember a story from about six years ago), now inescapable…

[Cumberbatch growl]
‘I’ve seen many terrible futures.
I’ve avoided many of those roles.
But it always ends at this moment.
I am a Doctor.
I am a Lord of Time.
And I am on lunchboxes.’
[/Cumberbatch growl]

Massive dinner consumed (thank you, beloved husband). Before we can manage cake, time to watch yesterday’s Class. Woo! Psychedelic titles! I’m in.

Labels: Class, Comics, Doctor Strange, Film, Marvel

Sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a book, a speech or a politician you know. Sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a Dictionary of Liberal Quotations when your a-bit-too-occasional-lately series needs kick-starting. And sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a cinema and scrabble for a bit of paper while trying not to grind too much popcorn into your pocket. That’s how to go from Lord Dahrendorf to Simon Pegg on a pub crawl, finding they’ve got more in common than you might think. Spoilers for the movie follow later…

“It is our basic human right to be fuck-ups!”

My previous Liberal Monday put together three quotations from respected academic, politician and peer Ralf Dahrendorf into a critique of utopia, a theme close to my heart. On an in-between Friday, Richard and I went to see the new Simon Pegg-Edgar Wright comedy drama The World’s End. I’d loved most of their previous work; I grew up reading and still love the sort of John Wyndham / Nicholas Fisk / John Christopher-esque ‘cosy catastrophe’ that I’d heard the movie was to open up into. And, obviously, I love Cornettos. What I was less expecting was for The World’s End also to morph into ‘Ralf Dahrendorf: The Movie’ (spoiler: may not contain actual Dahrendorfs. Other movie spoilers will be less prominent than my latest move to spoil the concept of utopia).



The World’s End is a less approachable film than, say, Hot Fuzz, and will probably make less money: it might make the audience ask difficult questions of itself, the paradox shared by many ‘cosy catastrophe’ novels that, at heart, they make you uncomfortable. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s another excellent reason for you to go and see it anyway. It’s been called a film about growing up, but it’s less dreary and more complex than that – with themes about consequences, and choices, and that while it may be better for you to grow up and better yourself and that the opportunity to do so is important, when you have all that imposed on you it’s really not worth it. And by the end it’s as explicitly anti-utopian film as any. Which is exactly where it chimes with Liberalism, those Ralf Dahrendorf quotes, and my sudden need to dig out a piece of paper and a pen in front of the big screen.

I left sixth-form in 1990 to a similar soundtrack to the lead characters in the film’s opening flashback, which struck the first of several eerie notes with me (though the flashbacks on grainy film are the sort of flashbacks people having grown up to turn 16-18 at that time would imagine, if it was really a flashback to 1990 it’d be on cheap video. But I digress. The digression in this paragraph is merely a device to separate the spoiler at the end. Honest). Some of you may know that drinking isn’t one of my many vices, so my only pub crawl was a year or three later, in the unlikely circumstances of being stranded in London after a business meeting (due to IRA bombs shutting down London Transport). This involved a friend who I worked with at the time going round a long assortment of pubs he wanted to check out while wearing identical pink ties (Tony was the straight one, and camper), with him sinking pints and me on fruit juices and the occasional absurd liqueur (I’d have thought it rude only to ask for tap water). The point of this anecdote is partly to express the movie-appropriate nostalgia that I’d like to get in touch with him, and the also movie-appropriate worry that he’d give me Nick Frost-face these days. But the main point of the anecdote is that, after a business meeting in Kensington, our crawl wound round Chelsea and Fulham and, inevitably, centred on The World’s End.

Spoilers. Liberal Bits. Ready?



The big reveal towards the end of the film is that the reason our heroes’ home town has been repopulated with very slightly higher-achieving Stepford people is that benevolent but disapproving aliens have decided that Earth is the least civilised planet in the galaxy (with a disapproving Polly Toynbee-esque chart to prove it). They’ve come to give us the opportunity to stop being such a blight on local spiral arm property prices, and to serve Alien Spitting-image Behaviour Orders on us if we don’t co-operate with the opportunity.

Yes – it’s New Labour From Space.

“Face it! We are the human race and we don’t like being told what to do!”

It turns out that we don’t like being forced to conform even if conformity can be shown to make things better against recognised galactic standards – with charts – though I suspect the percentage of those refusing to conform shows a slightly optimistic view of human nature. Less optimistically but chiming right in with my own prejudices, the attempt to impose a top-down utopia and sulky withdrawal causes massively more problems than the fuck-ups it was intended to ‘solve’.

The very end of the coda also displays in hearteningly simple form the difference between Liberals and UKIP: a fuck off to enforced utopia; but emphatically not a fuck off to aliens.


[Additional joke critique: Richard rightly points out that “Fuc-King Gary” would have been funnier, while I couldn’t believe that they didn’t knock over Chekhov’s roundabout sign.]

Labels: Books, Comedy, Film, Ideas, John Christopher, John Wyndham, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, Nicholas Fisk, Personal, Reviews, Simon Pegg, The End of the World, The World's End, Utopia

No, this isn’t another post about the Coalition. It’s a strange and sinister 1969 tale of waking up in an English town to find it deserted… But why? With a script full of tension, twists and betrayal, eerie direction, terrific music and impressive guest-star turns from Peter Barkworth, Joss Ackland and Brian Blessed, The Morning After is one of The Avengers’ strongest and most gripping episodes. Steed is landed with an unexpected (and unwilling) ally and faces unexpected (and all too unflinching) enemies in this stylish mid-point between Seven Days To Noon and Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs…

First broadcast in the Midlands 43 years ago last night (oh, all right, they showed it in London several months earlier, but it’s difficult to celebrate proper Avengers anniversaries when ITV regions all used to do their own thing), you can now find The Morning After on Disc 6 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 35 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy. You may be surprised, though, at how little Tara King appears in this episode from her season of the show; with Series 6 half as long again as any of the others, both Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee had to have a couple of ‘holiday’ episodes each. I’m a huge admirer of Tara, as I’ve gone into before in The Avengers – Game and My Wildest Dream, but Steed’s new best enemy in The Morning After more than makes up for her absence, a help and hindrance who’s surely the best of the one-off Avengers.

