Nippon Horrors: The Woman From The Sea (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1959)

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VIEWING NOTE: At present I do not own a copy of this film, and the review below is written on the basis of a screening that I attended as part of the BFI’s Nikkatsu centennial season in June. As such, no proper screengrabs I’m afraid, and my hazy memory may have injected some slight inaccuracies into the plot info summarised below. I’ve also been unable to locate an accurate / understandable cast list for the film, so character and actor names are scarcer than I might have preferred.

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One of the key figures in the rebirth of Nikkatsu studios as a powerhouse of contemporary youth and crime films during the late 1950s was novelist and scriptwriter Shintarô Ishihara. Probably better-known in Japan today for his subsequent political career, which saw him championing a raft of disappointingly right wing policies during his thirteen year tenure as Governor of Tokyo, the ‘new wave’ sensibility of his early writing proved a great boon for Nikkatsu as they sought to engage with younger audiences, and Ishihara-scripted films such as ‘Season of the Sun’ (1956), ‘Crazed Fruit’ (1956) and ‘Rusty Knife’ (1958) (all starring the writer’s brother, teen heartthrob Yûjirô) proved to be huge critical and popular successes for the studio. A somewhat less celebrated work from the pen of Shintarô however comes in the shape of 1959’s ‘The Woman From The Sea’, a decidedly peculiar borderline horror / coming of age tale with an ethereal, seaside atmosphere that seems uncannily similar to that of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, released two years later. (1)

Unobtrusively directed by one of Nikkatsu’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, Koreyoshi Kurahara (‘Black Sun’, ‘The Warped Ones’), ‘The Woman From The Sea’ begins in a similar milieu to Ishihara’s “sun tribe” stories – an idyllic coastal retreat where idle rich kids while away their summer holidays, mamboing to swing records and engaging in sundry horseplay, whilst the adult world looks elsewhere. One of these youngsters seems a little more serious-minded than most however. Young Toshio (Tamio Kawachi) rejects the empty hedonism of his peers (and particularly his jock/sex pest brother), instead dedicating his time to strumming his ukulele, staring wistfully out to sea and pottering about in his modestly equipped sailing boat. It is implied that the two boys are adopted orphans whose rich new parents don’t really care for them – or I think that’s the case anyway, the dialogue is somewhat unclear. But whatever the case, affection of any kind seems very distant for poor Toshio, his only real emotional connection being with the kindly Nanny (Keiko Sumida) who is charged with looking after the boys in their beach house, and his only real ‘friend’ (well, sort of) a ‘touched’ beatnik writer whose not-quite-all-there babblings he blankly tolerates when the two bump into each other on the cliffs.

It is this writer character who provides us with our first inkling that something unusual is afoot on this stretch of coast, exhibiting the kind of foresight often attributed to artistic types and the mentally ill (so a double score for this guy) as he drags Toshio down to the shore one morning, insisting that he has seen a terrifying apparition – some kind of ghostly woman had who previously appeared to him many years earlier, trying to lure him siren-like into the ocean… or something. Understandably, Toshio ignores the writer’s ravings, just as he pays little attention to the surly local fishermen who subsequently accost him, complaining that some maniac has destroyed their fish-farms, slaughtering their stock.

Slightly harder to ignore however is the sight that greets Toshio when he heads back down to his boat at dawn the next morning: a voluptuous, muscular young woman (Hisako Tsukuba) clad in a skimpy, makeshift swimsuit, sitting on the deck, bloodily devouring a raw fish. As you might well imagine, Toshio’s initial reaction to this discovery is a combination of confusion, outrage and disbelief, especially when the girl casually tells him that she caught the fish with her bare hands, that she swam to the harbour from her home ‘nearby’, and that she lives alone, sustaining herself solely via the food she catches from the ocean.

