Hammer House of Horror: The Silent Scream (Alan Gibson, 1980)

Continuing last October’s trawl through the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ archives where we left off, here we go with episode # 7, originally broadcast on ITV on 25th October 1980. 

Probably the most unsettling and seriously intentioned instalment of the series thus far, this one tells the tale of a feckless safebreaker (Chuck, played by Brian Cox), who, having just completed a debilitating prison sentence, grudgingly accepts a part-time job offered by sinister pet shop owner Martin Blueck, played by your friend and mine, Mr Peter Cushing.

Beginning with the unfortunate death-by-electrocution of a caged tiger, followed by Chuck’s return to the isolated roadside cottage he shares with his wife Annie (Elaine Donnelly), the first half of Francis Essex’s script is almost comically over-loaded with themes and imagery related to imprisonment and confinement.

Upon his return home, Chuck tells Elaine that she can’t possibly understand the misery he has experienced as a result of being incarcerated, causing her in turn to point to the virtual imprisonment she has faced while he was inside, as a result of poverty, isolation and societal disapproval. (To hammer home the point, her introductory shots are even framed through the bar-like partitions on the kitchen window.)

When Chuck visits Blueck’s shop, initially to thank him for visiting him in prison and gifting him with some money as part of a charitable programme, he scarcely finds much reassurance. Backed by the budgerigars and puppies he keeps caged in the shabby, public facing front room of his shop, Blueck quietly acknowledges his history as a concentration camp survivor, before inviting Chuck into the secret back room where his real work is done.

Therein, we find an appalling mockery of a zoo, in which a variety of flagrantly illegal animals (a panther, a leopard, assorted other big cats, a few apes and even a wallaby) subsist in cramped, bare cages, trained via the application of massive electric shocks to remain within their allotted spaces until a bell is sounded to let them know the circuits have been disengaged, at which point the sorry creatures can poke out their heads and gobble up the raw meat which comprises their chow.

For any animal lovers in the audience, the footage of these obviously unhappy beasts prowling around their tiny cages will prove immediately upsetting, whilst the idea that a veteran of the holocaust has become obsessed with imprisoning and controlling his fellow creatures - like a victim of familial abuse growing up to perpetrate the same cycle over again - is horribly perverse and disturbing.

As you’d imagine, it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic for us to realise that Blueck is set upon expanding his unsavoury “research” to human subjects, and that his motives in offering a questionable job to a hapless ex-con - and placing a very tempting safe in plain view when he leaves Chuck to look after the joint - are less than wholly philanthropic.

In fact, Blueck makes this fairly plain from the outset, expounding upon his Orwellian dream of creating “prisons without bars”, in which the terror-stricken inmates are ostensibly free, but paralysed by mind-destroying Pavlovian conditioning - a concept which pushes the story into the realm of the truly nightmarish. (Again, note the insane perversity of a man who finds the physical paraphernalia of imprisonment so repugnant, he is fixated on removing it, even as he craves the power of control over others which it represents.)

Perhaps inevitably given that we’re watching a mainstream TV production here, Essex’s script rather sidesteps the darker psychological implications of this tale, downplaying the whole concentration camp angle just, just as Cushing likewise rather downplays his characterisation of Blueck. Providing something of a call back to his always fascinating portrayals of Baron Frankenstein in previous decades, he keeps the character soft-spoken, slow and pointedly non-emphatic in his gestures, allowing his evil and mental instability to reveal themselves more in his actions than through any displays of cackling villainy, but still managing to radiate a certain, implacable coldness.

As his fans will be aware, accents could sometimes prove Cushing’s Achilles’ heel as an actor, but he handles this one very well, betraying just a hint of Blueck’s Eastern European origins, gradually eroded over decades spent settled in a particularly seedy corner of England, allowing him to add just the right amount of unholy relish to his dialogue.

(There’s scarcely a bigger chill in the whole episode meanwhile than the lazy, off-hand cruelty Cushing manages to inject into his character’s tired attempts to fob off an investigating police officer visiting his shop with “..a hamster for the boy, perhaps?”)

Relatively few of the big-hitters from Hammer’s feature film era deigned to lend their talents to Roy Skeggs’ venture into TV, so it is of course wonderful to see the ever-loyal Cushing stepping up for what I believe was his penultimate horror role (followed up only by his touching farewell to the genre in Pete Walker’s ‘House of Long Shadows’ two years later). Needless to say, the producers of the series could scarcely have found a better, more challenging role for him to get his teeth into.

Cox and Donnelly are both excellent too (the former doing a fine thick-yet-sympathetic turn, the latter convincing as the brains of their marital operation), allowing ‘The Silent Scream’ to develop into a strongly played three-hander drama, lending these characters a sense of realism which transcends the excesses of the increasingly far-fetched premise.

Perhaps mercifully, the second half of the episode becomes slightly less distressing, as the script concentrates more on the nuts-and-bolts survival horror of Chuck and Annie’s attempt to contend with the fiendish travails Blueck has devised for them, temporarily turning ‘The Silent Scream’ into what feels perhaps like an early prototype for the ‘Cube’-style “puzzle box” horror film.

A less high profile veteran of Hammer’s feature film era, Alan Gibson directs efficiently, with a certain amount of style, as befits the voluminous CV of TV work he’d racked up since helming the last two Christopher Lee Dracula movies in the early ’70s. Rather ironically in view of the episode’s subject matter, there is also some very nice location work to enjoy here; both Chuck and Annie’s remote rural cottage, lonely and isolated just off the motorway, and the thoroughly seedy row of commuter-belt businesses which houses Cushing’s shop (perhaps just a few doors down from Denholm Elliot’s estate agents from Rude Awakening), are very well chosen.

In view of my above observations on Cushing’s character however, I can't help but feel that Essex fumbles the ball rather dreadfully in the final act, when he drops what is clearly intended to be the blood-and-thunder revelation that Blueck was not actually a prisoner within the concentration camp, but a captor.

As well as stealing the punch-line to my all-time favourite bad taste gag, this misfiring twist actually succeeds in making the story far less disturbing than would otherwise have been the case. (After all, a mad Nazi on the loose is a far easier threat to deal with than that of a traumatised victim becoming secretly obsessed with exercising control over others.)

Sadly, this casual revelation also robs Cushing of the opportunity to give Blueck a touch of that sublime, sympathy-for-the-devil pathos he always did so well in his villainous roles - or indeed to invest the character with any of the knotty complexity we may have hoped for. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that the scene in which this twist is revealed is also that in which Blueck finally bursts out in a fit of ol’ fashioned villainous cackling.)

An unfortunate misstep, this can’t help but make the episode’s conclusion feel a little flat in dramatic terms, but regardless - on the surface of it, we still get a satisfyingly nasty and hopeless denouement, worthy of any grimy ‘70s British horror shocker, cementing ‘The Silent Scream’s place as easily the best episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ I’ve watched thus far.

Be sure to tune in this time next week, and we’ll learn whether episode # 8 proves a contender to the throne…

Noir Diary # 16: The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

 Even before he achieved card-carrying ‘auteur’ status following his celebrated collaborations with Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey already had a long history of turning genre conventions outside out. Early American films like psychological noir ‘The Prowler’ (1951) and anti-war allegory ‘The Boy With Green Hair’ (1948) were already total one-offs, and, after the blacklist forced his relocation to the UK, he was soon busy turning humble crime programmer ‘Time Without Pity’ (1957) into an exhausting treatise on post-industrial anxiety, before instigating an unprecedented mash-up of JD youth movie, Kneale-esque science fiction and cold war existentialism in 1962’s extraordinary ‘The Damned’.

