Bloody NEL: The Making of Tania: The Patty Hearst Story by David Boulton (1975)

If I approached New English Library’s cash-in Patty Hearst book expecting the same kind of questionable laffs I extracted from their cash-in Manson book, disappointment was soon the result.

Perhaps having learned a thing or two since they entrusted their earlier true crime opus to a pseudonymous London-based hack channelling a fictitious Californian hipster, NEL instead assigned this gig to David Boulton, a legit journalist and broadcaster whose achievements to this date had included a book about Conscientious Objectors during the First World War and a history of the Ulster Volunteer Force.

As such, ‘The Making of Tania’ presents what I am inclined to believe is a fairly sober and credible overview of the facts as they stood at the time of writing, largely avoiding the kind of sensationalism I was expecting (and, to be honest, quite looking forward to), and resorting to speculation only when gaps in the factual narrative make it unavoidable.

Above all, Boulton’s book serves to remind us that, extraordinary though the Hearst case may seem when viewed at a distance, the deeper one digs into the details, the more senseless and depressing the events surrounding Patty’s kidnapping in February 1974 become. Tapping into the very dankest corners of America’s pre-Watergate darkness, it is a story that leaves almost everyone involved looking irresponsible, ineffectual and ultimately idiotic.

One of the most interesting aspects of reading a factual account written so soon after the events described is the huge holes that remain in the centre of the narrative Boulton builds from the sources available to him (holes that to a certain extent remain unfilled, or at least bitterly contested, to this day).

At the time of writing, the majority of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s core members were already dead, and the survivors (including Patty/Tania) were on the run, their whereabouts unknown. Unsurprisingly, none of them had stopped to give any interviews.

Whilst the SLA’s movements and activities could be pieced together with a reasonable degree of accuracy (more thanks to the efforts of the media than the police, it seems), the details of what actually transpired within the group – their personal relationships, the balance of power, decision-making processes, and the means by which the members (most of them fairly comfortable, educated, white twenty-somethings lest we forget) ended up being driven to such an extreme degree of fanaticism – all of these things were (and to a significant extent, still are) a complete unknown.

Although a substantial amount of space in the book is taken up with reproducing the SLA’s assorted communiqués and tape transcripts in full, this feels less like an easy way to fill pages, and more like a necessary decision on Boulton’s part. After all, these unedifying diatribes – so charmless, hypocritical and sickeningly self-congratulatory you’re forced to wonder how their authors could possibly have taken them seriously – represent the only insights we have into the thought processes of the people who are ostensibly the “main characters” of our story.

One can easily imagine the frustration that legitimate activists working for left-wing/socialist causes must have felt when these ridiculous, gun-toting bozos suddenly came out of nowhere to instantly dominate all media coverage of progressive politics, but, they could hopefully at least take some succour from the fact that the SLA saga also served to show the USA’s state and federal law enforcement agencies at their absolute worst.

Repeatedly, the authorities’ failure to properly secure crime scenes or follow up evidence led to them missing easy chances to apprehend SLA members (potentially without bloodshed), and, when they did eventually catch up with them – in a casual rooming house in Compton, South Central L.A. in which the bulk of the group had inexplicably taken up residence, apparently without making the slightest effort to disguise their identity – the resulting confrontation was handled appallingly by both the LAPD and FBI.

That no innocent bystanders were killed as the cops opened up with automatic weapons, smoke bombs and hand grenades in a heavily populated urban area, without even bothering to make certain that the buildings in front of them were free of civilians, is little short of a miracle. (Astonishingly, Boulton reports that at one point they were moments away from opening fire on the wrong house, until a passing child(!) informed them that the “white girls with guns” were actually behind them, on the other side of the street.) Would the Feds have behaved like this had the SLA chosen a more affluent white neighbourhood for their showdown? You tell me.

Likewise, the six SLA members within the house may have been armed, dangerous and deluded individuals, culpable for any number of crimes including several murders, but they did not deserve to die like dogs - shot down as they tried to flee, or left to suffocate in the basement of a burning building. Whilst I have limited sympathy for their half-baked ideology and misguided activities, the descriptions herein of their final minutes are enough to make any reader feel sick to the stomach.

I’d like to think I’m not the kind of person to automatically criticise law enforcement agencies without good reason, but reading Boulton’s note that the charred body of Camilla Hall – shot in the head by a police marksman - was found next to the skeletal remains of the Siamese kitten that had accompanied her since her pre-SLA days as a Berkeley drop-out, led me to share the anger of the Compton resident who subsequently spray-painted a perfect, elliptical epitaph on the side of a building overlooking the smouldering ruins: “IT TOOK 500 COPS…” .

Meanwhile, the evidence Boulton presents regarding Donald DeFreeze – aka ‘General Field Marshall Cinque’, de facto leader of the SLA – vis-a-vis the possibility that he was working as a paid informant and agent provocateur for a (no pun intended) “black ops” unit within the CIA right up to (and even beyond) his suspiciously hassle-free ‘escape’ from Soledad prison in 1973, is extremely compelling.

I’m not sure what info has come to light on this in subsequent years, and I’m aware that relying on a single source for something like this is always a mistake (particularly when the source in question is a 40+ year old New English Library paperback), but again, this is an instance in which the facts seem to speak for themselves.

