In short: Puppet on a Chain (1970)

Because a trio of drug dealers are murdered in the USA, some US drug-centric law enforcement agency sends their agent Paul Sherman (Sven-Bertil Taube, who is about as American as I am), and extra secret undercover agent Maggie (Barbara Parkins) to Amsterdam to put a stop to that part of the drug trade once and for all. The Dutch colleagues aren’t terribly impressed by him, or enamoured by the idea, and don’t know about Maggie.

From then on, Sherman tortures and murders his way through Amsterdam, following leads and clues in the least effective yet most violent manner imaginable.

Say what you will against Geoffrey Reeve’s Alistair MacLean adaptation Puppet on a Chain, but it is most certainly a film ahead of its time, prefiguring the asshole on a rampage movie style by someone like Michael Winner for quite a few years. Sherman is a deeply unpleasant hero, a law enforcement agent who seems to go out of his way to break ever law imaginable, all of the time, even in situations where going by the book would make rather a lot more sense. He’s usually more violent than he needs to be and lacks in any actual investigative skills. Much worse for my sometimes rather amoral tastes when it comes to this kind of movie, he’s no fun at all, with no character traits apart from a badly written love affair with Maggie (who is of course killed off to motivate him to further violence), and played by Taube with all the verve and charisma of a concrete pillar.

It would be enough to make a boy rather cranky, if not for a couple of saving graces that eventually do make the adventures of an unpleasant prick doing unpleasant things for little reason at least decently entertaining. For one, there’s a certain degree of weirdness running through much of the plot, with villains who occasionally seem to think they are in a giallo, and so tend to rather creative corpse presentations and plans that make even less sense than Sherman’s investigative techniques. Corpses just look better in traditional Dutch garb.

Secondly, some of the action sequences are pretty decent too. The film’s major claim to fame is a long and pretty great motorboat chase scene; that one’s not directed by Reeve, but by Don Sharp, who also did some other trouble shooting. If I were a cynical man, I’d suggest all the good bits were Sharp’s responsibility.

Three Films Make A Post: Seven Suicides - and they roared back as The Living Dead.

Psychomania aka The Death Wheelers (1973): For the longest time, I didn’t get along with this particular bit of British bikersploitation/folk horror by Don Sharp at all. It’s not a complete surprise, for the film does have some undeniable drawbacks: the pacing is – rather atypical for Sharp – leaden, until it suddenly isn’t because it’s time for a stunt sequence; the bikers seem awfully well-groomed and polite even when they are undead and working for Satan; and the script never seems to agree with itself on the proper tone for the affair. On the other hand, and that’s what rather worked for me this time around: the stunt sequences are really great in mixing Sharp’s excellent instincts for action with a very British looking mundanity, and the folk horror tale has moments of proper weirdness that very consciously resemble folk tales about deals with the devil, until everything culminates in a set piece that absolutely should be part of a modern (as of ‘73) version of an actual folk tale.

Antlers (2021): I’m honestly more than a bit confused about what to make of this film by Scott Cooper. It’s at once an attempt to use a version of the wendigo myth to talk about circles of abuse and poverty, and a monster movie (with an awesome looking creature) so traditional, it could have been on the SyFy Channel before they go lost in the bad jokes. Which might have worked out fine indeed, if the script had ever found a way to actually connect its disparate impulses to build a proper whole.

Instead, the narrative drags the characters back and forth between two very different kinds of movie, without ever even seeming to make an attempt to convince its audience why they belong together.

The Negotiation aka 협상 | hyeob-sang (2018): That sort of thing could never happen to this ultra-slick South Korean thriller by Lee Jong-seok about a very intense hostage negotiation that turns into a series of twists and revelations. It’s all very professionally done, acted well (particularly Son Ye-jin as our hostage negotiating heroine does a wonderful star turn), and really rather exciting.

