Monster Books # 3: 1st Armada Monster Book edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Armada, 1975)

A lighter, more family-friendly take on the ‘monster book’ concept here, from children’s imprint Armada, cover artwork by hands unknown.

As you will note, this one has the distinction of being edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, the West London-based author of light-hearted horror tales whose work formed the basis for the Amicus anthology films ‘From Beyond The Grave’ (1974) and The Monster Club (1980) (and who of course enjoyed the privilege of being played by John Carradine in the latter).

Not much to add here, beyond noting that, even accounting for the fact he was writing for children, Mr Chetwynd-Hayes’ introduction establishes him as quite possibly the most jovial fellow ever to have turned his attention to vampires and ghouls.

Also on an Armada ‘monster book’ tip meanwhile, check out this one, which I posted here - cough - nearly a decade ago.

Horror Express: A Reencarnação do Sexo / ‘The Reincarnation of Sex’ (Luiz Castellini, 1982)

‘80s Brazilian sex-horror films don’t come down the pike very often round these parts, so you’ll need to forgive the total lack of cultural context and background info in the review that follows. But, sometimes, that’s the very best part of being a quote-unquote ‘cult movie fan’ isn’t it? Diving in blind and seeing what kind of three-headed guppy you come back up with. Suffice to say, ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is definitely a catch worth making a fuss about.

Story-wise, things get off to pretty mundane start here, as the father of a family living on a remote rural homestead becomes enraged when he overhears his daughter shagging the gardener. Dismissing his wife’s not unreasonable protestations that their daughter has the right to make her own decisions (and that the gardener’s not such a bad guy anyway), the father contrives to drive the gardener to an even more remote spot somewhere down the road, and murders him with an axe.

Thereafter, not for the last time, things get a little weird. The mother appears to take the daughter’s side in the ensuing familial conflict, and together they dig up the gardener’s body, re-burying his severed head in a potted plant, which the daughter then sits next to, looking distraught and rubbing her body with her dead beau’s blood. Subsequently, the daughter appears to become sick with grief, and dies.

SUDDENLY - ten years later! A sleazy estate agent sells a lease on the now empty homestead to a pair of virile young newlyweds. After they move in however, the wife og the couple begins hearing a creepy voice calling her name, emanating from a familiar plant pot in the living room (apparently the décor and contents of the house have remained unchanged over the preceding decade). As a result of this, the wife soon becomes sexually insatiable, exhausting her down-to-earth, wood-chopping husband and causing him to worry for her mental health, especially after she begins stripping off and masturbating at the plant pot-voice’s command.

Soon of course, the plant-voice’s demands become violent, and the wife’s uncle, called in by the husband to provide some help vis-a-vis her troubling behaviour, arrives to find his niece naked and blood splattered, waving the severed head of her husband around like a prize-winning pumpkin.

The next tenant the estate agent finds for the property is an emotionally troubled lesbian whose rich parents are paying for her to live in a rural retreat, apparently so she won’t embarrass them, and…. by this point, it’s pretty clear that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’s flimsy supernatural plotline is basically just going to function as a delivery mechanism for near-constant sex and violence. If you’re comfortable with that though, strap in, because it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.

The sex here is of the Jess Franco-style ‘hard soft’ variety, which is to say, it’s clearly simulated, but the cast really go for it nonetheless, leaving little to the imagination, even as director Luiz Castellini tends to favour heavily shadowed long-shots over Franco’s more, uh, intimate approach to capturing the action on camera.

Once it gets going, the film’s tone is shamelessly prurient and exploitative (one of the high/low points [delete as applicable] involves the lesbian character’s lover bloodily choking to death on a vibrator), but, from your jaded correspondent’s perspective at least, the frequent, highly sexualised violence is presented in a manner which never really becomes overly sadistic or difficult to sit through.

It helps of course that the film is pretty well made, with an imaginatively lurid colour palette of toxic purples and greens and all manner of OTT ‘horror’ effects (thunder and lightning, crash-zooms etc) helping to accentuate the fantastical nature of the proceedings, leaving us in no doubt that we’re watching a a crazy, pulpy soft-porn bloodbath, rather than something which aspires to be genuinely degrading or upsetting.

Also adding greatly to the film’s atmosphere meanwhile is the music, which seems to consist of a series of needle drops taken from every LP the filmmakers’ could dig up which sounded creepy or discordant. The opening credits proudly proclaim “music by Vangelis, Penderecki and Pierre Henry”(!), but, hilariously, variations on Les Baxter’s theme from The Dunwich Horror (1970) play during most of the sex scenes.

As the movie goes on, things become increasingly phantasmagorical, eventually descending into total, blood-curdling delirium, as the haunted plant grows toward ‘Audrey II’-like proportions, swinging its rubbery tendrils around in delight, whilst it also receives assistance from the white-clad ghost of the daughter from the film’s prologue, who happily assists with the slaughter; when she’s not standing outside the house as the thunder roars, swinging the huge axe which once killed her lover around like a golf club, that is.

Once a VW vanload of happy-go-lucky hippies take shelter in the seemingly empty house and swiftly find themselves descending into an involuntary blood orgy, well…. all bets for a return to relative sanity are well and truly off, even as cut-aways to “the city” begin to show us the sleazy estate agents guy, in cahoots with the shaky-handed, wheelchair-bound father from the prologue, receiving some hassle from assorted relatives and survivors of the preceding massacres, who understandably want to see this shit sorted out once and for all… but you don’t really need to know about that, do you?