All of which makes it interesting to consider just how uncharacteristically normal Losey’s three early collaborations with iconic Welsh tough guy star Stanley Baker turned out to be. The first film they made together, 1959’s ‘Blind Date’ [hastily reviewed on this blog way back in the mists of time] is a stylish but unremarkable whodunit, whilst 1962’s ‘Eve’ [ditto] may have allowed Baker to stretch his thespian wings a little, but is otherwise just a frothy continental melodrama, feeling uncomfortably like a strained British attempt to catch a whiff of post-‘La Dolce Vita’ decadence.

By far the strongest entry in this loose trilogy, 1960’s ‘The Criminal’, is, as its title suggests, just about as generic a crime movie (gangster & prison sub-divisions) as can possibly be imagined. Credited to playwright and future ‘Hard Day’s Night’ screenwriter Alun Owen, from an original draft by Jimmy Sangster, the script manages to trot out a formidable assemblage of hoary old clichés, as Baker’s London-Irish mob boss Johnny Bannion drifts in and out of the slammer whilst punishing his enemies, executing an audacious racetrack heist, hiding the loot, instigating a passionate affair with his ex-girlfriend’s flatmate (Margit Saad), and eventually being betrayed by his trusted right hand man (Losey’s fellow ex-pat Sam Wanamaker).

Could it have been Baker himself who reined in Losey’s more outré tendencies on these projects, I wonder? After all, he got his parallel career as a producer of no nonsense action-adventure pictures off to a flying start with ‘Zulu’ (1964) just a few years later. Indeed, ‘The Criminal’ plays to a great extent like one of the projects its leading man went on to produce (not least the similarly themed ‘Robbery’ (1967)), mixing a sense of raw nerve energy with dour, realistic brutality, whilst showcasing the talents of an extraordinary cast of character players.

Whatever the behind-the-scenes balance of power may have been though, Losey’s presence can still be felt, especially during the film’s prison sequences, which were shot on a vast purpose-built set modelled after the Victorian edifice of HMP Wandsworth (the genuine article was used for exteriors). Though impressively realistic in most respects, this set allows Losey - aided no doubt by cinematographer Robert Krasker, a veteran of Carol Reed’s ‘Odd Man Out’ and ‘The Third Man’ - to frame the action in suitably expressionistic, Kafkaesque fashion, dialling up the claustrophobia to an uncomfortable degree as he obsessively explores the complex power dynamics at play between the inmates and wardens.

In this respect, it would be easy to file ‘The Criminal’ away as the UK’s answer to Jules Dassin’s ‘Brute Force’ (1947) or Jacques Becker’s ‘Le Trou’ (1960). A more relevant point of comparison however might be Raoul Walsh’s classic ‘White Heat’ (1949), which is echoed here in the ‘out-and-in-and-out-again’ structure of the prison story, as well as by the steady accumulation of tension through the film, the betrayal/paranioa tropes and the intermittent outbursts of vein-popping male hysteria.

More importantly for its director perhaps, ‘The Criminal’ also shares with Walsh’s film the underlying notion that its tormented, working class anti-hero never really gets to experience true freedom, finding himself imprisoned just as much by the strictures of the ruthless socio-economic system which defines his actions on the ‘outside’ as he is by the more literal bars and truncheons which confine him on the ‘inside’.

Unpacking all that would be quite enough to keep most filmmakers busy, but Losey, being Losey, also insists on intermittently trying to punch through to the audience via some woefully self-conscious application of Brechtian distancing technique.

This can be most clearly seen during the ‘home-coming’ party which follows Bannion’s initial release from prison, when all music and sound effects suddenly cut out to announce the entrance of his estranged girlfriend Maggie (Jill Bennett). As the assembled partygoers split off to either side and observe her subsequent hysterical outburst like a bemused Greek chorus, what should rightfully be a fairly troubling, low key character exchange is instead imbued with the feel of a ‘West Side Story’-esque ritual showdown. Later in the film meanwhile, an emotionally troubled prisoner is allowed to deliver a long, introspective monologue direct to camera, staring fixedly at the lens in close up as the background shifts out of focus behind him.

In fairness to Losey, he soon found other, better ways to imbue his characters with an inner life, and even managed to incorporate these jarring techniques into his later, more formally experimental, films to great effect. Here though, surrounded by the dour (albeit exaggerated) naturalism of London’s criminal underworld, these attention-grabbing cinematic affectations just seem absurd, bordering on camp - which is frankly the last thing anyone needed, in a movie which was still predicated largely on the simple pleasures of watching Stanley Baker punch people in the face.

Speaking of which, Baker may have railed against being typecast in ‘hard man’ parts in subsequent years (three films in five years with ‘Hell’ in the title will do that for you, I suppose), but for those of us who love the hard-boiled persona he brought to British crime/noir cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, rest assured - we’re pretty much at Peak Stanley with ‘The Criminal’, and it’s beautiful thing to behold, even as he’s hamstrung to some extent by the necessity of slurring his trademark Welsh baritone to attempt some semblance of an Irish accent.

Essentially, Baker lends Johnny Bannion the feel of a man who, above all else, simply wants to be alone, but is cursed to be forever surrounded by other men (and even more troublingly, women) - scheming, wheedling and generally getting in his grill, 24/7. Left to his own devices, we assume, he’d be happy to remain in his outrageously decorated London penthouse, brooding over his impressive collection of jazz LPs; but alas, it’s not to be.

Lest we think we’re dealing with some Jean Gabin-esque sensitive, aesthetically-minded gangster here however, please note that Bannion has a life size photo of a nude model pasted on the back of his bathroom door, and when he is forced to resort to violence (which, of course, is frequently), there is a pure, underhanded street-fighting nastiness to his conduct which is genuinely frightening, whether belting a guard with his hand-cuffed wrists as makes an escape from a prison van, or (in one of the movie’s highlights) reducing a pair of hulking, feckless thugs who have been assigned as his cellmates to tearful agony in a matter of seconds.

Great as he is though, Baker is in constant danger of being upstaged by the rest of the ‘The Criminal’s top drawer cast of cinematic reprobates - not least BITR hero and Losey’s fellow Brechtian, Patrick Magee, getting stuck into one of his very best screen roles as the devilish-yet-craven Prison Warden, Barrows.

Venomous to a fault, Magee builds Barrows into a terrifying and fascinating figure, plumbing depths of weird perversity which I’m 99% sure the film’s script never thought to assign to him. One minute a cowering, authoritarian jobsworth, the next a Mephistophelian provocateur, Barrows seems to be perpetually attempting to stifle his true nature as a glowering sadist, but, he scarcely ever succeeds.

He can’t help addressing his underlings with a hissed, derisive “…mister”, making it sound like the disgusting insult imaginable, whilst the film’s opening sequence finds him pushing obviously-doomed stool pigeon Kelly (Kenneth Cope) down the steel steps to the prison mess hall with all the finality of a witch-hunter lighting a pyre.

Basically, you could write a whole treatise trying to get to the bottom of what makes this gimlet-eyed cur tick, and you’d still never quite get to the bottom of it. Magee’s every gesture appears to conceal some horrible, hidden purpose, and his scenes with Baker in particular crackle with an electrifying antagonism.

Elsewhere meanwhile, British horror fans will immediately feel at home as ‘The Criminal’ opens with the heart-warming sight of Patrick Wymark (‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’, ‘The Skull’) and Murray Melvin (‘The Devils’) enjoying an inevitably crooked game of poker, each looking almost impossibly shifty, and it’s likewise great to see such esteemed players as Tom Bell, Nigel Green and Rupert Davies popping up blink-and-you’ll-miss-it supporting roles. Each of these gents helps contribute to what must surely rank as one of British cinema’s most impressive gallery of villainous grotesques, creating a world so devoid of moral fortitude that Baker’s violent, self-serving antihero appears almost admirable by comparison.

For all this though, ‘The Criminal’ is also noteworthy as an example of a British film in which barely anyone on screen in actually English… well, not in the genealogically correct, WASP-centric manner which would have been recognised as such in the late 1950s, at least.

