Brought to our screens by Carlo Ponti, a man who had lent his production muscle to “La Strada”, “Dr Zhivago” and “Blow Up” in preceding years, “Smashing Time” is an aptly named if somewhat less high-minded motion picture that follows the fortunes of Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave as Brenda and Yvonne, two naïve Bradford lasses who arrive in London in search of fame, fortune and scenes that a-swing like a pendulum do, but who swiftly find themselves lost in a wondrous dreamworld of high camp slapstick carnage, incorporating sleazy nightclubs, pop stardom, lecherous toffs, rampaging robots, ill-judged cat outfits, several marathon food fights and a Salvation Army preacher being run down by an out of control steamroller. Having moved to London under broadly similar circumstances myself a few years back, I can confirm that this is still a more or less accurate picture of life for the newcomer in our nation’s capital.
With the late, great George Melly at the typewriter, “Smashing Time” is naturally blessed with a screenplay rich in bawdy wit, gentle social satire and outright sauciness. It is also a film whose simple yet unbeatable premise and riotous visuals help to spark memories of such disparate masterpieces as Vera Chytilova’s “Daisies”, Louis Malle’s “Zazie Dans Le Metro”, “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls” and “The London Nobody Knows”. In a typical British cool malfunction however, all this primo good stuff finds itself filtered through the embarrassingly outdated and forelock-tugging, prole-patronisingly inept sub-Carry On ‘comedy’ stylings of (I’m assuming) TV director Desmond Davies.
Armed with a solid script, an amazing cast, international financing and shooting on location in one of the most uniquely exciting times/places of the 20th century, modern viewers will be ready and waiting for Davies to start socking it to us with some seriously swinging gear and freakin’ out the squares in the editing room, and so it is with frustration that we realise during the film’s opening scenes that he has his sights set more on orchestrating grimly unamusing prat-falls and crude visual gags than on revving up his camera and showing us the sights.
But you can’t keep a good film down, and by the halfway point even Davies’ artless direction has become a clod-hopping joy, with the graceless clowning only adding to the fun as new incidents and outrages pile up with dizzying speed, as Tushingham and Redgrave wreck gleeful havoc upon the decadent edifices of the permissive society in a veritable orgy of atavistic zaniness that not even the drabbest of directors could keep a lid on. And I shouldn’t really be so hard on Davies; his compositions and cutting do seem to get more appropriately lively and Richard Lester-like as the film progresses.
Writing about “Smashing Time” at length would seem a waste of time, so primal and obvious is its appeal. So in this screengrab heavy review, I’m instead going to attempt to whiz you through some of the film’s many, many highlights, with a bare minimum of commentary. Enjoy!
“So where are all these men we’re not supposed to talk to then?” – the girls arrive at St. Pancras station.
The glories of Camden Town just prior to the Summer of Love.
Yvonne soon heads off to Carnaby St…
….whilst Brenda stays behind and helps instigate this truly epic sauce bottle fight in a greasy spoon caf. It goes on for so long, accompanied by looped Benny Hill music, that I started to suspect my scheduled viewing had been replaced by some kind of highly specialist condiment porn.
“They come in ‘ere these little mods, asking for animal paws, then when yr back’s turned, a nice bit a’ skunk vanishes up their knickers” – yes, that’s this thrift shop proprietor’s actual line of dialogue. Make of it what you will.
All the same though, I wish that London still had shops that would do a young lady up like this for £1 plus exchange;
Ah, the lovely Rita. Whilst Redgrave’s character is an overbearing Miss Piggy type who bullies her friend throughout, it’s Tushingham’s performance that outright OWNS this movie.
The joys of flathunting – hasn’t changed much. “You can soak up in the bath while yer boyfriend makes you a cuppa tea”, says new flatmate Toni Palmer.
What the hell’s the story with these bloody Japanese lady paintings anyway? Forty-five years later and the city’s still rotten with them.
No time to ponder that though; robots are on the rampage at a private view gone wrong at the chic Jabberwocky gallery…
Methinks Rita looks a bit like Ann Shenton from Add N to X here.
Not for long though, as the girls get jobs in a Soho hostess club, necessitating another drastic costume change…
Ian Carmichael is a depraved aristocrat who wants to take Yvonne back to his city flat and have his wicked way with her!
Pussycat to the rescue:
Oh, what larks.
Brenda gets a job at the ‘Too Much’ boutique where she bumps into Michael York’s David Bailey stand-in photographer for the second time…
..while Yvonne ends up waitressing at the trendy Sweeney Todd pie restaurant, where she’s required to dress as a '19th Century Street Bawd';
“Sweetie, my girlfriend loves cream, but limits, hmm, limits?” – this guy only has one line, but it’s a knockout.
Seething resentment? A busy cream pie shop? How d’you reckon this one’s going to play out?
Bingo!
There is nothing I can possibly add to this.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Lloyd is great as pop svengali Mr. Tove – “So we’ll make a record – psychedelic but not turned on! Cellos, definitely.”