What you do need to know is that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is staggeringly lurid, hypnotically repetitious and utterly bananas - clearly some kind of a landmark in worldwide-weird horror cinema, even as issues around music rights (aside from anything else) make it extremely unlikely that we’ll be seeing a legit re-release/restoration any time soon. If you’ve read this far without throwing your laptop aside in disgust though, consider it essential viewing. Seek and ye shall find. 

 

Horror Express: Beast From Haunted Cave (Monte Hellman, 1959)

Woe betide anyone who comes to this Gene Corman-produced quickie looking for the roots of the late Monte Hellman’s later, auteurist films. I suspect Hellman was just getting to grips with the basics of how to point a camera at stuff at this stage. Framing is certainly pretty haphazard throughout, and most of the cast deliver their lines as if they were shouting down a megaphone - which admittedly may have been a necessity in view of the muffled, live-on-location sound recording.

Charles B. Griffiths’ script however is characteristically sharp, off-beat and pulpy as hell, meaning that the movie begins as a kind of scrappy rural noir about a bunch of Jim Thompson-esque misfits planning a gold heist at a South Dakota ski lodge... and more-or-less continues as one too, notwithstanding occasional, lethargic attacks from a shapeless, cobweb-covered Lovecraftian snow-beast.

Making one of his only significant screen appearances before relocating to Italy, the great Frank Wolff is one cool mo-fo as the leader of the crooks. Looking almost like Warren Oates in ‘..Alfredo Garcia’ as he knocks back drinks in the bar early in the film, he provides a startling contrast to the kind interchangeable squares who usually tended to populate these movies (whenever Griffiths and Gene’s brother weren’t involved, at least).

Possibly revealing traces of ‘Key Largo’ in the script’s DNA, Frank’s venomous love/hate relationship with heavy-drinking moll/“secretary” Sheila Noonan crackles nicely as they exchange barbed put-downs, archly addressing each other as “Charles” (a detail made even weirder by the fact that that was also the name of the screenwriter). The other two members of their gang (Wally Campo and Richard - yes, cousin of Frank - Sinatra) are ill-defined, quasi-comedic goons, but they’re dumb and unpredictable enough to heft the necessary amount of menace, so all is well.

Though it’s rather poorly explained on-screen, the gang’s plan seems to involve blowing up a local mine as a distraction whilst they pilfer a very small number of gold bars from a nearby bank vault (Frank insists that they only can only carry two each in their backpacks). Then, they’re to proceed with undertaking a pre-arranged trek through the mountains, guided by an unsuspecting, granite-jawed ski instructor / wilderness survival guy whom the gang sneeringly call “nature boy” (played by the appropriately named Michael Forest, although he could easily be mistaken for a Scots Pine).

Give or take a dead barmaid (the monster killed her, but of course the others assume goon # 1 did away with her like the psychotic freak he evidently is), this scheme goes surprisingly smoothly, and… to be honest, I’m not really sure what they planned to do once they’re out in the wilderness, besides hide out indefinitely in the remote cabin Nature Boy leads them to, but… would you really expect a gang this dysfunctional to have thought things through properly? Besides, by the time they hit the shack, the monster is getting seriously on their case, so they’ve soon got bigger antediluvian, spider-like horrors to fry.

Filmed back-to-back with Roger C’s ‘Ski Troop Attack’ (1960) (apparently the Cormans had cut a deal with the ski lodge in which both films were shot), in technical terms ‘Beast From Haunted Cave’ is a pretty terrible film in just about every respect, feeling much more amateurish and chaotic than most of the films Roger turned in on similarly tight schedules in the late ‘50s. At the same time though, its warped (and occasionally inaudible) human drama has a loose, punk-ass charm that’s difficult to deny. So… perhaps not actually that far removed from Hellman’s later achievements, now that I think about it?

Instantly redeeming the movie’s rep with the monster kids meanwhile, when we finally reach the final five minutes of climactic monster action, they’re actually pretty damned good. Created (and indeed played) by actor and future director Chris Robinson, the beast seems fairly laughable during its early appearances, but when framed in the gloomy, atmospheric confines of the titular cave, it becomes a far more interesting and frightening prospect than most of its competitors in the Corman/AIP-adjacent monster movie canon.

Shot against this shadowy backdrop, the candy floss-like white tendrils which cover its spider-like appendages look sinewy and icky, whilst the beast’s lack of a face or fixed shape also proves extremely effective. Perhaps its just the snowbound setting, but it feels in some ways like a distant ancestor of Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, and… would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that the way the beast sticks its still living victims to the walls in webbed cocoons seems to pre-figure ‘Aliens’ a quarter century later…? Probably, but it still looks really scary and cool nonetheless.

In conclusion then, approximately ten times more enjoyable than Creature From The Haunted Sea, which I watched as part of my pre-Halloween marathon a few years back because I got the titles confused and thought it was this.

---

Check out the amazing artwork on this 8mm digest version… 

 

Monster Books # 2: Family Ghosts by Elliot O’Donnell (Consul, 1965)

In contrast to the horror/monster-related expectations raised by the eye-catching cover, Elliot O’Donnell’s subject here is, quite literally, ‘family ghosts’, and, without providing a contents page or index, he simply ploughs his way, Charles Fort style, through an interminable recitation of unsourced paranormal anecdotes, loosely categorised under such generic chapter headings as ‘Phantom Birds’, ‘White Ladies, ‘Scottish Family Ghosts’ and so forth.