Despite Toshio’s bewilderment though, his new acquaintance seems to have taken a bit of a shine to him, perhaps appreciating the gentle earnestness that sets him apart from his more obnoxious land-dwelling peers. Following their first meeting, she soon begins making unannounced visits to his bedroom at night, clambering up the rocks outside and sneaking through the window, prompting several laugh-out-loud moments as poor old Nanny intrudes on the pair, suddenly finding her shy and introverted charge in the company of a brazen, half-naked amazon.

Soon of course, Toshio’s initial reluctance dissipates, and he finds himself following the same path as any other lonely young heterosexual fellow suddenly confronted with such a fortuitous turn of events: namely, he falls head over heels for the nameless girl, cherishing their time together as he temporarily puts aside the vagueness of her explanations of who she is and where she comes from, and discounts any possible connection between her sudden appearance and the various rum goings-on that are now dominating conversation in the local village.

More fish have been slaughtered, and boats have been damaged. Sightings of a large and predatory shark have been reported, and a fisherman has gone missing (in fact, Toshio and the girl find his severed arm whilst out diving). Before long, we learn about how, twenty years previously, the men of the village hunted down and killed a giant shark that had been plaguing the harbour. It is whispered that this particular shark had the power to take on human form, and that it had taken a human woman as its lover, spiriting her away to the sea, from whence she has never returned, and…. well you can probably guess where all this is heading, especially once the superstitious villagers catch a glimpse of Toshio parading around with his mysterious new girlfriend.

Much like ‘Night Tide’ though, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ presents a far more ambiguous take on things than a standard “vengeful femme fatale from the ocean” narrative, down-playing the story’s potential supernatural aspects and instead focusing on the ontological uncertainties the previously apathetic Toshio is suddenly confronted with, and on the blink-of-an-eye ease with which the frankly insane beliefs of the villagers suddenly take precedence as the dominant belief system on this quiet corner of the Japanese coast - an explanation for their troubles that, for the lack of any alternative, is deemed solid enough to justify violent action against a flesh & blood woman.

And even if we – like seemingly everyone else around - accept the villagers’ supernatural hypothesis, Tsukuba’s shark-woman remains a very sympathetic figure, in spite of the destruction she may have caused. Her concerns are simple, and she acts impulsively, like a proud animal spirit, just going about her business. Certainly, she shows no sign of embodying any of the evil desires which the villagers project upon her. In all likelihood, she has simply returned to the harbour for much the same reasons a normal shark would - to find food and warm water, rather than to pursue any agenda of ghostly vengeance. And her affection for Toshio seems very genuine too – a source of companionship that connects her to her former human self, rather than some attempt to lure him to his doom.

Seemingly shot almost entirely in the very early morning or late at night, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ has a fresh, blinking-in-the-sun-at-dawn kind of quality to it that very much adds to the slightly unreal, daydream-like nature of proceedings. Led by the reserved Kawachi and the matter-of-fact Tsukuba, the drama of the film is handled in very ‘light’ fashion, managing to exercise a strange grip on the viewer whilst rarely resorting to melodrama or explicit displays of emotion. But what hasn’t come across thus far in this review is that, in spite of some potentially dark subject matter, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ is above all an extremely funny film. Rather than chest-beating emotion, the keynote of pretty much every inter-personal encounter here is an endearing sense of polite awkwardness. From Toshio’s disinterested tolerance of his writer friend’s outbursts, to Nanny’s utter bemusement at the unconventional behaviour of the scantily-clad new arrival in her household, the film achieves a kind of deadpan, goofball surreality that it’s hard not to love.

Japanese comedy, like that of many other countries, often doesn’t translate well when presented to the English-speaking world (2), but in this case I think it’s safe to say that the subtleties of the gags arrive intact, and there is a great deal of honest laughter to be had from ‘The Woman From The Sea’. Perhaps most interesting in this respect though is Kurahara’s knack for directly fusing this humour with the film’s more poignant and troubling aspects in a somewhat challenging fashion that perhaps prefigures the confrontational projects the director was to undertake during the ‘60s, creating odd juxtapositions of laughter and pathos that twist up the viewer’s emotions something rotten. Witness for instance the sight of Toshio earnestly practicing his ukulele after learning that his brother and lover have apparently died in a boating accident, tears running down his cheeks as he incongruously whistles a jaunty, Hawaiian melody; or the almost apologetic, ‘sorry-about-all-this-but-whatcha-gonna-do’ tone taken by the angry mob who turn up at the door to inform him that his girlfriend is a shape-shifting shark monster, their embarrassed buffoonery strangely undercutting the savage violence of their purpose.

