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. 

Nobody Knows What He Does

I don’t know exactly what it is about ‘Sebastian’, but I really, really like it. Ostensibly a somewhat frothy mix of Swinging London tropes and Cold War cliché, there’s an element of truth in its somewhat patchy narrative that I find irresistible. It also has really good music, mainly by the amazing American composer Jerry Goldsmith, with some electronics from Tristram Cary.

Dirk Bogarde stars as Sebastian, a supercilious academic who just happens to be the Government’s top code breaker, presiding over an all-female staff in some anonymous London skyscraper. These days I suppose he’d have Asperger’s or something but, in 1968, he’s simply portrayed as a spiky super genius with commitment issues, some odd bod habits and horrible wallpaper that he hasn’t even noticed.

Into his drab and monomaniacal life drops Susannah York, a dizzy dolly with a penchant for direct action and tiny dresses. When he realises she can make a dozen words out of ‘thorough’ without blinking, he immediately adds her to his pool of clever ladies (women are better are cracking codes, apparently), but his interest in her is always more than professional, which is not particularly surprising as she is absolutely adorable.  Things become complicated when an old flame is forced to sell him out to the Enemy, and things get really weird when the other side feed him LSD and try to get him to jump off a roof on the pretext that he can fly*.

It’s an all over the place sort of thing, half based on the true life exploits of Leo Marks (look him up – fascinating fellow), half seemingly made up on the spot. It struggles to decide what it's really about, and giddily (and endearingly) veers between genres and styles and changes tone from scene to scene. But everyone in it is good, and Bogarde and York make a lovely couple, however unlikely the pairing may initially seem. 

As you may recall, Bogarde grew to despise the ‘triviality’ of his early films so, after the mid-sixties, went all out to star in as many ‘masterpieces’ as possible, with often quite tedious results. ‘Sebastian’ is slap bang in the middle, a frivolous masterpiece, if you will**. I love it, not just because the marvellous Michael Powell had a hand in it, but also because, every time I watch it, frothy and a bit giddy or not, I just really ENJOY it.
  

* This is the only film in which Dirk Bogarde trips his tits off on acid although, in ‘The Mind Benders’, he does trip his tits off in a flotation tank.

** Bogarde described the film as a 'non event', one of many things he and I differ on.

A Horrifying Excursion

‘Paranoiac’ is one of those stylish, squiffy supporting feature thrillers that Hammer quietly excelled at in the sixties although, sports cars and Hush Puppies modernism aside, it could just as easily have formed part of their better known Gothic cycle. It’s about a haunted house, after all, and is as morbid as hell - choc-a-bloc with murder and madness and desiccated corpses and organ playing in the dark. Oh, and darts.

It’s also about the 25 year old Oliver Reed, excellent here as the febrile Simon, a bag of neuroses in a bruiser’s body– an overgrown, over-wrought child who drinks too much, drives too fast and has a dirty, nasty, nutty secret which has driven him around the bend. He’s in good company, though, as more or less everyone in the story is absolutely barking mad – except for the hero, who is a fraud and a criminal. It’s a wonderful advertisement for country living, and a nice summary of upper class values that still rings true today.

The story, which twists and turns before skidding through a hedge and hurtling off a cliff, is competently and cleanly directed in crisp black and white by Freddie Francis, perhaps the most interesting of all Hammer helmsmen. The dénouement is a thick, fat slice of Grand Guignol, and is absolutely delicious. I must have seen this film a dozen times. I never tire of it.

Paranoiac

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

Nowhere To Hide

For about half its running time 'A Lonely Place To Die' is fantastic: weird, unexpected, exciting. It slowly becomes more of a conventional action thriller, however, and although it never becomes boring, it can't sustain the disquieting mystery of its beginning.

Filmed in the beautiful wild parts of Scottish Highlands around Inverness,it begins with a dizzying near fatal mountaineering accident, then takes a strange turn when the climbing group discover a pipe buried in a remote part of the woods. The pipe leads to a large wooden box and the box, horribly, to an imprisoned ten year old girl. The girl can't speak English, so she is unable to tell them how she got there, but it is clear that she's not playing hide and seek. It's also fairly obvious that the people behind her interment didn't want her to be found - oh, and they must be completely amoral, ruthless and extemely dangerous bastards.

The rest of the film details the group's desperate attempts to get back to civilisation, all the while pursued by two thwarted kidnappers who will stop at nothing to get back their 'property', including killing everybody they come across. 

Genuinely thrilling in places, the narrative doesn't run out of steam so much as slowly drift off the beaten track and find itself on the main road and heading towards a relatively straightforward destination. It has style, though, and much else to recommend it. It's also more likely to be on a telly near you soon than our usual fare, so you can check it out for yourself although, please note, I do not rewrite stuff if you don't agree with me.

A Lonely Place To Die

Makes Your Blood Run Cold

Sieges are great subjects for films, aren't they? Tense, exciting - and even more tense and exciting if you have a mix of ruthless criminals and sympathetic innocents, say an international criminal and a trigger happy drunk holding an asthmatic child, an old man and a lady doctor at gunpoint? No? Not exciting enough? Well, what if there was a Black Mamba loose on the premises? What about that?  Yep, now you're interested...

'Venom' is really stupid. But as really stupid films go, it's a corker. I needn't go into how the deadliest snake in the world was given to a small child by accident, or how that very snake gets loose in a house and inadvertantly becomes a key character in a foiled kidnapping attempt, so let's just say that it happens and move on. I also won't go into why the house in question, a large Georgian terrace, was thoughtfully built 250 years ago with a massive stainless steel air conditioning system for the venomous killer to slither around in.