Elsewhere in the text however, things do at least get pretty peculiar, which is good enough for me. One chapter for instance concerns ‘Haunted Welsh Bridges and Ghosts That Follow Families’, whilst, intriguingly, ‘Fish, Bat and Tree Ghosts’ are considered in Chapter II, beginning with the case of Nottinghamshire’s infamous(?) death-predicting sturgeon;

If this were an original work produced for Consul Books in 1965, I’d be inclined to suggest that O’Donnell had singularly failed to get with the programme re: producing a good ‘monster book’. Although Consul’s edition contains no record prior publication however, it is immediately obvious that ‘Family Ghosts’ was penned considerably prior to the swinging sixties. O’Donnell’s prose has a stodgy, Victorian feel to it, he speaks of receiving letters in 1910 clarifying points he had previously made in print, and in fact he rarely seems to mention anything subsequent to the First World War.

Indeed, a brief glance at Elliot O’Donnell’s Wikipedia page confirms that, born in 1872, he actually died in 1965. ‘Family Ghosts’ was first published in 1934.

Although best remembered for ghost books - of which he wrote dozens, beginning as early as 1908 - in turns out that O’Donnell was actually also an exponent of weird fiction, beginning his literary career with a thriller entitled ‘For Satan’s Sake’ in 1904 and following it up with ‘The Sorcery Club’ in 1912. He subsequently made the cover of ‘Weird Tales’ with ‘The Ghost Table’ in February 1928.

Given that Consul include no copyright notice at the front of this book, I can only assume the they simply dug up the printing plates for ‘Family Ghosts’ from god knows where and slapped them onto new pages to fill a hole in their release schedule, perhaps without even informing the recently deceased author’s estate. The cover illustration and tag line certainly seem more suggestive of an anthology of horror stories than a compendium of hoary old blather about spectral hounds and phantom fish… but who knows?

And speaking of the cover painting - it really is a corker isn’t it? I’ve got no idea who did it, but it’s absolutely great. I’d suggest it might have been better attached to a reprint of some of O’Donnell’s fiction, which I’d probably much rather read too to be honest, but so it goes.

Gothic Originals: La Cripta e L’Incubo / ‘Crypt of the Vampire’ (Camillo Mastrocinque, 1964)

One of the more frequently overlooked entries in Italy’s cycle of ‘60s gothic horrors, ‘La Cripta e L’incubo’ had escaped my attention prior to its re-emergence this year as part of Severin’s Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee box set. It is all the more satisfying therefore to discover that it actually holds up as one of the very best second-tier Italio-gothics, muscling in just below the canonical classics of Bava, Freda and Margheriti in my own personal ranking of such things.

Leaving aside for a moment the contributions of director Camillo Mastrocinque (who went on to helm the similarly underappreciated Barbara Steele vehicle An Angel for Satan two years later), ‘Cripta e L’incubo’ seems to have been a project chiefly instigated by its co-writers, future director Tonino Valerii and the ubiquitous Ernesto Gastaldi.

As Valerii and Gastaldi have both recalled in interviews, their script for the film was produced in a single, heavily caffeinated all-night writing session, after producer Mario Mariani called their bluff by telling them he’d finance the top flight horror picture Gastaldi was boasting about having written, if they could drop the script round to his office the following morning.

The fevered, ‘first thought / best thought’ approach to writing which resulted from this circumstance is perhaps reflected in the pleasantly disjointed mish-mash of ideas which eventually made it to the screen.

Expanding upon a garbled retelling of Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (already filmed by Roger Vadim as the epochal ‘Blood & Roses’ a few years earlier), the two writers add a largely unconnected opening half hour cribbed either from Hammer’s ‘Dracula’ or Corman’s House of Usher (bequiffed young hero José Campos has arrived at the sinister castle to catalogue and restore the library of Christopher Lee’s saturnine Count Karnstein), alongside assorted hints of Gastaldi’s future notoriety as an architect of the giallo (see below), some blatant borrowings from Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’/‘La Maschera del Demonio’, and a startling injection of below stairs black magickal intrigue which anticipates the kind of imagery more commonly encountered in the wave of Erotic Castle Movies which kept the Euro-gothic tradition alive through the ‘70s.

Charged with knitting all this together into a coherent whole, Mastrocinque - a veteran director tackling his first horror film here after decades of comedies and melodramas - seems to have faced a certain amount of criticism over the years, not least from Valerii and Gastaldi, neither of whom seem to have held him in high regard. Reading between the lines, one suspects the younger writers may have resented not being given the opportunity to take a crack at directing their script themselves, whilst the fact that Mastrocinque sacked Gastaldi’s wife (the recently departed Mara Maryl, R.I.P.) from the film after less than a day on set can scarcely have helped matters.

The director has also been criticised though by some later commentators, who have accused him of failing the lacking a ‘feel’ for the horror genre - an accusation I find rather unfair.

Admittedly, both of Mastrocinque’s horror films are lugubriously paced even by the standards of this sub-genre, downplaying the kind of visceral shocks modern viewers might expect, and ‘Cripta e L’incubo’s early scenes do feel rather stiff and uninvolving, but regardless - once the film gets going, it is positively dripping with the very best kind of gothic atmos, as the director’s rather stately, old fashioned style intersects quite beautifully with the more irrational, exploitational content the writers have jammed into the screenplay.

Right from the outset, the use of one of Italio-gothic’s homes-from-home, the Castello Piccolomini in Balsorano, as the primary shooting location adds greatly to the sense of crumbling, atavistic weirdness (the Castello’s later tenants included both Lady Frankenstein and The Crimson Executioner), whilst a frantic, wild-eyed performance from Adriana Ambesi as the troubled Laura Karnstein also immediately grabs our attention. Though she still looks appropriately stunning in her period accoutrements, Ambesi brings a distraught, human fragility to her character which sets her apart from the icy brunettes who usually dominate this emotionally frigid sub-genre.

