Revisiting ‘The Damned’ (1962) - literally.

 Black leather, black leather, crash crash crash…

When I began this blog way back in 2009, one of the first films I felt compelled to review was Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ (aka ‘These Are The Damned’, 1962), which at that point I’d just discovered via a bootleg DVD acquired from the much missed ‘Up The Video Junction’ stall in Camden Market.

In the years since then, the film has remained a firm favourite of mine, and has, I believe, accumulated a steadily growing cult following through subsequent legit releases and screenings.

Revisiting ‘The Damned’ with a more critical eye via Indicator’s definitive blu-ray release earlier, I can certainly appreciate the film has a few ‘issues’. As in a number of Losey’s ‘60s films, the narrative has a tendency to grind to halt in order to allow a succession of male / female couples engage in protracted bouts of inscrutable navel-gazing, their dialogue rendered in vague and faintly preposterous terms by screenwriter Evan Jones. In the grand tradition of Brian Donlevy in Hammer’s ‘Quatermass’ films meanwhile, imported American ‘star’ Macdonald Carey makes for thoroughly dislikeable ‘hero’ figure - an ineffectual middle-aged chauvinist with Hemingway/Henry Miller pretentions who spends the bulk of his screen-time trying to molest a clearly uninterested Shirley Anne Field. (1)

Leaving these quirks aside however, the film’s disorientating car crash of mismatched genre tropes (rock n’ roll delinquency, paranoid cold war SF, arthouse existentialism) remains bracing and unique, whilst the photography, locations, music and action choreography are all exceptional, and a young Oliver Reed practically melts through the celluloid with smouldering malevolence.

It is the film’s considerably darker second half that really gives ‘The Damned’ its staying power though, as the focus turns to the science fiction elements, and the intractable moral dilemma faced by the character played by Alexander Knox - sombre, aesthetically-minded civil servant fanatically dedicated to preparing mankind for “when the time comes,” as he euphemistically puts in in his faintly sinister, Ivor Cutler-esque Scottish brogue.

Pre-empting the terrible grandeur of Troy Kennedy-Martin’s BBC mini-series ‘Edge of Darkness’ (1985) by several decades, the events which transpire once Carey, Field and Reed crash in on Knox’s antiseptic underground facility soon become truly harrowing. Expanding the movie’s emotional/thematic scope far beyond the realm of the cheap n’ cheerful ‘Village of the Damned’ cash-in Hammer presumably envisioned when they commissioned it, Losey and Jones propose the idea that there is simply no sane response to a world which remains perpetually on the brink of nuclear annihilation - merely violence, cruelty and chaos, as any notion of rationality crumbles in the face of an unimaginable (and, the ultimate nightmare for a bureaucrat like Knox, unmanageable) reality.

Rarely has a subject been more suited to the kind of hyperbole which tends to infect the director’s work, and when Knox, gazing upon the mighty slabs of Portland stone strewn jaggedly around the landscape surrounding his cottage, observes that, “a force has been unleashed which will melt these stones,” it is difficult not to feel a chill run through you as the matter-of-fact accuracy of this seemingly fantastical statement sinks in.

Thankfully for us all however, the Isle of Portland on England’s south coast (within which Knox’s fictional outpost is located) and the neighbouring town of Weymouth, (where much of the rest of the film was shot) not only survived the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but remains unmelted to this very day.

I can personally vouch for this furthermore, because - to finally get to the point - my wife and I visited the area in May this year for a long delayed seaside holiday, thus giving me the opportunity to undertake my very own ‘The Damned’ location tour.

Before we begin, I should acknowledge that the work undertaken by the Reel Streets website proved invaluable in pinpointing some of the shooting locations used in the film, and that my own efforts have essentially added little to the material already gathered by their contributors… but nonetheless, I hope that my photos and observations carry some kind of psychogeographical interest for fans of the film and/or the Dorset coastline.

“What’s the matter, never seen a clock tower before?”

Most of the Weymouth landmarks used in the first half of ‘The Damned’ are pretty easy to spot - not least the memorial clock tower where Macdonald Carey first encounters unlikely urban warrior Shirley Anne Field (complete with a knife in her belt!)

As you can see, background biddies remain a constant sixty years down the line.

“Last one to the unicorn’s a cube!”

Though not quite as accessible as it apparently used to be, Weymouth’s towering memorial to the town’s erstwhile patron George III remains present and correct, including the heraldic unicorn which serves as Reed’s gang’s favoured assembly point.

(Interesting incidentally to note various people - including what looks like a bunch of blokes in the process of delivering some carpets - stopping to watch the filming in the second screengrab above.)

And where there’s a unicorn of course…. here’s the lion on the other side of what is generally referred to as The King’s Statue, with King himself (Reed) lurking beneath, plus a bit of a view of the junction of Westham Road and St Thomas Street, leading onto the town’s shopping streets.

The name of Reed’s character, his violent and high-handed behaviour, and the focus Losey places upon this ostentatious bit of royal statuary, are surely no coincidence, methinks. Indeed, whilst Weymouth’s seafront certainly has its charms, the uneasy atmosphere which results from the town’s long-standing association with royal patronage, an extensive naval/military presence in the surrounding area and the Esplanade’s continued function as a magnet for aimless youth and passing biker gangs (the latter admittedly now of a more wholesome middle-aged / middle class demographic)… all this makes it a pretty inspired location for the depredations of the umbrella-wielding King and his strange band of quasi-militaristic Teddy Boys / proto-Droogs.

Unfortunately, remodelling of the exterior of the 18th century Gloucester House on Weymouth’s Esplanade means that the conservatory-style hotel bar in which Alexander Knox meets Viveca Lindfor’s bohemian sculptor character is no longer really extant / accessible, but visitors can at least thrill to the sight of the surviving gatepost adjacent to the steps outside. 

Over in Weymouth’s harbour area meanwhile, The Royal Oak pub on Custom House Quay - which gets quite a lot of screen-time in ‘The Damned’ after Carey moors his boat outside it - happily still abides as a thoroughly unpretentious boozer. (An extension added to the Ship Inn opposite now covers most of the car park / bomb site area seen in the third screengrab above.)

Incidentally, the former home of the Devenish Brewery, whose wares are proudly advertised on the frontage of the pub’s 1962 iteration, can be found on the other side of the harbour in Hope Square (coincidentally home to what I’m confident in hailing as Weymouth’s best current pub, The Red Lion). An impressive Victorian edifice, the brewery was subsequently home to Weymouth Museum, and is now undergoing redevelopment into the usual flats-plus-god-knows-what.