Bannion and most of his gang members are Irish, as, presumably, is Barrows, whilst the loosely allied gang (led by the affable Grégoire Aslan) who run the prison’s black market are Italian. In fact, it’s striking that, during a scene which takes place in the prison’s Roman Catholic chapel, pretty much our entire cast of characters - inmates and screws alike - are present, solemnly receiving communion!

The few ostensibly English inmates meanwhile tend to have prominent Northern accents, whilst all purpose thug ‘Clobber’ (played by Milton Reid lookalike Kenneth J. Warren, last seen around these parts in The Creeping Flesh) is Australian. As portrayed by the Jewish-American Wanamaker, the ethnicity of Bannion’s right-hand-man Carter is difficult to pin down, whilst Johnny’s girlfriend Suzanne, as played by Saad, is evidently German. In fact, the film’s the only definite, RP-enunciating southern Englishman is actually the haughty prisoner governor, marvellously played by Noel Willman (‘Kiss of the Vampire’, The Reptile).

A near-comically stern yet weak-willed exemplar of English good manners, everything in the tiny world of the governor’s office appears perfectly symmetrical. He is mildly perturbed when a dish of arrow-root biscuits accompanies his morning tea-tray (a cringing lackey apologises for the lack of digestives), seemingly oblivious to the violence, chaos and rampant corruption which define the defiantly heterogeneous community of incarcerated troublemakers beyond his door. 

Even more surprising is the notable presence of black characters in ‘The Criminal’. At the outset of the film, one of Bannion’s cellmates is a West-Indian - though seemingly not fluent in English, he seems a trusted ally nonetheless, communicating through ritual chants of “ok, sailor, ok”, along with the occasional patted shoulder - whilst, delightfully, Johnny’s cellblock also boasts a Sir Lancelot-esque calypso singer, who strums his guitar in the canteen, improvising new lyrics to reflect the prison’s latest dramas, in what seems like a homage to Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ (1943). (1)

Elsewhere, during the racetrack scene, the camera briefly zeroes on a black man decked out in some kind of far-out witch doctor get-up (perhaps a real life hawker or busker of some kind?), whilst at Johnny’s home-coming party, we can even see a fully-fledged black gangster strutting his stuff in the background. (Probably not something the Krays or their bigoted ilk would have stood for, needless to say.)

Though not exactly the most progressive representations of black Britons ever seen on screen, the very presence of these characters in an era in which non-whites were generally entirely absent from popular cinema feels like a deliberate statement on the part of the filmmakers. Were they perhaps attempting to portray the criminal class as a kind of loose coalition of oppressed minorities, or just trying, however haphazardly, to provide a more realistic portrayal of working class life in the post-Wind Rush era than had usually been seen on screen up to this point..? Who knows.

Music too contributes hugely to ‘The Criminal’s overall power. In what became a recurring trope in Losey’s films, diegetic music is everywhere - not only in the myriad of songs, chants and rhymes through which the inmates communicate during the prison sequences, but also in Johnny’s prominently displayed jazz collection. As is almost inevitable for an early ‘60s Losey film in fact, UK jazz luminary Johnny Dankworth provides an exquisitely nuanced score, even as viewers are far more likely to remember the contribution made to the soundtrack by his better half, the equally ubiquitous Cleo Laine.

A striking, Nina Simone-ish, near a-cappella blues, Laine’s ‘Prison Ballad (Thieving Boy)’ plays over the film’s opening and closing sequences, and indeed is reprised a number of times in-between. You could accuse the filmmakers of over-playing this track, were it not for the fact that its haunting, icy simplicity proves so astoundingly beautiful that it stops us in out tracks each time it is heard.

Evoking a contemplative, melancholic air which eventually colours the entire film, Laine’s ballad allows this brutal, boot-to-the-face drama to veer, momentarily at least, toward the kind of fatalistic, stylised noir being explored at around the same time by directors in France and Japan.

Would it be too much of a stretch to claim that the snow-covered, rural locations in which the film’s predictably grim final act takes place reminded me of Truffaut’s ‘Tirez Sur Le Pianiste’ / ‘Shoot the Piano Player’, which premiered one month after ‘The Criminal’?

Probably, but nonetheless, that feeling is in there somewhere, helping Losey’s opus slog its way into viewers’ affections with a steely determination worthy of Baker himself. Though overlooked by critics upon release, ‘The Criminal’ now stands out as one of the strongest entries in the cycle of late 50s/early 60s British noirs within which its star proved such a defining presence, remaining sharp, brutal and disconcerting enough to make vicars, governors social workers choke on their arrowroot biscuits, however many decades down the line.

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(1) Hearteningly, Tommy Eyrtle, playing the calypso singer, went on to enjoy a prolific career in British film and TV, notably performing his own composition ‘Man Smart (Woman Smarter)’ in the 1965 ‘Dangerman’ episode ‘Man on the Beach’. Prince Monolulu - presumably playing the un named West Indian prisoner, although he is credited as “himself” on IMDB(?!) - had less luck however. Born in the Danish Virgin Islands in 1881, he died in London in 1965, his only credit subsequent to ‘The Criminal’ being an appearance on ‘The Ken Dodd Show’ the same year.

Noir Diary # 12: Big House U.S.A. (Howard W. Koch, 1955)

With a plot that takes in extortion, kidnapping, blackmail and child murder whilst offering up an utterly unsympathetic, morally reprehensible protagonist and setting him against a supporting cast of equally loathsome, cut-throats heavies, John C. Higgins’ screenplay for ‘Big House U.S.A.’ (from a story by George Slavin and the supremely named George George) seems to scream its film noir credentials to the rafters. Director Howard W. Koch and producer Aubrey Schenck’s presentation of this grim subject matter however..? Not quite so much. (1)

Indeed, I was rather taken aback as the film begins by taking us to some kind of summer camp in the picturesque mountains of Colorado, where a plucky young lad wants to compete against the other boys in running races, despite his chronic asthma. After descending into a coughing fit and being threatened with a big needle by the camp’s nurse, the humiliated kid runs away into the wilderness, and search parties are dispatched to find him.

In unhurried fashion, we are subsequently introduced to the steadfast local sheriff, to the missing boy’s panicked (and apparently very rich) father, and to assorted forest rangers, cops and such. Meanwhile, the tearful lad is discovered hiding on the undergrowth by a wandering fisherman, who would seem fairly benevolent at first, were it not for the fact that he’s played by Ralph Meeker of ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ fame - an actor who, rather uniquely, combines the energy and good looks of a traditional Hollywood leading man with an aura of sheer malevolence which clearly marks him out as a grade-A piece of shit.

And, thus he proves to be; instead of alerting the authorities, Meeker leaves the boy imprisoned in a remote/abandoned lookout station whilst he calls up Panicked Dad and gives him the low-end on what appears to be a pre-meditated kidnapping scheme. This in turn prompts the introduction of a smug FBI agent (Reed Hadley), who arrives in good time to drone on and on about the fool-proof, scientific methods utilised by the feds to deal with such cases.

Complete with all the thrills and spills of an episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie’, this kidnapping plotline proceeds to plod along for ten minutes, then twenty, then eventually a full half hour, as I gradually found myself wondering whether the good folks at Kino Lorber had mixed up the reels with some other movie when they created their transfer of this film. Where was this “Big House U.S.A.” we’d been promised? And what of the incredible rogue’s gallery of b-movie sluggers promised by the poster? When are they all going to to factor into things?

Well, our journey toward them eventually gets underway when, in the first of several moments of startlingly callous brutality which punctuate the movie, the kidnapped kid takes a fall and dies whilst trying to escape his captor. Without so much as a second thought, Meeker picks up the kid’s body and hurls it over the nearest cliff into the rushing river far below.