DeFreeze was unaccountably acquitted of serious criminal charges (all involving firearms) on half a dozen occasions during his time in LA, and, when he finally ended up behind bars, he was allowed to practically walk out of a disused wing of Soledad, after Vacaville prison’s anarchic ‘Black Cultural Association’ programme had allowed him to establish personal connections with the unaffiliated Berkeley ‘radicals’ with whom we would later go on to form the SLA.

Again, you can do the math. Could this ‘wild card’ police operative – already noted for his schizophrenic tendencies and dangerous obsession with guns and explosives – have slipped his handlers and gone off-piste only when he realised the fun he could have leading a cabal of machine gun-toting white chicks, provided he could keep his “political” bullshit flowing well enough for them to buy him as a revolutionary Black Power guru..?

Thanks to the gusto of the police gunmen in Compton, we will never know whether or not ‘Field Marshall Cinque’ genuinely believed in the revolutionary ideals he espoused via the SLA’s propaganda, and, in fairness, Boulton doesn’t extend his speculation quite as far as I have in the preceding paragraph. But, it is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that DeFreeze was deliberately placed within the initially harmless Berkeley milieu in order to inform on and incriminate its occupants... thus potentially making this whole sorry mess just another gift to the people, courtesy of the paranoid excesses that predominated within US law enforcement during the final years of J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI.

Surprisingly, about the only person to emerge from Boulton’s book with any dignity at all is Patty’s father, Randolph Heart (the fourth son of William Randolph Hearst). Following his daughter’s kidnapping, Hearst went to great lengths to arrange meetings with representatives of organisations affiliated with the SLA, and announced, apparently in earnest, that his view of the world had been changed as a result of these discussions. He implemented the SLA’s demands for a vast public food programme about as well as he could within the prohibitive timeframe and guidelines the kidnappers had outlined, eventually sinking so much money into it that the solvency of his business empire was put in jeopardy, and he enraged the editorial staff of his newspapers by ordering them to re-print the SLA’s monotonous tracts in full, as they had demanded.

For these efforts, Hearst received nothing but abuse from all quarters, including from his own daughter. Given his impossible situation, one can hardly blame him for effectively washing his hands of Patty’s fate following the Compton blood-bath, and withdrawing from the public eye insofar as was possible. For this of course, he received yet more abuse – all of which leaves me feeling rather sorry for the poor guy, regardless of his nominally unsympathetic status as the multi-millionaire son of a notorious tyrant.

All of which, I realise, tells you very little about the aesthetic or editorial policy of New English Library, which is what I instigated this series of posts in order to discuss. But what can I say – as an example of no nonsense, long form journalism, ‘The Making of Tania’ proved an unexpectedly engaging read, blowing the dust off a series of now-historical events that I was broadly aware of, but had never really taken the time to read up on in this level of detail.

I hope I won’t need to derail this weblog into factual/, ‘true crime’ territory too often – rest assured, no icky serial killer fascination is forthcoming - but, like the Manson murders a few years earlier, the Hearst/SLA saga is a tale that has entirely transcended it’s historical context, becoming a key ingredient in the stew of the crazy culture that BITR exists to celebrate, and as such I find that freshening up my knowledge of the genuine article every now and then proves quite rewarding.

Nippon Horrors: The Lady Vampire (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)

Whilst we’ve already seen some pretty curious mash-ups of Eastern and Western horror tropes in this ‘Nippon horrors’ review thread, you’d be hard-pressed I think to find a more determinedly oddball example of the phenomenon than ‘Onna Kyûketsuki’ (‘The Lady Vampire’), another low budget quickie produced for Shintoho studios by J-horror pioneer Nobuo Nakagawa.

Whilst Nakagawa often used techniques and special effects inspired by Western horror in his films (which included Ghost Cat Mansion, ‘The Ghost of Yotsuya’ (1960) and the epic ‘Jigoku’ (‘Hell’, 1960)), the actual subject matter of his work tended to remain firmly grounded in traditional Japanese culture… which perhaps goes some way toward explaining how he got himself into such a muddle with ‘Lady Vampire’, a loopy little number that, to my delight, completely refuses to adhere to the rules of any particular horror sub-genre, or indeed any kind of narrative logic whatsoever.

From the eerie, low key atmosphere of the film’s opening reel, one might speculate that Nakagawa had Val Lewton’s 1940s RKO productions in mind, as we meet Tamio-san (Takashi Wada), a young reporter who works in one of those great movie newspaper offices where a bunch of hip cats hang around with their feet on the desks waiting for someone to phone in with a story. (“What’s that, a murder? I’ll be right there..”, etc.)

Finishing work late one evening, Tamio is driving to the family home of his fiancée Itsuko Matsumura (Junko Ikeuchi), to attend her birthday party. Temporarily distracted, Tamio accidentally runs into the shambling figure of a disheveled, long-haired woman. Stopping to help her, he finds that the woman has vanished, but, after shrugging off the incident and continuing to his destination, he suddenly sees her again, creeping around the garden of his fiancée’s home. Quite an unnerving occurrence one might imagine, but he doesn’t let it worry him too much, because hey – birthday cake!

Itsuko’s father and the family retainer however seem very worried indeed by these events, and, leaving the young folks to celebrate downstairs, they advance to the attic of the grandly appointed Western-style mansion (there’s a suit of armour and everything), where they find that the mysterious female glimpsed in the garden has broken in through a window and lies unconscious on a bed. Furthermore, the father immediately recognizes her – it is his wife (Itsuko’s mother), who hasn’t been seen since she mysteriously disappeared twenty years earlier, during a visit to the Southern island of Kyushu. Not only that, but get this - she looks exactly the same as she did the day she disappeared, having apparently not aged at all in the interim!

