Penguin Crime Time: Gun Before Butter (1963) & Because of the Cats (1963) by Nicolas Freeling

Cover design and photograph by Denise York.

Cover design by Denise York, photographs by Resnais.*

Like the Arthur Upfield book featured here back in April, the words and imagery on Nicolas Freeling’s trilogy of Amsterdam-set crime books have an intriguing sort of vibe about them that encourages me to actually sit down and try reading them (and the gratuitous Simenon comparisons in the back cover blurb certainly don’t hurt either). I will report back, perhaps.

Those with frighteningly long memories may recall that I posted the cover for ‘Because of the Cats’ a few years back, but it’s always worth seeing again right?

Hopefully one day I’ll find a copy of ‘Love in Amsterdam’ to complete the trilogy (I trust it has a matching cover design utilising nifty red and blue target motif), and all will be right with the world.

(Oh, and as a final note, I like the look of the supremely disreputable looking ‘Rembrandt’ club captured on the front of ‘Gun Before Butter’...)

* Not THAT Resnais, surely…? [Yes, that Resnais -- see comments. - Ed.]

The Songs of Herman Cohen: Konga (John Lemont, 1961)

Having started work on a series of posts earlier this year examining the British-made films of American ex-pat producer Herman Cohen, I confess I’ve found myself repeatedly staggering to a halt when it comes to writing about the very film that inspired me to undertake such a questionable venture in the first place. I’m sure those who have seen the film will know where I’m coming from when I say: what can you possibly write about ‘Konga’? If any motion picture justifies the text equivalent of a stunned, awkward silence, it is this one.

In common with many people who actually *like* genre films, I’m often reluctant to engage with the ubiquitous “so bad it’s good” mentality, not only because I have an increasingly low tolerance for the accompanying snark and the unpleasant attitudes of cultural superiority that underlie it, but also because, as has frequently been pointed out elsewhere, that formula as commonly used is a something of an oxymoron. More often than not, it is applied to films that are imaginative and entertaining on their own terms, and thus successful and to some degree ‘good’, with no qualifiers needed, whilst the vast majority of genuinely ‘bad’ films remain on the shelf unwatched, for the simple reason that they’re too dull to attract anyone’s interest. (To avoid a similar fate, I will save the rest of my diatribe on this subject for another day.)

Sometimes though, you get a film like ‘Konga’ that practically stands up and demands to be counted in the “so bad it’s good” category, meaning that writing about it without falling into the attendant critical pitfalls becomes a tough gig indeed. In fact, one of my first thoughts after viewing the film was something along the lines of “could this be the closest British cinema ever got to a ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’?” On further reflection though, I suspect that the circumstances that led to ‘Konga’s creation are very much the opposite of those that produced Ed Wood Jr’s magnum opus, even if the results are similar vis-a-vis their unprovoked assaults on normal cinematic protocol.

You see, whereas Wood’s best-known films become fascinating and engaging as a result of the poignant discrepancy between their creator’s earnest ambitions and the resources and skill needed to realise them, ‘Konga’ by contrast is a professionally funded (if admittedly low budget) movie put together by experienced film industry professionals. It is far too competent to qualify as a work of Uncinema, in spite of its frequent craziness, but it is rendered unintentionally extraordinary by vestige of the filmmakers’ sheer cynicism, laziness and disdain for their audience.




Case in point: all you need to know about ‘Konga’, really, is that it is a film in which a chimpanzee who is fed growth hormones grows up to be a gorilla, whilst a world-renowned biologist looks on without batting an eyelid.

That an incident of such obvious stupidity can have made it to the production stage without anyone pointing it out seems inconceivable, and thus we must look at the producers’ rationale for including it. The fact is, obtaining the use of both a trained chimp and a moth-eaten gorilla suit was probably easy enough for a low budget movie production. Trying to factor in either a real gorilla, or else some sort of giant-sized chimp costume, would have proven a lot more costly and difficult. So, they just went with the path of least resistance.

I don’t know anything about Herman Cohen’s manner or personality – for all I know, he might have been an erudite man of letters and a great humanitarian. But, solely from watching his movies, it’s hard not to imagine him, chomping on a cigar at this particular production meeting, saying; “For chrissakes, just shoot it already! Chimp, gorilla… the kids who go to these movies, they won’t give a FUCK.”

Well, I give a fuck, Mr. Cohen – in fact I’ve just spent the best part of half an hour pondering and writing about the whole chimp/gorilla issue, and I’m a busy man (ahem). But nonetheless, I’m not here to criticise. In fact, I’m really glad that things worked out the way they did. After all, if Cohen and his collaborators had just made a logical and carefully considered reworking of the old King Kong formula, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be talking about it here today. It is the sheer, couldn’t-give-a-fuck sloppiness that lies behind just about every creative decision in ‘Konga’ that helps make it such a deliriously joyful experience.

Things are frankly absurd right from the outset, as a fateful plane crash in the jungles of Uganda is represented by some plane flight footage that looks like it was probably filmed on a bit of scrubland near an amateur airstrip in the South-East of England, with canned “jungle noises” dubbed in over the top. Cue a post-production ‘explosion’ effect just as unconvincing as the kind of CGI nonsense you might see in a 21st century straight-to-cable movie (so I suppose ‘ Konga’ was ahead of it’s time in that respect at least?), and we cut straight to a radio studio, where an announcer informs us that a private plane bearing Professor Charles Decker, the famous English botanist, has been lost during “an exploratory trip to Africa”, leaving the Professor missing presumed dead. Cut again to a newspaper stand, as the seller barks, “read all about it, Professor Decker, crash survivor, returns after year in jungle”, and, having got that bit of initial set up out of the way in admirably concise fashion, we now meet the man himself, addressing the nation’s journalists (all three of them) upon his return to London airport.

The presence of Michael Gough in full ‘sombre & imperious’ horror movie mode bearing an inquisitive chimpanzee in his arms is a strange sight to take in, and if the ladies & gentlemen of the press are understandably a bit taken aback by the Professor’s new-found best buddy (“Konga has a name and a place in my heart.. we’ve grown rather attached to each other”), wait until they hear what else he has to say for himself.