And so Yvonne’s pop career is launched, in grand Phil Spector style:
Both Tomorrow (of “My White Bicycle” fame) and cult psyche group Skip Bifferty get a mention in the credits, and bits of music from both of ‘em can be briefly heard during the film – I’m not sure which ensemble these guys belong to though.
Lynn Redgrave’s OTT performance reminds me somewhat of Divine in “Female Trouble” in places. I particularly like her insistence on wearing clothes with her name emblazoned on the front in huge letters after she becomes famous.
Brenda retaliates by hooking up with York again to become ‘The Face Of The ‘60s’;
And in keeping with Zany Counter-Cultural Caper conventions, things must naturally reach their conclusion at a gigantic party, held by Yvonne in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Post Office tower, or “London’s heaven-threatener, the scene with the built-in trip, the tower baby!”, as Tove puts it.
And I'll finish up there because I want to leave this movie with SOME surprises to offer anyone who’s inspired to seek it out. Sorry for the absurd number of screengrabs, but rest assured there’s plenty of great stuff in the movie that I haven’t photoed the hell out of, and the fact is, just about every frame of “Smashing Time” is packed with beautiful detail that deserves to be preserved for the ages. For as you will surely have realised by now, the film is a gas of cosmic proportions; a reckless outburst of happiness waiting to engulf anyone who appreciates the value of cinematic camp, ‘60s aesthetics, destruction-based slapstick, London history, and above all, Rita Tushingham. Praise be!
About halfway through the 2001 documentary “The Strange World of Mojica Marins”, Jose Mojica Marins gets around to discussing the making of his debut cinematic feature (and apparently the first horror film ever made in Brazil), the wonderfully titled “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul”. Marins admits that he was whacked out of brain on cheap amphetamines throughout the production, working non-stop for 48 or 72 hours at a stretch, using two crews who rotated around him in 12 hour shifts. “I fell into a hole in the set, and nearly broke my leg,” he recalls, “and everybody cheered – they thought I was going to have to stop. But I had them wheel me in on a stretcher, and I carried on filming! I showed them!” And that just about sums the guy up really.
As it happens, he became pretty successful as a filmmaker and media personality following this film, but it’s easy to suspect he would have carried on banging them out in exactly the same manner even if everyone in the world had collectively burst into tears and earnestly begged him to stop. In fact, I’m pretty sure he would have liked it even better that way, the big freak.
Regardless of your thoughts on the director’s wider work though (and to be honest, I feel like I’m taking my life in my hands every time I hit play on one of these DVDs after “Awakening of the Beast”), it’s hard not to recognise “At Midnight..” as a real accomplishment, not only in the way it transcends its zero budget, backyard origins through sheer strength of vision, but also as a singular cinematic expression of rampant egotism.
One thing that initially surprised me about “Midnight..” is that, despite his outlandish appearance, Marins’ Coffin Joe begins the film not as a villainous monster, but as a pretty regular guy. Ok, so the whole thing with the curly fingernails must freak people out a little, and he’s liable to fly off the handle at any moment and start ranting about his contempt for the church or somesuch, but aside from that he’s just a lad from this small town who’s made a career for himself as an undertaker. He’s got himself a pretty young wife, and even some buddies he likes to go out drinking with.
Not a bad state of affairs really, although you wouldn’t know it from the way he stomps about behind closed doors, glowering and cursing and demanding to eat meat on Holy Friday (a big no-no it seems). You see, Joe’s got a lot on his mind – namely, his own obsessively realised philosophy of materialistic Social Darwinism. Vehemently denying the existence of God to anyone who will listen, Joe believes that man can only become strong by throwing off the shackles of religion and adopting a strict survival-of-the-fittest approach to life, devoid of ‘weak’ sentimentality. He is also rather unhealthily obsessed with a continuation of bloodlines, and specifically his own, believing that a man’s only chance for immortality is through his children.
We the viewers gather all this pretty quickly because, well… boy, does he ever like to go on about it. It seems that if there’s one quality the intrepid film fan needs to cultivate to get through the Jose Marins filmography, it is an appreciation of the director/star’s penchant for ranting endlessly about whatever’s on his mind, proclaiming his views (or, more charitably, his character’s views) in bloodcurdling, fire & brimstone terms at every opportunity, shaking his fists at the skies and gesticulating like a deranged carnival barker as he does so. “What is blood?”, he demands of us in his opening monologue; “It is existence!” Uh… sure thing man. Personally, I find all this blather gets pretty tedious pretty quickly, but I do enjoy the exaggerated emphasis Marins puts on the Portuguese word for ‘hell’ (“EEEnfernooo!”), and waiting for it to pop up again usually keeps me awake through these outbursts.
Anyway, needless to say, it is these homespun philosophies of his that see Coffin Joe swiftly descending from the level of the merely odd to that of the aforementioned villainous monster. As the film opens, he is angry with his wife for her failure to bear him a son. And rather than just, say, giving it some time or considering fertility treatment (which I guess wouldn’t have made for much of a horror film), Joe decides instead to take more affirmative action and kill her – which he deems no great loss, because hey, his best friend Antonio’s fiancée looks like a bit of a goer, and might make a more suitable vessel for the hallowed Ze Do Caixao seed. Which obviously means he's going to have to kill Antonio too, and... well, you see where this is going.