Having written about Seven Days To Noon a week ago, it’s appropriate to recognise the debt this story owes to that film while still being very much its own show. For me, of all the closest variations on that central idea (the original, this, Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The New Avengers – Sleeper) this is arguably the best, with a clear identity of its own and told with more economy, great visual style and an outstanding musical score. It turns the film’s central threat on its head, an idea which goes on to be swallowed whole by Invasion of the Dinosaurs; it’s probably a coincidence, but a satisfying one, that it deploys a minor young actor from the film, Joss Ackland, as a major guest star two decades later; and it may well be deliberate that it hires stock film shot for Seven Days To Noon to depict its own evacuation scenes, though intriguingly often off-cuts from the film rather than those used in the final version, such as a different edit of men hammering up an evacuation sign (Tat Wood put me onto this in his Doctor Who guidebook About Time 3, though take its thumbnail plot summary of this with a pinch and, for Homicide and Old Lace, a lorryload of salt). Its focus, punch and production values are way ahead of the Doctor Who, although that shares with Seven Days To Noon a greater political depth, while I’ve said before that Sleeper, while mostly enjoyable and looking impressive, is by far the least interesting of these, having no twists, nothing to say and, for all its attempt at ‘urban realism’, pulling almost all its punches (it even takes the near-comic relief gas from this episode and makes it the main plot). True, the others have over The Morning After the ambition and unsettling impact of a deserted London, though this story’s less iconic ‘everytown’ has its own claustrophobic effect. On which note…

That Golden Moment

“Do you think the world’s ended, and they forgot to tell us?”

The Avengers doesn’t do multi-part stories with cliffhangers – except that, made for an hour ITV slot in the ’60s, each fifty-minute Avengers episode usually splits into four ‘Acts’, each designed to come to a climax, then fade to black for the ad break. And the first Act of The Morning After is an outstanding example of the style, eighteen minutes opening with an exciting James Bond-style mini-adventure preview, then plunging into Steed’s forced exploration of a mystery in which he’s on his own – no briefing, no Mother to send him in, and no Tara to watch his back. And it’s as gripping for the audience as it is disturbing for our hero, building steadily until a sudden burst of action and the first death, inevitably, to keep you breathless through the adverts that aren’t there.

The Avengers doesn’t do ‘continuity’ – but could a man in a clown mask raiding the Ministry of Technology and Scientific Innovation suggest an old enemy? No. It’s just yet another of those sort of openings, here at least done more briskly and impishly than in previous episodes, then jumping straight to a busy, noisy town somewhere in England, where Steed and Tara lie in wait for him (no spending half the episode working out how he got in or what he’s stolen). I told you this started with a fast-moving Bond mini-adventure, didn’t I? And already, it’s unsettling; Steed never carries a gun. But against quadruple agent Jimmy Merlin, an adversary as playful, as charming and as dangerous as he is, Steed jarringly arms himself. Our heroes get the jump on Merlin; he jumps back to fling down the new sleeping gas capsule he’s stolen; but Steed’s locked the door, so as the little rendezvous fills with gas, all three go down. There’s a thrilling freeze-frame for the title as the phone starts to ring and suddenly music crashes in, fast, bombastic and threatening.

The most gripping part of the story for me is on the morning after; Steed wakes first, the busy town suddenly silent save for a dog howling miserably. Only emphasising the silence, eerie music drifts into the scene, like the wind. Steed tries the phone – no connection. The same with the red callbox outside – from where he can see a car crashed into bins and abandoned. All around, things smashed and left, and not a soul. With Tara still deeply unconscious, Steed testily wakes a protesting Merlin and drags him down to the yellow Rolls, eager to hand him over now he’s captured. I love the banter between the two fabulous characters as everything the camera shows us makes us – and them – more worried, right from Steed cheerily telling Merlin to enjoy the view while he can: usually, in The Avengers, glorious countryside; here, the garage door. And Steed has to enjoy the drive while he can, too, as soon he runs into an empty truck used as a roadblock and has no choice but to handcuff the two of them together and start walking…

“Any chance of making a deal?”
“I shouldn’t have thought so, but keep talking.”
“Twenty thousand? In a Swiss bank? No names, no strings?”
“Pounds?”
“Yes!”
“Very sorry, old chap. Only deal in guineas.”
“Well, I could throw in a yacht.”
“I’ve had one.”
“My private plane?”
“It’s lonely up there.”
“String of Arab ponies?”
“Prefer palominos.”
“Well, how about… A villa? France?”
“Whereabouts?”
“St Tropez.”
“Prefer Provence.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Steed – isn’t there anything you want?”
“Yes. There’s one thing I want very much. You – behind bars.”

And of course, in this strange setting, suddenly neither can get what they want. It’s a terrific sequence with superb cinematography as the two stroll through the deserted town, nothing but keening music to keep them company. And it’s a brilliant idea to use all the humour to build tension, every line played like a gag between them but juxtaposed with the emptiness yawning around them: the policeman’s helmet on the ground and in the foreground as we see them, tiny and lost, far beyond it; the high, old-fashioned buildings looming above them; the sack of spilled coal, the milk bottles, surely to Steed most disturbingly the abandoned pub with drinks left unfinished. And while both actors keep their tone light, their faces are at odds with their voices. Patrick Macnee’s Steed is determined but disturbed, keenly observing; Peter Barkworth’s Merlin jittery and increasingly desperate. Watch Steed knowing that “It’s lonely up there” merely reflects ‘here’; watch Merlin’s little face fall as Steed keeps raising and dashing his hopes.

It helps enormously that all of this is out on location, on a sunny day, so you can see right down long, narrow, slightly claustrophobic streets. This was The Avengers’ most ambitious location shoot to date (later beaten in that, I think, by Sleeper), and for this eerie ‘everytown’ director John Hough carefully slices together non-contiguous parts of Watford, Old Hatfield and, particularly, St Albans, most blatantly when the streets suddenly give way to the Cathedral, zooming on the little pram and dollies left behind in its grounds. That always gives me a bit of a turn, as I remember the place vaguely from a single childhood visit with my Nana and Grandad (who lived in the other end of Watford), though the cathedral also offers some mirth if you watch carefully; as Steed and Merlin walk and talk, you keep seeing it poking up in the background in different shots, but never in the same place. You could say that it shows they’re going round in circles; you might just shrug that they’re cutting together lots of different locations; but it keeps looking like the cathedral is tiptoeing from side to side, stalking them.