Unlikely explanations involving rare medical conditions and “bodily changes resulting from shock” are soon being thrown around, but, as the woman (played by Yôko Mihara) recuperates under the supervision of the family doctor, the plot soon thickens further. (1)

Attempting to escape the uncomfortable atmosphere at home, Tamio and Itsuko visit the “Ueno International Art Expo”, where they discover that the winner of the festival’s jury prize (which, in the grand tradition of paintings in horror films, looks like it would struggle to get a passing grade in a night school life-drawing class) features an exact likeness of Itsuko’s mother, painted as a reclining nude. Immediately inquiring as to the authorship of the painting, the couple learn that it was submitted to the expo by an individual named “Shiro Sofue” whom no one has been able to contact or track down.

By the time we’ve returned to the gallery by night to witness the painting in question being stolen by a dwarf with a distinctive two-tone hair-do (I wish I could credit this actor, he’s great) and his ‘master’, a tall, suave gentleman in a trilby, mirror shades and white driving gloves (Shigeru Amachi), and by the time we have subsequently seen the stolen painting delivered to the Matsumara residence care of (who else?) “Shiro Sofue”, suffice to say, the plot has assumed the consistency of a particularly lumpy gravy. (2)

By this point, ‘Lady Vampire’s combination of intriguing mystery plotting, flamboyantly grotesque evil-doers and an elegant, highly Westernised urban Japanese setting all seems to recall the distinctive atmosphere of Edogawa Rampo’s ero-guro stories, and that atmosphere is indeed captured quite well.

Despite the unavoidable predominance of flat, standing-around-talking type footage, Nakagawa nonetheless manages to employ some of the same clever focus effects and eerie sweeps through empty rooms that stood out in the opening segment of ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’, whilst Hisashi Iuchi’s heavy-handed but nonetheless rather likeable score goes big on the old singing saw / staccato strings / wordless female ululations combo.

Much like the earlier Lewton comparison however, the parallels with Rampo’s work are also ditched pretty quickly, as ‘Lady Vampire’ swiftly rambles on toward dafter and more unhinged realms than Rampo’s eminently logical approach to macabre storytelling would have countenanced.

As the more astute reader will no doubt already have guessed, that chap with the pet dwarf is Shiro Sofue, and furthermore, he is also a vampire. When we next see him, he is in his hotel room, freaking out with his head in his hands as shafts of light creep through gaps in the curtains. Acceptable vampire behavior you might think, but hang on a minute – the sky is dark. It’s clearly supposed to be night time.

“The moon, the dreadful moonlight..”, Shiro groans, before a maid enters the room and inadvisably throws open the curtains, at which point he undergoes a transformation into a sweaty, befanged beast with Nosferatu claws, and attacks her like a ravenous animal, leaving her bloodied body on a couch in the hotel lobby.

Yes, folks – what we have here is a vampire who behaves like a werewolf! Though a bit of a mind-blower for those of us who grew up in the West, with the “rules” governing the classic monsters set in stone, it’s worth remembering that things were probably a bit different in Japan in 1959. It’s all too easy to imagine Nakagawa and his collaborators sitting around, hazily trying to recall half-forgotten screenings of the Universal horror cycle; “ok, anyone remember how those Dracula guys work again?”, “Yeah, they’re the ones with the full moon, right?”, etc. I can only speak for myself, but as far as examples of cultural dissonance go, I found this monster’s apparent identity crisis absolutely delightful.

And, if our heads weren’t already reeling after that, the next thing ‘Lady Vampire’ hits us with is an unexpected history lesson. This is prompted by Mr Matsumura (Akira Nakamura), who begins lamenting “..the curse of those with Amakusa blood” – that being what apparently runs in his wife’s veins – and proceeds to ask Tamio and Itsuko how much they recall of the story of Shiro Amakusa.

Shiro Amakusa, it turns out, was the leader of the Shimbara Rebellion, which took place in Southern Japan in 1638 by the Western calendar. A significant uprising against feudal rule, this rebellion was spearheaded by an alliance of Catholic Christian converts who, under Amakusa’s command, took up arms against the Tokugawa Shogunate, and were soon violently massacred for their trouble.(3)

Amakusa himself was executed along with no less than 40,000 of his followers after the Shogun’s forces stormed their last remaining stronghold at Hara Castle near Nagasaki, and his head is said to have been displayed on a pike outside the castle gates. Subsequently, a legend has sprung up regarding Amakusa’s last words, which are reputed to have comprised a promise that he would return from the grave and seek vengeance one hundred years hence. As a result, Amakusa is often portrayed in Japanese culture as something of a supernatural or demonic figure– a “restless spirit” or wondering ghost of some kind.

Interestingly, this is not the first time we have seen the Shimbara Rebellion referenced in the context of a Japanese vampire movie. It was also mentioned in both Michio Yamamoto’s Lake of Dracula (1971) and that film’s follow-up, The Bloodthirsty Roses (aka ‘Evil of Dracula’, 1974), with the latter going so far as to include an elaborate historical flashback concerning the fate of a European missionary who inadvertently introduced vampirism to Japan after he escaped into the wilderness following the rebellion.