Carlo Savina’s score meanwhile nails down the mood perfectly with dissonant, droning organ chords, creepy harp arpeggios and gratuitous theremin, and from the moment we hear a ghostly church bell tolling across the desolate valley housing the deserted ruins of the village which once bore the Karnstein name (subsequently seen in evocative location shots of some suitably blighted/abandoned locale), we know we’re getting the real deal here.

Presumably by accident rather than design (although he was certainly old enough to remember them the first time around), Mastrocinque draws here on imagery recalling the pre-war ur-texts of Euro-horror, giving us diaphanous, slo-mo curtains dancing in the breeze (ala Epstein’s 1928 ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’) and Cocteau-esque pools of translucent darkness, along with glass-topped coffins, spectral, ruin-dwelling crones, and other faint echoes of Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931).

At the same time though, ‘Cripta e L’incubo’ also pre-empts much of the more envelope-pushing content which would come to dominate the genre as time went on, giving the film a bit of a transitional feeling - a gateway from one mode/era of horror filmmaking to another, if you will.

As noted above, Valerii & Gastaldi have got the basics of the ‘Carmilla’ story rather muddled here, so that their Karnstein family are actually the occupants of the home into which the Carmilla surrogate character (renamed Ljuba, and played by Ursula Davis) is welcomed following the traditional coach crash.

In this retelling furthermore, the daughter to which the predatory vampire turns her attentions (that of course being Laura) already has a whole heap of trouble on her plate, what with being hypnotised into participating in black magick rites at the behest of housekeeper/covert witch Rowena (Nela Conjui), causing her to experience occasional possession by the spirit of her inevitable, curse-declaiming witch ancestor (whom we see in flashback meeting her grisly fate at the hands of the Inquisition, in a blatant lift from ‘Black Sunday’). In addition to to this, Laura also suffers from nightmares in which she experiences real-time visions of crimes perpetrated by Ljuba prior to her arrival at the castle. Poor lass - no wonder she’s feeling a bit flustered.

The lesbian connotations of the ‘Carmilla’ story may be subtlety handled here, but - presumably following the example of Vadim’s film - they are still present, which must have been dynamite for audiences in ’64. Meanwhile, red-blooded cinemagoers were also given the opportunity to thrill to the sight of Ambesi’s naked back, which is presented to us on multiple occasions, not least in particularly kinky context during the Satanic rites and the inquisition sequence (I don’t really need to tell you that Ambesi plays her own ancestor during the flashbacks do I?) The highly suggestive nightmare sequence in which Laura’s assorted female tormenters appear at her bedside bearing over-sized goblets of blood (paging Dr Freud), is also excellent.

Speaking of which, all that occult stuff down in the catacombs - sans any real explanation of its origins or narrative purpose - feels incredibly potent and deranged. Bearing a paper pentangle covertly sliced from an ancient manuscript, the malevolent Rowena calls upon the spirit of her infernal mistress, as a mesmerised Laura drops her robe and lays face down, spread eagled within the crudely wrought magic circle, and Savina’s music explodes into a cacophony of fevered gong battering and shrieking, ring-modulated feedback. Again, wild stuff for the early ‘60s.

The comingling of vampirism and diabolism may be old as the hills (even creeping into Hammer’s ‘Brides of Dracula’ and ‘Kiss of the Vampire’ in the years preceding this), but it still elicits a charge of pure weirdness which I never tire of, whilst the trope of a domestic servant turning to black magick to commune with his/her departed mistress/master is one which would recur incessantly through the next few decades of Euro-horror.

In particular, Rowena’s practice has a DIY / folkloric aspect to it which I find interesting. Late in the film, she whips out a ‘hand of glory’ (nearly a decade prior to ‘The Wicker Man’), and the sequence in which she creeps through the castle’s nocturnal halls, bearing her strange talisman, is one of the most evocative and wordlessly weird in the movie, providing a great showcase for the classically crepuscular monochrome cinematography (provided either by Julio Ortas or Giuseppe Aquari, depending on whop you speak to).

I’ve long believed there is a thesis waiting to be written on the symbolic significance of hands in Italian gothic horror (seriously, they’re everywhere), and the presence of this crudely embalmed murderer’s extremity, traditionally left burning at a victim’s bedside, could no doubt provide some great ammunition to the brave scholar tackling such a topic.

For a more direct expression of sexuality meanwhile, look no further than the scenes between Lee (looking rather louche in a terrific quilted dressing gown, monogrammed with an appropriately gothic ‘K’) and Véra Valmont, playing housemaid Annette. Rather surprisingly in view of the usual bottoned up conventions of the sub-genre, we at one point see the pair lounging about together in the Count’s bed chamber, having completed the latest bout in what appears to be a long term affair.

Surprisingly mature and cynical, the couple’s dialogue in this scene transcends the pulpy/melodramatic writing usually encountered in gothic horror, giving us a rather more interesting and ambiguous character relationship, which, as mentioned above, anticipates the kind of thing Gastaldi in particular would make his bread and butter in later years, once the giallo kicked off as a viable genre later in the decade.

All of this aided greatly by Mastrocinique’s decision - repeated in ‘An Angel For Satan’ - to play things totally straight, refusing to wink to the audiences or leave room for sniggers, even as the narrative piles up genre clichés like dirty dishes; mismatched remnants of delicious, pulp/comic book indulgence.

By maintaining a stately pace and liminal, laid-back tone, the director gives his cast the opportunity to stretch out and deliver something closer to ‘proper’ performances than was common within the genre. Lee (who provides his own voice on the English dub) seems more relaxed than usual here - grateful perhaps to be playing a low key, relatively sympathetic, role instead of being slathered in ‘walking dead’ face paint as per many of his other European Counts - whilst Ambessi, Valmont and Conjui are all very good.

