Category Archives: Film, TV, and Theatre

Film, TV, and Theatre

Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (1967)

Leave a comment

Who is your favourite James Bond? My formative years coincided with the Roger Moore era so I tend to regard him as my favourite Bond, with Live And Let Die my favourite Bond movie. However, the definitive Bond, the one with the correct measure of roguish charm and cool sophistication, rugged masculinity and sex appeal, but also gifted by the stylistic elements of the Sixties (was there a cooler car than the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 driven by Bond in Goldfinger?), has to be the recently-deceased Sean Connery.

Connery made seven Bond movies beginning with 1962’s Dr No but today I’m looking at the fifth in the series, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, which particularly thrilled me as a kid (despite connoisseurs generally comparing it less favourably to its predecessors). With screenplay by one Roald Dahl, it is the first James Bond film to discard most of Ian Fleming’s plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story. In the film, Bond is dispatched to Japan after American and Soviet crewed spacecraft disappear mysteriously in orbit, each nation blaming the other. The Secret Service suspects a third party, however, and Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island to find the perpetrators. He comes face-to-face with Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), the head of SPECTRE, which is working for the government of an unnamed Asian power to provoke war between the superpowers.

Director Lewis Gilbert, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, production designer Ken Adam, and director of photography Freddie Young spent three weeks in Japan searching for locations, with SPECTRE’s extinct volcano headquarters being a particularly good find. The group was due to return to the UK on a BOAC Boeing 707 flight on 5th March 1966, but cancelled at the last minute after being told they had a chance to watch a ninja demonstration. That flight crashed 25 minutes after take-off, killing all on board: such a lucky decision for the party and their families, and also for the entire future Bond franchise.

John Barry produced the score, and (as is typical with John Barry) the result was sensational: the incidental theme music, and Nancy Sinatra’s stunning main theme song, knit the elements together so well. Those elements include all the usual tropes: car chases, fights, assassination attempts, love action and glamorous Bond girls (notably the beautiful Kissy Suzuki, played by Mie Hama), gadgets and gismos (including bullet-firing cigarettes and a heavily-armed gyrocopter), and witty one-liners. However, the movie is also having an obvious love affair with Japan, and so as well as a whole lot of ninja action, we get some sumptuous Japanese landscapes and ceremonies.

The whole thing is of course majestically absurd but stonkingly good fun. Here is a nice montage of clips from the movie alongside Nancy Sinatra’s winning theme song.

Bond, Tiger Tanaka, and Kissy Suzuki
Film, TV, and Theatre

Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)

4 Comments

I recently spotted that the 1931 film Dracula was playing on the Horror channel, and duly recorded it with one eye on a seasonal blog (this) and another eye on a suitably creepy family night-in with a classic, justified by the proximity to Halloween. Frankly, I was sceptical about the latter, given that my mind’s eye visualisation of an idealised family event or shared experience doesn’t always pan out as imagined; I suspected that the obvious ancientness of the movie would turn off teenagers. Indeed, it did turn one of them off and she soon drifted vampirically off to her bedroom, but the other one, and her mother, were gratifyingly drawn into this atmospheric and trope-laden classic.

The cultural icon that is Count Dracula had had its treatment earlier than this movie: the German Expressionist filmmaker F W Murnau had filmed Nosferatu in 1922 (though without permission and subject to a copyright infringement claim brought about successfully by Bram Stoker’s widow). The first authorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was the stage play written by Irish playwright Hamilton Deane in 1924 and revised for Broadway in 1927 by John L Balderston. The Broadway production cast Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the lead role, which helped him (though not without opposition from certain quarters) secure the role in the film version four years later.

Directed by Tod Browning, the film premiered at the Roxy Theatre in New York City on February 12, 1931. Newspapers reported that members of the audiences fainted in shock at the horror on screen. This publicity, shrewdly orchestrated by the film studio of course, ensured that people would flock to see the film, and indeed, within 48 hours of its opening, it had sold 50,000 tickets, and ended up being the biggest of Universal’s 1931 releases.

The mesmerising performance of Bela Lugosi was of course a key element in the success of the movie. It is said that he was quite an odd and quiet man; David Manners (who played Jonathan Harker) said: “He was mysterious and never really said anything to the other members of the cast except good morning when he arrived and good night when he left. He was polite, but always distant”. However, on screen he certainly looked and acted the part to the point of creating an enduring archetype.