Hand in hand with this tonal ambiguity and otherworldly atmosphere is the vague implication that Toshio is to some extent living out a fantasy, perhaps having ‘invented’ or otherwise summoned up the shark-girl to assuage his own loneliness – a notion that even seems to occur to him towards the end of the film, meaning that even in the wake of the crushing, all-too-real bloodshed that closes proceedings, he is still able to reluctantly shrug off what has happened like a lost dream, the supernatural atmosphere which now prevails allowing him to stumble forward into adult life without shedding a tear… but with the shadow of the haunted writer’s solitary existence nonetheless looming large in his future.

Prior to its horrifying conclusion at least, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ plays very much as a consciously light-weight film, but nonetheless it is one that lives long in the memory. Strange, funny, touching and genuinely haunting, it could easily sit alongside ‘Night Tide’, ‘Spider Baby’, ‘A Bucket of Blood’ or – particularly relevant here, perhaps - Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ in the loose pantheon of emotionally resonant black & white horror favourites. If only it had been more widely seen, I’m sure it could have gained a measure of the same affection those films receive from their fans; though modest in both style and execution, it is a work that justifies the overused “undiscovered gem” designation as well as any other film I can think of at the moment.

(As a post-script, my Japanese friends tell me that this film’s story was reworked for a notoriously sleazy TV show in the 1980s, revelling in a slightly less subtle title that translates as something like ‘Terrifying Shark Woman: She Eats Human Flesh’. Still proudly bearing a “created by Shintarô Ishihara” credit, it’s easy to speculate that the exalted Governor of Tokyo’s embarrassment at such a connection may have played a role in the near complete invisibility of this apparently well-remembered series online - a circumstance that perhaps also serves to deepen the relative obscurity in which ‘The Woman From The Sea’ languishes..?

Whatever the case, it’s certainly a shame that the film didn’t make it onto Criterion Eclipse’s recent ‘The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara’ box set, despite it clearly being a very distinctive and enjoyable example of the director’s work. But the sub-titled print Nikkatsu provided to the BFI this year looked quite nice, so I suppose we can maybe at least keep our fingers distantly crossed for some kind of release at some point in the future..? Here’s hoping, because I’d certainly like to see it again.)

The pitchfork photo at the top of this post was uploaded to Flickr by PreviewF3C. Many thanks to Satori for helping me track down the other screen-shots used above.

(1) Seeing as how ‘The Woman Form The Sea’ was never released outside Japan and remains largely unseen in the English-speaking world to this day, I think the notion that Harrington took any direct inspiration from this film can probably be discounted; the similarities between the two works are likely more just a happy coinciding of eerie aesthetic sensibilities.

(2) A factor that perhaps serves to reinforce the slightly skewed picture we tend to get of their popular culture… but that’s another story.

French Crime at the BFI.

Last month, the Bristish Film Institute held a series of screenings celebrating the work of legendary French actor Jean Gabin. Alongside the more revered items on his filmography (La Bête Humaine, Pépé le Moko etc.), the season also incorporated a few diversions into less familiar areas of French cinema – in particular, the numerous crime films that Gabin appeared in from the ‘30s right through to the early ‘70s. Having recently cultivated a keen interest in the way crime films developed as a genre in different countries in the post-war era (not that you’d know it from this blog), I thought catching a few slices of pre-Melville French noir might be good fun, and dutifully laid down my money for a triple bill.