Brian Clemens’ script is merciless, telling you nothing more of what’s going on than Steed and Merlin can see, and even as Act One draws to a close with eerie exploration shifting to sudden threat, there are no answers – just Merlin starting to ask some of the same questions as the audience. Where has everybody gone? And why? Was it an emergency? A mass kidnapping? War, plague, radiation…? Your mind races through all of Terry Nation’s favourite plot devices, not least because he’s script editor here (is this why he and Clemens fell out over who had the idea for Survivors? All so much more absorbing than Sleeper, which tells you what’s going in the pre-titles sequence). Even the bank’s deserted, notes fluttering everywhere, and no-one comes running when Steed sounds the alarm. Or do they? Now there’s a black, silent VW camper van gliding through the streets – robots? Remote control? Hypnotism? Then, just as Merlin and Steed explode into action, there’s that shockingly loud, thundering fanfare again, not a march but a dash, soldiers running through the streets to shoot a little man down as a “LOOTER!” And if you think the capital-lettered sign they toss onto him is shouting, the man giving the order to fire (camera appropriately zooming on his mouth in close-up) is Sergeant Brian Blessed!

Steed and Merlin

“Your friend wasn’t very brave.”
“He’s a big disappointment to me.”

The Morning After is a great episode for Steed, as he carries most of it and almost has to carry unwilling burden Merlin – a much more sober than usual performance, though still with plenty of Patrick Macnee’s charm. Against the usual flamboyant parade of outfits, this time he’s in the same suit from the teaser right up until the last couple of minutes; this isn’t London, and there’s no friendly flat to pop back to for a change of clothes and a glass of champagne. Fortunately, the brown with that trademark velvet collar suits him, and he stays immaculate throughout, of course (even if it seems strangely improbable that, confronting Merlin at the start, he has a touch of uncharacteristic five o’clock shadow, but is as beautifully clean-shaven as always on waking a day later).

Peter Barkworth, Merlin the spy before John le Carré, is a simply sublime guest star and, while I’d put My Wildest Dream just a touch ahead in the terrific episode stakes, Merlin makes a far better anti-Steed than the villain there. Charming and dangerous, tricky and devious, even more playful – sometimes gleeful – but far more cowardly than our hero, he doesn’t look as flamboyant (a straighter hat, a more buttoned-up look, a dark overcoat, as if he wants to stay unnoticed in the shadows) but has his own showiness, not least his conjuror’s-trick habit of producing whatever he needs from his sleeve. It’s a marvellous performance, easily the best and biggest of Barkworth’s four Avengers roles (one lost, a frosty businessperson in The Medicine Men, a well-mannered warrior in The Correct Way To Kill), dragged along, always complaining, never trustworthy – until Steed catches him out and leads him into the jaws of death. They make a very entertaining team. Look out for a particularly priceless exchange where each gives the other three reasons for investigating, or for running away, and just why Steed eventually uncuffs him…

“I’m too young to die!”
“You’re over 21.”
“If I were eighty, I’d still feel the same!”

Not a new man on the team but so fresh he sounds like it, composer Laurie Johnson adds to the feel of ‘The Avengers, but suddenly harder-edged’ with one of his very best original scores. After providing all the music for the Diana Rigg episodes, often reusing and reworking themes into old friends, Laurie Johnson had taken some time off while working on a musical, handing over several of the Tara King scores to Howard Blake. And that clearly recharged his batteries, as the soundtrack here is not just one of his best but strikingly different to his usual.

With Linda Thorson recharging her own batteries for the week, Tara gets a couple of good moments – praised at the start, an impressive knockout punch later – but is largely asleep with a teddy (not Chilcott) and in a red and white trouser suit, which isn’t bad but makes her seem a bit young. For anyone missing an Avengers woman for a week, half-way through we meet Jenny Firston, played by Penelope Horner. She’s not bad, if a little flat, and after a rather undignified entrance has little to do save act as the exposition and then hide; if you’ve seen Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs, you may just expect to find a plucky female journalist sneaking in for the scoop, and she even has a man called Yates teamed with her who isn’t much help. Her exposition is rather stylishly by television, though it slightly clumsily underlines that they’ve not given the ‘everytown’ a name: “This town has become a ghost area” seems very laboured, when anyone would naturally say ‘This has become a ghost town’.

But why has this ghost town been evacuated, and the fifty square miles surrounding it? Spoilers follow shortly…

Commentary and Conspiracy (Or – Spoilers – What’s It All About, Ackland?)

Late ’60s Avengers episodes look gorgeous on DVD, shot on film and in colour, and with the current full-season (or complete series) box sets they’ve not only been cleaned up beautifully but have been given a few extra features – though, while the look of the episodes mostly beats Doctor Who hands down, the value added material is still some way behind. While almost every Doctor Who DVD release has a full set of commentaries, they’re rare for The Avengers, so it’s cheering that on this (one of my favourites) director John Hough is there to give his recollections, ably questioned by Jaz Wiseman. Hough’s direction is particularly impressive here; not quite as exuberantly inventive as Robert Fuest but still with a great deal of style, equally able in building atmosphere for the unsettlingly empty streets and then in giving it lots of pace and energy as the soldiers crash into the story.

John Hough has some intriguing insights into this story in particular – how to match Peter against Patrick as the two leads so that both could let their own charisma flow and battle each other’s characters without overshadowing each other, or how though it took more hard work than usual to create so much of the empty town, it was only one step up from the way The Avengers always eschewed extras to create its own world – but, with few commentaries about for the series, it’s mostly more of an extended interview than a bantering, story-led traditional commentary. It ranges over his four episodes as full director (he returned for one especially good New Avengers) and how he started off as second unit director, having got that post on The Avengers following The Saint after he and Ray Austin managed to swap jobs. He explains how the series doing it differently led to such high quality, with good words to say about the likes of Linda Thorson, Patrick Macnee, and most of all producers Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. Though not about the Movie. And, like me, he admired Patrick Macnee’s special velvet collars, though unlike me he went to Patrick’s tailor and got one (it looks like you can see it in the Photo Gallery for Super Secret Cypher Snatch)!

So, now, are you ready for the spoilers on what was going on?