Whether or not there is any actual folkloric basis for this connection between vampirism and the spread and subsequent persecution of Christianity in Southern Japan in the 17th century, I’m unsure, but to be honest, I kind of doubt it. Basically, the thin thread of logic shared by all of these films seems to be that the vampire is an inherently Christian monster, and as such he must naturally have landed on Japanese shores alongside the European missionaries who arrived to propagate that religion.

Shiro Amakusa’s reputation as a ‘cursed’ figure certainly adds a bit of local colour to this assumption, providing a flimsy basis for an interesting, peculiarly Japanese twist on the vampire mythos, in which vampirism is understood less as a force that exists in *opposition* to Christian morality, and more as a kind of parasitic virus that inevitably accompanies it, reflecting to some extent the underlying suspicion of Christianity that persists in Japan to this day.

In ‘The Lady Vampire’ therefore, it is implied that Shiro Amakusa, in addition to being an evangelical Christian convert, was himself also a vampire (best not think too hard on the practicalities of that one), and that he has passed this curse down through his bloodline to his daughter, Princess Katsu. In a flashback outlining Shiro Sofue’s back-story (imaginatively portrayed via the use of a black-curtained soundstage, a few period props and some scratchy stock footage from an old samurai movie), we discover that he was originally the lover and loyal servant of the Princess (who, needless to say, is also played by Yôko Mihara). As the walls of the Princess’s castle crumble under the bombardment of the Shogunate forces, we see the two lovers embrace upon a Christian altar, as the Princess grants Shiro the gift of vampiric eternal life before being buried beneath the falling rubble.

That Shiro Sofue subsequently spends the next three hundred years lurking in a cave seeking out and imprisoning women who look exactly like his deceased love is somewhat of a no-brainer given that we’re dealing here with a low-budget horror movie rather than a historical epic, and, as Itsuko’s mother turns out to be both an exact doppelganger of the dead Princess and a direct Amakusa descendent to boot, well – that’s the rough outline of yr plot right there, pretty much.

All this is made clear to us – in a manner of speaking - when the mother, Miwako, finally wakes up, and recounts (via flashback) what she’s been up to for the past twenty years.

Wondering happily through a breathtakingly picturesque Kyushu locale having temporarily taken leave of her husband during that holiday all those years ago, Miwako encounters Shiro Sofue, who, elegantly attired as ever, is busy at his easel, working on a landscape.

After some suitably pungent banter (“I’ve been waiting for you for centuries..”, etc), he plies her with a knockout drop scented rose. When she awakens, she finds herself in the vampire’s lair, where Shiro stands over her, now sporting a full opera cape and shades ensemble, wielding a cobweb-coated candelabra with which he subsequently begins beating her chest (using the non-candle end, I hasten to add).

For the purposes of this lengthy flashback sequence, the vampire’s ‘cave’ is created on a blacked out soundstage, creating the impression of a kind of horizonless dreamland in which people and objects emerge from a featureless void – an inspired visual idea that, as well as presumably playing well from a budgetary point of view, helps to convey the dazed perception of the recently drugged Miwako very well, as well as allowing us to enjoy a veritable feast of the kind of tripped out, proto-psychedelic visuals that seem to have been an essential ingredient of Japanese horror filmmaking in the ‘50s and ‘60s.




As Miwako looks around her, a variety of bizarre, capering creatures appear one by one before her eyes, introducing us to the strange bunch who comprise the vampire’s inexplicable retinue of sidekicks. After the dwarf (with whom we’re already familiar), we meet the scary bakeneko lady from ‘Ghost Cat Mansion’ (presumably the Kyushu-set black & white sequences in that film must have been shot simultaneously with this one?), and, most intriguingly, a bald, loincloth-clad heavy whose look seems pitched somewhere between a caveman, a wrestler and a Shaolin monk. (Answers on a postcard please if you have any idea who or what the hell he’s supposed to be.)

After these weirdoes have ceased parading around (and after we’ve enjoyed Shiro’s own flashback-within-a-flashback origin story, as described earlier in this review) the vampire commences work on the portrait of Miwako seen earlier in the film. Haranguing her for failing to smile for his painting, he warns her of the fate she could meet if she fails to co-operate with his artistic aspirations, instigating an elaborate super-imposition shot in which we see multiple, underwear-clad Yôko Miharas emerging from a gilt-edged mirror, frozen like waxy-skinned zombies…. this marking the point, familiar to all devotees of ‘70s Euro-horror, at which we stop even bothering to try following the logic of what’s transpiring on screen, and just go with it.

Happily, the remainder of ‘Lady Vampire’ co-operates with this feeling, comprising as it does a splendid excursion into the realms of pulpy delirium that rarely lets up for long.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Shiro, his bedtime delayed by the police investigation into the murder in his hotel room, finds himself trapped in a shady Ginza bar, where, as shards of moonlight creep in through a broken window, he enters monster-mode and goes berserk, launching into a lycanthropic rampage that would do Paul Naschy proud.

Being an elegant vampire of course, Shiro only vents his animalistic hunger upon the necks of pretty ladies, and on this occasion he leaves no less than six of them thrown to the ground with blood gushing from their jugulars before the cops arrive and he flees into the night. And before this has even started, I should point out, his dwarf sidekick has already done a pretty good job of wrecking the place, dancing across the bar counter hurling full whisky bottles at the customers heads. The whole thing is just absolute pandemonium, one of the wildest sequences of old fashion b-movie carnage I’ve seen in recent memory.