After this shocker, things understandably take a darker turn, as Meeker is caught red-handed attempting to leave the National Park after retrieving (and secretly stashing away) the ransom money provided by the father. He tells the feds that he never actually laid eyes on the kid and was merely taking advantage of the situation by shaking down the dad for some quick dough, and, unable to prove a definite connection between Meeker and the kid’s disappearance, the cops have no choice but to allow the faux-fisherman - who has earned himself the tabloid nickname “The Ice Man” for his both determination to stick to his story and his refusal to disclose the location of his ill-gotten gains - to cop a plea on an extortion charge.

Thus we get to see Meeker merrily shipping out to spend a year or two cooling his heels on (FINALLY) a thinly-veiled fictional analogue of Alcatraz Island - but of course our man’s troubles are far from over. Despised by his fellow inmates as a probable child-killer, he finds himself transferred - via the connivings of Mr Smug FBI Man - to a cramped cell housing the worst of the worst of the prison’s hard-nuts.

Headed up by sly mob boss Broderick Crawford, this happy crew also comprises Lon Chaney Jr (“a nice guy, so long as he’s locked up”), a young Charles Bronson (introduced as a mad-dog killer, his character is really more of a practically-minded, musclebound moralist), and best of all, William Talman (‘The Hitch-Hiker’ himself!) as Crawford’s jittery, bug-eyed lieutenant.

The general idea is that, placed in such tough company, The Ice Man will soon melt and spill his guts to the feds. Unbeknownst to the powers-that-be however, Crawford and the gang are mid-way through planning their Big Break Out, and the prospect of taking Meeker with them and forcing him to hand over his hidden loot is just too good to resist.

Unsurprisingly, this central ‘prison movie’ section is by far the most entertaining part of ‘Big House U.S.A.’, ploughing through the usual clichés with gusto, whilst the gang’s escape plan presents a sublime bit of craziness straight out of a Men’s Adventure magazine. Basically, they’ve been stockpiling stolen oxygen cylinders, keeping them hidden in a hollow chamber inside the giant furnace which forms the centrepiece of the prison’s factory floor. When the time comes, they’re just gonna slide their way into the water via the machine’s waste pipe and frogman their way to freedom, getting picked up on open water by a fishing boat rented by Crawford’s outside cronies.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to spend half as much time as we might have liked with this esteemed line-up of craggy-faced bruisers (more Bronson in particular would have been welcomed), but they all do fine work in what little screen time they’re allotted, and the sheer sight of them all crammed together in a tiny cell will be worth the entry price alone for some viewers.

Crawford and Talman do great work her as a tag-team of comic book villains, whilst Chaney, looking shockingly haggard here considering he’d been slogging his way through Universal’s dapper ‘Inner Sanctum’ mysteries only a decade beforehand, is his usual doddering, likeable self nonetheless. He is also gifted with what is by far this film’s best line, delivered after Meeker protests that, “I’m no skin diver, I can’t even swim,”. “You’ll make out, just pull the water toward you like it was a big dame” - truly a tough guy swimming lesson for the ages.

I confess, if I were reading this review, I’d be thinking at this point that ‘Big House U.S.A.’ sounds like an absolute riot, but seriously folks - don’t build yr expectations up too high for this one. Writer Higgins and producer Schneck had previously worked together on 1947’s T-Men, and unfortunately the same feeling of a solid, hard-boiled story sabotaged by reams of ass-covering “crime doesn’t pay” procedural bullshit also predominates here.

Unlike that earlier film however, ‘Big House..’ has neither John Alcott’s majestic photography nor Anthony Mann’s brooding, no bullshit direction to fall back on. Instead, Koch’s pacing is stupefying slack, largely compressing the ‘good stuff’ we came to see into a middle half hour sandwiched between the workmanlike, TV drama opening described above and a listless, tension-free trudge toward the story’s dispiriting conclusion, whilst Higgins’ scripting meanwhile is full of needless complexity and annoying incongruities.

Beyond the inevitable, ‘Dragnet’ style voiceover which patronisingly book-ends the movie, we spend what feels like hours hanging around in the Park Rangers’ office in the company of self-satisfied Special Agent Hadley and boring cop Roy Roberts as they trudge through every pain-staking step of building their case against Meeker, then as they proceed to snidely torment him once he’s behind bars - all wasting valuable time we could instead have spent watching Broderick Crawford puffing on a bootleg cigar or Bronson cracking his knuckles (or indeed, checking in with Felicia Farr, who has a great bit-part here as Meeker’s duplicitous female accomplice).

With the unrivalled efficiency and moral superiority of the forces of law and order reinforced at every turn, it’s enough to get the attendees of yr average PTA meeting yelling “fuck you, cop!” back at the screen, but worse than that, this concentration on the unflappable righteousness of the fuzz completely ruins the movie’s final act.

Handled differently, Meeker, Crawford and Talman’s fugitive journey across state lines, frantically trying to get one up on each other as they navigate their way toward the Colorado treasure-trove, could have made for some fantastically gripping, hard-boiled stuff. Here though, this potential is just thrown away - and not only because their journey conveyed via an unconvincing series of time-compressing ellipses, clearly thrown together as time and/or funding was running short.

As eccentric and perversely charismatic as these crooks may be, the film has basically granted them little agency, no intelligence, and no chance to develop anything beyond a one dimensional persona for themselves. As they approach their goal, we know that law enforcement is one step ahead of them, lurking in the bushes with fingers on their triggers, and the hoods’ collective failure is a foregone conclusion.

On paper, the downbeat fate doled out to these admittedly horrible characters should be an explosion of classic noir fatalism, but as executed here by Koch and co, it’s simply banal, with Special Agent Smug Bastard adding insult to injury as he dusts off his hands and warns us all to stay straight and fly right.

Though noteworthy for its stellar cast, unconventional structure and stark moments of callous (albeit off-screen) violence, ‘Big House U.S.A.’ is ultimately a poorly rendered disappointment which does little to capitalise on the talents of those on either side of the camera. A passable mid-week watch, but one best left for completists or the morbidly curious, I suspect. 

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(1) After directing this movie back to back with the more highly regarded b-noir ‘Shield for Murder’ (1954), Howard W. Koch’s brief directorial career went on to include the likes of ‘Bop Girl Goes Calypso’, ‘The Girl in Black Stockings’ (both ’57) and the oddball Boris Karloff vehicle ‘Frankenstein 1970’ (1958) before he transitioned into a far more successful career as a producer from dawn of the ’60s onward.

Noir Diary # 4: Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)

Maybe it’s just me, but ‘Kiss of Death’ strikes me as an overly dramatic title for this meat n’ potatoes crime/gangster melodrama, made for Fox by western specialist Henry Hathaway.

True, Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) plants some big kisses on his kids and his second wife (Coleen Gray) in the second half of the movie, and ok, he’s a reformed felon in deep trouble at the time, but his affections certainly never smack of death, and that aside, there are no femme fatales or doomed dames here, no sexual undertones or any funny business like that – just crooks and cops in their off-the-peg duds, chatting in offices and cell blocks, taking care of the day to day. Solid stuff, and no damned kissing.

Am I being too literal here? Didn’t pulp crime writers basically just pick these titles out of a (big, black) hat, more often than not? Well, regardless, I’d probably have called the picture “Confessions of a Stoolie”, or hey, how about “Nicky Soprano”? [It’s been done – Ed.]

Well no matter, ‘Kiss of Death’ it is, and it begins with a nice bit of post-modern humour - the image of a revolver placed atop a movie screenplay (marked “shooting script”), as an unseen hand begins to turn the pages, and the credits are presented in the form of typed script notations.