Above all, ‘La Cripta e L’Incubo’ is a mood piece, and as such, it is probably not for all tastes. Those liable to be frustrated by the film’s sedate progress through a disjointed, weirdly structured and cliché-ridden narrative may prefer to give it a wide berth. But, for those of us who love the texture, the atmosphere, and the underlying sense of oneiric delirium which define Italian gothic horror, it is an absolute treat - a pure draught straight from the well of the genre’s fetid, short-lived high water mark. 

---

Monster Books # 1: Monsters Galore ‘resurrected’ by Bernhardt J. Hurwood (Fawcett/Gold Medal, 1965)

One curious phenomenon birthed by the commercial imperatives of mid 20th century paperback publishing is that of what I like to call MONSTER BOOKS; hastily thrown together compendiums of public domain short stories and folkloric / paranormal blather, no doubt intended to capture the attention of ghoulish, impressionable young boys and girls left alone in supermarkets and corner shops whilst their parents took care of hum-drum grown-up business.

Ranging across decades and continents, these rarely acknowledged books remain pretty ubiquitous on the second hand market, and, naturally enough, I generally can’t resist ’em. Despite the haste and cheapness of their production, they’re often actually pretty great reads too, assembled with admirable care and attention by their editors/compilers.

I mean, just imagine you’re a struggling writer with a taste for the stranger side of life, and some editor from Gold Medal calls you up out of the blue and says, “hey Bernie, can you get us about two hundred pages of copyright-free stuff about MONSTERS by a week on Thursday?” Boy, can you EVER. Dream gig, right?

That, presumably, is the call that the venerable Bernhardt J. Hurwood received sometime in 1965, and, as you can see from the scans below, he really went to town on it. Not only do we get M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearn, Sir Walter Scott and Ambrose Bierce, but also original retellings by the editor (sorry, ‘resurrector’) of tales sourced from China, Japan, Arabia, Greece and Siberia… amazing stuff. Whilst I haven’t managed to scan them, the text is also interspersed with blurry reproductions of images from Goya, Kuniyoshi, Hokusai, Brueghel, medieval wood carving, and an etching of “two Mongolian demons”.

Just imagine the impact this “United Nations of virulence,” as Hurwood dubs it in his introduction, could have had on some culturally deprived child out in the boondocks somewhere. Mr Hurwood, we salute you!

As you will note, things take a darker turn toward the end of the book, as Hurwood goes off on a bit of a “of course man is the only true monter” tip, throwing in some historical accounts of serial killers, cannibals and the like alongside such borderline supernatural cases as that of Elisabeth Báthory, not to mention the unfortunately named Johannes Cuntius, a medieval ‘vampyre’ whose unsavoury antics are reported here, sans context, in what appears to be an English translation of a contemporary(?) eye witness account.

Needless to say, it is this stuff, more-so than the were-bears and vampire cats, which would probably have given me nightmares had I stumbled across this book in my youth.

Finally, a quick word on the cover design. Incorporating a rough sketch from legendary illustrator Harry Bennett, nothing here is terribly remarkable from a technical POV, but it just looks really great, with that big, blobby lettering and the bright colours and everything. I often leave this one out on display in the living room, and I never get tired of looking at it.

 

Horror Non-Express Disclaimer / Urgent Hammer Vampire Update.

As you will have noted, today is the 1st of October - the date upon which, for the past few years at least, this blog has launched an annual posting marathon, providing some suitably horror-centric new content every few days in anticipation of the All Hallows bacchanal at the end of the month.

Unfortunately however, the same real life chores and responsibilities which have slowed down the frequency of my posting during the summer look set to only increase over the next month or so, meaning that dedicating additional time to writing/blogging is simply not going to be possible.

Never fear though -- I’ll get some good spooky stuff up here, that’s for sure. I’m just unable to make any guarantees right now re: quantity or frequency.

More urgently however, long-time readers will recall that, back in 2019, apparently high on the fumes of Autumnal horror delirium, I celebrated Halloween by posting a run-down of all of Hammer’s vampire films, ranked according to quality.

Well, since publishing these important conclusions, I am duty-bound to report that I have revisited ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness’ for the first time in a number of years, and now believe that I significantly undervalued it. Though the film’s flaws (stupid, back-of-a-napkin story, abysmal anticlimactic ending, failure to give Christopher Lee much to do) remain impossible to ignore, in most other respects (direction, acting, music), it is actually very good, with Terrence Fisher’s guiding hand lending a sense of dread solemnity to proceedings which positively reeks of “quintessential Hammer”.

Looking back on my list therefore, I’d probably now zip it straight up to, say, #8, between ‘Satanic Rites..’ and ‘..A.D. 1972’.

Meanwhile, I also watched ‘The Vampire Lovers’ again recently, and, although I still enjoyed it, in no way does it deserve to sit at #6 on the list.

Despite its charms (not all of them Ingrid Pitt-shaped), it now strikes me as a rather dreary, moth-eaten kind of affair. Visuals and production design aren’t remotely up to the level of those seen in Hammer’s earlier films, whilst its approach to sex and nudity - as per so much British sexploitation - has a furtive, slightly camp / self-conscious feel to it which makes it seem far sleazier than the relatively mild on-screen content (all crammed into one reel I note, so that the offending ‘naughty bits’ could be easily yanked out when needed) really demands.

I still find myself perversely amused by how outrageously misogynistic the whole affair is (see my original write-up), but… in short, not half as good as I remembered. In fact, I think I’d now boot it all the way down to #10, just narrowly beating ‘..Risen From The Grave’.

So, I’m glad to get all that off my heaving bosom. Please adjust your wall-charts accordingly.