It is also somewhat predictable for anyone who knows this style of movie – it’s just made so well I didn’t actually find myself caring it is in a terribly negative way – and mostly surprises by not going for the sort of deep formal or thematic turn many highly commercial films from Korea love to take despite this sort of thing supposedly not how highly commercial films are done.

Past Misdeeds: The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


It's 1588, and the Spanish Armada has just taken its deadly thrashing. The Diablo, the small ship of Spanish privateer Captain Robeles (Christopher Lee) has taken flight as soon as the tides of battle – and the weather - turned against the Spanish. With his ship in a bad state, Robeles decides to pilot it into the English marshes in the hopes of finding a place to make repairs in peace before he and his crew can take up pirating again.

Their luck leads the pirates into the vicinity of a small English town whose younger male population has nearly completely gone to war, leaving the place in the hands of a cowardly country squire (Ernest Clark), some middle aged and elderly men of the lower classes, and Harry (John Cairney), a young man who lost the use of his left arm in Spanish captivity, and who romances Angela (Suzan Farmer), the daughter of the squire, quite against the man's wishes. Harry's father Tom (Andrew Keir) is something of a spokesman of the village’s working classes. There are, of course, also the women of the village, but the film isn't quite progressive enough to do much with them.

Robeles hopes to win the help of the village in the repair of his ship - and later get an opportunity to loot it - by applying a trick that plays on the place's relative remoteness. He'll march his men into town and pretend that Spain won over the British fleet and is now occupying the British Isles.

The squire and the local vicar only seem all too glad to oblige the new master in town, but the working classes - especially Harry and his father - are burning to make contact with any British resistance against their supposed occupiers. Ah, class war.

While Robeles has to use all his cunning and cruelty to play his ruse and keep the villagers under control, he is also threatened by philosophical differences with his first officer. That young man, Don Manuel Rodriguez de Savilla (Barry Warren), is a true Spanish patriot, and disagrees quite resolutely with Robeles plans for returning to the pirate business. Perhaps he will even disagree with them enough to partner with a bunch of English villagers?

While everybody (of taste) loves Hammer Film's horror output, people - me too often included - tend to ignore most of what the studio put out in other genres. In some cases, like the studio's small yet insipid comedy output, that's pure self-defence, but in other cases, like its land-locked pirate movies, ignoring these films means missing out on some very fine genre filmmaking.

Case in point is The Devil-Ship Pirates, as directed by the generally dependable Don Sharp (who must have had a very good year in 1964, creatively, for it's also the year that saw him direct the very fine little horror movie Witchcraft). It's a film as clearly done on a budget as anything Hammer did at the time, but it's also a film that knows how to use what it has (one ship, some fine looking sets and a highly dependable cast) in often inventive, always professional, and very entertaining ways.

Sharp's direction isn't as endowed with an eye for the pretty as it was in Witchcraft, but it provides the film with a sense of pace and tension that works well with its script. Sharp also manages to handle the film's more melodramatic parts in a rather off-handed way that provides them with a stronger feeling of veracity than you'd usually expect from scenes like them. There may be nothing flashy about Sharp, but he sure does all the right things to tell a clever story in an appropriately clever way.

Clever is also a good way to describe Jimmy Sangster's script for the film. The pirates' plan does at once provide a simple yet exciting set-up and keeps the film's action constrained to a comparatively small number of locations without letting the production feel impoverished in any way; and once that plan is set up, it's only a question of letting the various characters act appropriately, put in a few opportunities for mild swashbuckling (an English countryman is no Errol Flynn), and just let the plot roll out in a logical yet entertaining manner. Of course, Sangster also finds time to add in some of Hammer's usual political interests: the upper classes (especially the middle-aged men of the upper classes; there's often still hope for the younger men and women in the production house's films, at least if they're willing to fall for lower class guys and girls) are not to be trusted, the working middle class is awesome, priests mean well but often don't really know what they're doing. It could be quite annoying, if it were not a) obviously true and b) made more complicated by characters who are allowed to transcend their class characteristics to act like actual human beings, or at least the adventure movie version of such.