Much of The Avengers takes place in a highly stylised fantasy of Britain, sometimes called ‘AvengerLand’, with highly stylised characters within it. Here, the threat is more grim and real-world than usual, though it’s still informed by Avengers themes and, in the extensive location shooting, brings ‘AvengerLand’ further than it’s ever been before in transforming the real world. Rather than outlandish sets, rolling countryside or picturesque villages called Little Storping-in-the-Swuff, this ambitiously turns a whole town inside-out and into Avengers country, closer to most viewers’ experiences but more unsettlingly different at the same time. And it’s unsettlingly different for Steed, too, as rather than be sent in to investigate the mystery, here he simply wakes up in the midst of it and becomes a hunted fugitive, the full force of the authorities seemingly out to kill him, a reversal that gives him new oomph.

Army nuclear expert Brigadier Hansing has detected an atomic bomb secreted by one of the unfriendly governments who backed the old Eastern Hemisphere Trade Commission in town, and enforces martial law while he’s staying in the evacuated area to dismantle the bomb. Or is he? The conspiracy goes right to the top, with Joss Ackland as Hansing moving deftly from sternly efficient, to snarling brutal orders, to just a few notches below his full Hollywood-villain-boggler of later years. Hansing’s due to be pensioned off in favour of a computer and, as with so many Avengers villains motived by either amity or animosity towards technology, turns. His good old British nuclear shock troop platoons are lying drugged in their trucks while merciless mercenaries led by the excellent Donald Douglas and the even more outstanding Brian Blessed shoot anyone on the streets and Hansing supervises not the dismantling of an imaginary bomb but the installation of a real one, ready to blackmail the government with no time for evacuation once the town’s population returns (though while he’s in it for money and pride, it’s never made entirely clear just what his “Eastern Hemisphere” backers are aiming for. It might have been interesting to hear they intended to double-cross him in turn, and blow up the bomb anyway).

“You have been found guilty of looting!”

A shoot-to-kill policy is, of course, just not British – except when it is – and you can see the effect it has on Steed; not concerned for himself, but neatly underplayed doubt that they’re genuine and fear that they might be. It’s a conspiracy thriller quite unlike any other Avengers, full of twists and betrayal, and as well as cleverly subverting the motivations of Seven Days To Noon, when we see soldiers running along house-to-house searches they become far more sinister, the film’s subtext become the text. And, in villainous ’tache, it’s Brian Blessed who barks their orders, on the cusp of serious stardom, already known for Z Cars, still in a working class role, some great asides as he tells Steed he’s not a regular (he gets the drink; Steed doesn’t; he doesn’t drink like Steed does, though), but in an early example of SHOUTING!


I should mention the final moment designed to defuse the tension, the traditional light-hearted ‘tag scene’; in Steed’s flat, it’s immediately rather jarring, as it’s the only scene since the pre-titles where we’ve not been trapped in that unfamiliar town. Unusually, there is a link to the main plot – something else Merlin’s stolen – but it’s not a particularly good gag and, for once, not particularly well done (dialogue or lighting). And though Tara’s back, in rather a shimmery frock, Steed’s tux is a bit much. If it ends on a slight disappointment, though, The Morning After’s still been one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes, and showing great confidence in doing something so different in tone so late in the series. That confidence even shows through in what might be the best moment of that tag scene: Steed, enjoying the TV, hears one hand clapping and sighs, “Sock it to me,” the catchphrase of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was right then causing problems for the series when scheduled against it on US TV. It was very interesting to show even Steed fondly watching their opposition… But it was also stupid. Though I think it was more interesting than stupid…

Labels: Brian Blessed, DVD, Film, Jon Pertwee, Music, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers

OK, any Londoners reading; before you sit down with a cup of tea and this cheering tale of your city facing nuclear destruction, have you voted yet? No? Then get out and do so (and here’s why)!

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll try to put a stop to that with this cosy catastrophe. It’s a thoughtful, understated but tense 1950 political thriller, so it may threaten London’s complete annihilation but, on the plus side, doesn’t have Boris or Ken in it. And though not science fiction, it was hugely influential, not least on Quatermass, The Avengers and Doctor Who, as well as films as late as, well, 28 Days Later.

BBC4 is at this moment cheering us all up at the end of election day with The End of the World? A Horizon Guide To Armageddon, so Seven Days To Noon sprang to mind; a film full of ‘firsts’ in the Armageddon genre, from the spectre of nuclear doom to an eerily deserted London, I’d been thinking about reviewing it for a little while, having recently caught it again on one of its frequent outings on Film4 (keep an eye out, if you don’t own a copy). While Advise and Consent and The Best Man, the early 1960s political thrillers I wrote about last week, were utterly American, this is incredibly British – though it mixes a queasy satire of World War II evacuations and Blitz Spirit with a looming dread of American, Russian and our own new nuclear capability. And while they had plotlines about intellectuals, this not only makes a scientist and thinker its central character, but forces the audience to consider the issues he raises. Though the conspiracy thriller rather than the lone actor comes later, and on the surface this is all stiff upper lip with a government that sternly protects the people, too, there is the subversive undercurrent that asks, like its main character, whether that government in fact wants to make us all complicit in mass murder and then see us blown to bits more comprehensively, just further down the line, which is a less reassuring subtext. While I won’t spoil the end, the way that the authorities simply abandon the plucky everywoman while the military rush about doing their thing is surely telling.

Seven Days To Noon was produced by the Boulting Brothers, perhaps best-known for their terrific version of Brighton Rock, with the story by Paul Dehn (Goldfinger, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and more) and, perhaps surprisingly, his partner, top Hammer composer-to-be James Bernard (another Quatermass connection). The film opens, quietly, with a letter posted to the Prime Minister from top British nuclear scientist Professor Willingdon (Barry Jones) – and if you thought the storyline of a terrorist walking around a big city with a nuclear bomb in their suitcase was new to the Twenty-First Century, think again. He’s come to the conclusion that the work he does is profoundly wrong, and gives the Government an ultimatum: give up nuclear weapons in one week, or have one explode at Westminster. Hence the title. And the film is all about the fallout from that ‘simple’ demand: why did he do it? How can he be stopped? And what will the effect be on everyone else, physically and philosophically?

