The Nanny

As you might expect from a film that is about the death of a child and the devastating impact it has on a family, 'The Nanny' is a rather somber affair, by far the most restrained of the psychological thrillers that Hammer used to supplement their various horror franchises. There are very few twists and turns, just a slow piecing together of the true circumstances of what may or may not have been a tragic accident.

Bette Davis stars here as Nanny, ably supported by extraordinary eyebrows. The only child in the house hates and fears her, but that's irrelevant as her real duties are to stop the Mother of the family unraveling completely, which she does by treating her like a  baby, obsessively brushing her hair and feeding her steak and kidney pie from a spoon (yes, Social Services, I am aware that does not necessarily constitute responsible child care). Davis' performance is mannered and slightly grotesque, without ever being ridiculous. As things begin to unravel, Ms Davis resists the chance to go full psycho-biddy, as if her character is already at the extent of her strangeness. 

The lovely Pamela Franklin pops up as a lonely teenage neighbour who pretends to have loads of boyfriends but mainly sits in smoking and watching westerns on the telly, and is by far the most sympathetic character in a film filled with emotionally damaged and psychologically distant people. 

It's all a bit depressing, really, but it's well made and directed and doesn't rely on cheap shocks to tell its ultimately rather sad story. I fancy some steak and kidney pie now. I'll have a bath later. 

Shock-Thriller Entertainment

‘Hysteria’ is one of Hammer’s psychological thriller films, and quite good it is too. It revolves around a man (visiting American star Robert Webber) who has lost his memory* after a car crash. After several weeks of recovery, and still not really knowing what happened, he is discharged from hospital and installed in a modernist penthouse apartment by a mystery benefactor. The apartment is great, all sculptures and plate glass and cockatoos in the hallway, but the rest of the apartment block is deserted and, at night, he can hear screaming. Is he going mad on his own, or is someone trying to help him? And who is the mysterious, beautiful, apparently dead woman whose picture was amongst his few personal effects? And who feeds the cockatoos, because he never does?

Stylish and occasionally quite dark in content, ‘Hysteria’ gets bogged down in implausibility long before the end but manages to slog on under the super-competent direction of Freddie Francis. Webber is okay (although apparently a pain to work with) and Leila Goldoni is very attractive, but the real star is dear old Maurice Denham, who plays a wily, slightly seedy private detective. The best moment in the film is when Webber tries to bully the older and much slighter Denham, who butts Webber in the gut, then effortlessly avoids his return blow before casually knocking the wind out of his sails with a swift punch to the solar plexus. It’s not much, but it feels like a triumph for the British underdog and that’s always nice to see, isn’t it? Well done, Maurice, well done.

* I wonder just how many books and films revolve around memory loss, and how that compares with actual cases? I suppose somebody might write in with the answer. I'd Goggle it myself, but my finger is tired from typing all this. 

Hysteria

One For The Ladies

Phwoar!

She Who Must Be Obeyed!

How does the song not go? ‘She’ may be the film I can’t forget? By my reckoning ‘She’ was the first Hammer film I ever saw (I estimate that it was in 1972). At the time, I thought it a film of enormous scale and ambition, a thrilling epic filled with fighting and violent death. I also liked the fact that Bernard Cribbins was in it.

Time has inevitably tempered some of my thoughts on the production, particularly in terms of just how much of a spectacle it provides. Some of the things that indelibly marked my impressionable mind (the execution of the black tribesmen by pushing them into a well of fire) are revealed to be much tamer than I remember (though no less horrible), and some of the sets now seem hewn from papier mache than granite. What we’re left with, however, is a good old fashioned adventure film – a stretch for Hammer in terms of scope and budget, but one that was rewarded with excellent business.

The story, about reincarnation and lost civilisations, is from the pen of H. Rider Haggard, a man who specialised in far fetched tales of white men in search of glory, and of weird, off the map places filled with savage, sterotype races who meet (or mete out) imaginatively sadistic deaths.

Cast wise, it has Bernard Cribbins, Peter Cushing (in a much more ‘laddish’ role than usual), Peter O’Toole lookalike John Richardson, Christopher Lee and Andre Morrel. Most of all it has Ursula Andress as Ayesha, ‘she who must be obeyed’, the best looking evil tyrant in history. It's great entertainment, and a lot of fun. What else do you need?       

She

Behind The Bright Lights

I’ve been a fan of ‘Primitive London’ for some time now. It’s not a great film at all, but it brings together a number of interesting individual elements to provide a visceral snapshot of life and commerce just off the beaten track.  I find it fascinating, and annoying. A lot of it is faked (or at least staged), but, for me, that says as much about the preoccupations of the time as any strict fly on the wall documentary. It’s a magnificently haphazard and seedy melange of sex, sexism, violence, cruelty and non-conformism, leavened only slightly by bits of pseudo sophistication and largely unsuccessful stabs at humour. All human life may not be here, but there’s enough to make you wonder whether people are really a good idea before concluding that, if nothing else, they’re good entertainment value.

Amongst other delights we get to hear the views of beatniks, see a baby born, a hundred chickens die, wrestling, body building, swinging and stripping, lots and lots and lots of stripping. ‘Primitive London’ was one of the films I programmed as part of the ‘Subverse Britannia’ season in January and, as I sat and watched it in the company of others for the first time, I began to see it through their eyes, and thought ‘Christ, these people are going to think I’m a maniac’. I’m not a maniac, of course, I’m just a bloke who has watched so many horror and smut films that I barely even register sex and violence anymore. Actually, that does make me sound like a maniac. Shit.  

To me, at the risk of sounding more maniacal, ‘Primitive London’ is like an ex-girlfriend who, despite your best efforts, you remain painfully fond of. So when you can’t stand missing her anymore, you get back together, only to quickly realise that your relationship is awful and she’s just not the person you think she is. You part, you move on and, a short while later, you start thinking about her again…

What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that I’m in love with the idea of ‘Primitive London’, but the reality is rather more problematic. With more time, effort and, above all, love, it could have been excellent. But it isn’t. But I still fancy it.

Primitive London

Analogue Knobs

While we're discussing 'Design For Today', I couldn't resist a part two, this time focusing on the various knobs, dials, reels and readouts featured in its fifteen minute running time.

God Bless The Central Office of Information!

Design For Today

'Design For Today' is a seminal 1965 short film directed by Hugh Hudson which presents us with an avalanche of good looking products all designed and made in the UK. Stylish, aspirational, it's a very high end vision of life but a highly desireable one: a pretty wife, a beautiful car, a high powered job in industry, aubergines for dinner, a Francis Bacon catalogue on the coffee table.

Made without narration as 'good design speaks for itself', it does, however, benefit enormously from a very cool Johnnny Scott soundtrack. An interesting aside is that the credits are read out, the only human voice on the soundtrack: I wonder if that's where Truffaut got the idea for the credits on 'Fahrenheit 451'?