First up, the translation-proof Razzia sur la Chnouf (Henri Decoin, 1955). Never released with an English title, the word ‘chnouf’ seems to have caused some confusion - seemingly an obscure slang term for drugs or narcotics, that leaves us with a less than elegant literal translation of ‘Raid on the Drugs’? I don’t know whether this title-related uncertainty harmed the film’s profile overseas, but I hope not, because ‘Razzia..’ proves to be a cracking bit of hard-boiled Parisian business, worthy of anyone’s attention.

Gabin wasn’t my main reason for watching the film, but nonetheless, it’s hard to deny that he’s absolutely brilliant here, portraying a veteran mid-level operator (‘Henri from Nantes’) hired by the boss of a Paris drug cartel to oversee his distribution network. Brutally efficient, but also calm, restrained and strangely compassionate in his approach, Henri wastes no time in establishing a kind of patriarchal respect from his underlings as he sets up HQ in the restaurant that serves as his cover, swiftly dispatching traitors, punishing slackers and even casually setting up home with the cute waitress (Fellini regular Magali Noël) that all the younger men had their eye on.

Extremely well-written and beautifully photographed and directed, ‘Razzia..’ builds up a rich picture of the Paris underworld, with much of the movie’s pleasure deriving from the scenes in which we follow Gabin as he goes about his day-to-day (well, night-to-night) business, breezing through opium dens, crash-pads, jazz clubs, farmhouse drug labs and all-black marijuana hang-outs, with Decoin’s panoramic shooting style and excellent, naturalistic performances from the entire cast helping imbue the film’s environment with a sense of depth and realism that goes well beyond the claustrophobic confines of yr average set-bound crime flick.

It helps too that the movie is hard as nails content-wise, full of stuff that you’d NEVER see in an English language film from the ‘50s, ranging from graphic drug use to explicit/non-judgemental portrayals of homosexuality and prostitution, not to mention a graphic axe murder(!) and some of the most enthusiastic cursing I’ve ever heard in the French language. (The bursts of guttural obscenity as the English subtitles offer us ‘fucking dickhead’ and ‘wide-legged whore’ etc are pretty hair-raising.) The gangster action, when it gets going, it handled in a merciless, gun-crazy style reminiscent of a ‘30s Warner Bros flick – an element which is nicely parodied in a scene that follows a police raid on Henri’s restaurant, when we see cops with brooms sweeping up the dozens of shooters that have been abandoned under the tables.

The only bum note in this otherwise wonderful film is struck by the ending. Presumably realising that up to this point they’d made a film in which presents a ruthless, drug-pushing criminal as a sympathetic, essentially decent man, the filmmakers seem to have felt the need to square things up with some more conventional movie morality, orchestrating a final reel turn-around that feels face-slappingly false – the equivalent of one of those jive-ass moral lectures that were tacked onto the end of movies like ‘The Asphalt Jungle’, but executed here without the benefit of any “ok, you’ve had your fun, now here’s this other bit we had to put in” wink n’ nod routine from the director. All the same though, a sappy conclusion can’t spoil the strength of what’s gone before, and ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’ is about as daring, riotous and stylistically accomplished as genre cinema was ever allowed to get during the ‘50s – highly recommended.


Jumping ahead almost a decade, it’s difficult to summon quite the same enthusiasm for Henri Verneuil’s Mélodie en Sous-Sol (1963), variously known in the English-speaking world as ‘Any Number Can Win’, ‘The Caper That Sank’, ‘The Big Grab’, and, most sniggersomely, ‘The Big Snatch’.

What we have here is basically a variant on the old “bunch of guys rob a casino” template, although it lacks either the intensity of Jules Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ or the pessimism of Melville’s ‘Bob Le Flambeur’, steering far closer to light-hearted japery of Lewis Milestone’s ‘Ocean’s 11’, made two years earlier. There are somewhat fewer guys at work here at least, with the job (and the movie) basically comprising a two-hander between Gabin and his young protégé Alain Delon, and the most likeable aspect of the movie arises from the fact that instead of suave criminal masterminds, they’re basically just a pair of low-level shmucks punching above their weight – Gabin a haggard old jailbird stuck with a bungalow in the suburbs and a wife who doesn’t quite get him, and Delon not much more than a slack-jawed teenage punk.