Joining Jones’ excellent, tortured Willingdon among the stars are André Morell, at the end of the 1950s the definitive Professor Quatermass with a remarkably similar moral quandary, but here playing stern, serious and exceptionally well-spoken Superintendent Folland, who’s put in charge of the manhunt; and the other standout character is Olive Sloane’s Goldie Phillips, there as the spirit of London, a good-time girl a little past her best, sympathetic to those in need but distinctly stroppy at the thought of being blown to bits. She’s hugely endearing in an old-fashioned way, but also has some striking undercurrents to her for a film made in 1950: not only is the ‘everyman’ character a woman, but we’re meant to identify not with the genteel young lady but one for whom every implication is used to get past the censor that she’s been around a bit, and good for her. Though I’m not convinced by Goldie picking up Willingdon in the first place – she doesn’t know how vital he is until he’s much later and more threatening, so he doesn’t seem much of a catch for her. Don’t fancy hers much.

More Betrayal, Vicar?

The crucial scene for me is one that in most films would be a flashback, but instead is a previous conversation with Willingdon related by a friend when Superintendent Folland comes calling in search of information. And the friend betraying a confidence happens to be the Professor’s local vicar, who’s caught doing some manual work and so for a moment presumed not posh enough to be among the clergy (ho ho. Look, most of the humour in the film’s better than this).

“And I’m going to be quite frank. His disappearance endangers – the national safety.”
“What is it you want to know?”

“…What would you do if you were convinced the results of your life’s work were being put to an evil purpose?”

It sets out clearly the moral argument without having to have Willingdon himself confronted by Folland early on, and is a powerful moment, though one of the film’s more dated. It also makes me curl my lip rather at the Church of England; I was brought up Catholic. A Catholic priest wouldn’t let a little thing like nuclear Armageddon pry a confession out of him, still less when only hinted at by a police officer. It’s notable that Barry Jones’ portrayal of a mild, gentle man driven to extremes carries almost all the different notes of religion in the film, with the vicar’s established religion coming across far more as ‘establishment’ than ‘belief’; there’s an element of the more modern depiction of any passionately religious person as slightly mad (or at least of the caricature British view that you should be wary of anyone who believes in anything too much), but he also confronts you – if you were involved in a threat to kill millions of people, what should you do? And is it any more wrong to mount that threat on your own behalf rather than the government’s? Willingdon’s overwhelming guilt, at least, is very recognisable to a Catholic (though his despair is a sin). The film does pull its punches slightly in suggesting that Willingdon may just be mad – everyone’s first conclusion – rather than making a coldly sane decision; is he having a breakdown from the start, or is it only the pressure of his having to sustain his crushingly heavy decision for a week, alone, that causes him to start pacing all night, whispering Bible verses as a trailer for the film’s ultimate climax in a church?

Also dated is the convention that the Professor has a pretty daughter with no noticeable character of her own but a boyfriend who’s a leading character, though at least here he’s only a younger scientist there to provide exposition, rather than a square-jawed hero in a ripped shirt (I’m not certain he even loosens his tie).

From this point on, the film is in essence a race against time to find a lone man in London, with first an attempt to keep it all quiet, then the city eventually put through total evacuation – save for Superintendent Folland, and the army – as it becomes clear that he means it, and won’t be easy to find. The stark black and white and frequent night filming all around London, some of it still bomb-damaged by much less ferocious ordinance in the last War, gives it all a tense atmosphere, but some of the film is also surprisingly witty.

There aren’t a lot of jokes in the script, with Goldie too plucky to be just a ‘comedy character’, though two characters do stand out – a man with a “The End Is Nigh” sign who keeps trying to get on his evacuation bus with it and being told to leave it behind, and who to add to the incongruity looks far too like Ronnie Corbett for an actor in 1950, and Joan Hickson’s Mrs Peckett, Willingdon’s temporary landlady. One of the few people less posh in this film than you’d expect – a gossipy Londoner with a fag surgically attached to her lip, a far cry from Miss Marple – she’s the most overtly comedic character, snooty, intrusive and paranoid, a caricature landlady. Suspicious when “Mr Richardson” (or is it “Mr Richards”?) doesn’t want to hand over his ration book, she manages to miss all the “Missing Scientist” posters, but runs to the police after “Moon Maniac” “LANDLADY KILLER AT LARGE” headlines in the Express!

“I thought you might be an actor, and of course I won’t have theatricals in the house.”

Most of the wit is in the cinematography; just as the camerawork prowls the shadows and shows us tormented faces, it can also brush past a petty crook or an inappropriate Atomic Racer game, or juxtapose The Garter and Slipper club with God Is Love, then listen to the Prime Minister’s broadcast under a dinosaur skeleton – before, along with “The End Is Nigh” signs, whole piles of items there’s no room to bring on the evacuation transport, from pets to sporting equipment.

To add to Joan Hickson, who was never young, there are many young faces in early roles – look out for Joss Ackland as an eager junior copper, or John Stratton (another to get a major role in Quatermass and the Pit at the other end of the decade) as a not eager at all young soldier, and at the end Victor Maddern as another young soldier at the end of his tether. And then there’s Geoffrey Keen, the thuggish, flag-waving, bomb-cheering ‘man in the street’ (or the pub) who decades later is the perishing Minister in the James Bond films that not even a change of government can get rid of, and Willingdon puts him (and the audience, who he’s almost speaking to direct when he angrily tells the man that he should be made to think about the things he says) down flat:

“You don’t understand what you’re saying… What you’re suggesting would mean the total destruction of mankind.”

After Noon – An Influential Film

As I noted above, Seven Days To Noon had a remarkably wide influence on British cinema and television – most obviously in a host of nuclear blackmail stories, but several more particular and noticeable scripts, especially those more science fiction than just setting topical concern two years ahead. Here are a few of the most striking ones, and two which I hope to review quite shortly (but which?)…

The Quatermass Experiment (1953, and 1955 film): in itself massively influential, but also borrowing a scientist chased through bomb-site London, a scientist lead and moral grappling, a finale in a big church, an apocalyptic threat and, at one remove, André Morell.

The Avengers – November Five (1963): another nuclear bomb threat to London from within the establishment.

Doctor Who – The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964): similar scenes of pursuit through a deserted London, though this is more of a Nazi than a nuclear parable (but Terry Nation always likes his countdowns and his radiation threats).

The Avengers – The Morning After (1969): a small town rather than London is evacuated under nuclear threat by a figure of trust, though the manhunt isn’t for the ‘villain’. This one (as Tat Wood pointed me to in his revised Doctor Who guide About Time 3) even uses footage shot for Seven Days To Noon as part of its own evacuation scenes. And Joss Ackland.

Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974): though very much by way of The Morning After for its conspiracy elements, this still recognisably borrows from the original source, as well, with London evacuated under a different sort of terror threat, and once again has people in positions of trust claiming to do good, by their lights, by means of mass murder.

The New Avengers – Sleeper (1976): London asleep rather than evacuated, though less interestingly than the very similar two immediately previous variations.

And films continue to use both the imagery and the moral complexity, from 28 Days Later to Watchmen…

Labels: Doctor Who, Film, Ideas, London, Quatermass, Religion, Reviews, The Avengers, The New Avengers

A US political thriller from the early ’60s with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton and Burgess Meredith, if you were watching BBC2 this time last week you’d have caught Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent. It’s a gripping film, but always blurs in my mind with Franklin Schaffner’s The Best Man from two years later (either side of the far more famous The Manchurian Candidate). While one was written by a conservative and the other by a liberal, they’re remarkably similar in outline: Henry Fonda wants to get a high position; a secret from his past; a dying President; and gay blackmail. Both are strong films, if not stunning – the former more interesting, more complex and shaded in its characters, the second more black and white (though they’re both, in fact, monochrome) but more coherent and driven. They were both unusual in their inclusion of homosexuality at the time – though as a shameful secret, of course – and in their political corruption, though both are more ‘moral’, more hopeful about the system, than the ’70s glum, paranoid conspiracy movies that Frankenheimer’s ’60s thrillers heralded.

Advise and Consent

“Fortunately, our country always manages to survive patriots like you.”

This is a tragedy of history; a dying President wants to secure his legacy by appointing a liberal intellectual Secretary of State who can negotiate for détente (before the term was in use) with the Soviets, but time is catching up with him and the history of everyone involved is creeping up on them. This one’s taken from a 1959 bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner by Allen Drury, its title a reference to the US Senate’s role in confirming Presidential nominations, and the crucial candidate is Fonda’s Robert Leffingwell. The film’s key players, though, are really two wily old Senate hands, both from the same party (clearly the Democrats in both films, though unnamed in either, from the days when both parties were much broader churches though, as one old President confesses, still required to ‘talk Church’) but old opponents, the Majority Leader Walter Pidgeon and the cantankerous old conservative Charles Laughton, here in his final screen role, both of whom are willing to do rather more than make speeches to get their own way. Laughton’s Seab Cooley is a virulent anti-communist who sees Leffingwell as a fifth columnist and goes all-out to stop his appointment, both in fiery speeches and in far more dangerous gimlet-eyed observation and plotting. Pidgeon’s Majority Leader is an urbane fixer for his President with a more charming manner but no less ruthless an instinct. And the twin hand grenades tossing between them are the secrets that suddenly near exposure about Leffingwell and the idealistic junior Senator Brig Anderson, hand-picked to see the nomination go through but doing his job rather too conscientiously.

Burgess Meredith, always a terrifically watchable actor, later to find enduring fame as the ’60s Batman series’ Penguin, and aiding the film in muddying the novel’s more strident conservatism by his history as a leftist actor not long since Blacklisted, shows up at the nomination hearing here to explode Leffingwell’s past – testifying that, as young men, both were part of the same Communist cell. It’s a small but vital performance, jittery, passionate, lost; part sneak, part victim. And Leffingwell calmly blows him apart by proving each of his details wrong… Before confessing to the President that while the man may have misremembered names and places, his accusation was true. The President, though, is determined to wave this aside and keep pushing him, just as Cooley is now more determined than ever to push back. And, while from that point Fonda (in theory the focal point of the movie) fades curiously into the background, it’s after this that both push Senator Anderson too far.


Don Murray is excellent as Brig Anderson, a young, handsome, upright Mormon who has details of Leffingwell’s Communist past thrust on him… And is then blackmailed in turn for his love affair with another man back when he was in the army. There are some implications, perhaps to make him more favourable to the audience or the censor, that he was only ‘situationally homosexual’ – but it seems to me that there are more than enough hints about his “unexciting marriage” to suggest that he was merely doing what so many gay men did then, and some still do, particularly if seeking political office. This was the first US film to show a gay bar – seedy and shameful, of course, and his literally tossing his ex-lover into the gutter where he belongs! is hardly pro-gay, not to mention then following the traditional plotline for all fictional gays of the time, and yet Brig is handsome, honest and more moral than anyone else in the film, none of which are attributes commonly associated with the Hollywood homosexual (even today, if you can find any). He’s a remarkable contrast with the film’s boo-hiss character – not the Alger Hiss character, that’s Fonda’s – the slimy, blackmailing Left-McCarthy Senator Van Ackerman, who in an interesting choice comes over much more as the cowardly thin streak of nothing that characters coded as gay were portrayed as, while it’s sexy, hairy-chested gay Brig who’s the butch one (the poster, above, bizarrely airbrushes him into a plucked chicken).

Part of the appeal of this film is that it doesn’t pull its punches – but also that it’s more complicated than the headlines allow. The only really despicable character is Van Ackerman, and I suspect he’s the closest to Allen Drury’s original conception: on the one hand, he’s there to scream that people who want to do business with the commies are nasty, unprincipled, untrustworthy and probably misled; on the other, it’s not difficult to see the evil McCarthy figure being one of the far left as Drury protesting too much, while through Twenty-First Century eyes the liberal being the extreme gay-baiter brings a wry smile against a Republican field for which the entry fee is strident homophobia. Perhaps the film’s intriguing balance and layers of character and politics are down to director Preminger’s occasionally deflecting the original text, whether through casting or slight plot changes – and the gay character being a Mormon, too, suggests for US politics today a less black and white approach than many would want to believe (the real-life model, incidentally, was the blackmailing by his fellow Senators of Lester Hunt of Wyoming over his gay son). And if you want a few entertaining incidental details, watch out for the minor Senators – not least an ancient old man who was a real five-term Senator, and a sparkling young woman who, yes, really is Betty White…

The Best Man

“It’s not that I mind you being a bastard. It’s that you’re a stupid bastard.”