Throughout the film, Joe uses his doctrines of self-preservation and violent egotism as justification for the brisk series of murders, mutilations and sexual assaults that this line of thinking sets him off on, and it is this crime spree, followed by the supernatural retribution he suffers after being cursed by a gypsy fortune-teller, that comprises the rest of the film’s narrative.
Visually, “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” is superbly realised, taking its inspiration less from the kind of formal gothic horror that was in the ascendant in Europe and North America at the time, and more from the most garish and theatrical end of the old Universal movies. I was particularly reminded of Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman as Coffin Joe stalked through fog-shrouded graveyards and treacherous forests, all obviously created to order on a ten foot wide set with a black backdrop and plenty of dry ice. These fake exteriors, along with the cramped and furniture-stuffed interior sets, help to give every shot in the movie a convincingly claustrophobic atmosphere. If not as overtly dreamlike or surreal as later Marins films, Coffin Joe still seems to spend "At Midnight.." trapped in a constrictive, funereal world of his own making, just as surely as the viewer in turn feels trapped within the crypt-like corridors of Marins' brain.
Although tame compared to the insane excess of his later work, this aesthetic set up gives Marins plenty of opportunity to indulge his trademark love of hair-raising and genuinely nightmarish imagery, with a few shocking incidents of graphic violence, and many moments in which deathless horror clichés – tarantulas, skulls, open graves, cackling hags etc. – are rendered with such ghoulish intensity that they become jarring and uncomfortable, as if we were seeing such things on screen for the first time. The film’s opening, with the aforementioned gypsy fortuneteller addressing the audience directly, warning them not to watch the movie if they “fear the wandering ghosts”, is a classic spookshow spine-tingler, worth the entry price alone, and the primitive ‘in-camera’ visual effects at the film’s climax are a joy – far weirder and more viscerally satisfying than more sophisticated techniques could ever have been.
What I found most unique about “Midnight..” though is the way that Marins – working entirely outside of any national film industry or pre-existing cinema tradition – manages to turn many of the conventions of the North American horror film upside down, reinventing the genre for a rural, working class, Catholic audience in Brazil, and apparently succeeding sufficiently well for them to welcome his film with open arms.
Seeing the image of Coffin Joe on a poster or video cover, most horror fans (or indeed innocent bystanders) would assume that he is going to be the supernatural antagonist in the film, in the tradition of Dracula, The Wolfman, Freddy Kruger or just about any other iconic monster. It is a surprise therefore to find that Joe is in fact a regular mortal and a staunch materialist to boot, and that his monstrous deeds arise purely from his own amoral and self-centered approach to life. And conversely, the supernatural in the world of the film, rather than being something frightening and strange, is presented as the benevolent belief system of the everyday people whom Joe terrorizes, closely aligned with the comfort and benign justice provided by the Catholic church.
In a North American horror story I suspect, the film’s memorable title would be something Coffin Joe himself might say, as he sets upon his victims with occult powers that seem an affront to their rational/scientific mindset. In Marins’ film however, the title is something that the gypsy fortuneteller – who in effect acts as the film’s moral compass – says TO Joe; a curse that brings the vengeance of the supernatural down upon him, to punish him for both his evil deeds and his lack of belief.
About the closest parallel to this I can come up with is the old fashioned use of literalist Christianity to fight evil in Hammer films (and not just the vampire and witchcraft ones either - “they charged me with assaulting a police officer… and acting against God”, Peter Cushing complains in ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’). But even Hammer always faced off ‘good’ supernatural forces (Christianity) against ‘bad’ (demons, monsters) – a recognisable idea to the Protestant/Western mindset, if an absurdly anachronistic one. It’s hard to think of another horror film from any country in which religion and the weirder forces of the occult are actually on the same side, helping to maintain the natural order by destroying a monster created by antisocial extremes of rational thinking.
But that is the situation which is made explicitly clear in “At Midnight..”, when Coffin Joe receives his comeuppance not only from the reanimated spirits of his victims (the “wandering ghosts”), but from also from a spectral parade of saints marching through the graveyard in a solemn funeral for Joe’s soon-to-be-departed spirit, and from a shining vision of a cross on a tomb wall, from which he recoils. Apparently Marins himself was once a steadfast Catholic, but it appears he underwent a crisis of faith shortly before he started making films. In the aforementioned documentary, he talks about arguing with priests, resenting their corruption and never going to church again. Clearly this loss of faith was still pretty fresh in his mind when he set about making “At Midnight..”, and both Coffin Joe’s somewhat subversive diatribes against religious belief, and the frenzied guilt trip of his supernatural fate, must have made for electrifying viewing for a Catholic audience.
Also unusual is the fact that Coffin Joe is the film’s protagonist. In conventional horror films where the villain is also central character, he will usually be a tragic, misguided figure with sympathetic qualities that help drive audience recognition (think again of The Wolfman, or of Vincent Price’s doomed aristocrats in all those Poe movies). When a villain is a TOTAL villain (the Dracula model), he is usually used as a shadowy threat, whilst other, more human, characters compete for our affections. Not so in “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” and its sequels – Coffin Joe is a miserable, misanthropic bastard with no redeeming features whatsoever, and yet he’s centre-screen throughout.