Efficiently staged and competently directed, there are numerous nice moments to be found here – I particularly liked the surprisingly arty/modernistic opening credits that see Gabin returning home from jail to find that newly-built towerblocks now surround his country cottage, and the ending is really well done too. But somehow the movie just never really takes off. No problems or antagonists ever really emerge to threaten Gabin and Delon’s well-rehearsed plan, meaning much of the time leading up to the robbery is spent treading water in comedy/romance mode, following Delon as he makes the best of his ‘aristocratic playboy’ cover persona, hanging around a Cannes hotel seducing a Swedish heiress.

Which is all well and good I suppose, but rarely has a film cried out quite so desperately for a splash of tehnicolor. I realise that sounds like a strange complaint, and I guess a mid-budget movie like this could have gone either way in ’63, but as Delon spends scene after scene cruising ‘round the sea-front in his flashy motor ogling chicks in bikinis, the decision to shoot in black & white starts to seem plain perverse. Some suitably blaring, oversaturated colour would really have brought things to life, marking ‘Mélodie..’ out as an early example of the kind of frothy, jet-setting thrillers that proliferated through the following decade. But the stark black & white photography (together with the weighty presence of Gabin) unfortunately invites comparison to an older, more serious mode of crime film with which this one can’t hope to compete, content as it is to never really rise much above the level of a pleasant rainy afternoon time-filler.


And speaking of those older, more serious kinda crime films, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more austere shot at the genre than Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) (literal translation ‘Hands off the Loot’(?), otherwise known as ‘Honour Among Thieves’). A quintessentially French affair, this one sees Gabin playing an aging mobster who seems to drift through life in a cloud of sheer ennui, caring for nothing beyond a nice glass of champagne, the company of a pretty lady and, as the programme notes from Criterion’s Geoffrey O’Brien put it, “listening to that harmonica tune he seems to like so much”.

The tune in question is a melancholic, minor key melody that reminded me of the kind of thing that tends to play at the end of Japanese gangster movies, as the entire cast lies dead in some wasteground and the tragic hero limps off into the sunset nursing a bullet wound, or whatever. Apparently taking such doomed sentiments to heart before anything remotely bad has even happened to him, Gabin’s character Max likes to put this number on the jukebox wherever he goes, and, when we follow him back to his apartment, it’s pretty unsurprising to learn that it seems to be the one record he owns, a reflection of the doleful, resigned nobility that seems to radiate outward from Gabin’s performance and gradually overtakes the entire film. (Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t help thinking that you could draw a direct line across innumerable aesthetic and cultural boundaries from Gabin’s performance here to the kind of ‘sad tough guy’ archetype that Takashi Kitano made his own in movies like ‘Violent Cop’ many, many years later.)

If the three films covered in this post are any indication, Jean Gabin is the kind of actor whose performances tend to rule his films with fists of iron, setting the tone of the piece as definitively as any writer or director, and that particularly seems to be the case here, in spite of an extremely strong supporting cast. As in ‘..Chnouf’, Lino Ventura (later the star of Meville’s superb ‘Army of Shadows’) acquits himself well as a dead-eyed thug, and Jeanne Moreau practically burns a hole through the screen in one of her earliest defining roles. (I love the fact that in all these movies, Gabin – who looks like a portly, even more weather-beaten David Lynch – seems to have girls a third of his age fawning over him, and somehow actually manages to make that seem plausible, rather than indulgent and creepy.)

Although far less graphic and incident-packed than ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’, ‘..Grisbi’ is in many ways an even better crime film, one in which violence is rarely seen, but forms a constant, lurking threat beneath the film’s respectable veneer, revealing itself in a quick cutaway shot of a would-be assassin brandishing a cosh under his coat as he steps out of a car, or in the sudden back-hand slaps that Gabin delivers to anyone who pisses him off. Things do kick off in pretty explosive fashion during the brilliantly staged finale in which the two criminal factions meet up on an isolated country road for a hostage / loot exchange, but despite this ‘..Grisbi’ is a film in which criminal face-offs and gang violence are merely incidental to the lives of our characters – an unfortunate inconvenience, rather than a central focus.