This self-awareness is immediately jettisoned however once we get into the film itself, which opens with Nick Bianco and a few of his cronies pulling off a Christmas Eve heist at a Manhattan jewellery store (located inside the Chrysler Building, no less). Although Mature gives the impression of being a pretty thorough-going, black-clad bad-ass at this point, voiceover narration (read, rather hesitantly, by Gray) foregrounds Bianco as a sympathetic figure, informing us that he’s been searching for a straight job for over a year, but that his criminal record has got him the bum’s rush every time, forcing him into this act of desperation to buy some Christmas gifts for his family.

A sweat-drenched journey down to the lobby in a crowded elevator establishes the film’s strongest suit – tension! – before a desperate flight from the cops leaves Bianco writhing in the gutter with a bullet in his leg. “The same thing happened to his father twenty years earlier; he died with a police bullet in him,” Gray’s voiceover flatly informs us. A pretty great opening, all in all.

Bianco keeps his stone-faced front up all the way to Sing-Sing, repeatedly telling obsequious Assistant D.A. Brian Donlevy “no deal” when the latter offers Nick a plea bargain in return for fingering his accomplices, manipulatively appealing to the felon’s recently acquired status as a father and aspirant decent guy. In the process of telling Donlevy to shove it, Bianco inadvertently gains the admiration of his cellmate, a twitchy young gangland psychopath, the perfectly named Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), but… more on him later.

After several years in the joint, things change for Bianco when he learns – via a fellow inmate and a scan of a newspaper obituaries column in the prison library, rather unfeasibly – that his wife has committed suicide. Stuck her head in the gas oven, no less, leaving the kids bound for the orphanage. Harsh.

Bianco had entrusted his family’s wellbeing to one of his partners on the robbery job. Evidently, that didn’t quite work out, so before you know it, Nick is back up-town, singing for Donlevy.

Out on parole as a result of his vengeful snitching, Nick is soon making time with Gray (the nice gal who used to live downstairs and babysat the kids) and, after tying the knot of course, the couple reclaim his two adorable moppets from the nuns. But, inevitably, ol’ Brian is soon on the phone again, asking Nick to set up and testify against another old pal of his – young Tommy Udo. One ‘not guilty’ verdict later, and you can probably see where this train is heading.

Behind the camera, ‘Kiss of Death’s credits are a dictionary definition of “solid”. Master script doctors Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer sure as hell knew how to write a three act genre movie (there are a few clunky lines and abrupt time transitions, but hey), and Henry Hathaway sure as hell knew how to direct one.

There are a few striking compositions, and the film is attractively photographed by Norbert Brodine, making effective (but rarely showy) use of real world locations – an element which doesn’t seem terribly noteworthy today, but proved a game-changing novelty for noir/crime films in the immediate post-war period.

Aside from a few looming shadows and dark hats in the final act however, there’s not much of that wild, expressionistic stuff that usually gets us noir fans excited. Even this early in noir’s “second wave”, realism was clearly already the big word, jarring somewhat with the film’s more baroque characters and theatrical performance styles - a disjuncture Hathaway and Brodine attempt to correct by allowing the atmosphere to become slightly more fantastical as the story progresses.

Likewise, there is little of the kind of moral ambiguity, all-consuming corruption and doomed inevitability that defines the noir sensibility to be found in ‘Kiss of Death’. Straight-down-the-line, good vs evil melodrama is more the dominant flavour here, with the Production Code-friendly, family values moralism championed by Donlevy’s character baked into the heart of the film, rather than sprinkled on top as an after-thought.

There is a cloying sense of paternalism for instance to the scene in which the prison governor compliments Bianco for his neat hand-writing, whilst a guard opines that “he’s not a bad guy”, and in the way that Nick timidly proceeds to follow the Assistant D.A.’s orders, hanging his head like a naughty child who knows he’s done bad and wants to make good.

When Mature tells Donlevy, “your side of the fence is almost as dirty as mine”, the older man comes back with, “yeah, but we only hurt the bad guys” – a questionable assertion which Hathaway is content to leave largely unchallenged, even after the D.A. proves himself to be pretty ineffectual when it comes to protecting his star witness’s loved ones from harm.

In front the camera meanwhile… well, I know that Victor Mature took a lot of stick over the years for his supposed lack of thespian talent and willingness to cruise on his good looks, but I’ve always had soft spot for him. Sure, he doesn’t exactly have much range, but how many capital letter Movie Stars really do? More important than that, he has brooding screen presence to die for, and does that lethargic, heavy-lidded drawlin’ thing just as well as Mitchum. He did great work as the tormented, alcoholic Doc Holliday in Ford’s ‘My Darling Clementine’, and as the crusading cop in Robert Siodmak’s ‘Cry of the City’, to name but two.

In ‘Kiss of Death’ though, well, I begin to see what his critics were getting at. Nick Bianco anchors this film front to back, and would likely have proved a challenging gig for any actor, with the script requiring him to transform in quick succession from a tight-lipped criminal operator to a grief-stricken jailbird, and from a craven, self-loathing stool pigeon to a defiant and proud family man. Mature might nail the first of these aspects pretty well, maybe the second, but beyond that, he struggles.

His conduct in the family scenes feels weird and overbearing, whilst the scene in which he reports back to the cops on Tommy Udo’s activities is deeply unconvincing; he sounds more like a concerned movie star recounting a conversation he overheard outside a nightclub than an insider from the criminal underworld breaking a lifetime’s silence.

Mature does manage to retain our sympathy throughout however, and he can get convincingly cool n’ tough when needed, so I won’t shame his memory by uttering the names of a few of his contemporaries who could have aced this role in his place… let’s just suggest that he was an actor who hit a lot harder in “one note” kind of parts, and leave it at that.

Speaking of “one note” parts meanwhile, most critics seem agreed on the fact that it is Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo who steals this movie. Indeed, Widmark – who made his big screen debut here after a few years slugging it out in theatre-land – even received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his trouble… and how I wish we still lived in a world where The Academy was willing to award a nod to this kind of berserkly cartoon-ish over-acting once in a while.

Basically, Widmark’s approach here is to take the kind of “sneering, psychotic punk” character first defined by James Cagney in ‘The Public Enemy’, and to crank the dial up to eleven. As a portrayal of full spectrum, eye-popping, lip curling (literally - he curls that lip good), subtlety-free villainy, Widmark pretty much knocks it out of the park here, and I don’t think anyone’s quite found it yet, over seven decades later. (Having said that, it’s certainly no surprise to discover that Nicholas Cage took on the role in Barbet Schroeder’s 1995 remake.)

Merely looking at Tommy Udo’s face is enough to conjure up images of bullet wounds being probed with pen knives, abandoned syringes and chorus girls with smashed up faces, along with a metallic smell of cologne and formaldehyde – and that’s even before he starts laughing like a hyena. He’s like some killer, mutant animal that has emerged fully-formed from the ugly tensions of the artificial urban environment, his cherubic features rendered grotesque by the sadistic impulses that lurk beneath.

At various points, Udo reminded me both of Richard Attenborough’s Pinky in ‘Brighton Rock’ and Ronald Lacey’s sadistic Nazi in ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’ – which should give you some idea of where this freak stands in the canon of OTT cinematic villainy.

In ‘Kiss of Death’s most notorious scene, Udo ties up a wheelchair-bound elderly lady (the mother of a fellow underworld fink) with electrical cord and pushes her down a flight of stairs to her death. A shockingly violent moment that succeeds in upping the ante on the similar exclamation points of perverse brutality that became a trademark of Warner Bros’ ‘30s gangster films, this admirably tasteless attention-grabber also serves a vital narrative function in establishing beyond doubt the kind of threat Tommy Udo poses to Nick Bianco’s family.