More than anything, this probably has to do with Jose Marins being a somewhat obsessive egotist who clearly felt that his performance and sound of his own voice were the central qualities of his film, to say nothing of the fact that he pretty much made the damn thing on his own with little in the way of a supportive cast or crew. And indeed, the film’s narrative suffers a great deal from this lack of anyone to identify with. The other characters are portrayed as little more than gormless cut-outs, and there’s only so long you can spend watching a hateful asshole going about his business before things start to get pretty tiresome, especially when he’s in the habit of pausing the action on a regular basis to lecture us on the finer points of his belief system.
Such flaws though are an integral part of the weird idiosyncrasies that make up Marins’ filmmaking, and to lose them would be to lose the intense imagery and visceral power that make “At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul” so unique - probably one of the best and most fascinating independent horror films made anywhere in the world in the early ‘60s.
Ah, Mayflower-Dell – a publisher who could always be relied upon to take a respectful and even-handed view of their subject matter.
I was planning to post this cover long before the recent catastrophe in Haiti (my brother handed the book to me when we were looking around a second hand bookshop in Wales over xmas, saying “here’s one you’ll like”), but now I figure that I might as well post it anyway, not in the name of bad taste, but because it leads us nicely to the topic at hand.
You may have already heard that some wrong-headed pundits in the United States (the usual assholes, essentially) have been coming out with some flat-out unbelievable bullshit regarding Haiti’s history as a land of demonic b-movie hoodoo, it’s subsequent attraction of divine retribution, complete with direct quotes from the devil(!), and all the rest of it.
There’s not much I can add to Stephen’s excellent post on the subject at Clean Living In Difficult Circumstances, except to suggest that if we are to take these insufferable clowns, and “Drums of the Dark Gods”, at face value, and assume that Haiti actually IS some crazy land where zombies go a-walking in the broad daylight and skeletal hands beat out licentious rhythms on the drums of sin…. well I’m sure the readership of this blog can agree that that would only give us all the more reason to pony up and help those guys out.
For the record, the book seems to be fairly dull, poorly written fare, lacking in voodoo fun but heavy on the kind of clichés and quasi-racist spiel you’d expect. Lots of ‘exotic stenches of evil’ and that sort of thing. Oh well. A prize to anyone who can guess what the opening line is.
Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books, along with his other assorted forays into non-linear and radical fiction in the 1960s and 70s, have long been one of my favourite bodies of work in modern literature, as both this blog’s title and current banner picture attest. Initially conceived as a public domain character and signifier of a new ‘instant genre’ by Moorcock and his fellow writers at New Worlds magazine in the mid ‘60s, and continuing in some form through to the late ‘80s, the Cornelius stories mix a recurring cast of ambiguous, larger than life characters into a time-shifting panorama of alternate world apocalyptic scenarios, usually derailing expectations of a conventional action/adventure narrative in favour of a jarring Ballard/Burroughs-inspired approach that sees oblique emotional battles and existential sagas of entropy and decay played out beneath disconnected vignettes full of dazzling, brutal and beautiful imagery that function like dream collages of the twentieth century’s most poignant nightmares, dreams and disasters.
Despite their proudly ‘difficult’ nature, I’ve always thought that the Cornelius stories carry vast cinematic potential. Whilst reading books like “The English Assassin” and “The Condition of Muzak” for the first time as a teenager, the climatic scenes of destruction and rich aesthetic details seemed to leap into full visual form in my mind, as if crying out for a visionary director to appear on the scene and make them a reality. Of course, to do these books justice, a potential film adaptation would require not only the aforementioned director, but also Hollywood blockbuster scale production values and enough creative freedom to allow for the almost total abandonment of a linear narrative – a combination of elements that seems unlikely to become a viable prospect for would-be producers and financial backers anytime soon, unfortunately.
So needless to say, “The Final Programme”, writer/director Robert Fuest’s 1973 adaptation of the first Cornelius novel, is NOT that film by any stretch of the imagination. But, as Jerry’s only cinematic outing to date, or simply as a goofy early 70s sci-fi/spy caper in its own right, I thought the film must surely be worthy of a viewing and a quick review at the very least.