Franklin Schaffner’s film has less complicated morals, a much more clean-cut ending and the disadvantage of coming second to Advise and Consent, both on the big screen and in Gore Vidal’s original play coming a year after the former’s book; it’s difficult not to think that it must, at least, have been aware of the crossovers with its predecessor. And yet it still manages to play for bigger stakes – not a Secretary of State, but a potential President – and by choosing Henry Fonda again, it has the confidence to face its critics right down, just as it has more balls-out models in American politics of the day. The central question here is who would make the best President between two candidates, and rather as if caught in Captain Kirk’s infamous transporter accident, one is liberal, moral, but vacillating, the other sexy, confident and a sociopath. But, the film and its aged President say, you need both intelligence and the killer instinct, so could the worst man be, politically, the best? And is this really more about who is the worst?

Henry Fonda’s William Russell here is a far less compromised character than his Robert Leffingwell – and far more his own man than a counter to be moved around between bigger players. Notably, rather than having literally vanished by the end of the movie as an illustration of his powerlessness, here he’s called on to make the crucial decisions and, eventually, makes one. And he’s no ex-Communist – instead, his opponent has got wind of a long-ago nervous breakdown, in some ways still more of a taboo for a political figure today than being gay is (and one that would explode in two Presidential elections’ time after the film was made). And, like the charming Senate Majority Leader in the first film, he’s having an affair – several of them, it seems – though, of course, as long as it’s a woman not your wife you’re involved with the club doesn’t seem to mind in either film, while even the suggestion of a man not your husband (or, worse, that is your husband) would be guaranteed to send voters screaming for the hills. Not that either film has many women, nor any who make an impact on the central plots – I’d wonder if there’s a deliberate subtext about the similarly homosocial environments of politics and the army, but I suspect it’s merely that in the early ’60s no-one in Hollywood or Washington bothered to think that women might make the decisions. At least Russell’s wife has some clout to her, though the ‘What women don’t like in a First Lady’ nagging activist is there only for stereotype and comic relief (when a similarly themed film was made in 2000, with Joan Allen as The Contender, note that the ‘slut-shaming’ is still directed against women, as with gays, and never at straight men who shag around, and whether she did or not). But it’s all the men who do the real machinations, from the jumpy public relations chief to the sharply observed “progressive liberal” Southern governor.


The most mesmerising figure here, though, is Cliff Robertson’s Joe Cantwell, Russell’s rival for the nomination. Apparently Vidal based Russell largely on Adlai Stevenson and Cantwell on Nixon, but while the Russell’s ‘philandering’ suggests a subtext of Kennedy for him, Robertson’s looks and charisma (and hawkishness) suggest a subtext of Kennedy for him, too, throwing sparks into what is plainly a Democratic Party in-fight. You may have seen him in later years as Spiderman’s Fonda-role-alike Uncle Ben (as well as another Batman villain in between); here, he’s terrifying, and when old President Art Hockstader pretty much tells him that with great power comes great responsibility, you can tell that the younger Robertson role doesn’t believe a word of it. It’s ironic that it’s Russell who has the documented mental health issues, as the one with the evident problem here is confident, blazing-eyed, even, Joe Cantwell, whose sociopathic inability to listen to other people extends even to not noticing Lee Tracy’s star turn old President telling him he’s dying.

And the gay plot? Again, this film chooses a simpler path, though the one that might have been expected to turn some of the audience to Joe Cantwell’s side then would ironically turn more stomachs four decades later – again, there’s the ammunition to blackmail him with stories of men shagging together when deprived of women in the army. Can Russell use this against him? Not because it’s anti-gay, you understand, but that blackmail even of that sort of thing makes him wring his hands. Try it, says the terrifying Cantwell in a twist; I have an alibi. Yes, I was named in the investigation into all those gays at that army base… But I wasn’t one of them. I was the one who accused them all. Back then, perhaps Gore Vidal was both ducking the censor by not having any actual ho-mo-sexuals and subtly trying to position the most strident homophobe as the villain; today, the first makes me think the film’s not as confident as it thinks it is, but the second explodes into making you think, this man’s really repellent. What a piece of Santorum.

Labels: American Politics, Batman, Bigotry, Film, Gay, Pictures, Reviews

Last Saturday night, ITV3 showed Murder By Decree, the 1979 film pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper (not to be confused with Hammer’s earlier variation on the theme, A Study in Terror). Of all the many films that tried to make a serious attempt at defining Holmes between Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, this is perhaps the most critically acclaimed and certainly the one that takes itself the most seriously. Yet though I rather like Christopher Plummer’s soulful Sherlock, the film’s achingly fashionable – for 1979 – Ripperology and conspiracy theories in general just test my patience. Spoilers follow…

“He seems to take a delight in keeping his subjects waiting. I suppose, since after all he is only the Prince of Wales, we should not expect the same degree of courtesy.”
“And since you are only the prince of detectives, Holmes, I don’t think you should presume to criticise a man who one day will be the King of England!”

My Puritan Streak

There are many reasons why this film gets on my wick, despite several fine actors, one or two of whom even give fine acting, and it’s to do with both style and substance. The narrative feel of the thing is a mess, not aided by a thoroughly unsatisfying excuse for an ending, nor in aiming for ‘realism’ by shooting almost the whole film in the dark until the last twenty minutes, making the picture even murkier than the script. But it’s the script that’s my main problem (just as it’s the reason many others praise it).

Essentially, the reason the narrative is a muddle, the reason the ending is an anti-climax, and the reason it takes itself so appallingly seriously all come down to the same central conceit: this purports to be an undiscovered adventure of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, but in fact he’s merely grafted on as a framing device for a very expensive docudrama of the trendy Jack the Ripper theory of the time.

My prejudices are showing here a little; I’m not one of nature’s great Puritans, but such a Puritanical streak as I have tends to come out about ‘true crime’. It’s probably not very logical to delight in many fictional murder mysteries and crime capers while sniffing at the tasteless exploitativeness of anything like the same plots if based on real criminals with real victims, but it’s my instinctive reaction. So while I can understand the idea behind this sort of film – hey! Let’s mash up the two biggest ‘popular legends’ of Victorian London to make big box-office! – I can’t help being a little biased against it from the start. A fictionalised stand-in for the Ripper, with a different name and in a work which promises nothing more than fiction, has nothing like the same effect on me, but if it’s purporting to be the real horrible misogynist murderer as ‘glamorous history’, I don’t like it. And so without the most extraordinary brilliance driving it, and it hasn’t, this film is almost precisely calculated by its po-faced presentation of both Sherlock Holmes and Stephen Knight’s schlock history book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (tasteful title, there) as ‘true’ to fall between two stools. It’s at the same time too serious, and not serious enough.