 

Hopping up the steps toward Town Bridge, Losey’s crew used the elevation to get a great, high-angled shot of King’s gang departing after their confrontation with Carey.

Nice to see that the railings and phonebox are still present and correct, but the goods train seen chugging past in the background of the 1962 shot (presumably used to transport unloaded goods from the harbour) is most definitely a thing of the past.

Panning over to the bridge itself, the gang saddle up. 

And, just to bore you further, here’s a quick shot from earlier in the film of Field’s bike whizzing ‘round the corner by the Crown Hotel, just opposite the bridge.

Which brings us, finally, to Portland, a mile or two down the road, in which most of the rest of ‘The Damned’ was shot. This vast, rocky outcrop of elevated land existed as an island until the mid-nineteenth century, when an artificial sandbank was created to expedite transportation of the island’s titular stone to the mainland via a purpose-built rail line.

A strange and fascinating place by anyone’s estimation, Portland’s identity is defined by an unlikely combination of insular, coastal gothic (ancient cottages, derelict medieval churchyards, Roman remains, weird superstitions), heavy industry (the ubiquitous quarrying) and sinister institutional secrecy (former and current prison buildings, small military facilities of uncertain purpose, weather stations, incongruous brutalist barracks etc).

Checking Portland’s Wikipedia page [linked above], I was delighted to find a quote from much-loved theorist and documentarian Jonathan Meades, who in his 2012 book Museums Without Walls wrote: 

“Portland is a bulky chunk of geological, social, topographical and demographic weirdness. It is the obverse of a beauty spot. ‘Beauty’ in this construction implies the picturesque. Portland is gloriously bereft of this quality. It is awesome. There is nothing pretty about it.”

Having visited the place, it is difficult not to see this ‘weirdness’, in all its monolithic, misbegotten glory, mirrored in the unsettling mash-up of genre tropes executed by Losey and his collaborators in ‘The Damned’, suggesting that the location itself might have played as great a role in inspiring the form and ‘feel’ of the film as any of its human contributors.

The location which forms the focal point of much of the action in ‘The Damned’ - the “bird house” which Knox allows Lindfors’ character to use as a studio - is, it transpires, an outbuilding at the rear of a remote property known as Cheyne Cottage (which also appears in the film), still clearly visible halfway down Portland’s east coast.

Unfortunately, the building is not accessible to the public (it’s on private land, and stands on a steep plateau impossible to scale without climbing gear), meaning we were unable to get a closer look or check out the interior. From the nearby Cheyne Weares car park and viewpoint though, bolder visitors can at least scrabble a few hundred yards through the undergrowth to get a better view, and to access the lower quarry area which was also used extensively in the film (from the atmospheric cliff-top opening sequence, right through to the harrowing conclusion, in which our assorted characters struggle with the radiation-suited functionaries rounding up the cold-blooded children). 

(One of the only significant changes to the landscape since the film was shot is the fact that I’m pretty sure the path which once allowed vehicular access to the quarry area - as shown in the second screengrab above - has now been blocked off. Otherwise, I’m sure we would have followed that path back to the road / viewpoint rather than scrambling back up the hillside - encountering a bloody great adder along the way, incidentally.)

Further on down the coast toward Portland Bill, I’m fairly sure that the scene in ‘The Damned’ in which one of the children rescues Reed’s character after he falls from the cliffs must have been filmed on these flat, rocky stretches of shore - their forbidding and inaccessible location in the film rather undercut by the fact that turning the camera 180 degrees would have revealed rows of cosy, brightly coloured wooden beach huts. File under ‘magic of the movies’.

(It’s a shame incidentally that ‘The Damned’s crew couldn’t find an excuse to crowbar the nearby Portland Bill Lighthouse in the movie -- if only to allow it to be paired up with David Greene’s The Shuttered Room on an unlikely double bill of “arthouse-adjacent ‘60s British genre films in which Oliver Reed menaces an aging American actor involved in an inappropriate relationship with a younger woman in close proximity to a lighthouse”.)

After rounding the horn of the island (as it were), having a look around the lighthouse and enjoying a few much needed refreshments at the café, the return leg of our journey around Portland took us back along the island’s west coast, which has a considerably bleaker and more foreboding feel to it than the comparatively tourist-friendly east side.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a direct match for the entrance to the film’s ‘Edgecliff Establishment’, but the kind of hurricane fencing seen in both of the above screengrabs remains a ubiquitous presence around the south-west quarter of Portland, shutting off various areas and creating an odd network of self-contained compounds, each dotted with lonely pre-fab buildings and military vehicles.

All perfectly innocuous I’m sure, but it can’t help but make the place feel like catnip for UFO nuts or conspiracy theorists in search of precisely the kind of scary, underground facilities which ‘The Damned’ chose to locate here six decades ago. (Indeed, the film’s nocturnal chase scene, in which King’s gang pursue Carey and Field around the perimeter of Knox’s ‘establishment’, still capture the ‘feel’ of this area uncannily well.)

Located more or less slap-bang in the centre of Portland meanwhile, the suitably imposing St George’s Church is bordered on one side by the dust and desolation of a working quarry, and on the other by the outskirts of the town of Wakeham.

 

As you can see, the church yard now appears to be maintained more actively than was the case in 1962, although unfortunately, I was unable to locate either of the monuments Oliver Reed clambered upon to whistle commands to his gang members. Either they’re no longer extant, or murky reference pics and general exhaustion prevented me from locating them.

(The idea of King using this location to marshal his troops will have been recognised by locals as a complete nonsense incidentally. The church is not on raised ground, and is the better part of two miles from the other locations used in the film… but what director could resist the appeal of a location like this sitting just around the corner..?)

After this detour, our original plan had been to hoof it up to Portland’s northern settlement of Castletown to try to find the quiet side street in which King’s gang beat up Carey at the start of the movie (another geographical absurdity of course). But, suitably chastened by the weird awesomeness of Portland’s monolithic totality and bone-tired after a full day of hoofing around its fearsome coastal paths, the call of the nearby bus-stop and a swift return to the comforts of our Weymouth B&B could be resisted no longer.

---- 

(1) Just as a quick side-bar, I seem to remember that in my original 2009 post on ‘The Damned’, I spent some time criticising Shirley Anne Field’s performance - a foolish judgement on my part which I would hereby like to formally retract. I now believe she is actually pretty great here - charismatic, smart and self-possessed, despite having to contend with reams of deathless dialogue, questionable motivations and some distinctly uncomfortable scenes with Carey. What was I thinking, etc.

Update / Apologies.

Basically I thought I’d better just pop my head ‘round the door to offer my apologies to regular readers for letting this blog go to seed over the past few months.