Now, roll on whatever I manage to knock out for October, and tune in in 2023 for my long awaited reappraisal of ‘Captain Kronos’!

Krimi Casebook: Monk with a Whip (Alfred Vohrer, 1967)

There are few things in life I enjoy more than a mid-week Krimi. Settling down with a glass of single malt to savour the delights of ‘Monk with a Whip’, aka ‘The College Girl Murders’, whilst my neighbours presumably content themselves with whatever Netflix or Mouse Plus have to offer, I can’t help but feel I’m “living my best life”, as the kids might put it.

By 1967, it’s safe to say, Rialto Films’ prolific series of German language Edgar Wallace adaptations had already lived their best lives many times over. But, even as the well-worn formula began to look a little ragged around the edges, both the introduction of colour and the gradual retreat of censorship through the second half of the ‘60s helped the ‘krimi’ experience something of a second wind, and happily, ‘Der Mönch mit der Peitsche’ (as it was known to West German audiences) stands out as one of the prime beneficiaries of these developments.

Although the film is allegedly adapted from Wallace’s 1929 novel ‘The Terror’, by this point Rialto’s scriptwriters were no longer even pretending to tell a coherent mystery story. Instead, ‘Monk..’ foregrounds a startling succession of outrageous, mildly titillating pulp / comic book set-pieces, loosely tied together into a distinctly half-hearted whodunit narrative, the resolution of which singularly fails to address the questions raised by the improbable events which have preceded it. Which is fine by me, needless to say - the crazier these movies get, the better, so far as I’m concerned.

As such, the film begins in a mouldering Frankensteinian laboratory located beneath a fog-shrouded gothic church (elaborate beakers and test tubes full of bubbling, fluorescent potions present and correct), wherein an elderly, white-haired scientist has perfected a colourless, odourless poison gas. As he merrily demonstrates, this can achieve the frankly less than earth-shattering result of killing a bunch of mice in a matter of seconds. (Is it just me, or does this feel like pretty uncomfortable subject matter for a post-war German film? Let’s not even go there, shall we.)

Keen to test his invention out on a human subject, the amoral egghead orders his reluctant assistant to enter the new formula in the book in which they apparently record such things. But, as the assistant opens the book’s cover - boom! - the crazy doc has only gone and installed a miniaturised poison gas spray it! Down goes the assistant, cackle-cackle goes the prof.

Cue the reverb-drenched voice of “Edgar Wallace”, the obligatory blood-dripping crimson titles, and the explosion of a main title theme, which, though it is not on this occasion composed by primo Krimi maestro Peter Thomas, nonetheless provides a pretty good imitation of the squawking, lurching tones of his deeply eccentric psyche/jazz/exotica stylings. (Martin Böttcher, who handled pretty much all the key krimis not scored by Thomas, was the man responsible.)

Clearly intent on wringing some immediate profit from his dastardly invention, we next see the scientist above ground amidst the tombstones, where he hands over a poison-loaded prayer book and a suitcase full of other nefarious, gas-related goodies to an unseen criminal, who arrives in a chauffeured Rolls Royce. The doc doesn’t have long to gloat however, as - ka-pow! - he suddenly finds himself garrotted by the lasso-like whip wielded by a hulking ‘monk’ clad in bright red robes and a conical KKK hood! Ye gods.

It would be difficult for any movie to top the EC Comics-via-Mario Bava ghoulishness of this opening, but ‘Monk with a Whip’ keeps the motor running for its next, loosely connected, segment, which concerns a prison inmate who is sprung from the joint, only to find himself transported (blindfolded of course) to the lair of a Dr Mabuse-like super-criminal, who sits with his back to the interviewee, his voice seemingly booming from the walls of a darkened, wood-panelled aquarium, from which giant turtles, manta rays and suchlike cast eerie, green-tinted shadows.

(The antechamber the villain’s lair, lest I forget to mention it elsewhere, comprises a rickety indoor rope bridge over an artificial swamp populated by alligators and pythons!)

Equipped with the deadly prayer book seen in the earlier sequence, the prisoner is promised riches in exchange for assassinating - for no reason which is ever satisfactorily explained - a suspiciously mature looking pupil at a Catholic girls’ school. (“FINALLY,” exclaim the audience who tuned in for ‘The College Girl Murders’.)

It is the demise of this unfortunate young lady which attracts the attentions of Scotland Yard, and in particular, the indefatigable Sir John, played as always by Siegfried Schürenberg. “What will they try next?”, he exclaims, throwing down a report on the killing, before calling in our old friend Joachim Fuchsberger (here playing one Inspektor Higgins), who, as a veteran of both The Black Abbott and ‘The Sinister Monk’ (1965), should surely be well-qualified to get to grips with this particular case.

A cameo player in the earlier films in series, Sir John was usually found choking on his tea in response to Fuchsberger’s mod-ish behaviour, but here he finds himself promoted to a central character - essentially subbing for mercifully absent comic relief overlord Eddi Arent, as he goes out ‘in the field’ to assist Higgins with the investigation.

Sir John’s shtick here concerns his attempts to prove the value of the new, “psychological” detection techniques in which he has apparently received some training - a one joke set up which, sad to say, soon becomes quite tiresome, as he bumbles around making a fuss about the psychoanalytical significance of witnesses’ testimony and so on, all whilst Fuchsberger smiles indulgently in the background.

This does lead to one genuinely amusing moment, when Sir John declares that he will rush home and consult his reference books to ascertain the potent Freudian implications of a dormitory full of school girls experiencing a collective hallucination of a red-clad monk, only for Fuchsberger - who, as noted, has form in this area - to gently reassure him that, “they say they saw a monk because there was a monk”.