“You mean what YOU CHOOSE TO CALL civilisation?” he immediately throw in when questioned about his delayed return to the developed world, and if that alone wasn’t enough to get your Mad Scientist Alert buzzing, his vague exclamations about “a new species of insectivorous plants”, “a revolutionary link between plant and animal life” and the necessity of “tearing up a lot of text books” should make things fairly clear.

“That little chimp is the first in a long line of kings, kings of the earth!”, Decker shortly thereafter announces to his all-purpose assistant, secretary, cook, housekeeper and lover Margaret (Margo Johns), and we can pretty much seal the deal.




Soon after that, Decker is busy tearing up the flowers Margaret has lovingly tended for him in the greenhouse, declaring that they have ‘outlived their usefulness’ (a phrase that Gough manages to turn into something of a catchphrase through the rest of the film) and will go on to serve as mulch for the crazy new carnivorous plants he’s brought back from Africa. By the time we find him inspecting the conspicuously gigantic cage he has ordered to be installed laboratory (not to mention shooting his pet cat in an outburst of fevered, egotistical rage), you might think that the rest of the movie pretty much writes itself, but, lazy and cynical though it may be, ‘Konga’ is nothing if not imaginative.

Where it could easily have just gone for another tedious “man finds a big ape, brings to city” story, the decision to mix things up with a Frankenstein mad scientist yarn, complete with a dose of horror/slasher business in the middle section and a decidedly queasy side order of poorly written domestic abuse drama, proves a heady brew indeed, and the screenplay that’s supposed to pull it all together (credited to Cohen and his regular co-writer Aben Kandel) offers up such a relentless tirade of barely thought out rubbish and questionably-inspired, cheap-jack buffoonery that even the most notorious b-movie trainwrecks that the USA produced in the previous decade start to look like sombre works of scientific speculation by comparison.



For a start, Decker’s man-eating plants are wonderful. Absolutely foul creations, they consist of veiny black phallic shafts with lolling red tongues that sway back and forth, chomping at anything that comes near them. Really the stuff of nightmares, and one pities the poor sods on the special effects crew who had to crouch underneath operating them through lengthy scenes of heated melodrama that take place in the greenhouse. (There are also carnivorous venus fly-traps, and what looks like a brood of killer avocados.)

Meanwhile, the aforementioned chimp / gorilla transformations are accomplished via the age-old horror movie means of “wobbly screen” effect plus some dodgy green-screen ‘enlargement’, but when Konga assumes his final (or at least, normal gorilla sized) form, I’m confident that all true connoisseurs of the man-in-a-suit gorilla will agree, the suit used in ‘Konga’ is truly a thing of beauty.

Fitted out with shag-carpet fur, permanently smirking facial features, wild, independently mobile eyes and ill-fitting hind-quarters that cause him to lumber about rather in the manner of a toddler who’s filled his nappy, Konga is an icon of everything that’s great about low budget monster movies, sharing the slightly unhinged charisma of classic-era Godzilla as he effortlessly steals every scene he’s in, providing a happy, grinning contrast to what seems like hours of Michael Gough doing his “biggest-bastard-in-the-world” thing.

Before moving on, I think it is worth quoting verbatim the following anonymous contribution to ‘Konga’s trivia page on IMDB:

“Producer Herman Cohen first considered using "ape" actor Steve Calvert, who had worked with Cohen on Bride of the Gorilla (1951) and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), but Calvert had retired from performing in his gorilla suit. Cohen turned to another renowned "ape" actor George Barrows, but only hired Barrows' gorilla costume, not Barrows himself. The actor Paul Stockman was instead chosen, based primarily on being a good fit for Barrows' costume. Barrows was annoyed when his gorilla costume was returned from England in bad shape.”

So now you know. As an aside, I’m absolutely thrilled by the suggestion in this factoid that not only was being a ‘gorilla suit performer’ a valid career choice in this era, but that said performers actually owned and maintained their own personal suits. There’s a lot of fun to be had for someone researching that whole milieu, I’m sure.

Having acquired his own hypnotically suggestible, English speaking gorilla in record time, and with a good forty minutes or so still to go before the film’s finale gets underway, Decker does what any self-respecting paranoid psychopath would do, ‘testing’ his creature’s ‘obedience’ by means of murdering those whom he perceives as standing in his way. This he accomplishes largely by means of driving his creepy and highly recognisable black van to the home of his victims, before letting Konga out of the back and ordering him to go in and KILL, KILL, KILL, whilst the doctor lurks about somewhere nearby.

A fool-proof method, I’m sure you’ll agree, and clearly far less likely to arouse suspicion than just doing away with his ‘enemies’ in some more conventional, non-ape related manner. But again: who’d bother watching that movie? The best of these murder sequences features George Pastell, Hammer’s go-to guy for non-specific ‘ethnic’ roles (you can see him portraying swarthy foreigners of one kind of another in ‘The Mummy’, ‘Stranglers of Bombay’ and ‘The Reptile’), as a turbaned rival botanist who ‘threatens’ Decker’s work. The moment when Konga reaches through a set of shelves to strangle him, perfectly on cue, before indulging in some spirited laboratory trashing, is a lot of fun.

Alongside all the monkey business and suggestive rubbery flora though, there is a slightly nastier, more modern edge at work in ‘Konga’ too. All of the Cohen/Gough movies feature this slightly disturbing undercurrent of dysfunctional relationships and emotional abuse (much of it generated by the sheer toxicity of Gough’s beastly characterisations), and ‘Konga’ is no exception.

Margaret is a pitiful creature, and Decker’s treatment of her is comically foul from the outset. “Now Margaret, you know there’s little room for sentiment in the life of a scientist,” he smugly explains to upon his glorious return from the jungle, and things go downhill from there as his barely disguised contempt for her crashes unhappily against her equally mysterious devotion to him.

Johns does her best to portray Margaret as a headstrong & intelligent woman, but the sexist dynamics of the script render it a wasted effort. Given Decker’s singular lack of charm, the curious question of why she puts up with his odious and patronising behaviour in the first place remains unaddressed, and even later in the film, when it becomes obvious that he has been busy sending a giant ape out to cold-bloodedly murder people, she initially keeps quiet and sticks with him. Why? Because the hateful, loveless psychopath has promised to MARRY her if things go well for him, and that would obviously be a happy ending, right?