With tedious predictability, the explanation for this lengthy break in posting is simply that, for various reasons, day-to-day life & grown up responsibilities have kept me extremely busy so far this year, leaving zero time for writing or creative pursuits.

Sadly, this state of affairs seems likely to continue for at least a few more months, but I have reached a point where I’m at least trying to claw back some spare time for myself. There are many things which I’m itching to write about, and several plans for exciting(?) new projects bubbling around in my brain waiting for a chance to be realised, so, uh… no promises, but watch this space. There’s life in this barren outpost yet.

Noir Diary # 17: Framed (Richard Wallace, 1947)

 

The very definition of an efficient, tightly plotted b-noir, 1947’s ‘Framed’ begins with a perfect visual metaphor for what’s to follow, as protagonist Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford) literally crashes into the small town in which the action takes place behind the wheel of an out-of-control truck with no functioning brakes.

The platonic ideal of a doomed film noir patsy, Lambert is an unkempt, down-on-his-luck drifter (an unemployed mining engineer, so he claims), who accepted the driving gig offered to him by an unscrupulous trucking company purely as a means to get himself to the next town along the trail. After painfully extracting his fee from said trucking firm’s local rep, he deposits it directly into the hat of the argumentative man whose fender he damaged in the process of bringing his death-trap of a vehicle to a halt, and heads straight for the nearest bar to see if he can scare up some credit.

Within the insalubrious environs of the La Paloma Cafe, we soon come to understand how Lambert has ended up in such dire straits. Clearly he’s one of those guys whose thirst for liquor is matched only by his inability to handle its effects, and, after a few shots of rot-gut, we find him trying to hock his gold watch to the barkeep for stake money to join the 24/7 crap game taking place upstairs, only to be saved from further humiliation when the crooked local fuzz waltz in to pick him up on a spurious dangerous driving charge finagled by the trucking company.

In spite of this world championship level display of loserdom however, archly mannered waitress Paula (Janis Carter) appears inexplicably enamoured of the new arrival; so much so that it is she who steps in to cover the fine Lambert is ordered to pay after a jerry-rigged court appearance, before also shelling out to provide the hotel room in which he sleeps off the effects of his subsequent drinking binge.

Anyone thinking that Paula’s efforts might be motivated by philanthropy, pity or good old fashioned lust however would be well advised to consult this movie’s title. Before you know it, our hero’s new guardian angel has quit her job at the bar, and is on the phone to arrange a meet-up with the smarmy vice-president of the local bank (Steve Price, played by Barry Sullivan), letting him know that she’s found exactly the right guy for their purposes. Same height as Price, same build, and no annoying friends or family to get in the way. Oddly, they’re not too concerned about his facial features… I wonder why?

Before we get the full dope on the ugly fate our hero is being measured up for however, ‘Framed’ takes an unexpected detour into B. Traven territory, as Lambert - suddenly determined to try to make something of himself - heads for the local Assaying Office. For the benefit of readers not based in the South-Western U.S.A. in the early 20th century, this was apparently a place to which would-be mining prospectors could bring samples of stuff they’d dug up, to get its mineral content analysed, and happily, Lambert’s visit happens to coincide with that of a garrulous fellow (Jeff Cunningham, played by Edgar Buchanan) who has just received confirmation that he’s struck a life-changing haul of silver up in them-there-hills.

Better still, when Lambert offers his services as an engineer for the forthcoming mining operation, Cunningham recognises him as the guy who paid him back for damage to his car the previous afternoon, clapping him on the shoulders and declaring him an HONEST MAN. So, hands are shaken, a partnership is born, and the new best buddies retire to nearby café (one which actually serves food, unlike the La Paloma) for a slap-up breakfast and some serious mining talk.

The only snag is, to finance the outfit, Cunningham will need to get a loan from the local bank, but don’t worry, it’s such a sure thing that…. ah. You see where this going. Forewarned by Paula, vice-president Steve turns Cunningham down flat, leaving the disgruntled prospector with no choice but to leave town to drum up some dough elsewhere, leaving Lambert to cool his heels… and to head straight back into the arms of one of the most robotically psychotic femme fatales ‘50s noir had to offer. Some guy just can’t get a break, huh?

Ben Maddow’s script for ‘Framed’ may not be high art, but it’s certainly high craft. A frustrated poet and documentarian before he turned to screenwriting to make a buck, Maddow cheerily lifts a few ideas from then-recent hits (Double Indemnity, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, and the previous year’s ‘Gilda’, also starring Ford), but he nonetheless gives us one of those great, watertight yarns in which every detail pays off, every character trait serves a purpose, and in which the overriding theme of the piece remains consistent, without ever getting heavy-handed about it.

In the synopsis above, I’ve casually referred to Mike Lambert as the film’s ‘hero’, and, despite his chronic lack of gumption, that descriptor remains more accurate than was often the case in the realm of noir. For all his faults, Lambert is indeed a scrupulously honest man, trying to ply an honest trade, only to find the combined forces of state and capital (the police and judiciary, banks, employers, the idle rich, even disgruntled suburbanites in one case) lined up against him, working in cahoots to keep him penniless, homeless, and preferably consigned to a wooden casket ASAP, all as part of their venal, corrupt daily routine.

(With an outlook like this, it’s no surprise to learn that Maddow found himself blacklisted post-haste once the dark fog of HUAC descended upon Hollywood, his official screen credits drying up shortly after he earned an Oscar nomination for his similarly themed work on John Huston’s classic ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (1950).)

The great ‘nearly man’ of 40s/50s household name leading men, Glenn Ford also does fine work here, dialling down the charisma he exuded to varying degrees in other roles to effectively portray a guy who is only one or two rungs up the ladder from the Elisha Cook Jrs of this world -- a stone loser, but one whose side-eye glances convey a sly, calculating self-awareness rather than mere blubbering self-pity, letting us know he’s possessed of just enough grit and smarts to overcome the forces rallied against him… if only he could stay away from the bottle, and the crap table - and most importantly, from Janis Carter.

Though she never scaled the same career heights as her co-star, Carter (whose other genre credits include ‘Night Editor’ (1946) and the notorious ‘The Woman on Pier 13’ aka ‘I Married a Communist’ (1949)) is equally memorable here, creating a character who ranks second only to Lizabeth Scott in ‘Too Late For Tears’ (1949) in noir’s pantheon of cold-blooded female predators.