What I have to say, however, is that this film has one of the most eclectic and downright bloody dangerous casts ever assembled: Oliver Reed, Klaus Kinski, Nicol Williamson, Sarah Miles and Sterling Hayden - a collection of unreliable nutters, troublemakers, malcontents, free spirits, drunks and degenerates that shouldn't even be able to co-exist in the same small space in the universe. The insurance premiums must have been through the roof. Shame Brando wasn't available.

Throw in Susan George as a scheming maid who gets her kit off in minutes and then turns dying from a snake bite into something wanton and erotic and you have half a dozen reasons for watching, and that's before you even get to the quite amazing finale where an out of control Kinski grapples frantically with a rubber snake, trying to blow the synthetic serpent's head off as he himself is shot repeatedly by Police snipers. It's like something out of a Norman Wisdom film. That one with the guns and the snakes.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention that Ollie Reed gets bitten on the bollocks. That's one brave hisser. Mr. Reed also suffers the indignity of a really nondescript credit, and I say that as someone who (much like everyone else) has several mates called Dave.

Venom

 

If You're Curious About Terror...

As you might guess from my nom-de-plume, ‘Unman, Wittering and Zigo’ is a great favourite of mine and, indeed, it has an awful lot going for it: great cast, oblique, unusual script, an interesting location and a pleasantly ambiguous ending. It’s a small film in terms of scope and execution, but it's hugely effective. 

The fantastic David Hemmings plays John Ebony, an inexperienced school teacher who snags a temporary job in a prestigious boys school in an isolated part of Devon, replacing a teacher who has died suddenly and under mysterious circumstances. According to the boys in the class, however, there is no mystery: the man was murdered, by them, and, if Ebony doesn’t watch his step, they’ll kill him too.

It’s a great opening gambit, and although the film doesn’t quite keep the tension up as much as it could, it positively smoulders with repressed emotion, suppressed violence and crazy hormones, culminating in a suspenseful and unpleasant sequence where Ebony’s attractive wife is menaced with gang rape by twenty over excited youths dressed in shorts.

The boys, class 5B, are very well played by slightly over age but convincingly spotty and smackable young actors, some of whom (Michael Kitchen, Michael Cashman, Tom Owen) went on to some degree of recognition. The performances are uniformly excellent, actually, from Hemmings’ sulky and immature teacher to Douglas Wilmer’s splendidly vague Headmaster and Caroline Seymour as Ebony’s neglected wife. A special commendation goes to Tony Haygarth’s amusing and likeable turn as Cary Farthingale, a cynical art teacher who drinks like a fish and genuinely doesn’t give a shit.

A fascinating study of the complex politics and savagery of the mob (not to mention the fear adults regard the coming generation with – here, perhaps, justified) , ‘Unman, Wittering and Zigo’ is apparently still  shown in schools to aid pupils study of Giles Cooper’s original play, which makes it even harder to understand  why it is not on DVD, although can watch the whole thing on YouTube here if you are so inclined.

Unman, Wittering and Zigo

A Phantasmagoria Of Fright

Billed as a ‘phantasmagoria of fright’, ‘Fragment of Fear’ (1970) doesn't quite live up to the hyperbole of that statement but is, nonetheless, a solid and intriguing thriller with an interesting premise, a great cast, and a fantastic soundtrack.

Tim Brett (David Hemmings) is a reformed heroin addict turned best selling confessional author who is pitched into danger when his newly discovered Aunt Lucy (Flora Robson), a kindly old woman known for her selfless work in reforming criminals is found murdered in the ruins of Pompeii. Eager to make some sense of the seemingly random killing (and with one eye to his next book) Tim sets out to find the truth, but soon finds himself the victim of those who want their secrets kept secret, and are prepared to use any means necessary to effect his silence.

Directed by Richard C. Sarafin (his next film would be ‘Vanishing Point’), ‘Fragment of Fear’ is actually really rather good, with appearances from British acting institutions like Mona Washbourne, Arthur Lowe, Wilfrid Hyde-Whyte and Dave from ‘Minder’. The screenplay (by Paul Dehn, writer of the four ‘Planet of the Apes’ sequels and, therefore, some sort of God in my eyes) is clever and literate, methodically setting out the steps by which the already edgy Tim is pushed to his very limits, and creating a paranoid world where appearances can not only be deceptive, but deadly.

An eminently watchable actor, Hemmings is in possession of a gravitas that belies his boyish face and small, slight frame, and has a calm, sonorous voice that veers between Received Pronunciation and Estuary English. He plays the brittle Tim to perfection here, making him insecure and naïve, but with more than a touch of petulance and arrogance, and a tendency towards the withering putdown and sudden burst of anger. He is particularly good when trawling the Late Night Chemists and dirty alleys where he served his junkie time, his expression a mix of disgust and longing as he joins a crowd gawking at a hapless junkie shooting up.

Ironically, it is the character’s most defining characteristic: his addiction, recovery and subsequent success as a writer, that proves to be his downfall: he is too well-known as an ex-junkie to be taken seriously, and his reports of the intimidation he is subjected to are written off as the hallucinatory ravings of a drug fiend.

A few loose ends aside, it's a cool little film with lots of cool little people and performances (Hemmings and co-star Gayle Hunnicutt were married at the time, and have an obvious chemistry), and the music (by Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey musical director Johnny Harris) is ace.

Fragment Of Fear