Though poorly written and camply performed, these power games carry a real fingers-down-the-blackboard discomfort that belies ‘Konga’s status as a quirky throwback to ‘50s monster movies, instead prefiguring the more squalid and upsetting strain of domestic dysfunction that would begin to predominate in British horror during the ‘70s.

Like Hammer’s Baron Frankenstein (to whom he bears more than a passing resemblance), Dr. Decker’s affected scientific coldness certainly doesn’t preclude the potential for sexual lust, and, with Margaret having ‘outlived her usefulness’ in that regard, the second half of the film has him setting his sights on Sandra (Claire Gordon), the top student in his ‘college’ class, as the story’s unsavoury melodrama moves into full swing.

At this point, we might pause to question why a scientist of such high standing that his exploits are recounted on the front page of newspapers still has to hold down a job teaching beginners level biology to a class of disinterested yahoos what looks to be a local Further Education college. Perhaps there is some transatlantic confusion going on here regarding the use of the word ‘college’ as opposed to ‘university’, but that still doesn’t really account for the discrepancy between the Dean sitting in a wood-panelled study earnestly contemplating his institution’s historic reputation, whilst the student body appears to consist mainly of sub-normal 30 year olds who sit sniggering at school desks and leap up for break-time when the bell goes. (“Now as you can see, in addition to leaves and stems, these ferns have roots, which collect water”, Decker tells his class of full-time botany students at one point.)

In my review of Horrors of the Black Museum, we touched upon Cohen’s tendency to put ‘teen’ characters in his movies, “so that the teenagers can relate to someone in the film”, but if these jiving goofballs are his idea of audience-surrogates, the level of contempt he must have had for the people who paid to see his movies is simply staggering.

Anyway, as you might well imagine, Decker’s attempts to seduce Sandra are creepy beyond words. “This may not have anything to do with class work, but I can’t get over how you’ve grown” he says in his mock-gentle voice as he imparts tutory ‘wisdom’ to her after class, and it gets more cringeworthy from thereon in. Urgh.

Despite Sandra’s declaration that she intends to forsake boys to concentrate on her dedication to “chemistry and physics” (so… not biology or botany then?), Claire Gordon’s blank eyes and practiced smile radiate nothing but cue-card reading emptiness – really an astonishingly bad performance, and a reminder that some of acting here hasn’t much improved since ‘..Black Museum’, despite the presence of some stronger players in the supporting cast.

Of course, Decker is determined to have his way with the young hussy whether she likes it or not, even sending Konga out to take care of her equally witless boyfriend, and when he finally gets her alone in the greenhouse, the sight of Gough aggressively pawing this ‘teenager’ is as horribly distasteful as you’d imagine, even as the bizarre, phallic plants waving softly in the background push the whole scene into the realm of utter surrealism. (He also offers her “greater glory than any woman has ever known”, which seems a bit rich coming from a guy whose plan doesn’t seem to extend much beyond living in the jungle with an army of hypnotised gorillas.)

It is this grim scene that of course leads directly to ‘Konga’s inevitable and much celebrated transformation into a proper Big Monster Rampage, as the neglected Margaret finally snaps and shoots Konga up with a huge overdose of the growth formula, setting free and ordering him to KILL, KILL, KILL his sort-of creator.

Bad news for all concerned within the movie, but good news for us the viewing public, as we finally get to see our simian hero strut his stuff, free of Michael Gough’s overbearing influence.

Ar, yeah, that’s the stuff.

“Fantastic,” says the gent pictured below in a manner that delighted Island of Terror and delights me no less, “there’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose on the streets!”

As befits a man with such a clear grasp of the situation, he’s onto the ‘war office’ by ‘radio-telephone’ within seconds, and the official response to Konga’s brief reign of terror takes shape.

Before we finish, it’s only fair that we should throw in a quick word on director John Lemont. He had a pretty short career in film, but in addition to orchestrating the myriad absurdities of ‘Konga’, he also directed, produced and co-wrote two other films – ‘The Shakedown’ (1960) and ‘The Frightened City’ (1961) – neither of which I’ve seen, but they both look like really solid British crime films with great casts. I think we can safely say that these Cohen productions were never really “director’s films”, and, like poor old Arthur Crabtree on ‘..Black Museum’, one suspects that if questioned about ‘Konga’, Lemont’s reaction might well have been along the lines of “It was a cheque, for god’s sake! Why can’t you leave me alone?!”. ‘Konga’ was the last feature film he directed.

In Lemont’s favour, we can at least give credit where its due and say that ‘Konga’ does actually look a lot nicer than ‘..Black Museum’, with better compositions, a more workable aspect ratio, improved use of colour and, for the most part, more lively performances and better pacing. None of which is likely to do much to salve the director’s bruised dignity in the face of a movie in which a red-headed rag-doll is used as a stand-in for the lead actress as her character is waved around by a man in an ill-fitting gorilla suit, but I’m prepared to believe he did his best.

And as to Michael Gough, well let’s just say that if Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were both sometimes upset at the ribbing they got from the snooty British theatrical establishment for their participation in horror films, Gough must have had balls of steel to hold his head high in the West End whilst ‘Konga’ was in the cinemas.

Between his roles for Cohen and his occasional turns for Hammer, Gough was busy with enough TV work to keep ten lesser men in employment, and managed to keep his parallel career in theatre ticking over too, so I’ll assume he approached things in the right spirit and didn’t let the type-casting that resulted from roles like this one get to him too much. After all, if somebody trashes your work in films as worthwhile as ‘The Revenge of Frankenstein’ and ‘The Gorgon’, you’ve got a right to be annoyed. If they’re gonna give you hard time for hamming it up in ‘Konga’, there’s not much to do except smile and nod and point to the new car that’s driving you to rehearsals for that Ayckbourn play you’re doing next month.

Quite a leap from that to the unedifying fate our favourite love-to-hate thespian meets back in ‘Konga’, as an extremely unconvincing dummy with super-imposed Gough-head is thrown from a hairy paw onto the unforgiving cobbles of Westminster. With Margo Johns unceremoniously chucked into a fire, Claire Gordon apparently eaten by a venus flytrap and only a corpse-stiff Michael Gough pleading for his life with the big ape, there’s no ‘beauty killed the beast’ sting in the tail here – just a few more braces of machine-gun fire, and one of the most poignant closing images even seen in the canon of monkey-related cinema.