The Hairpiece From Hell

As well as being made to cash in on ‘ninety years of the Ripper’, this was the end of the ’70s, and glum conspiracy ‘thrillers’ in which the establishment is riddled with nasty murderers and the hero never wins and is lucky not to end up dead in a ditch at the end were very much in vogue. So it’s not surprising that the decade ended with a big conspiracy movie ‘exposing’ the entire British nobility as behind a Masonic conspiracy over the Jack the Ripper murders (the only surprise being that, unlike the book it’s based on and several later Holmes-less dramatisations, this film bottles it and changes the names of the aristocrats they claim committed the murders, while happy to slander openly various public servants of the time they name as the Ripper’s friends in slightly less high places. Surely not forelock-tugging by the producers?).

The problem, on its own terms, of making The Parallax View for the previous century is that they decide to put Sherlock Holmes in it so people will flock to the cinemas to see it. And Sherlock Holmes is in complete conflict with a grim, ’70s-style conspiracy movie. Those have to end up bleak, despairing and insoluble; he has to end up victorious by means of his brilliant brain, and not end up floating face-down in the Thames or framed for murder and blamed for it all in the end (he is, of course, arrested for murder at one point here, but it’s such a lacklustre attempt that the charge slides off him in the very same scene). Well, at least seeing as it’s not one of those books in which Holmes turns out secretly to be Jack the Ripper, Moriarty and Queen Victoria, or any other of those dreary ‘twists’ telegraphed from the cover. Shove these two immovable narrative forces up against each other, and what do you get? One of the most rambling, pointless and unintentionally hilarious scenes ever committed in a Sherlock Holmes film, as the film’s excuse for an ending shifts from briefly bloody to protractedly preachy against the “madmen wielding sceptres.”

Unable publicly to bring the Ripper to justice (just a bloody end in the dark that no-one can mention) or even to name him, but equally unable to have Holmes fail, the film’s ‘climax’ is twenty minutes of a handful of haughty men declaiming quite bad but very long dialogue at each other in a vast Masonic hall deep within the Palace of Westminster. No, seriously. Christopher Plummer is the only one who comes out of it with any dignity, and probably an award for being able to deliver this tosh with a straight face. His Holmes is compassionate, socially concerned, and thankfully clean-shaven; the Prime Minister, of course, is a stiff, cold liar who refuses to take any responsibility for having in effect said ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome woman?’; but even his ludicrous whiskers (concealing John Gielgud, and I bet he wished it was a full face-mask) can’t compete with Anthony Quayle’s giant curlicues of pubic hair arranged at random all over his head. In Hammer’s ‘Holmes versus the Ripper’ film A Study in Terror, Mr Quayle had played the decent, dependable moral heart of it; here, the difference in his part and performance are so blatantly mirrored in his appalling wig that I wonder whether the hamming was playing up to the hairpiece or vice versa. Along the way to this meandering shouting match, David Hemmings’ scheming closet Radical is almost as bad – and almost as ludicrously coiffured – as those he wants to bring down, while Donald Sutherland’s goggling psychic tries hard to be worse.

The decent, dependable moral heart of this film is, of course, Holmes, with Christopher Plummer giving rather more sides than the usual cold fish or hyper aesthete, actually carrying off a Holmes who weeps over Geneviève Bujold’s sad fate rather than making us go, ‘Oh, come on’. James Mason’s older, stiffer Dr Watson isn’t so lucky; contractual obligations for every Watson of the second half of the last century make them all ‘an attempt to move on from bumbling Nigel Bruce’ (though I rather liked him), but the elderly Mr Mason seems so weary that he gives the impression, once removing the shadow of Mr Bruce, of having nothing to put in his place. The only excuse I can think of is that with Watson usually taking the part of Holmes’ narrator, he’s the one ‘watching’ the whole thing on the part of the viewer and so is postmodernly as fed up with it as we are. Between them, they have one quite endearing scene with a pea, but it’s thin pickings in a very long two hours.

A Study In Terror and More

In all, it’s not a patch on Hammer’s more lurid but much more entertaining A Study In Terror from 1965, despite sharing the same case, murderous aristocrats and even some of the same cast (notably, not just the Jekyll and Hyde performances of Mr Quayle and his stylist but Frank Finlay as Inspector Lestrade). James Hill’s direction gives a much more lively and colourful film – and it’s a good half-hour shorter – while its utter disregard for historical accuracy and open desire just to tell a thrilling story means that it’s not just free of the later film’s visual sludge but its turgid narrative sludge, too, and is as a result far less offensive. The film has far more satisfying twists, details (despite the ludicrous title “the Duke of Shires”) and an exciting climax, none of them purporting to be true, and the actors are given much more interesting things to do than strike a pose and recite indigestible chunks of bad history at each other. The late John Neville’s Sherlock is quite sparky and energetic, if without Mr Plummer’s depth, while Donald Houston’s Dr Watson is, by contrast to Mr Mason, awake. John Fraser gives one of his most striking performances; Adrienne Corri is terrific; Robert Morley does the sort of enjoyable schtick he was always asked to do; and viewers who’ve come to this movie second may be surprised to find Anthony Quayle acting in this one.

Or, from the same sort of between-the-definitive-Holmeses period, there’s Robert Stephens’s languid detective in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which hopefully will be released on Region 2 one day with some of the mutilated bits restored, or Peter Cushing’s various and interestingly different takes – I do wish they’d release The Masks of Death, an eerie and little-known mystery that’s always stuck with me despite its jingoism. Or, if you must, From Hell, which nicks from the same Ripperology as Murder By Decree but doesn’t throw in Holmes to try and glamorise it (though Alan Moore and Johnny Depp going several rounds in the same sort of glum conspiracy thriller isn’t going to have anyone rise to the surface at the end).

On the bright side, if you want to compare legendary British icons of a particular sort of period that never really was but which we can all picture, then Holmes and history both got off lightly in Murder By Decree. Channel 4 this afternoon showed Siege of the Saxons, surely the worst King Arthur movie ever made that doesn’t have Clive Owen in it. It’s a pale shadow of The Black Knight, and it’s difficult to think of greater damnation than that.


If you want ‘canonical’ Sherlock Holmes, incidentally, I’m still rather proud of my piece on The Valley of Fear’s Visit From Porlock…

Labels: Film, History, London, Reviews, Sherlock Holmes