Having sung Moorcock’s praises above, it is ironic that many of “The Final Programme”s failings as a Cornelius movie carry straight across from the source material. Whilst it’s still a good read, it’s safe to say that “The Final Programme” is probably the weakest entry in the series. Initially serialised in New Worlds in ’65-’66 and finally appearing as a novel in ’69, it seems to have been written before the elements that went on to define the later books had truly coalesced. For one thing, many of the series’ most memorable characters – Una Persson, Bishop Beesley and Shakey Mo Collier amongst them – are notable by their absence, having presumably not been created yet. More importantly though, “The Final Programme” is also the only one of the books to retain the vestiges of a traditional linear narrative, replete with elements suggesting the kind of rather less challenging counter-culture spy spoof that may have seemed daring in the mid-‘60s, but that must have quickly become dated as the decade’s greater excesses picked up speed. Clinging rather naively to a strain of pre-hippie utopianism that was stone dead by the dawn of the ‘70s, events in “The Final Programme” often seem to lack any real narrative drive as they ramble on toward a ‘dawning of the new age of man’ type conclusion that sees Jerry and the vampiric Miss Brunner united in an awkward alchemical marriage, an idea that seems almost embarrassing in light of the far more convincing sense of collapse, despair and near cosmic pessimism that Moorcock developed as he moved the series into the grimmer realities of the 1970s.
Of course, such missteps can be easily overlooked when they spring from the pen of an author as prolific and imaginative as Moorcock, especially in the context of a book that also introduces us to the doomed psychodrama of the Cornelius siblings for the first time, and that rewards us with perhaps only actual instances of Jerry fulfilling his original role as ‘the James Bond of the counter-culture’. But in a standalone motion picture, this sense of narrative drag, underpinned by a rather confused and simplistic philosophy, is more of a problem, especially as the aforementioned ‘70s comedown was already in full swing by the time the film entered production.
It seems that the idea of adapting the book came from Robert Fuest himself, and, riding high from the cross-over success of the two ‘Dr. Phibes’ movies, it seems he had enough muscle behind him to get the wheels rolling (if, admittedly, on a pretty miniscule budget). Somewhat inevitably, Fuest approaches the film as an excuse for what we might call a ‘Zany Countercultural Caper’ movie. I’m not sure whether or not any film critics have previously bothered to trace the history and conventions of the ‘Zany Countercultural Caper’ (ZCC, if you will), but it is a genre that’s long been recognised in the autonomous state of my head, so I’m gonna go with it, and possibly write a longer piece on the subject at a later date.
Although rarely seen as the province of high cinematic art, the ZCC aesthetic did manage to bring us its fair share of utterly strange and incredible films during the ‘60s, but by the turn of the ‘70s, entries in the genre were often floundering, carrying with them a residual sense of ‘bummed out-ness’ that undermined the light-hearted goofery on screen, as the films began to seem increasingly out of step with the fast-moving times and a cloud descended that not even the sight of Peter Sellers wearing a variety of amusing hats could quite lift. This feeling perhaps reached its nadir with Joseph McGrath’s Terry Southern adaptation ‘The Magic Christian’ in 1970, in which we were expected to guffaw at the oh-so-satirical sight of stuffy, bowler-hatted bankers fighting each other for a pile of money dropped into a vat of excrement, accompanied by the strains of Thunderclap Newman’s abysmal ‘Something in the Air’, right at the moment when the ACTUAL counterculture was fast disintegrating into drug addiction and political extremism.
And it is at the far end of this ‘bummed out’ after-life of the ZCC cycle that we find “The Final Programme”. Despite the fairly frivolous storyline and characterisations, an undertone of melancholy can be detected throughout the film, thanks in part to Norman Warwick’s decidedly autmunal cinematography (which at times pays a visit to the same drab, overcast ‘70s Britain seen in flicks like Jose Larraz’ “Vampyres”), and to the film’s obvious budgetary constraints.
As anyone who has seen “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” will know, Fuest was far from an untalented director, and, as with that film, his love of imaginative mise en scene is evident throughout “The Final Programme”, as is a healthy dose of the energy, dark humour and love of visual puzzles and gadgets that Fuest demonstrated in “..Phibes”. The overall effect is muted though by a painfully obvious lack of resources - reportedly, the film’s budget was less than £60,000, a meagre enough sum for folks inside the British film industry to start taking bets as to whether Fuest would be able to deliver the finished product at all. It’s to his credit that he did come through on such a pittance, and with a movie that doesn’t ENTIRELY fail as an eye-popping sci-fi extravaganza to boot, but nonetheless – compromises clearly had to be made at every turn.
It’s clear for instance that Fuest relished the idea of realising the interior of the Cornelius mansion – a purpose-built pop-art labyrinth which Jerry and his father’s associates have to infiltrate at one point, braving clouds of poison gas, chess/music based boor opening puzzles, a balloon-like maze of brightly coloured parachute fabric and weirdly dated modernist décor in the process. And whilst all this is handled as well as it possibly could be under the circumstances, the whole sequence is rendered somewhat unsatisfactory, possibly because the sets emerge resembling an up-market Dr. Who set, and the low-key visual approach can’t help but sit awkwardly with such an extravagant set-up.
Similarly, when we get a glimpse of Jerry’s London flat, it’s less of a space-age bachelor pad, and a lot more like the kind of gaff that someone – say, someone in the film industry - might ACTUALLY have lived in circa 1973, complete with well-trodden carpet, messy kitchen, Venetian blinds etc… which is kind of charming actually.
In fact, for me the most effective moments in “The Final Programme” came when the film embraces this underlying pessimism and drabness. I particularly enjoyed the wonderfully realised sequence in which Jerry drives his Rolls Royce through the woodlands bordering the Cornelius estate, sipping scotch and guzzling chocolate digestives from the glove box, for a secret rendezvous with the family retainer to outline his plans for ousting his brother Frank and rescuing his sister/lover Catherine.