And to think, on the other side of the world at this point, censorious types were still getting hot and bothered at the thought of Christopher Lee breathing down some young lovely’s neckline…




For the film’s conclusion, the now fully conscious Miwako is recaptured by Shiro, who promptly spirits her away to his lair in Kyushu, with Tamio, Itsuko and assorted police and newspapermen in hot pursuit, with the latter keen to see the perpetrator of the Ginza massacre run to ground.

Led by a fugitive thief who claims to have been assailed by monsters whilst hiding out in a mountain cave, this gang – who comprise the equivalent of the more traditional pitchfork-wielding mob, more or less - converge upon the vampire’s cave, at which point Nakagawa’s film abandons all pretense of seriousness and proceeds to go absolutely bananas, descending (or ascending, depending on your POV) into a Saturday matinee monster rally that recalls the full strength pulp of some of the livelier horror films being made in Mexico at around this time.

Separated amid the dry ice-swathed mountains on their way to the cave, our heroes are beset by attacks from the caveman / monk guy (who shoots at them with a primitive musket) and Shiro himself (who inevitably kidnaps Itsuko).

Eventually arriving at the ‘cave’ set- which we now see in daylight as a series of crumbly, slightly expressionistic hall and corridor sets that look very much like they might have been repurposed from another production – Tamio encounters flappy rubber bats, a moldering skeleton and (of course) a smoking acid pit, before bravely going man to man with Shiro in a life or death fencing foil / candelabra duel.

Meanwhile, everybody else runs around being pursued by the vampire’s ‘monsters’ for what seems like ages, until the slightly Scooby Doo-esque shenanigans eventually draw to a close when the thief manages to dig up with treasure he left in the cave, somehow triggering an avalanche that conveniently sorts everything out, in much the way these things tend to in the closing reel of horror films.

And, in conclusion, well… there is no conclusion. I can honestly think of nothing more to say about ‘The Lady Vampire’, now that I’ve exhaustively described what happens in it. Whilst the film’s nutty ambitions are necessarily confined by the low key, low budget nature of its production, it is nonetheless a bizarrely inventive melting pot of mismatched monster movie tropes that denies all attempts at rational analysis, and I’m confident that any open-minded fans of wild/weird global horror cinema will enjoy it a great deal.

We will close with a few words from Mr Matsumura, inadvertently delivering not only a concise critique of this review, but arguably of my writing style on this blog in general. Good night all, and careful with that dreadful moonlight.

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(1) Though she never really took on any leading roles to my knowledge, Yôko Mihara enjoyed a long and prolific career that should render her a familiar face to any fan of the wilder realms of Japanese cult film. Apparently specialising in pulpy horror roles in the last few years of Shintoho, she also appeared in such choice titles as ‘Girl Diver of Spook Mansion’ and ‘Bloody Sword of the 99th Virgin’ (both 1959, and both now residing on my ‘THAT I GOTTA SEE’ list), before moving to Toei, where roles in several of Hideo Gosha’s revered outlaw samurai films and assorted ninkyo/yakuza titles eventually led to her becoming a regular in the studio’s early ‘70s sexploitation and pinky violence output, appearing in such classics of the genre as ‘Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion’ (1972), Sex & Fury (1973), Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974) and ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (1974), not to mention ‘The Lustful Shogun and His 21 Concubines’ (1972), and, my personal favourite title-wise, ‘The Erotomaniac Daimyo’ (1972) – most of the above directed of course by the one and only Norifumi Suzuki.

(2)Top-billed in this movie, and indeed doing a great turn as a pale, aesthete vampire, you may recall Shigeru Amachi for his similarly fine performance as Hirate, the doomed samurai in the first Zatoichi film. Interestingly, he subsequently appeared in a number of other films alongside Yôko Mihara, including Gosha’s ‘Sword of Doom’ (1965), Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Blackmail is My Life’ (1968), and, somewhat less prestigiously, Norifumi Suzuki’s Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack (1971). He later played Edogawa Rampo’s master detective Kogorô Akechi in a 1979 TV movie (a role to which I can imagine he was uniquely suited), and subsequently appeared in Paul Naschy’s ‘The Beast With The Magic Sword’ (1983), thus allowing me to continue my tradition of finding an excuse to mention it at least once in every review of a Japanese film I complete for this blog.

(3) Forcibly curbing the foothold that Christianity had established in Southern Japan up to that point and hastening the Tokugawa decision to isolate Japan from the rest of the world (a state of affairs that famously persisted until the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ in 1854), the Shimabara Rebellion proved a pivotal event in the history of Japan, with its aftermath playing an important role in shaping the country’s culture and society as we know it today. To learn more about Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, why not visit your local library?

The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925)

It may not be readily apparent based on my writings thus far on this weblog, but over the past few years I’ve developed an inexplicable fondness for what I suppose you might call ‘lost world / explorer type adventure movies’. An overly specific designation perhaps, but necessarily so. I mean, if I just said “jungle movies” or something, chances are that would immediately conjure images of Tarzan, and fur-bikinied jungle girls, and strange exploitation quickies about women being menaced by guys in gorilla suits, and those sleazy, cut price cannibal / amazon movies that Eurocine and Jess Franco were churning out in the ‘80s… all of which are fine ways to pass an evening, I’m sure, but they’re not quite what I’m getting at. Plus, the intrepid explorers in the stories I'm talking about here are not always confined to the jungle - deserts, inaccessible mountain ranges and the bottom of the ocean all provide equally rousing backgrounds to their adventures.