Although still functioning as a bloody and effective crime film, ‘..Grisbi’ also manages to acquit itself as a more ‘high brow’ piece of French cinema, telling a simple, emotionally resonant tale full of dense and believable characterisation that, though highly stylised, never tips over into melodrama. A good litmus test for these things I think is the fact that it would still be a thoroughly watchable movie even if Max never stooped to picking up a tommy gun and just sat around for ninety minutes drinking champagne and listening to his harmonica tune. Classy stuff indeed.

British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 2

For my second dose of British b-pictures, I decided to hit the NFT for a double bill of movies that formed part of an apparently long-running series of low budget films based on the work of famed mystery writer Edgar Wallace. These films, it seems, were always introduced by a wonderfully campy title sequence featuring a bust of the great man slowly rotating toward the camera amid a cloud of mist, as a cut price imitation of The Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ plays on the soundtrack. I can only speak for myself, but I found that bit worth the price of the ticket alone.

The programme notes accompanying the screening initially refer to the Wallace series as being “wildly popular”, but both some contradictory comments later in the same text and the reminiscences of the two old gents sitting behind me would seem to somewhat undermine this assumption. Circumstantial evidence suggests that these homegrown quickies were rarely popular with audiences, with cinema crowds regularly groaning, throwing projectiles at the screen or ducking out for a drink when the lugubrious Wallace title sequence hoved into view. Disrespectful behaviour, you might think, but having now seen a few of these movies, I know exactly where they were coming from. While both the films screened tonight undoubtedly have their points of interest and saving graces, they also can’t help but emerge as spectacularly dull and unengaging pieces of filmmaking. Frankly, if these two have been picked out as the best in the series, it’s small wonder they found little favour with audiences and critics, at a time when Hollywood, bloated though it may have been in the early ‘60s, was still offering romance, decadence, shoot-outs, musical numbers, casts of thousands and Charlton Heston parting the red sea in glorious technicolor.

Flat Two (Alan Cooke, 1962) is a drearily sordid tale in which a sleazy casino boss is found dead in his lavish apartment on the same night that two men with entirely unconnected motives for the crime happened to break in, and a selection of police detectives and barristers proceed to hang around in a gentlemen’s club, casually trying to get to the bottom of things. The main point of interest here is an appearance by the superb John LeMesurier, and as ever he’s a class act, although the script gives him precious little to work with. The mannered British performances and stiff upper lip approach to drama is as hypnotically charming as it ever is in these things, but the rest of the cast is dry to the point of dehydration, and the story – which doles out alibis and motives as dispassionately as cards in a Cluedo game – is a bore for anyone who likes their murder mysteries to carry some sort of emotional weight alongside the logic puzzles. Oh, and the only female character is an empty-headed hussy and all the working class characters are small-time crooks on the make – because that’s the way things were done back then. One best kept for the long, dark teatime of the soul, I fear.

Never Back Losers (Robert Tronson, 1961) is altogether more lively, a tale of a rookie insurance investigator stumbling his way into uncovering a South London race-fixing scam. The plot is hokey and unconvincing, but there are some great attempts here to try and imbue the material with an American sense of hardboiled pulp squalor, as our man traipses through the sordid streets of Soho, doing the rounds of crooked bookies and basement clubs, receiving a beating in a dark alleyway for his troubles and falling down the stairs to land at the feet of sultry, fishnet-clad cigarette girl Jacqueline Ellis. Yowza. Also thoroughly entertaining is the presence of the one and only Patrick Magee, playing menacing gang boss ‘Big’ Ben Black with all the subtlety and restraint you’d expect. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in months is the scene in which our insurance man, his dame and her jockey kid brother leave their house in an archetypally dreary South London suburb, only to find they’re being followed! Turning around, they see Macgee and his goons in extremely slow pursuit, in a gigantic, tailfinned Cadillac Eldorado, with Magee leaning out of the window, cheroot in hand, wobbling along like a big, angry toad! Wonderful! A few more scenes like this raise a chuckle, but can’t quite keep the slight story afloat – especially when most of the film’s enjoyable moments result from the director’s brave but doomed attempts to make exciting and striking things happen within the inherently drab and self-deprecating context of pre-Beatles Britain.