Also great is the scene in which Jerry briefly visits Trafalgar Square and finds Nelson's Column buried under a mountain of abandoned cars – a brilliant and evocative image, even though aforementioned budgetary constraints only allow us a few quick shots of the scene (one of which can currently be seen at the top of this blog). And it’s also great to see a prologue and a few later inserts in which Jerry relocates to a suitably moody Indian temple location to consult with his guru/buddy, the mystic scientist Professor Hira.
Altogether less effective are the film’s various attempts at ZCC-worthy antics and set-pieces. For instance, Sterling Hayden makes a mystifying cameo as a Texan general, ranting and raving with a comedic fake beard in what seems to be a goof on his role in ‘Dr. Strangelove’. Pretty much totally pointless, although his scene does at least manage convey well the apocalyptic feeling of Moorcock’s books. Witness the moment when the General’s sultry, Iron-Cross wearing German secretary conveys a message received from the malfunctioning WWII radio set –
“You heard about Amsterdam?”
“Yeah – some mistake. 28 miles of white ash.”
“For once the Americans did something right.”
Moments like that can’t help but make me smile, in spite of the film’s flaws.
The movie’s other big ZCC set piece is a protracted sequence in which Jerry visits a sort of gigantic underground pinball arcade / pleasure palace, in which he arranges to buy some explosives off a mate of his, plays pinball, watches girls spinning around in giant hamster wheels and nuns playing slot machines, flirts with groupies and swaps mumbled dialogue with a whitefaced woman who is supposed to some sort of psychic. Then there’s the scene where Miss Brunner takes Jerry out to dinner, to a club where semi-nude combatants wrestle in a vat of milk and rude waitresses profer plasticated tubes of gourmet industrial waste-contaminated wine – ah, that crazy apocalyptic future. All of this seems an attempt to infuse the film with some decadent, Barbarella-via-Fellini visuals, but none of it really makes much of an impression, despite presumably using up a hefty chunk of Fuest's spending money.
Budgetary constraints also take their toll on the story’s requisite globe-trotting, and again, Fuest is definitely deserves the admiration of all tight-fisted filmmakers for shooting scenes that purport to take place in Kazakhstan, Albania, Lapland and India, all seemingly without leaving the British Isles. Much like Kubrick recreating the Vietnam war in the London suburbs for ‘Full Metal Jacket’, careful framing and cinematography means that the results are far from ridiculous, but the local colour that helps liven up a lot of more expensive spy yarns is… shall we say, somewhat lacking.
And so, with limited production values undermining “The Final Programme”s potential as a visual spectacle, it is up to the cast to carry the film, and by and large, I think they do a surprisingly good job. Almost inevitably, screen versions of much-loved fictional characters are going to disappoint, and when Jon Finch makes his first appearance as Jerry, he looks all KINDS of wrong. Far from the svelte dandy of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion mythos, Finch initially turns up in aviator shades, with curly locks, muttonchop sideburns and a rather too robust physique – more of a Jim Morrison type; a big hippy oaf. Despite this poor first impression, it is to Finch’s credit that he actually embodies the character pretty well, playing Jerry with the sort of arrogant swagger and studied charisma that befits a superhero born of the rather elitest British counterculture. And more to point, he’s got a terrific stride, a brooding, Oliver Reed style physicality, and looks as if he was born in the requisite frock coat and driving gloves.
Such a portrayal is great as far as it goes, with Fuest and Finch occasionally approaching the same brand of lapsed aristocratic profanity that Bruce Robinson captured so perfectly in ‘Withnail & I’. But as the film goes on, Jerry’s characterisation becomes increasingly heavy-handed and eventually flat-out irritating, as his feigned boredom and constant demands that people “piss off” start to grate, making him seem more like an irritable teenager than a jaded interdimensional assassin. Subtlety and unpredictability are vital components of any eccentric British hero, and both are squandered here as the scripting inexplicably takes a nosedive. Likewise, the first time Jerry’s fondness for ‘choccy biccies’ is referenced (in aforementioned driving scene) it’s an amusing idiosyncrasy, and a great image, but by the time Fuest has crammed a gag about it into every single scene, it simply becomes infuriating, as if he hasn’t got the imagination to pull any other traits out of this potentially fascinating character, leaving Jerry looking like a one dimensional bore on a par with a cat stroking villain or a one-armed man.
In fact, there seems to be an overall drop in quality in “The Final Programme”s second half, not just as scene set ups become sparser and less interesting as – I suspect – the production began to run short on time/money, but the genuine wit of the some of the earlier scenes is also traded in in favour of lame gags and visual puns, as exemplified when Jerry gets a glimpse of a brain preserved in a tank of water, and comes out with “evidently some kind of brain washing machine” – ouch. Pretty poor show from a guy who was effortlessly tossing out wry, Alfie-style one-liners not half an hour previously.