What lessons can be draw from this excursion to Herman Cohen’s hideously amoral universe, you may well ask. Well, if you’re going to kill someone in a fit of jealousy or paranoia, probably best just get on with it without getting any giant animals involved - that would seem to be the main one; a doctrine which was followed in word if not in spirit when the Cohen/Gough team reunited once more, to complete their inglorious trilogy with 1963’s singularly odd ‘Black Zoo’. We’ll be getting round to that one soon, so, once again: you have been warned.

Old New Worlds:June 1965.

Skipping over the much-ballyhooed 150th issue extravaganza (which I don’t have a copy of), our next visit to Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds brings us to June 1965, with a new, slightly more trendy cover design in full effect, showcasing an agreeably abstract illustration that could be seen as prefiguring the impending onrush of psychedelia, at a push.

Not only is the illustration uncredited, as per usual for NW, but it is also entirely unrepresentative of Barrington Bayley’s cover story – a mildly fascinating little tale that makes for a brave choice to open an issue of New Worlds with. “This story may not at first seem to be SF of the usual kind,” the editors advise, “but read on, read on…”. And indeed, partisans of NW’s brand of ‘thinking man’s SF’ might well have been perturbed when the story opens with the haughty commander of an Elfen galleon navigating the misty oceans of some fantasy kingdom with a crew of Troll galley-slaves. Personally, I was so surprised when skimming over the opening pages that I immediately took the editors’ advice and sat down to read the damn thing.

As the high fantasy type business rambles on, with the Elf Lord reflecting on the destruction of his race’s lands and the rebellion of their Troll slaves, and taunting his human captive with meals of soft and insubstantial Elf bread, I, like many contemporary readers presumably, found myself just waiting for the big reveal. Is Bayley gonna drop a few clues to hip us to this being Earth’s distant past, or far future? Or better yet, some kind of meta-textural type thing about a writer trapped in his own fiction, or a holo-deck style hallucination, maybe..? Which is it gonna be?

Those are indeed the general lines that the splendidly named Barrington B. is thinking along, but, very much in keeping with the rather nebulous style of new wave SF that New Worlds was already making its own by this point, his realisation of this wholly predictable genre-shift is neither as crude nor as linear as readers might have expected. I won’t give it all away here, but suffice to say, ‘The Ship of Disaster’ turns out to be an ambiguous and rather beautiful little story, a very well written piece that hints at a number of vast cosmic schemes without ever fully signing off on any of them, keeping its mysteries intact and instead letting us drift off into speculative reverie.

Perfect mid-‘60s New Worlds stuff in other words, although apparently not everyone at the time agreed. Whilst the lurch toward the experimental that would overtake the magazine in subsequent years is still in its early stages here, the letters pages in this issue still overflow with revolt.

“Aren’t we getting a little off the point?,” thunders the I-swear-I’m-not-making-this-up-worthy T.B. Pulvertaft, B.A., BChir of City Hospital, Gladstone Road, Exeter:

“Since you have taken over NEW WORLDS an atmosphere of obsessive PENGUIN NEW WRITING has become apparent. The fact that a story vibrates with obscure meaning and ends in a crystalline, nebulous web of obscurity in a social extrapolation of present day society does not make it ‘Good Literature’, however hard it may appear to be trying to. Your job is to please the customers (and don't throw up your increased circulation at me) and to do this you must provide an alternate reality in your plot-forms. And more than a touch of the old cliché ‘sense of wonder’, which must not be confused with the ‘sense of utter bewilderment’ you have succeeded in conjuring in me in recent issues.”

Interestingly (or otherwise), a quick google reveals that T.B. Pulvertaft actually wrote extensively on the subject of cardiology, so presumably when he gave his stated address as a hospital he did so as a member of staff rather than a long-term inmate of some kind. Anyway, in regard to his views on science fiction at least, I suspect he might have found a soul-mate in the form of Mrs. Elizabeth French Briscoe of Brighton Road, Dublin;

“My blood chilled when I read this month’s directive (NWSF 148) from Commissar Moorcock, wherein he proclaims a bleak austerity regime bereft of space stories,” 
[…]
“Mr Moorcock has said that he want to attract new readers. I suggest that the way to do so is to offer what SF alone can give: the space story. Tired, sophisticated old men with jaded palates (who have read all the SF in the world) may need to seek new titillations, but please remember the needs of simple but vivacious girls who have hitched their wagons to the stars.”

I don’t know whether we’ll be hearing more from Mrs. Briscoe in future, but I like the cut of her jib.

Meanwhile, “J.G. Ballard worries me,” confides Richard Gordon of Buckie, Banffshire, Scotland;

“So far as SF goes, he could easily be one of the finest writers yet he persists in retilling the same ground all over again. The Burning World – very well written and readable, yet it is little more than The Drowned World in reverse.”

An easy laugh, but also a good point from Mr. Gordon, I think. Even after all these years, his letter got me thinking about how Ballard – like that other NW fringe favourite William Burroughs – was mining a style so unusual and ahead of its time that he basically could spend much of his career endlessly reiterating the same themes, as sections of his audience continually struggled to get to grips with them.

Elsewhere in NW151’s editorial content, other controversies rage. For some reason, the writer Charles Platt pops up, contributing an unnecessarily vicious takedown of Brian Aldiss’s novel ‘Earthworks’, which he describes as “..a monotonous diary of a schizoid hypochondriac of dubious intelligence who is pushed around throughout the book, […] by Higher Powers, until finally discovering an Answer which was obvious to the reader two chapters previously.” Given the trenchant nature of this piece, one suspects a bit of a longer term Aldiss / Platt beef might be in progress, perhaps? (Go get him, Brian!)

In a longer than usual reviews column, the elusive James Colvin gives a hearty thumbs up to the aforementioned ‘The Drowned World’, Asimov’s ‘The Martian Way’ and several anthologies, as well as discussing his mixed feelings about the work of Poul Anderson. Possibly the most interesting thing here is his claim that Anderson’s ‘The Broken Sword’ is “..possibly the only ‘sword & sorcery’ novel I shall ever enjoy”. A pretty surprising admission from the future author of thousands of pages-worth of Elric and Hawkmoon chronicles, but… oh yeah, we’re talking about the tastes of “James Colvin” here, aren’t we?