The atmosphere of the movie is cleverly crafted, and it has all the defining features that you’d expect: the huge, cobweb-bedecked castle, with an impossibly large and ranging staircase, an inordinate number of candles and hovering bats at the window. Lugosi nails the Count’s stand-offish charm and of course the authentic eastern European accent, and there is a lingering, pervasive sense of danger.

Enjoy this clip, the excellent “mirror scene” in which, after a tense meeting between Dracula, Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Jonathan Harker and his fiancée Mina, Van Helsing notices something very unusual…

Bela Lugosi
Film, TV, and Theatre

Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942)

3 Comments

In 1942, Hollywood churned out over 500 movies, most of which, naturally enough, you will have never heard of (unless you happen to be a professor of Film Studies specialising in the forties, which is unlikely). When they were making Casablanca in that year, nobody was thinking that this was going to be the movie that would become an enduring classic still appearing near the top of “greatest ever movie” polls eighty years later. What makes Casablanca so great?

You already know the synopsis: it’s set in 1941 in Vichy-controlled Casablanca just before Pearl Harbor and America is stalling about entering the war. The Germans’ hold is tightening, and everyone’s fates are uncertain. Everybody is wanting to get out before it’s too late. Against this backdrop, American ex-patriate Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) runs a nightclub and gambling den, Rick’s Café Américain. He also has previous as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, so he’s no slouch, and he knows a lot of people. He has also come by two “letters of transit”, valuable and authentic documentation that would allow the bearers to make their escape through German-occupied Europe.

Rick’s former lover, from when they met in Paris during the fall of France, Isla Lund (Ingrid Bergman), walks into his club. Her husband Victor Laszlo is a linchpin in the Czech resistance; they need those documents to escape to America and continue his work. When Isla confesses that she still loves Rick (she’s no hussy though: when they’d met in Paris she had thought her husband dead) we come to the nub: Rick’s moral dilemma is to decide between his love for Isla and the good of the world. He makes the right choice, and at the end of the film (surely this is no spoiler) sends Isla and Laszlo off, with their papers, to fight the good fight.

Let’s talk cinematography; it’s full-on film noir by Michael Curtiz. The use of light and shadow is used to dramatic effect: the morally torn Rick is often seen half in light, half in shadow. Laszlo, the bright hope for the future, is almost always in full light. Isla’s flawless and pearlescent skin is accompanied by eyes sparkling impossibly by the use of tiny lights. The venetian blind is a handy way to cast prison bar-like shadows on the protagonists.

The narrative is economical; there is no detail that doesn’t matter to the plot, no scene that is wasted. Sure, there’s corn (more corn than Kansas and Iowa combined, said its screenwriter Julius Epstein) but it’s Hollywood, what do you expect? And surely it’s no coincidence that so many classic lines were thus spawned: “Here’s looking at you, kid”, “We’ll always have Paris”, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”. I know that you already know that the line “Play it again, Sam” was never actually said, so we needn’t mention that!

But let’s look at that closing scene when Rick sucks up his personal loss and delivers that classic parting speech to Isla, to the emotional orchestral accompaniment of As Time Goes By. It is pretty marvellous stuff, isn’t it?

Bogart and Bergman
Film, TV, and Theatre

Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Leave a comment

Years ago I read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the remarkable account, by T E Lawrence, of his experiences while serving as a liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks between 1916 and 1918. It’s a rollicking, rip-roaring tale, to say the least, replete with desert skirmishes, blowing up of trains and high-octane adventure but also much psychological struggle, with Lawrence having to ameliorate fractious tribal enmities in order to unite the Arabs against the common enemy. Then there is Lawrence’s own emotional turmoil in balancing his divided allegiance between the British Army, and its ultimate interests, and his new-found comrades within the desert tribes. The story was clearly ripe for an epic film to be made about it.

Suitable, then, that cinematic heavyweights Sam Spiegel and David Lean would be involved in the 1962 film version of these events,  Lawrence of Arabia, and an array of big-name, dependable acting talents: Peter O’Toole (in the title role, of course), Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains (alongside several hundred extras). Actually, Peter O’Toole hadn’t been the first choice for Lawrence: Albert Finney had been cast but was fired after two days for unknown reasons; Marlon Brando, too, had been offered the role; and both Anthony Perkins and Montgomery Clift were considered. However, O’Toole’s screen test and perhaps his resemblance to the real-life Lawrence edged it for him. With his blond hair and piercing eyes, he certainly looked good on screen: Noël Coward quipped: “if you’d been any prettier, the film would have been called Florence of Arabia”.