But if I just said “adventure movies”, well, that would open up the field to swashbuckling films, pirate films and light-hearted historical capers of all descriptions. So no, what I mean is that particular tradition of lost world / lost continent / lost something or other tales, in which great white heroes of safari-suited colonial oppression travel to uncharted realms, treading upon ground untouched by man for millions of years (the natives just can’t be bothered, y’see) and encountering, well… dinosaurs, usually. I mean that’s what we paid our money for right?

What really gets me about these movies though (and likewise the books and serials that inspired them) isn’t just the opportunity to witness an endless parade of stop motion beasties, random wild life stock footage and square-jawed character actors smoking pipes and looking stern. Rather it’s the palpable feeling of wistfulness and nostalgia generated by a form of fantastic story-telling that has been rendered entirely obsolete by the social, scientific and technological advancements of the past hundred years.

For me at least, this nostalgia relates not so much to the abhorrent notions of Western imperialism and Caucasian manifest destiny that underpin these tales (in fact these regrettable ideologies are often addressed in these stories in such a quaint and off-hand manner they almost become perversely charming), but to the almost total disappearance of the glimmer of speculative plausibility that used to fire the imagination of their original audiences.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote ‘The Lost World’ in 1912, ok, it perhaps wasn’t likely that there was an untouched plateau sitting in the depths of the Amazon basin inhabited by giant prehistoric creatures… but it certainly wasn’t impossible. The book was inspired by a 1911 lecture presented to the Royal Geographic Society by renowned explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, during which he reported seeing “monstrous tracks of unknown origin” whilst undertaking a survey of the Huanchaca Plateau in Bolivia. And who else, back in 1911, was really in a position to cast doubt on his assertions? Have YOU surveyed the entire region by aeroplane, he, like Conan Doyle’s aptly-named protagonist Professor Challenger, may well have asked his audience. Have the Royal Geographic Survey succeeded in compiling a detailed map? Have any groundsmen staked out the terrain beneath those untold hundreds of miles of forest canopy?

Well, no, but I’d damn well like to give it a try, the eager young reader would be primed to respond, and a million dreams of adventures into The Unknown were born; dreams that have gradually faded ever since, as the world has become smaller, more heavily populated and more freely accessible, and that are now snuffed out entirely, rendered dead on arrival in the era of GPS, Google Earth and gap year geography students goofing around on Skype from the depths of the rainforest.

Could there still be an untouched plateau, deep in the heart of – well no, there couldn’t, we’d have found it already - end of story. We can relocate our mysteries and monsters to outer space or other dimensions or, at a push, to the bottom of the ocean or the wilds of Antarctica - but it’s no substitute really. On dry land at least, The Unknown is no more, and that spine-shivering sense of adventure that began when mediaeval cartographers first scrawled ‘here be dragons’ across their charts has finally been extinguished, leaving only these foggy tales of rampant brontosaurs and unconvincing ape-men as a final memorial.

As befits the somewhat wistful feeling evoked by these stories, I guess it follows that I often tend to enjoy cranky, flawed and ill-conceived entries in the canon to the big successes, and as such, what better place to begin such an examination than with First National Pictures’ 1925 adaptation of ‘The Lost World’ - a grand commercial failure in its day, now primarily viewed merely as a curio - a rather cranky warm-up for the formula that stop motion maestro Willis O’Brien would perfect a few years later on ‘King Kong’.

‘Kong’, it must be admitted, is a vastly more accomplished entertainment in every way, but somehow, in my usual bloody-minded, underdog-supporting fashion, I actually find ‘The Lost World’ more enjoyable. Great though ‘Kong’ is, these days it just seems so… over-familiar, with such a flat, brash, under-developed kind of narrative, exhibiting none of the rambling, discursive strangeness of its predecessor.

And it’s worth noting at this point that when I describe ‘The Lost World’ as "rambling" and "discursive", that’s based on the experience of only watching about one half of the material that comprised the original theatrical cut. Actually, there have been so many alternate presentations of this film over the years, so many rumours of lost reels, destroyed negatives and unconfirmed running times, that just trying to piece together what the hell is going on with the versions available to us today is a bit of a challenge. But most likely, the story goes something like this:

Originally running around two hours, ‘The Lost World’ was brutally chopped up by its distributors after it initially flopped, doing the rounds in subsequent years as a 30-something minute short (presumably consisting entirely of dinosaur action), before eventually being restored to a shaky 64 minute feature that turned up on a slew of public domain releases in the ‘90s. (1) A slightly more complete restoration emerged later, bulking things up to around 90 minutes, but it was the 64 minute cut that I ended up watching prior to this review, and… well, I was quite happy with it, to be honest.
 
Normally of course, I’d be appalled at such wholesale butchery of a motion picture, but in this case, I found that the one hour hack job hit the spot quite nicely. I’m assuming all the dinosaur footage and action/running around stuff stayed in (for indeed, there is enough of it to satisfy even the most rabid monster fan), but so seemingly did all of the necessary plot info, and the introductions, motivations and developments of the central characters, the threads of the various sub-plots and diversions etc. – are all also present and correct, making me wonder just what the hell the missing extra hour might have consisted of. Having sat through a number of arse-aching Silent Era ‘epics’ over the years – all seemingly falling victim to the fallacy that greater length equalled greater prestige – I fear the answer might simply be: an awful lot of faffing around.