When Sullivan’s character met her two years ago, Paula was modelling “someone else’s furs”; now she has to make do ugly, lace n’ polka-dot small town finery, but not for much longer. A dead-eyed, remorselessly amoral dame straight out of a philandering studio mogul’s worst nightmares, she’s clearly capable of leaving any of the men who dote upon her to perish in a flaming car wreck at a moment’s notice, just to gain an extra percentage point on the purloined dough which sits awaiting her in that numbered safe deposit box back in town.

There is kind of a performative, self-aware aspect to the behaviour of both lead characters in ‘Framed’ - a feeling that Mike and Paula simply complying with the expectations of their archetypes, if you will, unable to break free from the roles they’ve been assigned within Maddow’s rat-trap of a script. Some viewers might see as a weakness of the film, but personally I really enjoyed the weird, fateful quality it brought to proceedings.

Paula is so obviously ice cold and insincere in her interactions with Lambert and Price, it’s difficult to believe that either of them could believe her rote “I’m crazy about you / let’s run away together” jive for a second. Indeed, Lambert appears suspicious of her motives right from the get-go, but nonetheless, he still keeps trudging straight back to the horrible, chintzy bungalow she rents on the outskirts of town, accepting her stream of lies, rationalisations and half-hearted declarations of devotion with heavy-lidded resignation, like some cut price, off-brand version of Robert Mitchum’s storm-tossed fatalism in the same year’s ‘Out of the Past’.

Though ‘Framed’ has none of the high-falutin’ dreaminess we associate with such top tier noirs, Wallace’s direction is punchy and efficient in the best tradition of Columbia crime pictures, relying on fast cutting and simple visual storytelling to get its point across, whilst the film is further elevated by fine supporting performances from Sullivan, whose smarmy bank exec contains a finger of the same juice which would later fuel Fred McMurray’s character in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ (1960), and Edgar Buchanan, who essentially plays the movie’s dishevelled, proletarian conscience, offering Lambert a fleeting glimpse of friendship, hard work and proper, American Dream-type redemption.

The work of Director of Photography Burnett Guffey was not generally as showy as that of his more celebrated competitors in the chiaroscuro racket, and with the best will in the world, this picture’s small town / daylight setting and familiarly drab Columbia interior sets offer little scope for expressionist grandeur.

Nonetheless though, Howe’s steady hand ensures that the movie always looks at least pretty good, employing the steady hand which led some wag to describe him as the “little black dress” of noir photographers to transcend the penny-pinching production design, using mirrors, blinds and jagged, asymmetric shapes to keep things interesting, whilst a few brief nocturnal street scenes evoke the kind of sleek, inky smooth menace he would go on to employ so beautifully on career highlights like ‘The Reckless Moment’ (1949) and ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950). (1)

If anything in ‘Framed’ cuts against the grain of noir expectation, it’s probably the film’s ending, which - whilst straining here to avoid spoilers - does not proceed in the direction which the hard-boiled nihilist crowd might have wished, let’s put it that way. As much as such a conclusion sounds bad on paper however, in practice it’s handled here with an elegance and open-ended emotional ambiguity which actually works rather beautifully, leaving open the possibility that good ol’ Mike Lambert - now weighted down by an extra layer of cynicism and soul-sickening regret - might be back soon, trying hawk that damned gold watch in some seedy bar ‘round the corner from your place, next week, next year, or on into eternity.

--- 

(1) I need to credit Imogen Sara Smith’s excellent audio commentary on the Indicator blu-ray release of ‘Framed’ for hepping me to that quote about Guffey, but I don’t remember who she attributed it to, and google hasn’t helped me put a name to it, so… answers on a postcard etc.

Horror Express: Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

When I initially read about writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond’s debut feature ‘Censor’ last summer, I was pretty intrigued. I mean, a phantasmagorical trip into the murky underbelly of the infamous ‘Video Nasties’ hysteria whipped up by the British tabloid press in the early 1980s, as seen through the eyes of a BBFC examiner who becomes embroiled in a missing persons investigation involving an underground horror movie director? Lots of fascinating stuff for a smart, self-aware 21st century horror film to get its teeth stuck into there, surely.

My enthusiasm dissipated however when I read Gav Crimson’s review of the film - a detailed and all-too-believable dismissal which sets out a catalogue of anachronisms, missed opportunities and failures on the part of the filmmakers to effectively engage with their chosen subject matter. Oh well.

Suitably forewarned, I took a “walk don’t run” approach to checking out ‘Censor’, but finally caught up with it last month through the eerie medium of streaming. [In view of the film’s subject, it feels weirdly ironic that I chose to ‘rent’ it for 48 hours from the BFI.] I’m happy to report though that, although Mr Crimson’s conclusions are essentially correct, I nonetheless found a lot more to enjoy here than he did, overcoming some pretty severe mixed feelings to eventually come away with a fairly positive assessment of the film.

Which doesn’t exactly sound like a whole-hearted recommendation, I’ll grant you, but… if you can engage with ‘Censor’ on its own terms, there is a lot of good stuff here. In terms of direction, visuals and performances in fact, I’d probably rank ‘Censor’ as one of the most effective and enjoyable films to have emerged from the post-2010 wave of UK art-horror pictures. At the same time though, well - let’s just say there’s a lot to unpack here too.

For a start, and as concisely summarised in the above-linked review, historical verisimilitude is all over the place. In spite of ‘Censor’s shamelessly retromantic fixation on the aesthetic of early 1980s, Bailey-Bond & Anthony Fletcher’s script is full of details both large and small which simply don’t ring true, holding together a series of plot developments which feel wildly unlikely, to put it mildly.

As the film’s story unfolds though, we come to realise that at least some of its more far-fetched events could easily be chalked up to the old “unreliable narrator” factor; and besides, at the end of the day, this is a heavily stylised psychological horror film, and I mean, it’s not like we watch ‘Deep Red’ to get a realistic picture of the life of young creatives in Turin in 1975, right?

On that basis alone, I feel I should extend ‘Censor’ the same courtesy, especially given that (along with the film’s director, I’m assuming), I was busy making my debut at play school at around the time the notorious Video Recordings Act was being fast-tracked through the Commons.

Perhaps more worryingly though, at a certain point whilst watching ‘Censor’, I also found myself concerned that the film might be taking a “the people who make these movies are sick and perverted and basically one step away from being serial murderers” kind of stance, rather akin to the approach Paul Schrader's ‘Hardcore’ (1979) took to pornography. Not exactly a good way to get us horror fans on side, needless to say.

Thankfully though, the film swerves away somewhat from this trajectory during its final act, instead instigating a script-flipping shift in perspective (‘twist’ doesn’t really cover it), the details of which will remain unspoiled here, despite being fairly obvious/inevitable in retrospect.