Indeed, it is the reality of this threat that helps to make the film’s final act - in which everything goes a bit ‘Cape Fear’ once Udo is acquitted and back on the street – into by far its most compelling section. Hathaway may not exactly be the most stylistically extravagant of filmmakers, but as Bianco waits, and waits, for Udo to make his move, the director wrangles the slow-burning suspense and apprehension of the scenario beautifully. There are looming, empty shadows, bead-of-sweat close-ups, nocturnal door creaks, passing headlights and lots and lots of clock-watching. Endangered innocents, helpless heroes and long, pregnant silences. Old tricks, but they work like a charm.

By the time our hero and villain finally square off, we’re deep into a psycho gangster dream world (and back on the studio lot), hanging tough in a Mafioso seafood joint after midnight whilst gunmen in a sedan with black window blinds lurk outside. Lugosi and Karloff meanwhile wish they could have come up with some jive as genuinely chilling as the threats Udo issues to Bianco whilst ironically acting out the part of his “big pal” through sneering, clenched teeth: “yeah, it’s all gonna be fun, fun, fun for us from now on. Just you, and me… and your wife … and your kids. Kids like to have fun.”

In the end, this superb build-up is slightly undermined by a muffed ending, in which a perfectly respectable downbeat / tragic conclusion is ruined by a last minute attempt to “fix” it with a closing voiceover narration that must have left the entire audience filing out into the lobby scratching their heads in confusion… but you’ve just got to learn to live with this stuff in old Hollywood crime pictures, I suppose. Here in the home video era, I’ll simply advise viewers to mute the sound for the final ten seconds, and everything should work out nicely.

At the risk of repeating myself, ‘Kiss of Death’ isn’t exactly what I'd deem definitive film noir, hampered as it is by plodding melodrama and some deeply square, self-satisfied moralising, but as a more straightforward crime / suspense movie, it does the business.

Tommy Udo at least has become something of a key gangster movie archetype (in a horrible instance of life imitating art, the notorious NYC mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo is reported to have used the character as an early role model), and the scenes involving Widmark crackle with a malign energy that makes the film essential viewing, irrespective of its flaws.

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Check out these great European poster designs:

Sitting Target (Douglas Hickox, 1972)

The pantheon of great ‘70s British crime films is, I suppose, I fairly limited one. Whereas Italy, France and Japan were cranking them out with a vengeance, codifying and exploiting every corner of their nations’ rich underworld mythologies, the UK never managed to get a comparable production line rolling, despite having all the requisite ingredients (a readymade hard-boiled aesthetic, an intimidating legacy of real-life hoods, enough industrial wasteland to host a million blood-thirsty showdowns) very much in place. With a film industry increasingly deprived of vital US funding and increasingly snooty in its approach to genre cinema, British crime cinema entered the dread wasteland of the ‘80s clutching a mere handful of carefully guarded classics alongside a scattering of misbegotten duds and money-sink bad ideas, and that’s yr lot really.

As such, good examples of the Brit-crime aesthetic are highly prized, which leads me to rejoice even more in my belated discovery of what turns out to be one of the best of the bunch – Douglas Hickox’ ‘Sitting Target’. Once again, I must here thank the proprietors of London’s Filmbar70 for bringing this one to my attention, their uncanny knack for screening incredible movies that had somehow slipped beneath my radar once again delivering the goods.

Not that I needed much encouragement to step out for a screening of ‘Sitting Target’. I mean – action-packed crime/revenge story? Oliver Reed? South London? 1972? Count me IN! Shooters! Car chases! Coppers in Morris Minors (possibly)! Edward Woodward (definitely)! This is gonna be amazing.

But you know that feeling when you approach a relatively little-known film and think, “well theoretically this sounds great, but I’d better keep my expectations low, because if it actually WAS that great, surely it would be hugely popular and acclaimed; given its continued obscurity, I suppose it will most likely be a missed opportunity or ill-starred fiasco of some kind”? Yes, I’m sure you know that feeling, even if your gut instincts don’t regularly include suffixes and semi-colons. And correspondingly, you’ll probably also be familiar the  sense of surprise and elation that follows when you watch a film like ‘Sitting Target’ said discover that yes, it actually IS as good as it sounds - perhaps even landing a dent or two on the rear bumper of ‘Get Carter’ in the great Brit-crime grind up the M4.

Ok, well, maybe not quite. I guess the plotting here is fairly contrived, the characters are pretty shallow (only really distinguished by the oomph the first-rate cast puts into them), and there are some goofy ‘action movie’ moments in the second half that come across as kinda silly, undercutting the prevailing mood of quasi-realism. But on first viewing such things don’t matter much, and on the whole I was verily blown away by just how solidly *good* ‘Sitting Target’ is. In the limited field of British crime, it’s one of the heavy-hitters for sure, going off with the kind of unpretentious, populist bang that’s rarely encountered in the staid world of mainstream British cinema (rated X solely due to its blood-curdling thuggery!), and basically providing one hell of a good time for anyone with a yen for tough crime flicks in general, and the murky underbelly of ‘70s Britain in particular.

Not that the film’s quality should come as that much of a surprise I suppose. Director Hickox came to ‘Sitting Target’ following a divisive adaptation of Joe Orton’s ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’, and went straight on to make the much-loved ‘Theatre of Blood’, taking the unpromising (from a mainstream POV at least) shell of a retirement-era Vincent Price bodycount flick and transforming it into one of the most perennially popular British-made horror movies of all time.* In their own way, both of these projects – precariously balanced between outrage and respectability – suggest that Hickox was perfectly placed to go to town on a smart, violent crime movie… and a hefty bank-roll from MGM probably didn’t hurt matters either.

Whilst I’ve never actually bothered to research the issue in any detail, my understanding is that it was in around ’72 or ’73 that the American studios started to pull the rug out from under their UK-based operations, thus precipitating the eternal crisis that has dogged the national film industry ever since. But assuming this was the case, you certainly wouldn’t know it from looking at Douglas Hickox’ CV. Both ‘..Target’ and ‘Theatre..’ were backed by MGM and for whatever reason, the director seems to have thrived on such productions, apparently pleasing the studio to the extent that he managed to spend the rest of the decade working on such high profile US/UK crossovers as the bizarre, John Wayne-starring Brit-crime caper ‘Brannigan’ (1975) and 1979’s belated sequel ‘Zulu Dawn’.

Anyway, point is, whilst ‘Sitting Target’ is not exactly lavishly budgeted by Hollywood standards, it clearly had more cash to throw around than your average British b-movie, and the bulk of it seems to have been invested wisely – in production design, technical expertise, casting, stunt-work, music… stuff that really matters, in other words.

Most importantly, ‘..Target’ plays like a film in which the cast and crew had the time to get things right - a rare virtue in genre cinema. Just like the sort of heist the characters presumably wish they could pull off, nearly every shot here seems flawlessly planned and executed. The cinematography (courtesy of Edward Scaife, whose career as DP ranges from ‘Night of the Demon’ to ‘The Dirty Dozen’) is plain superb, making somewhat experimental use of reflections on glass, super-impositions, deep focus and so forth, with some really effective night shooting too. The editing is tight as a story like this requires, and Hickox’s direction, though rarely ostentatious, oozes style, precisely the way a post-Point Blank/Get Carter crime movie should.

For my money, the film’s opening half hour – filmed largely in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, subbing for a non-specific English prison – is practically faultless, launching straight into what looks to be a brutal, existential crime yarn in the tradition of Jim Thompson or Jean-Pierre Melville. And what better vehicle for your brutal, existential needs than Oliver Reed, here looking more embittered and punch-drunk than ever, expressing more pent-up rage in a single flared nostril than most actors manage in a lifetime?