As you might imagine, relatively little faffing remians in the 64 minute cut, and if the opening scenes that bring us to Professor Challenger’s pivotal lecture at the Royal Society seem a little choppy and meandering, all doubts are put to rest as soon as we get a look at the Professor himself and realise that THIS GUY is about to launch a daring expedition into the prehistoric unknown:

The guy in question is of course veteran Hollywood hellraiser Wallace Beery, and his singularly rousing performance is only one of the things that help make the scene depicting Challenger’s lecture so much fun.

“Bring on your mastodons! Bring on your mammoths!” demand the crowd of jeering, football rattle waving Edwardian students, before the Professor takes the stage to lay out his evidence for the existence of a lost Amazonian plateau rich in prehistoric flora & fuana, and of his plan to lead a rescue party in search of his unfortunate colleague Professor White, who has disappeared shortly after posting home the tantalising reports of his discoveries. It’s a shame that the 64 minute ‘Lost World’ doesn’t allow us to actually see these reports, instead cutting straight to the ‘WHO’S WITH ME?’ part of the presentation, as Challenger – having presumably reduced his critics to a state of cowed submission - canvasses for volunteers to join him on his perilous mission.



Happily, those who step up to the plate are exactly the crew the conventions of a lost world explorer type movie demands. Reporter and anxious ninny Lloyd Hughes takes on the juvenile lead / audience surrogate role, his character’s fiancée having apparently demanded that he must prove his manhood by facing some exotic dangers prior to their marriage; an unusual request perhaps, but observing Hughes’ chinless mugging here, I think I kinda get where she’s coming from. Lewis Stone meanwhile essays the obligatory safari-suited great white hunter Sir John Roxton, and does a very fine and dignified job of it too, whilst some other guy is an absent-minded, elderly scientist type (he’s probably a geologist or something, I forget, and presumably included to provide a contrast to Beery’s brow-furrowing human wrecking ball), and most importantly, Miss Bessie Love is on hand to add some glamour to proceedings, as the daughter of the missing Professor White, braving the travails of the tropics in search of her father. (2)


As an interesting aside, Love’s character, and the notion that Challenger’s expedition was launched with the intention of tracking down her father, is an addition to Conan Doyle’s source text, and a slightly unnecessary one you might think – perhaps merely a convoluted justification for including a new heroine and giving her a reason to accompany the chaps into the jungle. Actually though, a spot of Wikipedia-based “research” reveals that this alteration to the story in fact served to give the film a bit of a contemporary twist.

You see, Percy Harrison Fawcett, the man whose lectures inspired the original novel, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1925, whilst leading an expedition in search of an ancient lost city, provisional named “Z”, that he fervently believed to be located in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. The subject of much publicity and speculation at the time, Fawcett’s disappearance prompted numerous ill-fated ‘rescue missions’ in the years that followed, and it initially struck me as likely that the alteration to ‘The Lost World’s storyline must have been undertaken as a timely, if perhaps slightly distasteful, reference to these events. However, IMDB states that the film premiered in February 1925 – several months prior Fawcett’s final communications - so, assuming these dates are accurate, I suppose we should probably view the film’s script more as an eerie premonition of the explorer’s fate than as an exploitative cash-in. (3)

Anyway, getting back to the movie, we all know what’s coming next, so why waste time in getting there, eh? Before we know it, our intrepid band is kayaking down the Amazon with the help of their obligatory retinue of comic relief servants (a cockney, a bloke in black-face and a pet monkey are all on hand). Plentiful insert shots of mangy tigers, sloths, apes and so forth abound, providing the ‘wildlife footage’ angle that inevitably accompanied jungle tales prior to the era of TV wildlife documentaries, with some beasties (a big snake, primarily) even sharing shots with the actors amid the back-lot greenery and dry ice swamp smoke.

Soon the infamous plateau is in sight, and the proto-monster kids in the audience can rejoice, as they finally start to get what they paid for. Our initial monster sighting – a pterodactyl - has a bit of an Oliver Postgate look to it – shoddy and clumsily animated with a sort of jerky, one-frame-in-three style of motion, but pretty charming at the same time. Disappointingly for those who demand accuracy in their monsters, the rest of the creatures we’ll soon we introduced to largely follow suit, and actually, the dodginess of the monster effects is probably one of ‘The Lost World’s biggest pitfalls as regards its failure to really enter the canon as a pioneering monster movie.

I suppose on the one hand, we’ve got to remember this WAS 1925, and that this WAS the first time anyone had ever attempted to create ‘realistic’ moving creatures for a film on anything like this scale. But at the same time, given that the technical triumphs of ‘King Kong’ were only eight years away, the limitations of ‘Lost World’s wobbly, plasticine beasties speaks volumes about the astonishing progress O’Brien made with his work in the intervening years.

But thankfully, the questionable quality of 90 year old animated dinosaurs isn’t really a dealbreaker for me, and watching a lovingly rendered Allosaurus (“the most vicious pest of the ancient world”, according to Professor Challenger) going toe to toe with an alpha male Triceratops is a rousing sight irrespective of the level of formal sophistication used to achieve it. In fact, personally find that these scenes are actually enhanced by the jerky movements and rather malleable shapes of the combatants, and, from my own cranky, retrogressive viewpoint at least, they’re far more characterful and fun than the swish beasts of yr latter-day Jurassic Park sequels, just as the scientifically inaccurate stone dinos in Crystal Palace Park remain a lot more personable than their more solemn cousins in the Natural History Museum.