That aside though, I confess that the Scotland Yard elements of ‘Monk with a Whip’ didn't quite hit the mark for me. Fuchsberger in particular seems a bit tired here, both as an actor and a character. Lacking much of the ‘silver fox’ charisma he brought to earlier adventures, he is more of a straight up, down-at-heel detective in this one. Despite some token attempts at flirtatious banter with Sir John’s Moneypenny-ish secretary (played on this occasion by Ilse Pagé), the unlikely depiction of Scotland Yard as a kind of louche bachelor’s paradise, as seen in films like 1964’s Der Hexer, seems to have diminished considerably by this point.

Likewise, as per The Hunchback of Soho, this one comes up disappointingly short on the kind of incongruous, not-quite-right English detail we UK-dwellers love to chuckle at in these films. Set largely in anonymous rural locations, there is perhaps a sense here of the Rialto films attempting to increase their international appeal (foreshadowing perhaps the reliance on questionable co-production deals which would just about keep the Krimi brand on life support into the early ‘70s).

Changes were also clearly afoot in terms of casting, with few holdovers here from the ‘krimi gang’ who helped fill Rialto’s black & white era films with such a memorable gallery of rogues and red herrings - but, despite all this, if we can cease comparing ‘Monk with a Whip’ to earlier krimis for a few minutes, there is so much else to love here.

Primarily, the film’s lighting and production design - though evidently executed on a tight budget - is really rather wonderful. Nocturnal scenes (of which there are many) fare particularly well in this respect, as DP Karl Löb (who appears to have handled photography on the vast majority of ‘60s German cult films) intersperses fields of dark shadow and deep, mossy greens with occasional outbursts of searing primary colour - not least the crimson-clad monk himself - whilst the smoke machines are meanwhile working overtime, lending a bit of a ‘Blood & Black Lace’ vibe to proceedings; ‘60s pop cinema in excelsis.

Throughout the film in fact, colours are cranked up to an admirably extreme level of saturation; all of the female characters wear eye-popping, monochromatic dresses and swimsuits, whilst many of the sets find a way to glow with some kind of eerie phosphorescence or another, like a wild, candy-coloured riposte to the cheaper, more naturalistic brown n’ beige mundanity which begins to predominate during the less imaginatively shot interior dialogue sequences.

Director Alfred Vohrer may not manage to include quite so many of the baroque props or forced perspective / model-based trick shots which became his trademark (“Vohrer-isms” as I recently heard them described in the Projection Booth podcast’s Krimi episode), but he nonetheless does everything in his power to keep the film visually exciting.

In particular, Vohrer gets much mileage out of the scenes set in and around around the school’s swimming pool, which, inexplicably, includes a kind of ‘viewing window’ in the service area beneath the pool, allowing for a number of unusual/distorted shot compositions. (How exactly this airy, modern building fits in with the ancient gothic exteriors we see representing the school’s estate is anyone’s guess, but no matter.)

It is here that the film’s perpetually sweaty pervert science teacher character (played by Konrad Georg) likes to crouch, watching the bathing beauties swim by - but, the teacher’s voyeurism goes both ways, as, in one of the films best moments, the young heroine Ann (Uschi Glas) dives into the pool, and, gazing out through the submerged viewing window, spies the hanging corpse of the sweaty teacher, ironically deposited in his favourite peeping spot by the monk.

As such incidents suggest, there is still a strong undercurrent of macabre sordidness running through ‘Monk with a Whip, however light-hearted and campy things may become at times. As well as sweaty Konrad, characters like the shifty-eyed headmistress (Tilly Lauenstein) and menacing chauffeur (Günter Meisner) bring some fresh blood (so to speak) to the movie’s unwholesome ID parade of suspects, whilst the idea of the school’s pupils leaving the safety of their dormitories to ‘party’ in the red-lit lodge occupied by a shady writer and sundry leery teachers is also fleetingly explored.

Momentarily reminding me of 1962’s somewhat krimi-influenced Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory, this notion of lonely girls leaving the safety of their collective lodgings to drift into the dark woods, in search of illicit thrills, remains a potent addition to the mystery, and, though it is never fully developed here, we do at least get a nice piece of ‘Twin Peaks’-ish noir jazz to set the mood.

Then of course, there’s the whip-wielding monk itself - such a wonderfully absurd, surrealistic creation! Seemingly pulled straight off the cover of some especially depraved fumetti, it’s enough to make you forget that this was somehow at least the third film Rialto managed to make about malevolent masked clerics knocking people off in the dead of night before being subjected to an inevitable, ‘Scooby-Doo’-esque unmasking.

(If the plot is not complicated by at least one instance of an innocent character dressing up as the monk, or an unconscious hero being left lying around in monk robes, or multiple monks, or something, I believe you’re allowed to ask for your money back.)

As to that whole business with the odourless/colourless poison gas meanwhile, well, given that by the second half of the film the villains have been reduced to loading it into guns and squirting it into their victims’ faces, leaving a thick layer of fake cobwebs, I’m not really sure what advantage it holds over just, say, shooting people, especially given that the same criminal cartel employs a crimson-clad maniac with a lasso, but…. there I go with that pesky ‘logic’ again. It all adds to the fun, and boosts the body count - which at the end of the day is very much the point here.

I mean, let’s face it, but the time we account for Not-Dr Mabuse in his study / aquarium, with his snakes and crocodiles, and eerie florescent lighting, we’re pretty far gone into the realm of euro-cult delirium and - in my case at least - enjoying it all immensely.

As noted, the eventual ‘resolution’ to this mystery proves a complete damp squib, doing very little to rationalise any of the preceding carnage and leaving us essentially non-plussed as to why any of this madness really needed to happen, but at the end of the day - so what.