On the acting side, The Devil-Ship Pirates provides ample opportunity to watch various Hammer stalwarts do their usual thoroughly convincing stuff. Standouts are Andrew Keir - who brings surprising intensity to a rather small roll, and Michael Ripper who portrays a pirate as if his usual innkeeper character had gone nasty with a relish that can't help but delight.

Even the film's romantic leads in form of John Cairney and Barry Warren are perfectly okay. That may be caused by the script providing them opportunities to play somewhat more complex characters than usual for romantic leads, but I'm surely not going to complain about added complexity in my adventure movies.

For once, I'm also not going to complain about my least favourite iconic horror actor, Christopher Lee. Sure, he plays more than half of his scenes on auto-pilot, doing his usual menacing shtick with little obvious interest in his role, but he has two really great moments. The first one - in his first violent confrontation with Don Manuel - is one of these (getting rarer the longer the actor's career went) moments when the actor stops letting his Christopher Lee-ness stand in for acting and really puts some energy into projecting the smouldering menace he always was able to bring into its roles, but often seemed too disinterested to actually bring to use, turning his villain suddenly into someone not just bad in a perfunctory way as afforded by the script, but Evil in a much more total sense. Staying with the capital E Evil, his second great scene here sees Lee delighting in doing the most evil thing imaginable in a movie villain: outwitting a little boy.


So, clearly, The Devil-Ship Pirates has everything you could ask of an adventure movie.

In short: Hennessy (1975)

Belfast in the mid-70s. Despite a certain amount of IRA connections, Niall Hennessy (Rod Steiger) has sworn off all violence for whatever Cause. This changes when his wife and daughter are shot – not exactly on purpose - by a panicked British soldier (who is afterwards promptly killed by an IRA sniper) during a minor riot that goes catastrophically wrong.

Before his family is even buried, Hennessy takes off to London – the promised killing of the whole British squad involved by his former IRA buddies isn’t quite enough for him, it seems. Instead, Hennessy’s planning to blow up the British parliament on opening day, timed to kill every MP, the House of Lords, the Queen and most of the rest of the Royal Family. That’s not a plan the IRA would reasonably underwrite, so Hennessy is soon hunted by his former best friend Sean Tobin (Eric Porter) as well as equally damaged Special Branch Inspector Hollis (Richard Johnson).

Don Sharp’s mid-70s thriller is – not unexpectedly – quite a good film that does some rather interesting things, most of them well. Particularly striking is the horrible awkwardness of the violence in it, the death of Hennessy’s family setting up the style in which the film portrays violence as something that – once put in motion – tends to escalate to the point of catastrophe, something that would be funny if it didn’t leave so many dead bodies; the idea of controlled violence committed by professionals leading to computable results contemporary action cinema loves a little too much is completely alien to the film. Here, things escalate, people make mistakes, and innocents have to die for them, until mass murder doesn’t feel so much like a choice anyone makes but as something they just happen to commit because that’s what using violence to solve any conflict in the end will lead to.

Sharp isn’t much for Peckinpah-style slow motion blood baths in his portrayal of bloodshed; the tone of the violence here is much more matter of fact, lending everything that happens a – quite horrible – kind of logic. Generally, Sharp goes for the gritty and unsentimental style you’d expect from this kind of thriller shot in 1975, and doing the expectedly good job with it.

The director also somehow manages to reign in Rod Steiger’s love for scenery-chewing, dragging a quieter and more effective performance out of him whose only flaw is the bad Irish accent. But then, the film is full of those – just listen to what Lee Remick does -so I won’t blame Steiger too much.

