The Appointment (1981)

After an intro sequence in which a twelve year old girl hears strange, mocking voices in the woods and is suddenly dragged away, never to be seen again, the film comes to a point in time three years later.

The family of Ian (Edward Woodward), Dianna (Jane Merrow) and their fourteen year old daughter Joanne (Samantha Weysom) seem in a happy place. They are rich and apparently happy, Joanne going to a private/public (please delete the appropriate word depending on the country you live in) school where she is groomed as a budding star violinist.

There’s something not quite typical in the relationship between Ian and Joanne, though, for there’s some very Freudian thing going on concerning Joanne’s budding womanhood, the closeness between the two, and Ian’s clear inability, perhaps unwillingness, to build useful emotional borders. So it is not a complete surprise that Joanne takes news that Ian won’t be able to come to a concert that is inordinately important to her the next day because he has to drive a day or so to an important judicial hearing, very badly indeed.

Joanne’s mood – or is it perhaps something else? - seems to infect the house’s other inhabitants that night. Both Ian and Dianne have strange dreams about cars and travels, and some rather more symbolic things, all of which are imbued with an air of dread. Alas, they do not meet in the morning before Ian has to go on his road trip, so they can’t realize the most disturbing thing about these dreams: that they have both been dreaming the same dreams.

Needless to say, Ian’s trip is not going to go terribly well.

If ever I saw a horror movie not made for every horror fan, this one, directed as well as written by the mysterious Lindsey C. Vickers, is it. It’s not just that The Appointment is a slow film, very fond of visual symbolism, it’s how much it insists on staying ambiguous and letting the audience figure out their own version of what’s going on by interpretation and an act (well, rather a lot of acts) of filling in the blanks, while still having a clear idea of its own what’s going on in it. Seen in the wrong mood, or by someone who just doesn’t like films working exclusively via hints and moods – really, it’s as if this were a case of Slow Horror come thirty years too early – this would be properly infuriating stuff, as obnoxious and annoying as a YouTube personality to me (I’m showing my age here, sorry, YouTube personalities).

If you have a general appreciation for this sort of thing, though, The Appointment might very well be your new favourite secret gem. At first, the film is built to keep even a sympathetic viewer pretty unsure about what they are actually watching here: the Freudian family business is certainly easily enough parsable, but what does that have to do with the film’s intro, or with the camera’s tendency to linger unnervingly on certain quotidian details, either loading them with meaning in the process or hinting on some hidden or future importance. Yet slowly, things come together, the film’s stylistic choices, be they visually, on the acting side (well, Weysom isn’t actually good at all, but her approach is so weird it fits the film perfectly), or a score that wavers between dramatic somewhat modernist classical and sporadic synth noises, not exactly explaining the film but giving the impression of the viewer being in the hand of filmmakers who know what they are doing very well indeed.

For me, the film reaches a near magical intensity in the long scenes of Ian’s and Dianne’s very bad night, full of shots of the camera slowly gliding over sleeping faces while nothing outwardly happens, intercut with dreams full of symbols and things that could be symbols but feel like premonitions of the most dreadful kind. After this night, the film keeps up its quiet intensity without ever letting up. Simple sentences, movements and gestures seem – and indeed are – loaded with hidden, second meanings, and there’s a feeling of doom and dread running through proceedings until the end. An end that also shows how good Vickers is at portraying things that aren’t metaphorically loaded anymore but have actual physical impact.

The final scenes also suggest that we have indeed been watching something of folk horror film, the black dog motive (and some of its folkloric meaning), the suggested idea of terrible kind of sympathetic magic, and the importance of a patch of woods all resonating with that particular genre. 

Sitting Target (1972)

Despite having landed in prison thanks to a mysterious snitch, hardened professional criminal Harry Lomart (Oliver Reed) seems willing enough - though not happy to, mind you - to peacefully wait out the next fifteen years or so in prison. After all, his wife Pat (Jill St. John in a surprise non-awful performance) is going to be waiting for him when he gets out, so there's something to look forward to, right? Harry's disposition changes when Pat visits him to give him a particularly fine Dear John speech. Not only does she want to get divorced, but she's also pregnant by another man. Harry's not the kind of guy to take news of this sort in stride, and unsuccessfully attempts to strangle Pat at once.

A bit later, Harry and his partner and eternal best friend in crime Birdy Williams (Ian McShane) - in fact, they seem so good friends it is sometimes curious why Harry is so hung up on his wife seeing as he is also married to Birdy - break out of jail. Birdy would prefer to just flee the country, but Harry still has his murderous plans for Pat (and her elusive new man) in his heart, and Birdy's not the kind of friend who leaves his buddy just because of a minor murder plan. Or because Harry does the unthinkable for a British criminal (even of his rather brutal persuasion) and acquires a gun and starts using it quite like the bad guy in a crime movie. This sort of behaviour doesn't just increase the enthusiasm of Inspector Milton (Edward Woodward), the man in charge of protecting Pat, for his work, but also strains Harry's relations in the underworld to a breaking point. It's really just the question of how much carnage he will be able to cause before somebody gets him and Birdy. Perhaps he'll also find an answer to the question of who exactly did initially snitch on him. Harry probably won't like the answer.