The movie was helped tremendously by the combination of Super Panavision 70 cinematography with the incredible backdrops afforded by the deserts of Jordan, along with a suitably majestic score by Maurice Jarre. It won seven Oscars, and is recognised as one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema. Let’s take a look at Lawrence entering the desert for the first time…


Peter O’Toole as Lawrence

Film, TV, and Theatre

Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921)

Leave a comment

The rise to stardom of the original Hollywood “Latin lover”, Rudolph Valentino, is a remarkable one. I’m pretty sure nobody who knew him in his childhood could have had the slightest inkling of what lay in store for him: he was born in 1895 in Castellaneta, at the top of the heel of Italy, to a captain of cavalry in the Italian army and a French mother. Although even as a boy he was known for his exceptional looks, he did poorly at school, squeezed a certificate out of agricultural college in Genoa, and couldn’t find work. As with so many others, he departed for the United States, and was processed at Ellis Island in 1913, aged 18.

Rodolfo, as he was then (real name: Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella), sought work bussing tables at various New York restaurants. He was fired several times, but eventually one skill that he did have – dancing – secured him work as a “taxi dancer” (hired to dance with customers) at Maxim’s Restaurant-Cabaret. He befriended a Chilean heiress there and became entangled in something of a scandal which motivated him to leave town, joining a travelling musical which took him to the West Coast.

It was on the West Coast that things started happening for Rodolfo; he was encouraged to seek screen roles and his “exotic” looks led him to win bit parts in several movies. His big break, though, came when he won a lead role in the 1921 silent movie, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which became a commercial and critical success and catapulted him to stardom. He was marketed as the “Latin lover” with a new stage name, and the movies The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, and The Son of the Sheik all followed, each one cementing Valentino’s reputation and star quality.

He soon became the archetypal sex symbol of the silent movie era, alongside the fair-complexioned, all-American male leads Wallace Reid and Douglas Fairbanks Junior, as well as the other contemporary hearththrob matinée idol of foreign extraction, Tokyo-born Sessue Hayakawa (who decades later would appear as Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai). Valentino’s status as a cultural icon was sealed in 1926 by his early death from peritonitis, aged just 31. Mass hysteria ensued, and indeed the events of Valentino’s funeral are a story in themselves (100,000 lined the streets to pay their respects, but so much disorder broke out that 100 mounted NYPD officers were needed to restore order).

Here is a montage of Valentino footage in various publicity shots and off-screen scenarios – if your only image of him is in costume and make-up (perhaps as “the Sheik”), then you might find this quite compelling and worth viewing to get an insight into the “real” Valentino and why the women swooned…feast your eyes!

Rudolph Valentino
Film, TV, and Theatre

The “Clinton Baptiste” Scene From Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights (2001)

Leave a comment

Observational comedy takes for its source the minutiae of everyday life that people recognise without necessarily having consciously acknowledged or discussed out loud. Essentially, it begins with “Have you ever noticed…?” and follows up with some amusing observation that hopefully strikes a chord with the audience. A large part of stand-up comedy is based on this premise, of course. When you bring in some well-observed characters, themselves honed from years of observation of various archetypes, and put them into a well-devised situation comedy, you can add a whole new level of humour; Peter Kay is a past master at this.

It’s his observations of life growing up in Bolton that informs Peter Kay’s comedy. In Phoenix Nights, we see his comedy oeuvre at its finest, having filled it with idiosyncratic but true-to-life characters and scenarios gleaned from his experiences of northern working men’s clubs (for fairness, it should be mentioned that it wasn’t solely Kay’s baby: Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice were co-creators and writers). The Phoenix Club is a fictional working men’s club, home to the usual variety of club themes: cabaret entertainment, bingo nights, karaoke, raffles, fundraisers, and themed nights, with a stage bedecked with a tinselly back-drop and – all mod cons! – a smoke machine.

The scene I’m highlighting is the one starring “psychic medium”, Clinton Baptiste, and it strikes, I think, a seam of comedy gold. Replete with the motifs of the end-of-the-pier entertainer – the campness, the mullet, the flamboyant suit, the local accent at odds with the assumed gravitas of a true mystic – actor Alex Rowe’s character is a gift, and he portrays it brilliantly. The conceit is that Baptiste is a rubbish medium, with no redeeming qualities, and none of the empathy that you would expect from a truly spiritual person.

Not only is he clumsily obvious with his cold-reading techniques (“is there a John in the audience?”), but he also manages to cause offence and upset by delivering the bluntest of messages from “beyond the grave”. To one lady: “You’ve not been well have you? And it is terminal, isn’t it…?” (which is evidently news to her!). And to a man sitting with his wife: “Is there something you wanted to tell her? Get off your chest maybe?”. “What is it?”, we hear the wife demanding, as Clinton walks away.