Bear Island (1979)

A UN sponsored group of scientists of different nationalities – of course all played by English native speakers doing horrible fake accents – under the leadership of one Otto Gerran (Richard “Nein, hören Sie!!!!” Widmark) comes to arctic, Norwegian Bear Island for some vague studies concerning climate change. Apart from the small former Nazi base the scientists are making themselves at home in, there’s only an old Nazi submarine harbour and a NATO base that is so completely out of bounds for the scientists they are not even supposed to make radio contact with it. Even before most of the expedition arrived, there has been the first mysterious disappearance (well, it’s a mysterious disappearance for the characters, the audience knows full well the victim was murdered), and that’s just the beginning of a series of violent events.

American scientist Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland, not attempting a Californian accent as far as I can make out), who is actually on the island because his father was a German submarine captain who probably died right there and he feels in need of some closure, quickly discovers that there’s a huge cache of gold hidden on the island. It’s a lot of the stuff, and there are a lot of people in the expedition willing to kill for it.

Finding out who these people are will become rather difficult, though, because nobody on the island actually seems to have come to do any science at all, everybody has a secret, and nobody is truly who he or she seems to be.

By 1979, Don Sharp – despite a career that would in stops and starts continue for a further ten years – was still the always at least dependable, sometimes brilliant director he had been for decades, but he didn’t exactly move with the times anymore. From this perspective, he’s a very good fit for Bear Island, a thriller inevitably based on an Alistair Maclean novel that seems to come from a different world in a movie landscape after Star Wars and Jaws as well as after much of 70s action and adventure cinema.

There’s something old-fashioned and stiff about the film, a certain lack of sharpness and focus that results in a rather draggy middle act, with a script that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a more visceral thriller, a variation of an Agatha Christie style manor mystery, or both, or nothing of the sort. From time to time, the film finds its step for ten minutes or so, thanks to Sharp creating a set-piece that’s actually exciting (if you like snow mobile duels, that is), or moody and actually telling us something about the characters (like Lansing’s first secret visit to the submarine base). Of course, a few minutes later, everything becomes a bit lifeless again, because obvious red herrings (seriously, no self-respecting old-fashioned mystery would be this obvious) have to be laid, and anything interesting has to wait for a while.

At least Bear Island has quite the cast. Apart from Sutherland (giving a performance fluctuating between bored and amused), and Widmark, there are also Lloyd “Bad Ass” Bridges, Christopher “I’m Polish, really” Lee, and Vanessa “Oops, forgot my accent for a scene again” Redgrave (wasted on playing The Girl, of course), and while the script does its damndest to not give them much to do or puts many a clunky line in everyone’s mouth, you can’t quite put this assembly of talent down, so from time to time, tiny sparks are indeed flying between them.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,reviews,thriller,don sharp,donald sutherland,vanessa redgrave,richard widmark,christopher lee,lloyd bridges

Curse of the Fly (1965)

The newest generation of the Delambre family – as represented by Henri (Brian Donlevy) and his sons Martin (George Baker) and Albert (Michael Graham) – still hasn’t learned a thing about research safety standards, and is continuing with its ancestral (by my calculation, the film should take place in the 2030s) teleportation experimentation. Yup, they still haven’t realized inventing a teleporting device that’s only good for dead matter would still be an incredible technological leap.

Anyhow, when Martin’s driving through beautiful Canada one night, he meets Patricia Stanley (Carole Gray), running in her undies through the woods in slow motion. Some short words about her fictitious employer’s fictitious husband convince Martin that there’s nothing strange about her behaviour at all, and before you can say “slow down, cowboy”, the two are married and moving into the mansion where the family conduct their experiments.

In truth, Patricia has escaped from an asylum where she was treated for a nervous breakdown. Of course, she’s not the only member of the new family who has secrets. Martin suffers from some weird sporadic aging sickness that leaves him in rather a bad state from time to time, but that’s really not the worst problem here, for Martin and his dad have been conducting their experiments on human beings, and keep the irradiated results (no flies here, I’m sorry to say) locked up in some nice little cells in the garden. Oh, and one of these results is Martin’s wife Judith. And no, they never got divorced. Add to that Henri’s total lack of scruples, Albert’s disgruntlement with his crazy family ways, and the fact that the Delambre’s Chinese (cough) servants hate her, and soon you’ll find a drugged up by her husband and father in law Patricia slowly driven insane by the mutants and the servants, among the less troublesome developments.