Another surprising claim comes from Langdon Jones, who, under the heading ‘WHERE’S IT ALL GOING’, glumly states his belief that “..no classic novel that is purely science fictional in nature has been written in the sixties”. What give, Langdon? Even leaving aside writers like Ballard, whom he rules out in his next sentence as “not SF in the strictest sense”, off the top of my head (and with a little help from wikipedia) I still count Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ and ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’, Walter M. Miller’s ‘A Canticle For Liebowitz’, Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘The Sirens of Titan’ and Robert Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ as having been published between 1960 and 1965, to name but a few. So I really don’t know where Jones is coming from here to be honest, although who knows, perhaps his claim seemed more reasonable at the time of writing, prior to the universal canonisation of the aforementioned works? Another slightly underrated classic of the ’60-’65 period that I’d go to bat for any day is John Brunner’s ‘Telepathist’, and Jones offers an equally positive appraisal of that one later in his column too, so I’ll let him off the hook for now.

So, those are the main points of interest I took from NW151. After all that palaver, there scarcely seems much point in going over Moorcock’s wishy-washy ‘how do we define SF?’ editorial, or noting the rather mystifying science column (headline: ‘GAS LENSES DEVELOPED FOR COMMUNICATION BY LASER’), but I’ll leave you with a few intriguing notices from the small ads, and a brief mention of my disappointment that the character limit in blogger’s ‘Labels’ box won't allow me to start a new tag for “simple but vivacious girls who have hitched their wagons to the stars”.

This Month’s Zatoichi: Zatoichi The Fugitive (Tokuzô Tanaka, 1963)

For an itinerant blind man who has presumably spent the majority of his spare time achieving his uncanny mastery of swordsmanship, Zatoichi sure has a lot of hobbies, and carries a wide variety of talents up his sleeve. Whether in the field of massage, music or fishing, he’s already proven himself a force to be reckoned with, and now ‘Zatoichi the Fugitive’ begins with our man cheerfully entering a sumo wrestling championship, where of course he embarrasses the local contenders by beating all comers and walking away with the prize.

As usual, this gets our hero in hot water, and he only discovers that a yakuza gang who were rigging the matches have put a price on his head when an inexperienced young warrior turns up to try to kill him for the reward money. Regretful as ever at having been forced to slay this young lad, Ichi sets out to find the boy’s mother, so as to atone for his actions.

Turns out he needn’t have bothered: the dead warrior’s mum is a thick-skinned brood mother to the local yakuza, who takes her son’s demise in her stride (“he was always useless son”, “at least he died honourably..”, etc.), leaving Ichi temporarily hanging around in a town that, whilst it may seem bright and happy on the surface, is absolutely riddled with unsavoury underworld intrigue.

Even the owners of the inn in which Ichi is staying are a yakuza-affiliated family who used to run a profitable gambling joint, until their allegiance to a ‘banished’ former gang boss saw them knocked down from their lofty position, and forced instead to run a humble guesthouse as the father covertly plots his patron’s return. Further straining the already tense atmosphere, Otane (Masayo Banri), Ichi’s sweetheart from the first film, is staying there too. Turns out she didn’t marry a quiet carpenter after all - in fact her husband is Tanakura (Jutaro Hojo), a surly, ill-mannered ronin with a drinking problem and bit of a Mifune kinda look about him. Oh dear.

Trapped again in very much the same situation she was in when we encountered her in Tale of Zatoichi, poor Otane is deep into her doomed Enka singer victim trip by this stage. “Being a woman is a serious business”, she laments, “blowing in the wind from one man to another”. This being a chambara / ninkyo yakuza film, such expressions of doomed fatalism send just as clear a message regarding her likely fate as a soldier in a war film showing off pictures of his family back home before going into battle.

Though the plotting here is just as convoluted, digressive and downbeat as director Tanaka’s earlier New Tale of Zatoichi, ‘Zatoichi the Fugitive’ is nonetheless a far brighter and more visually appealing film than its predecessor, with dazzlingly bright blue skies and picturesque summer landscapes accompanying hearty scenes of rural summer festivals and associated merry-making. Chishi Makiura’s cinematography is, as usual, first class, and the whole movie captures the atmosphere of a sweltering June day perfectly. The title sequence alone – in which Ichi trudges into town, wiping his brow, before getting mixed up in the crowd at the sumo tournament – is assured and iconic filmmaking of the highest order, with Akira Ifukube ‘s music further adding to the sense that whatever happens here, we’re in safe hands.

Less satisfactorily, ‘..Fugitive’ is also the first of the Zatoichi films that fails to really reel us in with a big, emotional hook that directly affects our hero’s future, and, in the absence of such an anchor, things quickly become pretty vague and confusing as the various plot elements pile up, and I confess that I rather lost the thread of what was going on through much of the film’s middle section. Why for instance does Ichi, who is as yet not formally involved in the local gangs’ disputes, choose to march into the gang bosses’ big pow-wow and make a scene, right after Otane’s surly samurai husband has just done the same? Well, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day, so perhaps it’s best just to go with the flow and enjoy Katsu’s characteristic grand-standing, regardless of the narrative purpose it’s supposed to serve. (The skit he pulls off here with a dice and a flask of sake is a hoot – one of the series' best swordplay stunts to date.)

Amongst other interlinked diversions, Ichi spends a lot of time here looking after Boss Sakichi, a gormless youngster who has been forced against his will into gang leadership, helping the craven youth both his yakuza business and his love-life, and in the process fighting an initial duel with the glowering Tanakura – a hair-raising skirmish that sees the samurai actually succeeding in landing a blow on Ichi, cutting his cheek; a shocking event, given our hero’s usual invincibility, and a sign that he has found another worthy adversary.

Meanwhile, Onobu (Miwa Takada), the inn-keeper's daughter and subject of Sakichi’s affections, takes Ichi to the location of her family’s old gambling house – a beautiful river-side ruin, apparently shot on a genuine location, that goes on to provide a memorable setting for the film’s closing battle.
And speaking of which, well, let’s put it this way: if the first hour or so of ‘..Fugitive’ seems like pretty standard Zatoichi business, make sure you stay tuned for the finale, because it’s a real doozy - probably the most astonishing (and violent) extended sequence we’ve seen in the series thus far.