Incidentally, Alex Rowe has gone on to develop the Clinton Baptiste character, outside of the Phoenix Nights episode – check out the hilarious Clinton Baptiste’s Paranormal Podcast. But for now, let’s watch his original scene, and enjoy Clinton “getting a word”…

Alex Lowe as Clinton Baptiste
Film, TV, and Theatre

The Shower Scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

Leave a comment

In November 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin, investigating the disappearance of store owner Bernice Worden, arrested one Edward Gein. Upon searching his house, they found Bernice’s decapitated body hanging upside down by her legs and “dressed out like a deer”. In addition, they found a catalogue of grisly trophies and keepsakes made from human skin and bones. Gein confessed to murdering two women and, even more shockingly, exhuming up to nine corpses of recently-buried middle-aged women from local graveyards. The Butcher of Plainfield, as he became known, would provide inspiration for the future makers of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and – thanks to the 1959 Robert Bloch novel of the same name – Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Besides making people forever wary of motel-room showers, Hitchcock’s Psycho continues to have an incalculable influence on popular culture. It was a clear marker in the history of cinema, particularly the psychological thriller, of which Hitchcock was a master. It may not have been the first “slasher movie” (that credit has been given to British movie Peeping Tom, released just three months prior to Psycho, or even 1932’s Thirteen Women) but it was certainly the most dramatic and impactful in the public consciousness.

It is of course the story of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the obsessional, split-personality psychopath of the title, and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), the single female finding herself in very much the wrong place at the wrong time, namely Bates Motel. The notorious shower scene, in which Marion is murdered in a frenzied knife attack, is the pivotal scene and one of the most studied montages of film editing ever made. It was shot over one week in December 1959. The finished scene runs for three minutes, includes seventy seven different camera angles, mainly extreme close-ups and fifty cuts.

For Leigh’s blood, which swirled down the shower drain, Hitchcock used Bosco chocolate syrup. To create the sound effect of the knife stabbing flesh, he sent prop man Bob Bone out to fetch a variety of melons. The director then closed his eyes as Bone took turns stabbing watermelons, casabas, cantaloupes and honeydews (he chose casaba). The soundtrack of screeching string instruments was an original and highly effective piece by composer Bernard Herrmann.

Paramount had considered the movie a highly risky project, so Hitchcock deferred his salary in exchange for 60 percent of the net profit. The film cost just $800,000 to make, grossed $40 million and Hitchcock pocketed some $15 million…so not a bad decision!

Alfred Hitchcock
Film, TV, and Theatre

Christopher Guest’s This is Spinal Tap (1984)

Leave a comment

When I was young, not yet a teenager, I inherited from my elder sisters a number of vinyl LPs, among them David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat, the Moody Blues’ In Search Of The Lost Chord, and an album that apparently didn’t need much of a title: Led Zeppelin II. Although I loved all of these records, it was the latter album that informed my immediate direction in music; riffing guitar, crashing drums, shrieking vocals: what was not to like?

Soon I would encounter Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, UFO, AC/DC and Black Sabbath, and by my mid-teens, a (largely young male) cross-section of the country would be in the grip of the so-called “New Wave of British Heavy Metal”. Seemingly all of a sudden, there was a superabundance of bands comprising long-haired, leather-, denim- or lycra-clad rockers: Judas Priest, Saxon, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Angelwitch, Praying Mantis, the list went on and on. And oh, the gigs! I attended many of those. You would find your senses assaulted by very loud music, bright lights, dry ice, a seething crowd of headbanging fans, the smell of sweat and patchouli oil – it was certainly a thrilling experience. However, the idiosyncrasies of the genre, along with some of the bands’ increasingly theatrical stage shows and themes, would make them ripe for satire.

Enter Christopher Guest, a British-American screenwriter, actor, and comedian who would become known for his series of comedy films shot in mock-documentary (mockumentary) style, and beginning in 1984 with his hilarious take on the heavy metal movement, This Is Spinal Tap. Directed by Rob Reiner, it stars Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer as members of fictional British heavy metal band, Spinal Tap, and we follow them on their American tour. The film satirizes the behaviour and musical pretensions of rock bands, and to those with an inside view of the British heavy rock scene, the result is a painfully accurate and utterly hilarious pastiche.

Let’s start with the band members’ names, all great choices: David St. Hubbins (McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Guest) on vocals and guitar, bassist Derek Smalls (Shearer), keyboardist Viv Savage, and drummer Mick Shrimpton. Most of the film’s dialogue was improvised and dozens of hours were filmed, and given that the principal actors were American, the fidelity to the Britishness is outstanding.