For modern viewers, the momentum of these dinosaur scenes is liable to be hampered not so much by the effects themselves but by the production’s rigorous insistence on fixed camera angles, which sees most of the prehistoric battles take place in static long shots, broken up only by occasional cutaways to leering close-ups dino faces (which are admittedly pretty great), and disconnected shots of our human characters cowering in fear, giving us their best ‘awe’ from amid patches of studio undergrowth. Presumably these drawbacks were imposed by the limitations of O’Brien’s stop motion technique – problems which an additional input of time and imagination would no doubt have solved, as was the case by the time ‘King Kong’ rolled around.

Shots in which monsters and people interact were also clearly a tricky business at this point in time, but although ‘The Lost World’ suffers from a modern POV for including very few of them, the ones that are here are generally very nicely done, particularly during by far my favourite part of the film: the exciting, city-wrecking conclusion!

For yes, after the chaos of the volcanic eruption that precipitates our heroes’ escape from the plateau, they find themselves in the enviable position of being able to trap a dazed and confused brontosaurus, prompting Challenger to decide he’s going to ship it straight back to London in time to hit the chattering classes with the ultimate “I told you so”. As you might expect, things do not go entirely to plan…

If this direct warm up for ‘..Kong’s dramatic conclusion fails to feature buzzing airplanes, tall buildings, imperilled heroines or tenderly and sympathetically portrayed monsters, what is DOES have is the sight of a crudely animated brontosaurus rampaging through the streets of a painstakingly detailed recreation of Edwardian London. And I don’t know about you, but there are few things I can imagine seeing in a motion picture that would please me more than that.

Although the whole London segment adds up to little more than five minutes of screen time (in the 64 minute cut), it’s a gloriously action-packed blue-print for all that would subsequently become required of such sequences. Smash, bash, crash goes the frightened and enraged leviathan, selectively laying waste to the area around Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, as top-hatted crowds flee in blithering terror! (Look out in particular for the shot in which a life-size dinosaur tail swishes by to knock a crowd of gawpers off their feet – I thought it was great).

Wasting no time, the beast moves on to menace and demolish a public house – ‘The Blue Posts’ – which seems to have attracted its particular displeasure. One brief sequence shows a cloth-capped pub patron (presumably an underworld ruffian of some kind) firing a pistol at the monster’s looming feet as he attempts to save a stricken lady from a stomping – stirring stuff indeed, and a welcome contrast to the rather sedate dino action that transpired back on the plateau.(4)

Rather brilliantly I think, the brontosaur’s haphazard reign of terror reaches its conclusion when it crashes through the surface of Tower Bridge mid-crossing and determinedly swims off down-river towards the coast. At this point, the people of London choose to call it a day and celebrate their victory over the dinosaur, irrespective of the fact that an unhappy prehistoric behemoth will presumably be wrecking havoc in Chatham or Gravesend before the night is through. Because hey, London is safe for now, so let’s all put our feet up and raise a glass to the inadequate weight-bearing capacity of our bridges, for truly, the sloppy standards of British municipal engineering have saved the day once more.

Watching these dazed Londoners celebrate the conclusion of the first of the innumerable urban monster rampages that would follow in the subsequent years feels strange indeed; a mirror perhaps of a few handfuls of perplexed yet overjoyed young silent-era cinema-goers, cheering the awkward birth of a modernist pulp aesthetic of cinematic destruction that would help define the next century of popular culture, just as surely as the fusty, safari-suited adventure tropes that opened the film had defined the previous century’s daydream excursions into the great unknown.



(1) Another version of events claims that the movie was actually a colossal success, and that all the original theatrical prints were destroyed for legal reasons pending completion of a never-to-be-completed sound version, or something like that. But again – who knows.

(2) Appearing here towards the start of a long and varied screen career, Love went on to feature in more interesting flicks than you can shake a stick at, even clocking up ‘old lady’ cameos in the likes of Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’ and Tony Scott’s ‘The Hunger’ in her declining years, not to mention an walk-on appearance in Jose Larraz’ ‘Vampyres’, of all things.

(3) Apparently described as a “Neitzschean explorer spouting eugenic gibberish” by the Canadian explorer and historian Dr John Hemming, you’ll be pleased to learn that a 1911 portrait of Percy Harrison Fawcett shows him sporting a mighty handle-bar moustache, a pipe, deerstalker hat and a singularly piercing gaze. Lack of dinosaurs notwithstanding, his Wikipedia entry suggests a life more eventful than anything that transpires in ‘The Lost World’.

(4) Central London currently boasts no less than six pubs named ‘The Blue Posts’ – a brief discussion of the theories behind the proliferation of the name plus further details can be found here. I won’t hazard a guess as to which of these establishments the brontosaurus was bothering (assuming it was based on a real location at all), but if any more daring (and bored) Londoners want to examine the screen shots and give it some thought, be my guest.

Pelican Time: The Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney (1970)

(Gustave Doré)

(Illustrated London News, 1852)

(George Cruickshank)

(‘Preparing for an execution at Newgate, 1848’. Mansell Collection.)

(‘A Spree in a Railway Carriage’, about 1850. Mansell Collection.)

(Gustave Doré)

(From ‘The Day’s Doings’, about 1870. Mansell Collection.)

A comprehensive and no doubt endless fascinating & astounding volume, which I am very much looking forward to reading properly when time allows. All illustrations are contemporary to the period, credited as above.