In fact we’ve barely even been introduced to jailbird Harry Lomart before he see him subjected to a harrowing spell in solitary confinement following a homicidal assault on his wife (Jill St. John). When she pops in at visiting hour to reluctantly inform Harry that she is seeing another man and wants a divorce, Lomart literally punches straight through the plastic communication grille, foaming at the mouth as he throttles her – an astonishing moment of violence that only an actor like Reed could render believably. Indeed, Lomart turns out to be such a perfect role for Reed that I can only assume the character was written as such, balancing a mixture of brooding, taciturn nihilism and relentless single-mindedness with outbursts of unhinged, hulk-like aggression, and just a hint of blubbing sentimentality behind the machismo… aside from the fact he has to adopt an East End accent in place of his usual husky RP tones (“I’m gonna get that toffee-nosed git one day..”), fans can be assured that this is full-force Reed, exactly the way we like it.

Hickox wastes little time in establishing the bind Lomart is in, setting out his inner turmoil and limited range of action with admirable cinematic efficiency, whilst Stanley Myers’ so-fucking-bad-ass-I-can-scarcely-believe-it psychotronic score adds tension-building pulse to proceedings**, as we head straight into a tour de force prison break sequence that is vicious and suspenseful enough to actually seem kinda convincing. Lomart and his best mate Birdy (Ian McShane) team up with a snooty Firm big-wig to make their escape (an excellent turn from the rarely-less-than-excellent Freddie Jones) , scaling walls, paying off and/or bludgeoning night-guards and beating a guard dog to death with a brick, culminating in a nail-biting bit of chasm-crossing grappling hook business that sees Reed swinging Tarzan-style toward the outer wall with seconds to spare (I really hope he did his own stunts).

At the risk of repeating myself, all of this is tautly directed, brilliantly performed, and by the time Ollie, Freddie and Lovejoy have made their getaway, swigging from a bottle of scotch in the back of a counterfeit US Army truck as it roars off into the night, I’m finding it hard to believe that a film this good can actually exist without tearing a black hole in the delicate fabric of British cinema.

Sadly, the remainder of ‘Sitting Target’ perhaps doesn’t *quite* live up to the promise of the opening prison segment. Somehow it feels as if the freedom of movement offered by the outside world invites the movie to take on some slack, loosen its belt a few notches. But even as the brooding Melville-ism is overtaken by a more commercially minded, action-packed approach to the genre, there’s still an absolute shit ton of stuff left to enjoy here, often enlivened by the same spirit of devil-may-care mayhem and street-level psychopathy that fuelled the contemporaneous Italian crime boom.

Once Birdy and Lomart hit London (the latter packing a high-end shooter and fixated on dead wife-shaped vengeance), some of the action set-pieces that transpire are simply ridiculous, but well-chosen locations, keen attention to detail and pure cinematic flash all do their bit to stop things ever going completely off the rails. For instance, a scene in which Reed scurries through a maze of washing lines at the base of a Clapham tower-block dodging a pair of motorcycle cops seems absolutely absurd on a practical level, but as a bravura cinematic sequence is works brilliantly, with disorientating montage editing and bright patterns of gauzy colour, accompanied by Myers’ churning collage of police radio, sirens and malfunctioning synth bleeps – a great example of low(ish) budget cinema’s power to take a pretty laughable concept and render it extraordinary.

It’s a particular treat to see the familiarly drab environs of just-over-the-river South-West London transformed into a viable backdrop for shoot-outs, double-crosses and pyrotechnics, as the sodden, concrete landscapes of Clapham Junction and Battersea begin to play an increasingly prominent role in proceedings. Using chaotic, vertiginous angles and jagged, asymmetrical lines, Hickox fills this overlooked corner of London with noir-ish signifiers of confinement and confusion, adapting them for a new era and a new city, as tower blocks, construction sites, snaking rail lines and the crumbling remnants of Victoriana combine to reflect Lomart’s tormented headspace; brutalist design meets brutalist behaviour, if you will.

In British films from the ‘50s and ‘60s, Battersea often seems to feature as a place where deviant toffs and shady characters from across the river in Chelsea keep their quiet little love-nests***, and indeed we see that tradition followed up in another great segment here, as Harry & Birdy crash a spectacularly garish/grotty swank-pad where a former underworld acquaintance (Frank Finley) is housing his current mistress (Jill Townsend). Although he’s not allotted much screen-time, Finley’s portrayal of crooked race-track mogul Marty Gold is one of my favourite things in the whole movie (“Christ, don’t you do nothing but wash your bastard self?” he yells up the stairs as he hears the bath running), and Townsend is very good too (probably the film’s strongest female presence, not that that’s saying much). The whole sequence oozes a wonderful, peculiarly British bad taste, from the pink bathtub and matching telephone to endless supplies of cheap scotch, ceiling mirrors, a sudden mania for elaborate mirror / reflection shots, and what appears to be a giant brandy glass full of goldfish in the living room… heavy Pete Walker vibes predominate, which is fine by me.

Like a thousand other 70s crime flicks, ‘Sitting Target’s conclusion decamps to a junk-strewn, disused railyard (directly opposite Battersea Power Station, if the editing is to be believed), matching up the splintered allegiances and collapsing plans of the story with a visual palette of twisted metal, shattered glass and rust-covered girders that’s pretty much obligatory for this kind of movie, but is captured with particular verve here. In an inspired move, Reed gets to screech around is some kind of bright red, soft-topped land-rover / dune buggy type thing – perhaps the perfect vehicular equivalent of the actor himself (assuming you discount the possibility of a pirate-hijacked Victorian dreadnaught) - and much fire, bloodshed and heavily sign-posted bathos ensues, leading us through a wholly satisfactory stock conclusion.

Overall, I think ‘Sitting Target’ is one of those films that works best as a purely visceral experience. As soon as you subject it to closer examination, significant flaws start piling up left & right. For one thing, former Bond girl and American interest Jill St John really doesn’t cut it as Lomart’s missus. Set adrift in a film in which the rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, her nervy, exaggerated mannerisms and wobbly trans-atlantic accent (like Reed’s cockney, it comes and goes) fail to ever quite convince, and the expository dialogue she feeds police detective Edward Woodward in their scene together feels clunky as hell.

Speaking of which, what the hell happened to Woodward’s character anyway? He has one big scene, introduced as if he’s going to be a significant player in the forthcoming drama, but then he disappears completely, only turning up again in the film’s final moments to glower through the flames. I get the feeling much of his screen-time might have ended up on the cutting room floor, and actually the film betrays numerous other symptoms of regrettable script-chopping shenanigans, reducing the story to a set of bare bones that perhaps stick out just a bit too clearly at times (particularly given that many of the best moments result from its assorted detours and local colour). Whilst I personally didn’t guess the finale’s Big Twist on first viewing, I’m sure that if I’d paused for five minutes midway through to examine the several gaping holes in the information the script had provided us with, the ‘shocking’ turn-around would have been rendered pretty bloody obvious – a conclusion more analytical viewers than I will likely reach without the aid of a ‘thinking break’.

But - this kinda stuff doesn’t really matter. It won’t even register on first viewing, what with all the great stuff that’s also being thrown at the screen. Even if it doesn’t quite manage to connect on quite the kind of gut-punch emotional level I demand of real top drawer crime films, this one is easily still, uh, top of the second drawer down, if you get me? A high-energy ninety minute rampage through the streets of Ted Heath’s England, full of flash cinematic business, powerhouse acting and unfeasible mad dog violence, it’s a real thrill to see a British tough-‘70s-crime contender that can step in the ring alongside ‘Gang War in Milan’ or ‘Yakuza Graveyard’, and here’s hoping there’s plenty more of the same out there somewhere awaiting my attention.

Bloody cinema, you bastards!

* Interestingly, ‘Sitting Target’ also shares several shooting locations with ‘Theatre of Blood’. One beautifully shot but entirely pointless scene has Reed wandering across the stage at the derelict Putney Hippodrome (site of many of Price’s depredations in ‘..Theatre’), and if I’m not mistaken, the final showdowns of both films take place in the same SW London railyard / car park type place.