The belated third The Fly film was directed by sometimes mediocre, sometimes nearly brilliant genre film veteran Don Sharp in one of his good weeks. It’s barely a sequel to the first two films – which is a good thing given that you can do only so much with a human fly, I think – and could really be about a family of totally unrelated mad scientists without losing anything. Sharp, or writer Harry Spalding, really seems to be more interested in crossing the more science fictional horror approach of the first two films with typical gothicisms. The film’s sense of the gothic doesn’t  just offer the expected mad scientist type but also includes a huge dollop of gothic romance of the sort the post-Daphne Du Maurier generations were actually beginning to churn out (unless I’m off a few years, in which case this would be something of a predecessor of the type). “Rebecca”, it turns out, only further improves with the addition of mad scientist family troubles and mutants.

It’s a rather interesting combination that leads to a film recommending itself at the very least through the originality of unexpected sub-genre crossings. I’m also quite fond of Curse’s moments of delicious strangeness, executed with style (and a lot of rather beautifully staged scenes) by a Sharp who is clearly in his element whenever it comes to the gothic and the strange.

What Curse of the Fly isn’t, is a film whose plot will withstand any kind of logical scrutiny. Everything that happens here makes sense thematically and atmospherically, though, and if you’re willing to accept the basic silliness (and who wouldn’t be?), then you might even call the film’s treatment of different kinds of mentally illness, and its sombre thoughts about the troubles with family and trust rather intelligent; one might even think there’s a reason behind the way this unassuming little horror film contrasts Patricia’s relatively open and only dangerous for herself mental illness with the Delambres’ secret and much more destructive ones. I’m even willing to go as far as suggest there’s a bit of a hint of criticism of how much more willing the society of 1965 seems to accept “aberrant” behaviour of men when compared to that of women packed into this delicious sandwich of mad science and mutants.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,horror,don sharp,brian donlevy,george baker,carole gray

What Waits Below (1985)

The US military is planning to install some kind of secret experimental radio transmitter in cave systems somewhere below a Central American country. Unfortunately, they have two problems. Firstly, they haven't found an actual cave entrance yet, and the major responsible for this particular transmitter, Stevens (Timothy Bottoms), is running out of time to get the device up and running in time for a manoeuvre. Secondly, a merry trio of anthropologists (Richard Johnson, Anne Heywood and Lisa Blount) with a hankering for caves is poking around in the very same area the military is interested in.

To solve the situation, the uniforms call in mercenary with a side-line in caving Rupert "Wolf" Wolfsen (Robert Powell, of all people), who has been hating Stevens for good reasons ever since the Vietnam War. Thanks to the efforts of Wolf and the anthropologists whom he befriends where Steven went the antagonizing route, a cave entrance is eventually found, but soon the men posted with the transmitter are attacked by mysterious forces and disappear together with the device. It's time for a rescue expedition consisting of Wolf, the anthropologists, Stevens and some redshirts. But who or what is waiting for them below?

What Waits Below's director Don Sharp was always a dependable man whose films are generally highly competent and watchable, and who always could surprise one by detours into actual brilliance. The film at hand isn't one of the latter, and the former it will only be for viewers with a bit of patience. For unfortunately, before the film gets to its actual meat in form of the adventurous cave expedition, there's an astonishing amount of introductions, dithering, and pointless nothing to get through that really starts What Waits Below off in a bad way. It's five minutes of set-up - most of the character bits could have been fruitfully moved into the caves - drawn out over thirty minutes plus.