Also characteristic of the way in which the freedoms of post-60s anything goes ‘creativity’ can often lead to inconsistency and boredom is the way that Catherine Cornelius (as played by Sarah Douglas, who went on to become Ursa In Superman II!), the film’s natural love interest / leading lady, is unceremoniously dispatched halfway through the film by a stray needle-gun round as Jerry and Frank fight it out in her bedchamber, having only had a chance to utter a few lines. Obviously this is another element carried over from the novel, and it probably would have been considered a bit beyond the pale for the film to dwell on Catherine and Jerry’s incestuous relationship. But rather than seeming distraught at the death of his one true love, Jerry simply seems bored in subsequent scenes, as he drifts under the influence of Miss Brunner.
As an amoral and manipulative older woman who vampirically ‘consumes’ her lovers for sustenance, and who is portrayed in Moorcock’s stories as a pre-emptive Thatcherite attempting to control the fluctuations in world events via the logic of primitive computer programming, Miss Brunner seems an extremely unlikely choice for a substitute heroine, and a traditional Hollywood narrative would not have allowed her to fall into that role. But hey, this is the new era baby, we can do whatever we like (even if it’s dull and makes no sense).
In actual fact though, Jenny Runacre is a fine actress, and manages to make the character her own. Moorcock’s Miss Brunner is always a bit of a gargoyle – one of the only characters in the mythos who is generally outright ridiculed for what she represents – but Runacre’s performance brings a lot more subtlety to the role, creating an ambiguous but not entirely unsympathetic character, despite an initial lack of resemblance to the stern dominatrix of Moorcock’s books. The scene is which she ‘consumes’ her subservient assistant Jenny (Sandy Ratcliff) in a lesbian encounter on Jerry’s couch is extremely well done, and pretty daring for this kind of movie – definitely another highlight.
There are some welcome faces in the supporting cast too, and in particular the always wonderful Graham Crowden (whom you’ll recall from Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’ and ‘Britannia Hospital’) takes on quite a prominent role, breathing life into the otherwise quite dull rogue scientist Mr. Smiles. Patrick Magee puts in an appearance too, as a disgraced scientist who shelters the fleeing Frank in his Eastern European villa, although sadly he’s not given much time to rev up his patented scenery woodchipper before falling victim (off-screen, thankfully) to Miss Brunner’s lusts.
The film’s soundtrack has some interesting moments, although it’s not that prominent overall – there are some nice period psyche jams anyway, and a surprisingly pleasant bit of mellow trad jazz, courtesy of Gerry Mulligan, plays over the end credits, and…
Oh yes, the end. Well, I’m not going to give it away or anything, but let’s not beat around the bush: the ending of this film stinks. It is, in the parlance of our times, a total fail – the kind of thing where you just think “hang on, they must have viewed the daily rushes at some point, and somebody thought that was good?” So the less said about that the better, really.
So there we go – ‘The Final Programme’, ladies and gents. Not exactly a rip-roaring success of a motion picture, but far from a total wash-out, and certainly worth seeking out if you count yourself a fan of Moorcock’s books, or ‘70s British science fiction, or the aesthetics of pop art informed action/adventure movies in general. At it’s best moments, the film is truly excellent, and even outside of them it still has enough striking images, great performances and memorable scenes crammed into it to last a canny b-movie maker for years, and sometimes, out of the corner of your eye, you can just about see the vision of the New Worlds writers moulding itself into tangible form. Thus it’s a crying shame that these abundant strengths are so pulled down by the even more abundant failures and missed opportunities, particularly in the saggy and de-energised final act and the startlingly crap conclusion.
A noble effort from Mr. Fuest then, but the bottom line is that I’m still waiting for my mythical Terry Gilliam-meets-Jean-Luc Godard character to emerge from the shadows and make the REAL Jerry Cornelius movie. Better stock up some fire wood and ammunition then, cos entropy levels being as they are, it’s gonna be a long wait.
I found these scans this weekend on the Random Acts of Geekery blog, and, whilst I hopefully won't make a habit of stealing other people's content, I thought they were too cool not to share - original artwork by Jack Kirby, from the unpublished "Soul Love # 1".
It's interesting to note the extensive alterations to the central character's features in places - presumably to make her look 'more black' - but that aside I think this is an awesome piece of work - the dancing splash page in particular is just freakin' wonderful.
Some background of "Soul Love", and Kirby's work on the equally unlikely "True Divorce Cases", can be found here.
It seems that for the first time thus far in my weblogging career, I have been nominated by receive one of those chain blog award thingys – a ‘Kreativ Blogger’ award, courtesy of Hans, whose excellent blog Quiet Cool would be getting one right back from me, were it not for the fact that would start some sort of mutual appreciation feedback loop. Anyway, many thanks to Hans, and needless to say, his writing on film is really excellent and has helped bring more than a few previously unknown classics to my attention over the past few months. I particularly appreciate the way in which Quiet Cool recognises art and exploitation cinema as flipsides of the same coin and treats both with equal respect – an idea close to my heart, and one that I’d like to see more film fans/writers take on board.