The film is packed with great scenes of on and offstage antics and drama, but to keep it down I have selected three classics for your amusement: the scene wherein Nigel Tufnel takes us on a backstage tour of this guitars and amps (including the ones that “go up to eleven”); the scene wherein the band get lost trying to find the stage door; and the hilarious Stonehenge scene, in which the band, playing its set-piece epic, is flabbergasted to see the expected 18-foot-tall stage props of “Stone’enge” descend to the stage at the crucial moment in dimensions constructed erroneously and underwhelmingly in inches. Priceless.


Derek Smalls, Nigel Tufnel, and David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap
Film, TV, and Theatre

Ken Loach’s Kes (1969)

Leave a comment

I’m from Yorkshire and, like all Yorkshire men and women, am very proud to be so (you may have encountered this probably not-unannoying phenomenon if you’re not yourself from Yorkshire). The county is known for the rugged beauty of its Dales in the north-west, and its Wolds and Moors in the north-east, though it is associated too, in the west and south, with a bleaker, more industrial landscape, where social deprivation and poverty has played its part. One such area provides the setting for Ken Loach’s 1969 film, the classic (and often very moving) “Yorkshire film”, Kes.

The film, adapted from Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, follows Billy Casper, a sensitive and downtrodden 15-year-old from working-class Barnsley who finds solace in training a kestrel. It is a gentle drama about harsh circumstances, and I remember its impact: it was something of a sensation, and it won the young actor, David Bradley, a deserved BAFTA for his role.

Billy’s brother bullies him and his family neglects him. At school, most of his teachers ridicule and reject him, especially sadistic Mr Sugden (Brian Glover, with a bravura performance you’ll see below). Billy appears headed for a menial job with no future and consequently has no motivation and nothing to look forward to, until the day he finds a kestrel, a European falcon, which he befriends and cares for. He raises, nurtures, and trains the falcon, whom he calls “Kes”, and encouragement from one of his more sympathetic teachers (played admirably by Colin Welland) offers Billy hope.

The naturalism achieved in the film is testament to Loach’s directorial skills and his desire for authenticity. The schoolkids that he directs play their parts for real, with little apparent self-awareness. It often feels as if the viewer is watching via a hidden camera. Take this classic football match scene, below, wherein Mr Sugden bosses the kids boorishly (though, it has to be said, highly amusingly), eliciting much banter, rich with local jargon and accent, from kids on and off camera. It will perhaps prompt recollection of cold, muddy sports pitches from your own schooldays; it does me. However, it is a charming piece of social realism that you will enjoy even if you don’t catch every bit of dialogue!

Film, TV, and Theatre

Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World (1992)

2 Comments

Writing my last blog about Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock put me in mind of the hilarious scene from the movie Wayne’s World, wherein the character Garth, prone as he is to day-dreaming, envisions himself inveigling a beautiful woman to the soundtrack of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. I chuckled so much solely from its recollection that I just had to find it and feature it (along with several other scenes from the movie) this week!

Back in 1987, on a Canadian variety show called It’s Only Rock & Roll, an aspiring comic called Mike Myers was trying out a new character in a brief segment called Wayne’s Power Minute. The character of teenage heavy metal fan Wayne Campbell with his puppy-like exuberance and loveable-airhead philosophy was pretty much fully formed even back then.

It was a couple of years later that Myers joined the Saturday Night Live cast and introduced Wayne to a wider audience, in the form of the Wayne’s World sketches, now with sidekick Garth Algar (Dana Carvey). The premise of Wayne’s World was that it was a public-access television show broadcast from Wayne’s basement, and characterised by its chaotic production style, the anarchic schoolboy humour of its hosts, and their obsession with “babes” and rock music.

Myers and Carvey recorded 27 episodes during its 1989-1992 heyday and in 1992 filmed the first Wayne’s World movie, the perfect vehicle for Wayne and Garth to get involved in antics and exploits in the wider world. The movie was an instant critical and commercial success. Catchphrases abound, and many of them have become colloquialisms: “Party on!”, “Good call!”, “I am not worthy”, “Excellent!” (when intoned in the correct way), “No way…way!”, and of course “…not” (as in “Sure, it’s a great movie…not!”).

Let’s view a montage of some of their hilariously juvenile movements, followed by that mesmerising Foxy Lady mating dance of Garth’s. Excellent!

 

Wayne’s World basement