Though the lingering suggestion that the world of low budget genre cinema is a weird, alienating, sleazy and dangerous place to do business may still rankle with some viewers, on the whole I thought that the film’s big narrative turnaround was very nicely handled, packing an appropriate emotional punch.

And, once again, we need to remember that this is a horror movie, with all that that entails. If the people and situations our protagonist Enid (Niamh Algar) encountered in the lower depths of the film industry were friendly, respectful and welcoming, it’s safe to say ‘Censor’ would not exactly have hit its mark, tonally speaking. As it is, the film builds a Ramsey Campbell-esque atmosphere of liminal unease that I actually found quite effective, in spite of the concerns outlined above.

Although the world of the ‘Censor’s fictional horror director Frederick North isn’t as fleshed out as I might have liked, I nonetheless enjoyed the material dealing with his films. More than anything though, I just found myself wishing I could watch them. I mean, why DIDN’T we have some kind of British answer to Lucio Fulci lurking about in Sussex woods making weird, atmospheric gore films in blatant defiance of the Thatcher/Whitehouse brigade? That would clearly have been amazing. His absence from reality surely marks a collective cultural failure, which we in the UK should regret daily.

Whether it was consciously intended as a joke or otherwise, I liked the fact that North’s magnum opus ‘Don’t Go In The Church’ does not appear to feature a church, and, whilst on the subject, I also very much enjoyed Michael Smiley’s turn as the director’s sleazebag producer, a role which surely cementing his place as the closest thing 21st century UK cinema has to a fully paid up, never-knowingly-underacting ‘horror man’ (following his equally memorable performances in ‘Kill List’ (2010), ‘A Field in England’ (2013) and ‘The Toll’ (2021), amongst others).

Likewise, I also appreciated the detail of the scenes set within the offices of ‘Censor’s thinly fictionalised version of the BBFC. It is here that the film crosses over slightly into the realm of that distinctly British ‘comedy of awkwardness’ which has become such a ubiquitous element of 21st century UK horror, and whilst this kind of stuff is not usually my bag, in this case I found spending time with Enid’s mismatched colleagues to be more comforting than hellish, with their portrayals veering more toward the humane/relatable than the overtly grotesque.

In fact, I found myself quite taken with the idea of hanging around all day in a pokey pre-fab office with a bunch of failed academics and social workers, drinking tea, filing reports and watching films to obsessively count the “shit”s and “fuck”s. Aside from the inherently objectionable business of having to actually cut / ban films, that actually strikes me as a pretty great job. Given that they rarely do much cutting or banning these days, I was almost tempted to call up the BBFC’s website to see if they’re recruiting at the moment, and what kind of background they require, etc.

Meanwhile, ‘Censor’s overall aesthetic struck me as being very much on the same page as Peter Strickland’s recent ‘In Fabric’ (2018), mixing beautifully phantasmagorical neon/gel lighting and baroque, Argento-esque production design with painstakingly fetishised period detail and low key/naturalistic performances to create - especially in its latter half - a similarly vertiginous disjuncture between fantasy and reality (though I personally found Bailey-Bond’s film a less discomforting and more conventionally rewarding experience than Strickland’s).

One visual device I particularly liked - and which I don’t recall ever seeing previously - is the way ‘Censor’ plays with aspect ratio and film grain across its run-time. An idea which would presumably have been nixed on the grounds of expense and impracticality back in the pre-digital era, this now of course feels entirely appropriate to this archly referential horror film-about-horror films. (Once again, Strickland springs to mind here as a reference point, particularly vis-à-vis the intertextual monkey business which characterised ‘Berbarian Sound Studio’ (2012).)

When I first noticed horizontal bars appearing at the edges of the screen, I thought something had gone wrong with the streaming platform, but soon realised that this was deliberate as the film begins to move back and forth between scope anback and forth from “reality” to “video nasty-vision”.

This is a neat trick, and a nice wink to cinephiles and survivors of the format wars in the audience, but it also serves to foreground the suggestion that watching violent videos has actually warped our vulnerable protagonist’s mind beyond all recognition - a problematic notion which is never really sufficiently explored or resolved by Bailey-Bond’s film, for all its visual pyrotechnics and technical acumen.

BEST FIRST TIME VIEWINGS: 2021 (part # 3 of 3)

Yes, I know - this took forever. I’m sorry. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back onto a regular(ish) posting schedule soon, fingers crossed, but in the meantime, please enjoy the superlative gushing which follows.

10. The Curious Dr Humpp 

(Emilio Vieyra / Jerald Intrator, 1969)

During the late 1960s, Argentinian director Emilio Vieyra made a number of striking (yet also curiously boring) low budget films mixing horror tropes with nudity and sexploitation elements. Vieyra’s strangest effort was probably ‘La Venganza del Sexo’, a sort of warped reimagining of Jess Franco’s ‘The Awful Dr Orlof’ (amongst other things) which sees a mad scientist dispatching a paper mache-faced monster to kidnap young people, whom he subsequently hypnotises and forces to have sex with each other as part of his rather vaguely defined experiments - the nature of which appears to be dictated to him by a sentient brain he keeps in a jar in his lab.

In and of itself, ‘La Venganza del Sexo’ certainly makes for an intriguing oddity in the history of global horror cinema, but it really only achieved infamy / immortality [delete as applicable] after a print was acquired by a New York-based hustler named Jerald Intrator, who haphazardly chopped about and reshaped the film, largely to allow for the inclusion of additional, extraneous sex scenes. A wilder and more tightly paced experience all round, Intrator’s reworking also benefits from a staggeringly knuckleheaded / inspired English language dub, written with scant reference to the original Spanish dialogue and featuring several of the most extraordinarily unlikely pronouncements ever to be formed by human lips (let alone minds).

Given a brief run on the NY grindhouse circuit as - yes, I’m afraid so - ‘The Curious Dr Humpp’, the result is an inexplicable, indigestible hodge-podge of relentless, theremin-drenched psychotronic dementia capable of blowing minds at 200 yards. Suffice to say however, the owners of any minds blown during the film’s original release seem to have kept the matter to themselves, leaving the depredations of Dr Humpp entirely forgotten for several decaes, until Frank Henenlotter and the late Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video acquired a print at some point in the ‘90s, cued it up, and - I can only imagine - performed some cult-movie-nerd equivalent of that “we struck gold” dance Walter Huston does in ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ before promptly retreating to the bathroom to soak their heads in cold water for a few hours.

Honestly, if I started unpacking this thing to pick out particular highlights, we’d be here all night, so, by way of exemplifying the general off-kilter vibe of the whole thing, I’ll simply leave you with the zen-like question solemnly posed at one point by the film’s pipe-chewing police detective; “why would a man who needs drugs send a monster to the pharmacy?” Well, quite. 