A frantic and chaotic confrontation, with many volatile elements in play, this showdown begins with Ichi cornered in the ruined house along with the craven child-boss Sakichi, the furious Onobu, and the kidnapped Otane, whilst big, bad boss Toru Abe’s swordsmen, including a sniper with a rifle, mass outside, and Otane’s vengeful samurai husband lurks in the sand dunes, determined to have another crack at taking down the legendary Zatoichi.

This tense siege culminates in the samurai’s shocking slaying of his wife Otane as she begs him not to go after Ichi – a horribly cruel move aimed solely at drawing Ichi out from his hiding place, a goal in which it succeeds admirably. Upon being informed of what has happened to the woman he once loved, Ichi totally loses his shit in a manner we have never before witnessed up to this point, ploughing into the assembled yakuza like a whirling dervish, killing dozens of men and leaving the landscape scattered with corpses in a frenzied, cathartic rampage.

When he eventually reaches Tanakura, the two men’s final battle becomes a real gritted teeth business, the filmmakers milking the tension for all it’s worth, as the combatants are convincingly presented as an even match. Anyone looking for a clear demonstration of the extent to which duels in samurai films influenced the equivalent scenes in Spaghetti Westerns will find all the evidence they need here. For a moment, when Ichi is pushed to the ground, his sword broken, it even looks like he might be a goner. Of course, he isn’t, but the fact the film can make us think that, even for one gasping moment, is quite an achievement.

In his dying breaths, the cruel samurai bad-mouths Otane, saying that it was her idea to set a trap for Ichi and claim the bounty on his head, trying to besmirch Ichi’s memory of her forever. Are his words truth or lies? With both parties dead, we will never know, but the sentimental Zatoichi is buying none of it. “Otane was a beautiful person!”, he shouts at his opponent’s corpse before walking away.

After this exceptionally grim yet fiendishly gripping finale, ‘Zatoichi The Fugitive’ ends, rather incongruously, with a cheesy, upbeat closing scene that sees our hero bidding farewell to the survivors of the conflict, placing Onobu’s hand in Sakichi’s and wishing the couple a happy future (the young boss’s craven treachery apparently already forgotten), before he makes his usual exit, this time laughing heartily, and even performing a merry folk dance as he skips off happily down the road.

A strange ending, but perhaps one reflecting the fact that, in spite of the cruel and unnecessary death of a woman he loved and his ensuing instigation of a crazed massacre, this film has seen our hero relatively unscathed by the kind of emotional apocalypse that the scriptwriters put him through in previous instalments. Well, either that or he’s just getting used to it I suppose. Whatever the case, he was actually allowed a surprisingly long time to catch his breath before ‘Zatoichi on the Road’ hit cinemas over a year later, in October 1964.

Deathblog: Norifumi Suzuki (1933 – 2014)

“But entertainment, see... if you look back at its history in Japan, it's been anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, since the Edo Period. That's precisely what thrills the audience. You've got to have that element somewhere. The reason why the general public seeks out stories of revolution is because they're searching for some kind of catharsis. They're looking for an escape from oppression.

Of course, it was different with Shochiku audiences. But with us, Toei audiences, they wanted anti-authoritarian movies, no question. That was a given. Because the reason why I feel so strongly about these films, about mass entertainment, is because the real world is no fun for us... and I want to toss a rock at authority. But listen, my films aren't exactly masterpieces... half the time, they're nothing but pure fun. Amusement!”

Some sad news reached me on the trans-continental grapevine this weekend regarding the passing of a director who I think it’s safe to say is one of the heroes of this blog (not to mention the uncontested world champion of making films with wacky sub-titles), the one and only Norifumi Suzuki.

(N.B. - Though his name is sometimes romanised as ‘Noribumi’, which I suspect to be more correct, I’ll go with ‘Norifumi’ in this post, just to remain consistent with previous discussions of him on this blog.)

Writing a post about Norifumi the person is difficult, because whilst I have been consistently fascinated (as well as entertained, astounded and occasionally sickened) by his films, I still know almost nothing at all about the man behind them. Whilst some of his films have definitely picked up a bit of a reputation as ‘cult classics’ in the West, his name remains relatively little known, and, to my knowledge, no one has ever really taken the time to translate an interview with him into English or undertake any critical or biographical writing about him, meaning that, personality-wise, he remains a complete unknown.

Given this dearth of information, you can imagine my surprise and frustration when I wandered into a chain bookstore in Tokyo when I was over there in January, and discovered that Japanese speakers can pick up the guy’s goddamn autobiography, which was proudly displayed amongst the top-selling items in the Cinema section. One of many occasions during my visits to Japan when I could almost weep at my pathetic monolingual status.

Anyway, with such resources remaining unavailable to me, my sole source of Norifumi knowledge remains an online translation of a fourteen minute youtube interview, which I found here. Thankfully, it’s pretty concise and revealing sorta stuff, so quotes from the translation will be used at the beginning and end of this post. That aside though, we’ll have to build a picture of the guy solely through his movies - which suits me, because I always seem to have a lot to say about them.

My own introduction to the ways of Norifumi Suzuki actually came quite a while ago, before I’d really started to develop much of an interest in weird cinema, when, inspired by a highly misleading blurb in our local art cinema’s monthly listings which presented the film as a kind of wham bam, must-see Grindhouse-style action spectacular, a friend and I attended a one-off screening of 1974’s ‘School of the Holy Beast’. Bad move. Largely unschooled in the ways of global exploitation cinema, never mind the particularly savage Japanese iterations thereof, we emerged pale, quivering and speechless from this sordid epic of Sadean, pink eiga-style nunsploitation, causing a mutual friend to greet us with words to the effect of “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to you guys?”

Whilst I have subsequently made a full recovery from the trauma of this screening (well, if you can take the existence of this blog as evidence of recovery, at least), my poor friend remains a little scarred to this day, and is still extremely reluctant to commit to a viewing of any film I’ve recommended, lest the terrible nightmare of sadistic Japanese nun porn begin again. (An understandable concern, to be honest.)