Once the film finally gets going it doesn't exactly turn into an affair full of fast-paced excitement, but the acting is solid, the caves and cave sets are fun to look at, and the film does some half subtle, very British clever things with the lost world tropes it uses. It's also a film that doesn't want to explain the obvious, so it never outright states that the albino people are the descendants of a much more technologically advanced people who now give a religious, or at least ritual, meaning to the artefacts their forebears left behind. It's not much but I appreciate it nonetheless.

The other element of What Waits Below I find worth mentioning is its tone. On a plot level, the film is of course another lost world adventure film but Sharp stages large parts of its running time - until the final twenty minutes or so - as if it were a horror film, milking the caves, the mysterious disappearances and the way the underground people are only glimpsed and not seen, as if this were a monster movie. It's an interesting approach, and while I wish Sharp had taken it even farther - once the underground people are really revealed, they're just not that frightening or original anymore - it's an interesting way to go about things that give What Waits Below a degree of individuality despite the well-worn ideas it uses.

Of course, the effect of the unknown terror turning into just people might very well have been a very consciously used one, even if it weakens the film's effect as a horror film and an adventure movie. It is, at the very least, not improbable to read the film as a political allegory where the sheer supernatural bogeyman we built our political enemies into turns in the end out to be not all that different from ourselves.

Which, come to think of it, is quite a daring thing to attempt in a film that starts out this boring and indifferent.

Technorati-Markierungen: reviews,british movies,adventure,fantasy,horror,don sharp,robert powell,lisa blount,anne heywood,timothy bottoms

Dark Places (1973)

Old Mister Marr (Carleton Hobbs) dies in an English asylum for the mentally ill, telling his friend Edward Foster (Robert Hardy being very very fragile) something about money hidden behind a wall, probably a wall in Marr's old mansion from where Marr's wife, his children, and their nanny one day just disappeared, which may or may not have been the beginning of the man's madness.

It just so happens that Marr leaves said mansion to Foster, and boy, are there many walls inside behind which money might be hidden. But Foster isn't the only one who knows about the money. The local physician, Ian Mandeville (Christopher Lee, there to cash in a paycheck, not to act) and his sister Sarah (Joan Collins, playing the role Joan Collins always plays in these movies, but hey, she is at least acting that much) have heard about the hidden treasure, too, and both seem hell-bent on acquiring it by any means (looking like Christopher Lee, flirting like Joan Collins) necessary. Marr's lawyer Prescott (Herbert Lom) is also clearly in the know about the money. Now, you may ask yourself why these people haven't looked for the money long before Foster arrived, seeing as how the mansion has been empty and slowly rotting away for decades; and there you are, already thinking things through more thoroughly than the writers of the film.

Prescott's and the Mandevilles' vague plans to get at the money aren't Edward's only problems, though, for the mansion has a peculiar influence on him. There's a picture of the young Marr hanging over a fireplace, and he just happens to look exactly like Edward does. Soon, the face of a young woman in a window, noises, lights and the laughing of children haunt Edward. Eventually, he will have waking dreams in which he sees himself as Marr, living with a mad wife and two sociopathic children, and not quite thinking an affair with the nanny (Jane Birkin) through. Why, it's all enough to drive a man to lose his identity.

Dark Places is one of the many films of Don Sharp, a seasoned workman director with some moments of brilliance in his filmography. In its first half hour or so, Dark Places promises to be one of Sharp's outstanding movies, with a properly gothic atmosphere so thick you won't forget Sharp had been working for Hammer for a bit. At the beginning, the film seems to strive to mix a classic British ghost story about a haunted house that drives a man into doubting his own identity and losing contact with reality with the type of rather spooky thriller the British film industry loved so dearly. That's a genre combination akin to mixing rice and refried black beans (read: perfect), so I found myself enjoying these early stages very much.