 

9. Snowpiercer 

(Bong Joon Ho, 2013)

Along with much of the rest of the Western world, watching ‘Parasite’ early in 2020 inspired me to belatedly catch up on the rest of Bong Joon Ho’s filmography - the first stop being this train-bound, post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic, which immediately scores bonus points for having seemingly caused such consternation for financiers Miramax that (as I understand it) they initially did everything in their power to bury the damned thing.

Based on a long-running bande dessinée created by the revered Jacque Lob and shot in English with a multinational, all-star cast, ‘Snowpiercer’ - for which I’ll spare you an easily google-able plot synopsis - is the kind of movie which really, honestly SHOULD NOT WORK. For all its grandiose ambition, the story’s core premise becomes increasingly preposterous the longer you spend thinking about it, and presenting the comic’s world with the kind of nuts-and-bolts verisimilitude it demands would have required a budget and duration far beyond that available to any feature filmmaker.*

And yet… if we leave such concerns aside and simply view ‘Snowpiercer’ as a blunt allegory for the same socio-political concerns its director seems to wish to address in all his films, well, it actually works rather brilliantly.

The same story ‘Parasite’ frames as a contemporary thriller, ‘Snowpiercer’ essentially tells through the lens of a CG-slathered SF blockbuster, and the challenges and conclusions it dares to confront its audience with are bold indeed for a film in this general genre/budgetary realm, mercilessly pricking the balloons of us-vs-them dualism and individual exceptionalism which generally keep such pulpy action/adventure narratives afloat. I’m pretty sure in fact that the harrowing succession of revelations and script flips which comprise during the story’s final act would never in a million years have seen the light of day in a common or garden multiplex clogger (much to the studio’s chagrin, I’m assuming).

As the stubbornness he seems to have demonstrated in preserving his film’s content and tone in the face of full spectrum interference clearly demonstrates though, Joon Ho is a strong enough director to keep even a project this sprawling and ridiculous tightly focused, and the result is, in its own weird way, just as effective as his later Oscar-winner.

* It’s worth noting that, as much as the ‘Snowpiercer’ concept may seem preposterous in strictly logical/utilitarian terms, given that we now find ourselves living in a world in obscenely wealthy celebrity plutocrats are routinely blasting themselves into space and planning gigantic underground highway networks… well, perhaps the idea of a monomaniacal Ed Harris chuntering across the dead globe in a giant train set powered by the blood of his serfs isn’t quite as far-fetched as may have seemed a decade ago…?

8. Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975)

Sticking with dystopian nightmares, here we have one of the very best - and, I would suggest, most widely misunderstood - of the many such visions which emerged from Hollywood in the 1970s. Misleadingly promoted as a violent future-sports action movie upon release, Jewison’s film is a more foreboding and cerebral work than audiences (then or now) may have anticipated, feeling almost like a distant cousin to John Boorman’s ‘Zardoz’ or the late Douglas Trumbull’s ‘Silent Running’ vis-a-vis pushing the ‘anything goes’ philosophy of ‘70s Hollywood to the point of commercial suicide in an attempt to bring the aesthetic of the era’s new wave literary SF to the masses.

The film’s actual rollerball sequences are indeed as hard-hitting as the violence-in-the-movies blather which accompanied the film’s release may have implied, but they are more frightening and confusing than conventionally exciting, and by the time we reach the film’s ugly, desultory climax, the monolithic fascist pomp of the arena spectacle has become genuinely nightmarish, the callousness of the game’s brutality leaving us as tired and nauseated as a public execution or a Nazi pep rally.

Outside of the arena meanwhile, the rest of the film is unsettlingly inert. Pacing is glacial and the atmosphere hangs heavy, like an unseen weight on the audience’s shoulders, mirroring that hefted by James Caan’s lost, lonely, test tube-bred athlete, groping around the edges of his world for an exit he can’t even begin to envisage.

‘Rollerball’s masterstroke I think is the way that (with the exception of one or two brief scenes) it keeps us trapped within Caan’s heavily blinkered perspective, refusing to allow us beyond the walls of the placid, self-contained environment within which our protagonist, as an elite Olympian within a corporate/totalitarian global state, is allowed to exist. He has no reliable sources of information, no context for his existence, no friends whose word he can rely upon - and as a result, neither do we.

In a conventional dystopian / earth-future SF tale, we would expect to zoom out and get The Big Picture at some point. We’d get some omnipotent narrator filling us in on the exact nature of the ‘corporate wars’ which seem to have turned North America (and by extension, the rest of the world) into a vast, homogenous monoculture. We would cut away to the huddled masses at whom the spectacle of rollerball is presumably aimed - be they toiling, subterranean morlocks, impoverished, inner-city TV zombies, or whatever. But, there is none of that here, and the absence of this context feels deeply troubling.

Caan’s corporate handlers keep him in a land of plenty, in which a sparse population seem to shuttle between ranch houses, sports arenas and gleaming corporate palaces. But we know that this can’t really be the full story, don't we…?

The icy, transactional manner in which Jonathan E is expected to conduct his interpersonal relationships, the way that decisions are made on his behalf, the complete lack of culture, history, knowledge or education accessible to him - all of this is telling. Meanwhile, the occasional hints we do receive of the Big Bad underlying ‘Rollerball’s world (such as the haunting sight of a group of executive parygoers, high on synthetic drugs, destroying a copse of trees with some kind of flame pistol) feel queasy and inexplicable.

Viewed from an era in which dystopian sci-fi and post-apocalyptic survival fantasies have become a familiar part of the tapestry of popular escapist entertainment, ‘Rollerball’ provides a stridently NOT FUN reminder of just how existentially terrifying it must actually feel to subsist within the calm heart of a vast Orwellian machine, with any notion of truth or understanding kept far beyond your reach.

7. Alphabet City   

(Amos Poe, 1984)

Seemingly an attempt to break into the commercial mainstream from NY underground filmmaker/punk scenester Amos Poe, ‘Alphabet City’ may not have exactly made his Hollywood dreams come true, but, newly scrubbed up by Fun City Editions after decades of neglect, it still stands out both as a beautiful, hyper-stylised exemplar of neon-drenched ‘80s psychedelia and a fiendishly gripping, straight-down-the-line crime drama.

The film’s basic plot is as old as the steam rising from Manhattan’s subways. Ambitious young drug dealer Vincent Spano cruises the streets and alleys of the Lower East Side in his sweet white Trans-Am, paying the rent on the swanky penthouse loft he shares with his artist girlfriend and baby son. When his mafia paymasters order him one night to firebomb the housing project where his mother and sister live though, that’s a step too far. Ya don't say ‘no’ to the mob though of course, so by dawn he and his young family are on the run from the mob, with a violent showdown fast approaching.