The irony here is though, if the cinema had instead chosen to show pretty much any other example of the fantastic run of films Suzuki made in the first half of the ‘70s, well, I guess we might still have been a bit unnerved by some of the sexual content, but basically I think we’d have got on-board with it and had a blast. I’ve written before here about the spirit of no-holds-barred craziness that seemed to characterise the output of Toei studios in the early ‘70s, and, more than any of their other directors, it was Norifumi-san who really made this style his own.

It is interesting to note though that whilst his films in this era seem to embody an “I couldn’t give a FUCK” spirit that suggests the presence of a speed-huffing, cop-hating teenager behind the camera, Suzuki was actually a seasoned industry professional by the time he initiated the Sukeban/Girl Boss series in 1971, and it is this underlying technical proficiency that keeps his work engaging even in its stupidest and most ragged moments.

What little biographical info is available to me reveals that Suzuki entered the film industry after dropping out of Kyoto’s prestigious Ritsumeikan University in 1956, joining Toei’s Kyoto division shortly thereafter, and working as an assistant director for a few years, until he moved up to scripting and directing in the mid-‘60s. He first made a big impact (as far as I know?) when he wrote the script for 1968’s ‘Red Peony Gambler’, a vehicle for his niece Junko Fuji, which proved successful enough to generate a total of eight sequels, most of them either scripted or supervised by Suzuki. He also directed the second film in the series (ranked as one of the best entries by Chris D’s Gun & Sword), and helmed two spin-offs starring a popular supporting character from the series, one of which bears the alluring translated title ‘Silk Hat Boss: The Short-Moustached Bear’.

I’ve yet to dig into the ‘Red Peony Gambler’ films (I have the first two buried somewhere in the ‘to watch’ pile), but from what I’ve read, they are often seen as breaking new ground in regard to allowing their female heroine to single-handedly hold her own in action sequences and sword fights, and have been singled out by several writers as a key influence on the veritable explosion of female action films and ‘pinky violence’ exploiters that followed over the next few years.

Viewed in hindsight after several years of watching every example of the form that I can get my hands on (I have no regrets.. well, maybe one or two, but let’s move on..), it’s easy to see the development of the Sukeban/Pinky Violence sub-genre as a bit of an arms race when it comes to the inclusion of sleaze and violence. Nikkatsu’s ‘Stray Cat Rock’ films, excellent and hard-hitting though the best entries may be, were relatively restrained in this regard, initially pitched more as youth / rock music films, and thus Toei’s competing ‘Delinquent Girl Boss’ series starring Reiko Oshida upped the ante, with a greater emphasis on organised crime and revenge-orientated action. These in turn were rendered thoroughly mild in comparison to the successor series Toei cooked up to replace them, and it is here that we meet Norifumi-san again, as he begins the astonishing run of films that would really put him on the map for fans of insane cinema with the staggering outburst of high octane deviancy that is Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack (1971).

As I’ve written extensively about that film before, I won’t repeat myself, but will simply say that if you’re unfamiliar with these ‘Girl Boss’ movies then, brace yourself, because they’re quite an experience. Suzuki directed three sequels to ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’, all presumably thrown together at great speed, as very much befits his guerrilla film-making style: ‘Queen Bee’s Challenge’, ‘Girl Boss Guerrilla’ (both 1972) and the succinctly titled ‘Sukeban’ (aka ‘Girl Boss: Revenge’, 1973). All of these feature incredible moments and are well worth tracking down if you liked the first one, but their habit of slavishly reiterating the same formula and plot elements time after time means that the law of diminishing returns inevitably comes into play, and by the end of the fourth film, I think it was high time for the director to pull down the shutters and move on.

One of the most distinctive elements of the ‘Girl Boss’ films is their capacity to pull off jarring shifts in tone, as each follows a similar pattern of opening with half an hour or so of light-hearted action and bawdy sex comedy antics, before taking a darker turn for a middle section of yakuza-instigated violence and sexual humiliation, then pulling things together for a surprisingly serious final act that often takes in moments of genuine character development and emotional catharsis – a combination of conflicting elements that went on to define the uneasy ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ approach to the portrayal of women that underpins all of Suzuki’s best films.

In parallel with the Sukeban films, Suzuki also directed a number of period-set sex films for Toei (including ‘The Lustful Shogun and His 21 Concubines’ and ‘Tokugawa Sex Ban: Lustful Lord’, both 1972), and these two threads of his work came together (so to speak) in 1973 to create what is arguably the director’s masterpiece, and probably one of the greatest exploitation films ever made (IMHO), ‘Ocho: Tale of a Rebellious Elder Sister’, better known in the West under the wholly appropriate title Sex & Fury.

Whether planned as a blood & boobs enhanced update of the ‘Red Peony Gambler’ formula, or as a middle-finger aimed at Toho’s ‘Lady Snowblood’ films (both speculation on my part), there is little doubt that ‘Sex & Fury’ is simply fucking brilliant, succeeding on every level that a film like this could conceivably aim at. From the moment Reiko Ike leaps naked from her bathtub to bloodily slaughter an army of yakuza, your jaw will hit the floor, and will likely remain there through most of the running time, as a positively epic array of libidinous mayhem unfolds, all of it realised in a vibrant and confident, pop-art infused cinematic style that matches and perhaps even surpasses that of subversive Japanese pop-cinema godhead Seijun Suzuki, whilst at the same time, a deep and conflicted dialogue about the nature of Japan’s place in the modern world sizzles away in the background. Just astonishing.

And, rounding out Norifumi’s phenomenally busy schedule during these years, we find yet another utterly raging series of transgressive and/or despicable bad girl focussed movies: the ‘Terrifying Girls’ High School’ series. Actually, our man only directed the first two of these four films, and thus far I’ve only managed to find one of them in sub-titled form, but boy is it a winner. Along with ‘Sex & Fury’, Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom gets my vote for Suzuki’s best film, a cranked up chronicle of blood-curdling depravity, delinquent sisterhood and alternate world WIP weirdness that takes the anti-authoritarian streak that was bubbling under in the director’s earlier films and explodes it into a hellish howl in the face of official corruption, unthinking nationalism and societal conformity, culminating in a full-scale riot that plays out like Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’ as reimagined by Koji Wakamatsu, complete with a burning Japanese flag and riot police being beaten down by mini-skirted sukeban warriors.