And in a sense, maybe that’s the key to why these British b-pictures so rarely hit the mark. Perhaps it’s just a matter of distance, but when British viewers watch an American crime movie, there’s a sense that *anything* can happen – that we’re watching a bulletin from a world where life is dangerous, where deals go down, tough guys live and bad things happen. What’s more, the minutiae of American life can fit INTO this world – Sam Spade could munch a Hershey bar, and it would be cool. Move things across the Atlantic though, and any attempt to inject a stylised sense of danger and excitement into proceedings is sabotaged by the knowledge that just around the corner there’s Weetabix and Marmite, Morris Minors and policemen with funny moustaches, making anything remotely dramatic or threatening just seem implausible and silly. Of course, the true British crime idiom would come into its own over the course of the next decade, crystallised through iconic films like ‘Performance’ and ‘Get Carter’, a whole universe away from the milieu of these tired and anachronistic Wallace adaptations.

The irony of course is that at the same time as the British studios were knocking out these sub-par timewasters, the German film industry was busy transforming the Edgar Wallace back catalogue into the swathe of far more daring, controversial and exciting movies that comprised the much-loved ‘Krimi’ sub-genre, bringing us such shockers as “The Fellowship of The Frog” (1959), “Strangler of Blackmoor Castle” (1963) and “The Phantom of Soho” (1964), whose titles alone probably tell you all you need to know about the continental approach to the same material that was putting British audiences to sleep, and whose influence eventually helped birth the Giallo in Italy, drawing a direct line between Wallace’s work and some of the most eye-popping excesses of European cult cinema in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Score one for the foreigners I’m afraid, Major. Well at least we had Hammer, eh?

British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 1

This December, the British Film Institute has seen fit to run a short season of vintage British b-pictures, pulling some choice items from the NFT archives, most of them rarely screened since their initial theatrical release, backing up the big Hollywood items of the day at the bottom of double or even triple bills. Given how familiar we’ve become with the history and conventions of American b-movies, from the heyday of westerns, RKO gangster flicks and poverty row quickies through to the slide into exploitation and horror, I was interested in getting a feel for their unheralded and largely forgotten British equivalents, and managed to make it along to two of the four double bills that the BFI is running.

In an era when information and a critical consensus on even the most obscure movie can be googled up in a few seconds, it was strangely exciting going to the cinema with no idea at all what to expect. Nobody except maybe archivists and British cinema historians have watched some of these films in decades – could they be lost classics, or just total junk? Well, for the most part they’re neither as it turns out, but they are at least entertaining, competently constructed timewasters and great examples of unpretentious popular cinema, not to mention effective “windows into a lost world”, as organisations like the BFI always like to claim, not unreasonably, when screening low budget films of questionable artistic merit.