Simple as this tale may be, it’s brought to life with admirably fevered intensity by a wildly varied cast of character players (ranging from ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’s Zohra Lampert to ‘Police Academy’s Michael Winslow), generating some real, edge-of-seat investment in the story’s outcome. Beyond that though, it is ‘Alphabet City’s stunning visuals and period detail which seem really set to blow 21st century minds.

Real downtown locations are transformed into phantasmagorical wonderlands by Poe and DP Oliver Wood’s inspired lighting and tracked to a characteristically slinky/superb Nile Rodgers score, meaning that, if you’re into that very particular cinematic aesthetic found only in early ‘80s New York, you just found the motherlode.

From glimmering reflections of headlights on washed down streets and incessant, blinding neon, to infernal gel red lighting cascading down towerblocks as trashcan fires blaze in the foreground, from smoke-filled, candlelit subterranean shooting galleries to swank, art-filled loft spaces and handheld crawls through genuine Manhattan nightclubs…. it’s almost too much, man. Like some flickering fever dream of Michael Mann’s ‘Thief’ mashed up with every Abel Ferrara movie you’ve ever seen, cut with a manageable dose of ‘Liquid Sky’ and whizzed up in a blender for easy mass consumption; just incredible.

(It’s no surprise to learn that, after a screening of this film, Mann himself is rumoured to have demanded that Oliver Wood be immediately tracked down and offered a job on ‘Miami Vice’; no such luck for Mr Poe sadly, but he abides.)

 

6. Drunken Master II 

(Lau Kar-Leung & Jackie Chan, 1994)

Marred by well-publicised behind the scenes clashes between Jackie Chan and director Lau Kar-Leung, and long available to viewers in the West only via a cut/dubbed Miramax version [thank you to Hong Kong Rescue for fixing me up with the real deal - now no longer on sale, sadly], ‘Drunken Master II’ hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it over the years.

Nonetheless, it remains a staggering high water mark of Jackie’s late 80s/early 90s “imperial” phase (and of late period HK martial arts cinema in general), applying epic, no-expense-spared production values to a frankly exhausting compendium of super-human physical/martial prowess, resulting in a film which, for sheer spectacle and entertainment value, arguably tops even the revered 1978 original.

At which point I should probably just give up and resort to asking “need I say more?”, but, I can’t help also taking the time to point out that this is one of the rare kung fu comedies in which the script’s broad comic chops actually worked very well for me, cutting the expected screwball farce with a welcome dose of full-on surrealism - particularly when embodied by Anita Mui, who is absolutely fantastic here as Jackie’s strong-willed step-mother; surely one of the funniest, coolest female characters HK popular cinema ever produced.

Meanwhile, the film’s ending - during which it seems to have suddenly occurred to the filmmakers that encouraging their audience to drink excessively and fight in the streets was maybe just a little bit irresponsible - presents a tonally jarring, bad taste WTF moment which few cult film fans will be able to find it in themselves not to adore.

 

5. Memories of Murder 

(Bong Joon Ho, 2003)

Back on the Bong Joon Ho trail, this riveting, technically impeccable police procedural details the travails of a pair of incompetent / borderline corrupt small town cops and an in-above-his-head rookie detective from the city as they - spoiler alert - completely fail to solve an on-going series of sex murders in rural South Korea during the dreary, mid 1980s tail-end of the nation’s period of military dictatorship.

Arguably rivalling ‘Parasite’ as the director’s best film to date, ‘Memories of Murder’ is less bleak than its unsavoury subject matter and grey, muted colour scheme would tend to suggest. Essentially playing as a down-at-heel black comedy for much of its running time, it takes an admirably non-judgemental attitude toward its morally equivocal protagonists, as each apparent breakthrough in their case soon dissolves into a sticky morass of bungling, botched evidence, interpersonal bitterness and base level stupidity.

Though the stark social commentary which went on to define much of Ho’s later work remains very much on the back burner here, there is nonetheless a strong sense that no sensibly ordered society would leave an active serial murder investigation in the hands of people so clearly incapable of dealing with it, whilst the low level poverty and emotional emptiness of the characters’ surroundings meanwhile speak for themselves.

Amidst the grimness though, the director’s obvious talent for commercial / genre-based cinema still shines through strongly, with superb editing and photography contributing to a series of painstakingly choreographed chase and suspense sequences which feel as exhilarating as anything in a more conventional action picture. Defined by a lingering sense of irresolvable complexity and human frailty which matches up to any of cinema (or literature)’s finest hard-boiled procedural fiction, what we have here is in fact something of a slow-burn masterpiece of 21st century crime cinema, I feel.

4. Notorious 

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

Straight from the “can you believe I’ve never seen this one before?” file. Hitch’s entry in the short-lived post-war “those pesky Nazis are out there somewhere, we’ve got to find ‘em” sub-genre (also see ‘The Stranger’ (1946), ‘Cornered’ (1945) amongst others) finds him at the absolute peak of his powers, delivering an elegant, engrossing and (needless to say) nail-bitingly suspenseful thriller which measures up to any of his more frequently screened classics.

Alongside the expected technical mastery and inspired visual storytelling, the photography and production design also deserve a shout-out here, with the gleaming, high noir style of DP Ted Tetzlaff’s nocturnal Rio De Janeiro exteriors looking so rich you almost want to step into them and lose yourself, whilst the labyrinthine geometry of Claude Rains’ luxurious rented townhouse meanwhile assumes a foreboding, paranoid gothic atmosphere, reminiscent not just of Hitchcock’s earlier smash hit ‘Rebecca’, but also of the kind of digs in which Rains’ aristocratic Nazi business magnate was presumably ensconced shortly before he and his domineering mother were forced to skedaddle across the Atlantic.

Beyond all this though, ‘Notorious’ is, surprisingly perhaps, more an actor’s movie than anything else. it’s no exaggeration to say that Ingrid Bergman proves an absolute revelation here, hitting a wild palette of complex emotional states in a far more demanding and multi-faceted ‘heroine’ role than Hollywood’s leading ladies usually had to contend with (then or now), whilst Ben Hecht’s admirably hard-boiled script skirts into dangerously ambiguous terrain by allowing Rains’ urbane Third Reich-apologist to often seem like a more appealing presence than Cary Grant’s hectoring and duplicitous, jobs-worth FBI man.