Another theme that seems to run deeply through all the Norifumi Suzuki films I’ve seen is the mockery and general subversion of religious imagery, and that of Christianity in particular. I don’t know whether or not Suzuki was raised a Christian, but the fascination/repulsion with such imagery that he seems to crowbar into just about all of his films would certainly suggest as much, even as the disrespectful treatment frequently dished out to representatives of Buddhism and Shinto signposts a wider problem with organised religion in general. The ‘Girl Boss’ films overflow with hypocritical priests of all persuasions being blackmailed and humiliated, and both ‘Sex & Fury’ and ‘The Great Chase’ (1975) feature their heroines squaring off against corrupt, knife-wielding nuns. Even when the storyline doesn’t allow for any explicit reiteration of this theme, Suzuki, like Ken Russell, always seems to find room for this personal bugbear of his: in ‘Lynch Law Classroom’, Miki Sugimoto’s character is “the boss with the cross”, whilst the best sequence in the otherwise religion-free ‘Girl Boss: Revenge’ finds Reiko Ike attacking a yakuza boss with a crucifix-shaped flick-knife.

This all leads on of course to discussing ‘School of the Holy Beast’, perhaps Suzuki’s best known film for many in the West, although to be honest, I don’t have much to say about it right now, simply because I haven’t seen it since that aforementioned cinema screening all those years ago, and I don’t remember much about it beyond an all-pervasive feeling of sado-masochismic confinement and a strong blue & red colour scheme. Neither ‘nunsploitation’ or ‘women in chains’ movies are really my thing, so I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the idea of revisiting it, although I have a DVD-rip on hand somewhere that I’ll probably get around to at some point.

In the mid-‘70s, as the productivity of the Japanese popular film industry plummeted, Suzuki played a role in Toei’s post-‘Streetfighter’ shift toward making martial arts & pure action films aimed at an international market, providing characteristically barmy scripts for Sister Streetfighter (1974) and the surely-that-title-can’t-be-literal? Sonny Chiba vehicle ‘Karate Bullfighter’ (1977).

In 1975, he moved a little bit closer to the mainstream with ‘The Great Chase’, a ludicrous action-fest in which ‘Sister Streetfighter’ star Etsuko Shihomi plays a champion racing driver who is also a master-of-disguise secret agent on the trail of an international drug gang. I actually watched this one a few weeks ago, and whilst I think it is categorically impossible for a film with that plotline to fail to be a whole lot of fun, somehow it never quite gets it together to become as great as it rightfully should be. It still features a few outstanding moments of full-on Norifumi craziness that I won’t spoil for you here, and rips along at the director’s usual breakneck pace, but at the same time, the standard of his filmmaking seems to have slipped a lot in comparison to the masterpieces of just a couple of years earlier, and audience interest and suspense frequently evaporates into a mass of “y’know, this shit just makes no sense whatsoever”-style sloppiness. A B+ movie where it should have been an A+, if you get my drift, which is unfortunate for Shihomi, because she is AWESOME in this, and really deserved to be a bigger  international star, if only she’d got the breaks.

In the second half of the decade, Suzuki’s energies were largely ploughed into another of his creations, the Torakku Yarō (rough translation: ‘Truck Rascals’) series of comedies, which proved one of Toei’s most lucrative hits during this difficult period. More mainstream that anything else the director had done up to this point, these movies star yakuza film icon Bunta Sugawara and comedian Shinichiro Sawai as a pair of roughneck dudes travelling around Japan in garishly decorated articulated trucks. I’m not really sure what else happens, but one suspects that ‘hilarity’ probably ensues, with the kind of puerile antics seen in the first halves of the Sukeban movies perhaps taking precedence. Norifumi directed ten of ‘em between 1975 and 1979, anyhow.

If 1979 however, perhaps tiring of light-weight comedy, he flew way back in the opposite direction with the notorious ‘Star of David: Beautiful Girl Hunting’, a serial killer / rape n’ torture themed movie that holds legendary status amongst fans of that sort of extreme fare, although again, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to back away from it mumbling my usual “um.. sorry, I just don’t really like that kind of thing..” excuses.

Suzuki continued to write and direct intermittently through the ‘80s, with late career highlights including another Chiba / Shihomi actioner ‘Roaring Fire’ (1982), and ‘Shogun’s Ninja’ (1980), also with Chiba & Shihomi, his contribution to the brief vogue for all-star wuxia-style historical fantasy movies kicked off by Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘The Shogun’s Samurai’ in 1978. (I have this one on a bootleg DVD multi-pack, in a cropped, dubbed form so horrible I can scarcely bear to watch it.)

Norifumi-san’s last film as director was the little-known ‘Bimbari High School’, which appeared in 1990, and which, in a nice bit of circle-closing synchronicity, was produced by his fellow bad boy of Japanese cinema, Koji Wakamatsu – a heart-warming example perhaps of the commercial meeting the avant garde, united by a joint love of sex, violence and radical fervour.

By this point, I hope I’ve gone some way toward demonstrating what an absolute legend of crazed cinema Norifumi Suzuki was, and how widely the influence of his legacy can be felt (for better or for worse), both in Japan and elsewhere. For reasons outlined above, I think we can probably assume he wasn’t a man who held much of a belief in the afterlife, nor placed a great deal of value on peace and tranquillity, so let’s instead perhaps hope he’s now enjoying an explosive, kick-ass, kinky sex-filled eternity somewhere out there in the cosmic firmament. R.I.P.V., perhaps?

---

“As far as movies go, I don't think they're built to last for posterity. And that's exactly what gives movies their value. Because they're in total sync with the era in which they were created. So... I think they're similar to fireworks. All they have to do is linger in the minds of those who saw them.

In my case, they're no masterpieces, so I never thought there'd be people still watching 10, 20 years later. Never crossed my mind! Still, I guess you could say... how should I put it? When you set out to create something, of course the process of making it is enjoyable in itself, but you have to ask yourself, Just what does it mean to be human? Or...what makes us go on living? And that's what I always tried to keep in mind whenever I made a film. And when you come right down to it, is life something that's worth living? That's what it all boils down to. Always. And the answer is yes, it is worth living. No matter how wretched that life may be.”