Oddly, by far the best film I saw was also the earliest one, Penny and the Pownall Case, a rip-roaring comedy-adventure flick directed by the excellently named Harry ‘Slim’ Hand in 1948. Running to barely 45 minutes, the film was inspired by the popular ‘Jane’ newspaper strip – a daily item which, in typically reserved British fashion, traded on the adventures of a pretty lady who was constantly threatening to take her clothes off but never actually did. As such, Peggy Evans here stars as Penny, a ditzy, detective novel obsessed blonde (hey, this was 1948) who models daily for her own comic strip, as drawn by – wait for it – Christopher Lee, in one of his first screen roles! Sir Christopher’s performance here is camp as canvas, with a naive stage school sparkle in his eye that rather undermines his subsequent decades of moody “I’m a serious actOR” posturing, and it’s at least faintly unbelievable when it transpires that his character is also the ruthless kingpin of a criminal gang smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Europe! It also turns out that Penny’s roommate (Diana Dors!) works as secretary to a Scotland Yard bigwig on the trail of said Nazi-smugglers, and as such Penny is recruited by the Yard to help put an end to Lee’s dastardly schemes. The result is a non-stop cavalcade of thrills, spills and comedic antics, taking in desperate tranchcoat-clad villains, a trip to “Spain” (I think they just borrowed some sets from an opera company and hired some swarthy-looking guys as extras), dinner invitations from dashing detectives, and a speeded up chase through the home counties in Austin 10s (“step on it Jones, he’s getting away”). Remember the good old days when an airport was a scout hut with a few yards of runway…? Obviously I don’t, but this film still brings it all back.

One of the things I found most interesting about ‘Penny..’ is that, whilst it is obviously very, very restrained, some of the scenes and set ups seem to prefigure the kind of thing you’d be more likely to see years later in an American sexploitation flick – two pretty girls wrestling in their pyjamas? Penny running around town with a raincoat over her bathing costume? Plenty of ‘changing behind the curtain’ footage? Not much to go on, sure, but it must have raised a few eyebrows in 1948, when most British films still steadfastly refused to offer anything more visually stimulating than a bunch of Edwardian gents sitting around in a drawing room waiting to die. Also worth a mention are the endless succession of ludicrous outfits Peggy Evans is forced to wear – it’s hard to tell whether they’re an honest attempt at contemporary high fashion or a deliberate parody of such, but either way, her every appearance in a new scene was greeted with a roar of laughter from the crowd at the NFT, and understandably so – between the heart-shaped bonnet with matching waist-level patches and the twelve inch Robin Hood hat feather, I think the costume designer for this movie deserves credit as a visionary maniac of some kind.

In addition to this, we get some tough crime action (“what’s the news?”, “not good sir – he’s been shot through the heart, with a Luger I think”, “oh dear”), innuendo so vague it’s positively surreal (“I get the oddest letters from France”, “I’ll bet you do”), and everybody’s home in time for tea. As the title and short running time suggest, ‘Penny and the Pownall Case’ was planned as the first instalment in a series of adventures, and it’s a shame the rest seemingly never came about, because this one’s still a hoot, sixty years after the fact.

Somewhat less enjoyable was The Third Alibi, directed by b-movie stalwart Montgomery Tully in 1961. Quaint as the idea may seem today, Jack Clayton’s ‘Room At The Top’ sparked a veritable revolution in British cinema in 1959 with its frank depictions of extra-marital relationships and class conflict, and ‘The Third Alibi’ follows Clayton’s lead, in regard to the former aspect at least, with a cynical, melodramatic tale of a brooding songwriter carrying on an affair with his wife’s recently divorced sister, a situation that leads to a bungled murder plot when the sister announces her pregnancy and songwriter guy’s wife cruelly refuses his request for a divorce. As essentially a murder mystery with no mystery, it’s hard to know how to really categorise this one – given the Postman/Indemnity style storyline you could call it a noir, if only it had a decent script or any sense of visual style. As it is, it’s a fairly grim, workmanlike affair, conveying a queasy sense of suburban hopelessness, and is chiefly notable for the visual evidence it provides of an England that the bigger budget films of the period were careful to keep from the screen – a world of ugly interior décor, pebbledashed bungalows and cheap modernist furniture that was new when this film was made, and that I remember fading into the past during my own childhood. Also of interest is an excellent musical interlude featuring Cleo Laine – accompanied on the piano by Dudley Moore according to the BFI site, although I didn’t notice him. That aside, following the logic of the plot would waste an hour nicely enough on afternoon TV, and you’ll get a cruel chuckle out of the ‘poetic justice’ conclusion, but ‘The Third Alibi’ is a pretty empty experience on the whole.