Like many of the finest ‘40s American films, ‘Notorious’ seems to offer the viewer a choice between skimming the surface of a masterfully crafted, beautifully rendered entertainment, or plumbing the bottomless depths of psychological motivation and socio-political significance which bubble beneath it. Whichever level you choose to engage with it on though, it’s difficult not to reach the conclusion that we’re looking at a stone-cold classic right here.

3. Ceremonia Sangrienta [‘Blood Ceremony’]  

(Jorge Grau, 1973)

This one is perhaps not strictly speaking a 2021 first-time viewing, as I believe I battled through an iffy bootleg of the U.S. ‘Legend of Blood Castle’ version of this film at some point in distant past, but to be honest I barely remember anything of that sleep-and-alcohol fogged misadventure, and besides, watching the film as its intended form via Mondo Macabro’s revelatory blu-ray release - and actually paying attention to it, more to the point - proves a whole other goblet of gore.

In fact, I’d now go so far as to place ‘Ceremonia Sangrienta’s within the very top tier of European gothic horror - a status rarely acknowledged in the past perhaps simply because director Jorge Grau largely rejects the kind of campiness and exploitational thrills we fans tend to expect of ‘70s Spanish gothic, instead treating this loose extrapolation of the Countess Bathory mythos with a straight-faced artistic seriousness which leads one to suspect he saw himself competing against Buñuel and Pasolini (or at the very least, Michael Reeves and Harry Kumel) rather than Amando de Ossorio or Paul Naschy.

Thankfully however, Grau and his collaborators match these lofty ambitions with a level of imagination and technical accomplishment which ensure the film never slide into pretention or tedium, employing rich, shadow-haunted photography, fascinating and impeccably detailed historical production design, and a far stronger set of performances than one would generally expect to encounter in a horror film of this era.

Of course it’s not my intention here to in any way denigrate the purveyors of pulpier, more down-to-earth Spanish horror (as regular readers will be aware, I love them dearly), but Grau is working on another level here, laying down a sombre, engrossing atmosphere - half lice-ridden realism, half oneiric fairy tale - through which to explore the weird hinterlands separating psychological dysfunction from the supernatural, and the fevered, libidinous effect which such ambiguities tend to inspire within the medieval mind-set which predominates in the film, in spite of its ostensible 19th century setting.

Folk-horror - as we’re now obliged to call it - plays a significant role in the drama here, as do the more prosaic horrors of the feudal class system, with authentic-seeming details of folk magic(k) customs extensively detailed and contrasted with the grander, more blood-thirsty satanic pomp and sexual predation practiced by The Countess (Lucia Bosè) and her dark-eyed consort (played with memorable menace by playboy/producer Espartaco Santoni).

What I appreciated most of all about ‘Ceremonia Sangrienta’ in fact is the way it pulls you so deeply into the beliefs which underpin the film’s world that, after spending 90 minutes convinced you’re watching a a tale filled to the brim with witches, vampirism, demonic possession and corpses rising from the grave, you find yourself reviewing the events you’ve just witnessed and realising that, when reassessed from a “rational” 20th/21st century perspective, nothing objectively supernatural actually happens here at all. A neat trick which I don’t think I have ever seen pulled off this successfully in a period horror film.

And, just for the record, there’s also lots of gushing blood and naked neck-biting, and candle-lit processions through fog-drenched wilderness and wild, reality-shredding delirious editing, so c’mon horror fans - give it a try. The pace may seem a little ponderous at first, but trust me, once you get into it, the restored ‘Blood Ceremony’ really is a WIN-WIN proposition.

 

2. The Lineup 

(Don Siegel, 1958)

It’s difficult to express how much I enjoyed Don Siegel’s psychotic, perverse, action-packed late period hitmen-on-the-rampage noir…. but hopefully I had a pretty good bash at it when I reviewed the film in July last year.

1. Blue Collar 

(Paul Schrader, 1978)

Going into Paul Schrader’s directorial debut, I was expecting, I suppose, a downbeat, neorealist character drama; and heaven knows, I sure got one. Simply put, Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel deliver extraordinary performances in ‘Blue Collar’, each of them pretty much tearing out yr heart n’ soul and giving them a good kicking across the parking lot at various points in the picture, whilst the late, great Yaphet Kotto isn't far behind as their somewhat more canny and laidback cohort Smokey.

Although I daresay the closest Schrader likely ever got to “working the line” was turning in copy for Pauline Kael at the New Yorker, he is, as ever, a phenomenally gifted screenwriter, and the words and scenarios he throws at his volatile cast into here feel entirely authentic. Splitting the weight of the story’s drama between several characters works extremely well, allowing the film to breath somewhat without sacrificing the intensity of each performance, whilst the necessity of concentrating on the essential ordinariness and gut level relatability of our characters’ quandaries meanwhile offers a compelling alternative to the obsessive, lone wolf male martyrs who usually tend to populate Schrader’s universe.

Likewise, I don’t know if there is an aspect of modern life which has been subject to such a weight of fatuous, factional bombast in its fictional portrayals as labour relations, but Schrader, as he is apt to do, cuts straight to the heart of the matter here, rejecting both the chest-beating, all-for-one sentimentality of the left and the poisonous, Social Darwinist bullshit of the right. Instead, he depicts trade unions for what they (in my experience at least) really are. Which is to say, a necessary evil; a leaky cushion of hot air and graft shielding workers from the faceless, instinctual divide-and-conquer tyranny of their employers. The frustration and paranoia which results from being caught in the grind between these two tectonic plates, whilst attempting to remain beholden to neither is, I would contend, perfectly captured here.

Beyond any of this though, what really got me about ‘Blue Collar’ is the unexpected discovery of what a great crime movie it is. It is instructive to hear Schrader speaking about how, nervous about directing for the first time, he wanted to ensure that this movie was “plotted to within an inch of its life” in the manner of a ‘40s thriller, leaving no holes in which the pacing could sag or the actors could lose the narrative thread, because that is indeed very much how the finished movie plays out.

From the painstaking (often hilarious) detail built up around our protagonists’ botched heist attempt to the intractable hell which proceeds to engulf each of them in its aftermath, and the excruciatingly yet totally inevitable manner in which they each willingly deliver themselves up to their own destruction, ‘Blue Collar’ is, surprisingly, one of the best anti-capitalist noirs ever made, be it neo- or otherwise.

It is rare for me to urge readers to watch the conclusion of a film outside of the context which preceded it, but anytime you feel in need of a refresher re: the straight dope on the forces that govern our lives, you could do a lot worse than consult the last two minutes of ‘Blue Collar’ prior to your next encounter with an interview panel / line manager / union rep / tax assessor / polling station.