What's His Game?

‘The Stud’ may have seemed the perfect suburban adult entertainment in 1978, but today the signifiers of sophistication displayed in the film (furs, cocktails, poppers, loafers, top loading VCR's, Joan Collins) give it a laughably kitsch appeal that just about make up for its shortcomings as a work of art.

Based on a best selling ‘novel’ by Jackie Collins, the film tells the story of an ambitious London nightclub waiter turned greeter turned club manager Tony Blake, played by saturnine Swiss actor Oliver Tobias. Tony wants his own club but, in the meantime, is stuck with ‘Hobo’ (absolutely nothing like ‘Tramp’), a swinging cellar populated by wealthy and unbearable middle aged people making jokes about child molestation, Legs and Co. dancing and a cool black DJ in a great big cowboy hat playing Leo Sayer records.

On top of this (literally) he has to contend with his boss, bored socialite Fontaine Khaled (played by Jackie’s sister Joan) who sees Tony’s frequent and vigorous affections as part of their working relationship, and has no qualms about letting him know this on a regular basis. What unfolds over the course of the next hour and a half is a tacky maelstrom of recrimination, class consciousness, disco, angry parrots, homosexual assault, wrinkly nudity, uncomfortable looking lift sex, uncomfortable looking swing sex and an eight minute filler sequence where Tony simply drives through the countryside in his MG.

Glowering Tobias gives a fairly wooden performance, and Joan Collins, as ever, makes your skin crawl. The film itself is obviously low budget, dimly lit and poorly located, re-using shots over and over and slumping unceremoniously from one scene to another. The result is a slightly crushing experience, detailing as it does the depressing, sleazy lives of idiots in a dingy, miserable world where prostitution and borderline paedophilia are presented as the zenith of jet set glamour.

In its defence, the film is very funny on all sorts of (mainly ironic) levels, and has some memorable dialogue (once you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to check your reflection in the mirror without growling ‘you handsome bastard’). It is also quite clearly and cynically designed to make as much as money possible by cutting costs and appealing to the lowest common denominator at every turn, so we shouldn’t expect a cinematic masterpiece. That said, the climactic scene, where a crushed and humiliated Tony fights his way out of the club as the countdown to the New Year begins, finally bursting out into the (day for) night at the stroke of midnight and taking a massive breath of clean and uncorrupted air actually achieves a level of profundity missing elsewhere in the film and, as he saunters off into the night, you wonder where’s he’s going and what (and who) he’ll get up to next. Sadly, the sequel ‘The Bitch’ is all about Fontaine and is irredeemably awful. But we'll pick that scab tomorrow.

The music for the film was put together by the enigmatic Biddu, a talented writer, arranger and producer who had a few glory years in the UK charts with hit records like Carl Douglas’ ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ and Tina Charles’ ‘I Love To Love’ before returning to his native India. Appropriately for this low rent celluloid opus, the soundtrack LP was released by US infomercial giants Ronco, famous for severely editing tracks to fit more on an album and their immortal range of household must haves like the Veg-o-matic and the Buttoneer.

Anyway, here is a pretty comprehensive American trailer, which will give you a damn good idea of what you’re up against.

If you were wondering, by the way, Oliver Tobias' Wardrobe is by Herbie Frogg.

The Stud

The Curse Of The Wraydons

After a break for the war, Tod Slaughter had a bit of a revival, and made a few more films. 'The Curse of the Wraydons' (1946), takes the fascinating details of the mysterious case of Spring-Heeled Jack and makes them really dull. Shame, as that's a story crying out for a decent film adaptation (no, Tim Burton, I don't mean by you). Regardless of the merits of the film, however, Tod is still good value, especially if you're a fan of gurning.  

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

In the very early days of Channel 4, the station had less programmes than it had air time. Initially, there were interludes between shows to cover the gaps but, quite quickly, they turned to the past for help. It was here that I first saw ‘The Human Jungle’, 'The Twilight Zone', ‘The Avengers’ and ‘The Prisoner’  - and, as you may have guessed, I liked them. They also showed old films – some so old they seemed to go back to the dawn of cinema, so old that they demanded to be watched in a completely different way (I’m sure they showed silent films, for instance, but may very well be wrong). It was like the Wild West for a  while: anything went. It was rather cool.

‘Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street’ is a film that found itself dusted off and unleashed on the UK by Channel 4 nearly fifty years after it was first released, one of a series of films starring the semi-forgotten Tod Slaughter (not his real name. His real name was Norman Slaughter). Slaughter  was an ‘expressive’ actor manager from Newcastle who had successfully revived a number of lurid Victorian melodramas on stage in the twenties, and then on film from the mid-thirties.

Slaughter specialised in maniacs, and was very good at them. He never essayed supercool, intellectual killers, or cat stroking megalomaniacs, concentrating instead on twitching, shouting, foaming at the mouth killer loonies. He gives some of the most gleefully ridiculous performances of all time, somewhere between panto and genuine mental illness. For all that, he’s still a better actor than Terence Stamp, and much more fun to watch.  

When revived on Channel 4, these were old films of old productions of even older plays and, as such, they seemed alien and bizarre, not least with regard to the performances (see above), which all teeter between ham and hysteria. Everything about the films seemed old fashioned, outmoded, ancient, antique - from the dead cast (Slaughter had died in 1956; his company were almost all middle aged) to the blurred, scratchy prints and the noisy hum of the often inaudible soundtrack. You could be forgiven for thinking they had been excavated during an archaeological dig.

Yet ‘Sweeney Todd’ still made a big impression – I remember kids at school enthusing about it, particularly in terms of how exciting and violent it was. Having re-watched it recently, however, I simply couldn’t connect that impression with the stagey, shouty, cheap, creaky, washed out and worn non-spectacle I was seeing thirty years later - eighty years after it had been made. Then I realised that, although the film never actually provided much in the way of murder and mayhem, it had worked a little stage craft and let us see what was not there – it felt exciting and violent, and all the gory details were provided by that wonderful and underused commodity, imagination. Fancy that.      

As a postscript, I'll just add that I performed in a Victorian melodrama while at school, one that Slaughter had great success with: 'Maria Marten and the Murder at the Red Barn'. It was a brilliantly overwrought piece of gothic, full of declamatory statements, fixed poses and intensely serious expressions, so much so that it was difficult to perform without bursting into laughter. It was an enormous amount of fun.

For the record, I played Tim Bobbin, the village idiot. Typecasting: the curse of any great actor.