**Sitting Target’s OST was reissued by Finders Keepers in 2007. Now out of print, but worth every penny if you can find a copy.

***Well, I’ve seen several films in which this was the case anyway. I don’t know whether it was a frequent enough feature of the era’s cinema to constitute a ‘thing’, but I’d like to think so.

FRANCO FILES: Barbed Wire Dolls (1975)

AKA:

‘Frauengefängnis’, ‘Jailhouse Wardress’, ‘Caged Women’, ‘El Reformatorio De Las Perdidas’, ‘Women's Penitentiary IV’.

Context:

Being a fan of a director like Jess Franco is all about learning to take the rough with the smooth, and at some point in this series we’ve got to acknowledge the fact that he made a whole pile of Women In Prison films over the course of his career, ranging from 1969’s surprisingly upmarket ‘99 Women’ to 1981’s unspeakably grimy ‘Sadomania’.

I know that the WIP genre has its fans, but, as you may have gathered from the tone of the preceding paragraph, I’m not really one of them. Probably best not dwell too much on my reasoning here, but let’s just say that more-so than their obvious legacy of cruelty and misogyny, I just find these films unspeakably dull – drab, joyless productions that offer few possibilities for visual or narrative excitement, like the slimy basement lurking beneath the grand ballrooms where all the more glamorous exploitation sub-genres go to party.

Obviously there are some noteworthy exceptions (Shunya Ito’s endlessly incredible ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ trilogy springs to mind), but by and large, I find these cheaply rendered tales of confinement and degradation to be a stone drag. So the $100,000 question is: can Jess Franco bring anything to the WIP party to make us sit up and take notice?

By way of an answer, let us turn to one of the earliest fruits of Franco’s long association with ubiquitous Swiss sleaze-baron Erwin C. Deitrich, and the third highest grossing film in Germany in 1975 according to Tombs & Tohill in ‘Immoral Tales’, ‘Frauengefängnis’ aka ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’.

Content:

Communal shower scenes are inexplicably absent, and there’s not a cat-fight to be seen, but aside from that this is WIP 101 really: beautiful Lina, sentenced to a lifetime behind bars for defending herself from a paternal rape attempt, finds herself condemned to a totally context-less island penitentiary ruled over by sadistic lesbian wardess Monica Swinn. Sharing a cell with a duo of underwear-shunning, mentally-damaged nymphomaniacs (Beni Cardoso and Peggy Markhoff), our heroine proceeds to run the inevitable gamut of electro-shock torment, rape, starvation, aphrodisiac injections, cowardly, lecherous doctors (euro-horror stalwart Paul Muller) and more rape, before an ill-conceived escape attempt leads to a desperate jungle pursuit, climaxing in… well you don’t think I’m going to spoil the ending of a grand drama like this, do you?

Kink:

Given that the many of the scenes in this film present the director with a visual palette of bare concrete walls, unmade beds and largely unclothed women, no prizes will be awarded for guessing where Jess’s zoom lens tends to linger. Although things remain softcore, restraint was entirely off the menu by the time Franco was working with Dietrich, meaning that viewers will be able to draw the leading ladies’ private parts from memory by the time they get to the end of this one.

Initially, most of the naked writhing is handled by Markhoff, but inevitably Lina soon gets in on the act too (I mean she’s got a reputation for this sorta thing to keep up, and hell with the fact her character’s supposed to be a naive innocent), and sitting through the film’s more dreary passages becomes easier with the knowledge that we’ll soon once more be able to enjoy the strangely soothing feeling of being smothered to death by ‘70s pussy. The assorted inter-personal sex scenes by contrast are somewhat less soothing, showcasing a teeth-grinding awkwardness more in keeping with the WIP genre as a whole, and personally I was never quite won over by the nazi-kitsch antics of Commandant Swinn and her decidedly improper hot-pants, but each to their own. 3/5

Creepitude:

With its sunny surroundings, sexy machine gun toting guards and improbable softcore seductions around every corner, I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that Jess Franco’s idea of a fascistic high security prison is less a relentless hell on earth and more like some strange holiday camp for habitual masochists.

In fact, the total unreality of the film’s world immediately undercuts any attempt to convincingly convey the brutality and horror of prison life, and if the obligatory scenes of squalid, high level nastiness (Lina wetting herself as electric shocks are administered on an iron bedspread, a naked Cardoso being starved and forced to beg for food) are indeed extremely distasteful, the disgust the viewer feels is less a gut reaction to the events depicted on-screen, and more a kind of soul-sapping, second-hand revulsion at the idea that we have somehow chosen to watch these listless, poorly staged atrocities in the name of entertainment. Grim.

It should probably be noted that the UK 18 rated version of the film I’m watching runs to 77 minutes of what IMDB claims is a potential 93, but given the strength and duration of what’s been left in, I can’t honestly imagine much of the missing footage was cut for reasons of explicitness (unless there’s a hardcore version out there somewhere, in which case god help us all). 1/5

Pulp Thrills:

I suppose if you were to consider the ‘70s WIP film as a valid pulp aesthetic in its own right, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ would be an absolute hoot, ticking pretty much all of the relevant boxes for full scale camp enjoyment. As outlined above though, that’s not really my preferred bowl of gruel, and I found precious little escapist fun here, in spite of the complete detachment from reality. 1/5

Altered States:

Well quite a lot of the film is out of focus, so there’s that.

A brief rape scene in the prison governor’s office has some strikingly good disorientating, baroque compositions, but this stands out as an exception, and on the whole the technique here is unashamedly slap-dash, with erratic focus errors, wobbly, improvised zooming and awkwardly cropped framing all suggestive of a film whose makers spent more time looking at the clock than the viewfinder.

In the extras included on this Anchor Bay DVD, the supremely weasel-like Mr Dietrich expresses his belief that the film’s technical shortcomings were not merely the result of laziness and directorial apathy, but a deliberate statement of cinematic primitivism that directly prefigured the innovations of the Dogme 95 movement. And, indulgent though I am toward Jess Franco’s erratic artistic whims, even I feel I must pause here to suggest that this mind-bogglingly self-important claim is, how you say? A load of bollocks.

Probably the weirdest moment in ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ is a creepy, vaseline-fogged incest flashback in which Franco makes an appearance as Lina’s father, both parties seemingly carrying out their movements at half speed in a baffling and rather laughable attempt to mimic the effect of slow motion. Well, you win some and you lose some I suppose – at least they were *trying* for something a bit different. 2/5

Sight-seeing:

Filmed entirely in Honduras, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ fits in nicely with the whole swathe of jungle-set films Franco made through the Dietrich era and into the early ‘80s (‘Doriana Gray’, ‘Sexy Sisters’, ‘Voodoo Passion’, ‘Diamonds of Kilimanjaro’, to name but a few), all of which feel like they could have been shot next door to each other, despite utilising a wide variety of ‘exotic’ (and no doubt affordable) locales.

Anyway, we get some jungle, a fairly impressive coastal fort, a few colonial looking houses. It’s ok I suppose, but not really much more eye-opening than the kind of terrain you’d see in one of those Filipino Vietnam movies. 2/5

Conclusion:

Y’know, in truth, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ isn’t really that bad. It isn’t that good either… in fact, who am I kidding, by any reasonable standard it’s bloody awful. But if nothing else, the performances given by Lina Romay and Beni Cardosso feel genuine, managing to connect on a vague, emotional level that helps us empathise with their characters’ hopeless plight to an extent that is rarely encountered in the ultra-cynical realm of the WIP film.

And maybe I’m just saying this because I’m a fan, but despite its numerous crimes against social and cinematic decency, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ doesn't leave one with the impression that Jess Franco is a bad man or a misogynist – more just a down-at-heel technician going through the contractually obligated motions, throwing in some personal touches as and when he can; a feeling that would sadly predominate through the majority of his subsequent collaborations with the Dietrich empire.