Douglas Hickox' Sitting Targets belongs to the fine group of deeply pessimistic crime films (one could argue they are even more pessimistic than the classic noir movies) made in the UK during the 70s whose most famous example is of course Mike Hodges' Get Carter, and rightly so. Sitting Target is a fine example of the form too, filtering a gritty sense of reality (rather than "realism") through the lens of the sort of artificiality that is meant to heighten intensities rather than break them. There's - apart from the dramatic one - no irony in Hickox' direction. No curious camera angle, no peculiar framing of a scene is meant to point out its own artistry; everything is in the service of characters and plot.

Still, from time to time Hickox lays his obvious visual metaphors and clever camera angles on a bit too thick, not like somebody who wants to point out his own awesomeness, but as if he were afraid the audience wouldn't get what he's trying to do unless he hammers it home and then hammers it home again. A man for subtlety and ambiguity the director ain't.

Fortunately, the film only suffers from that sort of over-emphasis (which always reminds me of Eisenstein when I encounter it) in a few scenes, and isn't at all ruined by it. Hickox also shows himself adept at increasingly intense, often just slightly bizarre and highly creative action scenes. My personal favourite is a sequence where Reed has a peculiar kind of duel with two motorcycle cops in an immense mass of hanged laundry. It's the sort of scene that should be ridiculous taken at face-value but is set-up and filmed with so much cleverness and intensity it's impossible not to take it absolutely seriously.

That scene - and many others - wouldn't play quite as well if not for some rather great acting, with Reed playing the kind of violent, intense and too frequently unthinking man (critics often like to use the word "animalistic" here, but that's a cop out word to describe physical emotionality as primitive if ever I heard one) he got often typecast as with all of his immense powers of glowering and slurring his lines (an approach whose general lack of subtlety fits the film it occurs in perfectly). As is often the case in his movies, Reed's performance is the obvious main attraction in the cast (in Sitting Target's case quite logically so for plot reasons), but McShane and the other actors do more than create good foils for his various outbreaks and sudden mood shifts. The way they play it, there's more going on than the violence and the shouting, just not necessarily things Harry as a character very much caught up in his own emotions is able to realize, turning him into another crime movie protagonist caught up in things very much beyond his control and understanding.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,douglas hickox,oliver reed,jill st. john,ian mcshane,edward woodward,crime

Callan (1974)

Up until 18 months ago, David Callan (Edward Woodward) had worked as a professional killer for an especially secretive branch of the SIS, tasked with the very democratic job of getting rid of undesirable people by everything from "just" ruining to outright killing them. His boss Hunter (Eric Porter) has retired Callan, though, feeling that his former best man's habits, among them alcoholism and a growing conscience, made him unfit for his work.

Callan's retirement bonus is a classic shit job in the office of an equally classic irascible little man who very much needs to be called "Sir".

Callan still fights with his alcoholism, his feelings of guilt leading to nightmares, getting parked in a nowhere job with no future to speak of obviously working on his self esteem (not to speak of his mood).

But - if fortunately or unfortunately is hard to say - Hunter would like to take Callan back into the fold, providing Callan has come round to being "reasonable" again. He will just have to prove his loyalty and abilities by killing a certain Schneider (Carl Möhner) without complete company backup. Funny, for some reason Hunter even insists on Callan getting himself a gun on his own. One could start to develop feelings of distrust towards one's superiors.

Fear of being used as a scapegoat is not Callan's only problem, of course: his conscience still isn't gone down the drain and makes the thought of murdering someone in cold blood abhorrent to him, something that surely isn't helped by Hunter's refusal to explain the reasons why he wants to see Schneider dead. So Callan's going to find that one out on his own. It's not getting any easier when he gets to know his future victim and finds Schneider to be a man very much like himself, damaged, dangerous, definitely not a "good" person but no monster.

Callan, directed by old TV and b-picture pro Don Sharp, is based on the pilot episode for a British TV show of the same name. As spy films go, this is very much on the dark, grim and more realistic side of the equation. You won't find any suave and smooth-talking ex-bodybuilders here, nor are there any gadgets around. On the other hand, the film's tone is a little too exciting, but also too skeptical when compared to the works of someone like Le Carre (whose world view is certainly not friendly, but still seems to be based on a conviction of the necessity and basic moral rightness of spycraft, a conviction Callan very much lacks) to be part of that wing of the genre.

In other words, it's a film seemingly written directly for my special tastes -  the story of a man who is quite lost, damaged and trying not to lose the little humanity he has left, which is rather difficult for someone whose main talent is killing.

The film is very good at telling this type of story, with Sharp's direction not necessarily inspired but always capable enough to create a convincing atmosphere of claustrophobia and a subtle tenseness that sometimes erupts into short bursts of violence. Unlike what one would expect, the film isn't drenched (if you can call it that) in grey, its colours are instead a variety of many drab brown tones that are just as depressing. Britain here seems a very small and ugly place, even the relatively few location shots are carefully chosen to emphasize that mood. It's not a place you'd want to kill for, so much is sure.

The plot proceeds methodically and (for some viewers perhaps too) deliberately, while what action happens is kept short and rather naturalistic. There is a lot of subtle character work through details to be found here, kept low-key by excellent acting and a script that mostly (there are two or three moments of surprising bluntness) trusts in the viewer's ability to think.

I can't end this without mentioning Edward Woodward's excellent performance which alone would be enough to carry a film without much else to recommend. Here, Woodward's work is just one part of a very fine whole.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,reviews,spies,edward woodward,don sharp