Here’s the deal:
The Rules:
1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award. 2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog. 3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award. 4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting. 5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers. 6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate. 7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.
For the seven blogs I’m nominating, I should point out firstly that since the award has been given to this, my film/books/weirdness blog, rather than my music blog, I’ll thus highlight some of the blogs I follow in that general area, rather than the many great music blogs I also enjoy.
Thinking about it, I guess that many of my favourite non-music crit blogs – If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, Final Girl, A Journey Round My Skull, Monster Movie Music etc. – are already extremely popular, and probably don’t need any cheerleading from the likes of me. Also, much of my favourite film-writing is to be found on sites that, in addition to being equally well-known, aren’t blogs at all (crazy stuff, huh?). In particular, Keith Allison and his comrades at Teleport City are at least partially responsible for helping to revive my enthusiasm for cult film, as is Joseph A. Ziemba at the hopefully-soon-to-be-resurrected Bleeding Skull.
So, with that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to venture beyond the realm of movie blogs and give a shout out to some of the more unusual sites that may be found on the blogroll to your right – blogs that, in one way or another, have helped expand my horizons and regularly planted thoughts in my head that I otherwise would never have thunk. Here goes;
From the birth of the cocaine trade in the Chinatown underworld of Billy ‘Brilliant’ Chang, to the Ku-Klux Klan marching through Battersea, to the jazz age outrages of Elvira Blarney and ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, to Keith Moon’s memorable last words, “Another Nickel”s meticulously researched and copiously illustrated posting reveal astounding hidden histories lurking behind the façade of the city I call home that would make the most lurid pulp novelists go weak at the knees.
Ok, so I suppose this one is sort-of a music blog, in that most of the posts use music as a jumping off point, but in reading Beyond The Implode you’re liable to learn a lot less about music and a lot more about…. well, I’m not sure to be honest – this and that. But whatever Mr. Beyond The Implode sees fit to bang on about, he does so in a style that’s the very embodiment of the kind of effortlessly entertaining guttersnipe gonzo ranting that used to make the British music press the envy of the world, before it all went to shit and they decided to sack anyone who was any good. Or something like that. Anyway, the continued existence of this kind of discourse, roaming free unshackled from the niceties of word counts or editorial direction, makes me happy.
I like the anonymity of this video blog’s presentation, and the complete lack of commentary. It seems to be run by a guy called Joe, but beyond that…. just take a deep breath, press play, and enter another world. Visit every few days and repeat. Enough in the archives to keep you going for months, assuming the great Youtube purge of ’09 hasn’t claimed back too much ground.
For anyone with even the faintest interest in the aesthetics of book design, JRSM runs just about the best one-stop-shop for such things imaginable, with content ranging from praise for the genuinely good to scorn for the lazy and bad to general ‘?!?!?!’ for the unspeakable oddities of the Print-On-Demand sector, and plenty of nice vintage design and eye-boggling pulp covers to enjoy too – so fun for all the family really, assuming your family all like looking at books. Oh, and in addition to that, JRSM’s recent end of year book round up actually managed to pique my interest in some contemporary authors with whom I was unfamiliar – quite an achievement, as I’m usually pretty curmudgeonly when it comes to people trying to persuade me to read any literary fiction published after about 1976.
Dusty S. says of her blog: “COTTON CANDY TRUANT is a blog for fiends of quivering pop culture of the past, exploitation flicks, and deep fried fun.” What more can I add? It’s a rolling parade of awesome from an era when American pop culture was really something worth digging, and I dig it.
I only found this neat pulps/comix focused blog over the xmas holidays, so it’s a bit of a new one to me. In fact, I didn’t even notice until today that it’s the work of Mike Hunchback, of Norton Records fame! Sadly the blog is pretty sparsely updated, but we’re talking quality over quantity here, and every post is a veritable eye-gasm (if you will) of ‘60s underground comix, Weird Tales, EC horror titles, some totally killer sleaze and horror paperbacks and, well, All The Good Stuff basically. Clearly Mike Hunchback’s position as a man of impeccable aesthetic taste isn’t limited to just putting out all those killer Sonics and Hasil Adkins reissues.
Grant Balfour is a great and noble man, and such qualities are naturally reflected in his current venture, The Guild of Scientific Troubadours, delivering a steady diet of news flashes from the laboratories, observatories and research expeditions of the world, presented with an eye to the more humanistic and artistic aspects of science, not to mention a healthy love of weirdness, that even a science illiterate swine like me can appreciate. Distant galaxies! Strange and frightening sea creatures! Frozen Viking DNA! It’s all here. AND ALSO: songs – wonderful, dreamy psychedelic pop songs – inspired by it all, one a month, and commended to your attention.
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As to “Seven things about yourself that people might find interesting”? Are you kidding? Strip away my various cultural obsessions and hobby-horses and I’m probably as dull an individual as you could ever have the misfortune to meet, having spent my life thus far studiously avoiding the possibility of doing anything noteworthy.
I enjoyed Hans’ run-down of cinema-related life anecdotes though, and thinking about it, I’ve got some good ones, so I’ll try to put something together for a future post.