Alas, the film's script lacks the proper tightness ghost stories - at least of this type - and thrillers sorely need. Instead of slowly but surely building its plot out of hints and a tightening feeling of menace, the writers opt for over-exposition in form of Edward's hallucinations. Used more subtly, these could have been an excellent way to demonstrate our protagonist's deteriorating state of mind and give us glimpses at what really happened in the mansion in the past, but the script goes for a sledgehammer obviousness that killed most of my engagement with the story; even in 1973, we had seen all this before again and again, and realized with much more elegance. As it stands, the film shows its cards way too early and then doesn't seem to know what to do afterwards, except for shuffling its feet and showing Christopher Lee looking bored.

Sharp does his best with the rather indifferent script, but he's not the kind of stylistically dominant director who can turn Dark Places into anything more than a solid, watchable movie. Of course, there are worse things than that.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,horror,thriller,don sharp,robert hardy,joan collins,christopher lee,herbert lom,jane birkin

On WTF: The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964)

By far not enough love is showered on Hammer's non-horror movies, for while really everyone must know by now how great Hammer's horror movies are, their contributions to other genres still don't get as much praise in the cult movie world as they deserve.

Case in point is the landlocked pirate movie The Devil-Ship Pirates by Don Sharp, a film good enough to inspire me to say nice things about Christopher Lee between the sarcasm. Click on through to my column on WTF-Film for more.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,adventure,don sharp,christopher lee,andrew keir,john cairney,barry warren,other places

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

Witchcraft (1964)

The two British country families of the Laniers and the Whitlocks have been feuding for more than 300 years now. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Norman Laniers managed to discredit the Saxon Whitlocks as the leaders of a local witches' coven, leading to the death of family matriarch Vanessa by being buried alive. This little coup made the Laniers the leading family of the community, with the remaining Whitlocks their eternal enemies.

In 1964 not much has changed between the families. Although the Laniers' head of family Bill (Jack Hedley) is a rather civilized man, it does not take much to rekindle the hatred of Morgan Whitlock (Lon Chaney junior in one of his more dignified late performances).

The Laniers have fallen on hard times and are in need of money. Bill is planning on building a housing estate on his land, but needs the help of the shady (is there any other kind?) building contractor Myles Forrester (Barry Linehan) for its funding.

Trouble arises when Forrester thinks it cheaper to just flatten the graves and crypts on an old cemetery where the ancestors of the Whitlocks (of course including Vanessa) are buried, instead of moving the gravesides.

Lanier himself had nothing to do with the decision, but the enraged Whitlock does not care much.

When Lanier visits the graveyard at night to assess the damage he hears scratching and moaning from Vanessa's sarcophagus. This can't of course be real - or so the man thinks until the people around him start dying in strange accidents. All this can't have anything to do with the devil dolls that are found near the victims, or the strange mute woman in the mud-crusted coat (Yvette Rees), don't you think?

Then there is the little tryst between Lanier's younger brother Todd (David Weston) and Whitlock's niece Amy (Diane Clare) to cope with. Lanier couldn't care less if the girl's a Whitlock or not, but Whitlock does have a different perspective on things.

 

Director Don Sharp and writer Harry Spalding were two of the more talented workhorses of British genre film in the late 50s and early 60s, both probably not all that artistically inclined, but very capable of making the best of low budgets and tight shooting schedules.

With this in mind, I went into Witchcraft expecting a solid film, no more, no less. What I actually got was an effective and moody piece about the collision of the supernatural and modern times.

The script is stronger than usual in this type of film - the protagonists are understandably skeptical when it comes to the reality of witchcraft but are not disbelieving their own experiences so much that the viewer stops taking them seriously anymore. Spalding even goes so far as to make everyone in the film act rather sensible. As sensible as I'd expect someone suddenly confronted with a hidden coven of witches with real supernatural powers to act, at least.

Sharp's direction is a career high, making good use of the clear black and white of the early 60s and reaching a quite perfect gothic mood in the second half of the film. The attack on grandmother Lanier alone is worth the price of admission.

Even if Witchcraft does not reach the dream-like heights of Bava's masterpiece, the photography and the look of Vanessa bring to mind Mask of the Demon, and I'd be very surprised if the Italian film hadn't been an influence on it.

 

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