So long as that bloody monk gets his comeuppance and Higgins and Sir John can head back to the Yard in one piece for a pot of tea and some banter with the girls in the typing pool, all will be right with the world. As the nation’s foremost experts in the field of crimes involving girls’ schools, poison gas, secret passages, crocodiles and/or evil monks (we get a lot of that sort of thing in the home counties, don't you know), I’d like to think they have a long and rewarding career ahead of them - in my dreams, if nowhere else.

---

Exploito All’Italiana: Poliziotto Sprint / ‘Highway Racer’ (Stelvio Massi, 1977)

Stelvio Massi’s appealingly titled ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ [less attractively/ accurately released as ‘Highway Racer’ in English-speaking territories] stands out as a real oddity in the canon of late ‘70s poliziottesci.

Entirely bypassing the mean-spirited narratives of violent crime, institutional corruption and bloody vengeance which usually define the sub-genre, this weirdly ambitious tilt toward the ‘car action’ dollar is instead built around the framework of an uplifting martial arts/sports movie in the ‘Rocky’/‘Karate Kid’ mould… only with driving cars around Rome in place of fighting.

Euro-crime fans will recognise that something is up with this one the moment Maurizio Merli turns up for business without his trademark moustache. I know - WTF, right? As far as sartorial faux pas in the world of screen tough guys goes, this one takes some getting used to.

In fairness however, it soon becomes evident that the two-fisted star of Violent Rome (1975) and ‘Rome Armed to the Teeth’ (1976) has resorted to the razor with clear purpose here - specifically, to signal a clean break from the indefatigable “iron commissioner” archetype he embodied in pretty much all of his other crime films. Indeed, perhaps uniquely in his catalogue, Merli is actually called upon to do some acting here, playing Inspector Marco Palma, a feckless young hothead who dreams of one day becoming the champion interceptor driver of Rome’s equivalent of the Flying Squad.

Always first to hit the asphalt when one of the those pesky, balaclava-clad bank robbery gangs are making a getaway, the single-minded Palma soon proves himself to be utterly incapable of realising his ambitions, disregarding orders, endangering his colleagues, wrecking cars and letting the baddies get away at every screeching turn - much to the chagrin of the hard-bitten Commissario Tagliaferri (Giancarlo Sbragia - scruffy, balding, cardigan), who stubbornly refuses to allow him access to the faster, souped up roadster he repeatedly demands to better compete with the crooks.

The relationship between Palma and Tagliaferri is complicated by the fact that, before retreating to a desk job, the latter actually was the previous generation’s equivalent of the the legendary, super-star police driver Palma aspires to become, lauded by the popular press for running down villains in his special issue Ferrari. As such, Palma (whose bedroom is still decked out with grand prix posters and model cars, as if he were a 13-year-old boy) hero worships his commanding officer to a frankly embarrassing degree, even as Tagliaferri wearily plods through the familiar routine of telling him yet again to shut up, obey orders and pay attention to the bloody road signs.

Before long, Palma (and we along with him) suffers a blunt moment of pathos when his latest high speed antics result in the death of his mild-mannered partner (Orazio Orlando) - an incident which understandably leads him to offer his resignation from the force in conventionally dramatic Merli fashion following a climactic bust up with Tagliaferri.

But, after being given a dressing down by his own superior officer vis-à-vis the need to apprehend the robbery gang led by charismatic Italio-French wheelman ‘Il Nazzardo’ (Angelo Infanti), Tagliaferri decides that planting an undercover man posing as a crack driver in the gang is the way to go…. and wouldn’t you know it, he knows a certain disgraced young petrol-head who’d be just perfect for the job. Heck, he’ll even dig up his old Ferrari for the occasion and give it new paint job and some go-faster stripes. Do you feel a training montage coming on, readers..? To the race track!

Simple-minded to the point of idiocy though its story may be, taken on its own terms, within the context of its genre and era, ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ soon becomes a rather enjoyable and refreshing prospect.

An underrated cinematic stylist, crime movie specialist Stelvio Massi tackles the material with pace, polish and, well, style, keeping things fast-moving and visually interesting at all times. (Like Joseph H. Lewis before him, Massi clearly never met a shot he couldn’t improve by moving the camera to really low angle and sticking some picturesque obstruction in the foreground.)

A low key, alternately hard-driving and wistful, score from Stelvio Cipriani helps matters too, whilst Massi & co clearly worked closely with acclaimed stunt co-ordinator Rémy Julienne to ensure that the obligatory chase and stunt sequences which make up much of the run time, if not always world-beating, are never less than thoroughly satisfactory.

Delivering all the hair-raising screeching through heavy traffic on open / non-permitted streets you could possibly ask for, the film incorporates some daring, hold-on-for-dear-life camera placements which seem to anticipate the innovations of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max’ by several years, with safety and good sense clearly slipping way down the priority list.

(Very much the highlight in this regard is a frankly jaw-dropping slo-mo sequence - framed as a flashback to Tagliaferri’s adventures of yesteryear - which clearly shows two cars careening at full pelt down Rome’s Spanish Steps, colliding and spinning mid-way down, with zero fucks apparently given for the famed historical landmarks which surround them on all sides; an effect only slightly marred by the fact we can see in the new blu-ray transfer that the totalled car is empty as it crashes down the steps.)

More surprising however is how well the film works as a character piece. Merli’s screen persona always had a vain, preening side to it, with sits well with the more vulnerable, self-conscious character he plays here, allowing Palma to emerge as a surprisingly sympathetic presence, in spite of his oft knuckleheaded behaviour. (By way of Characterisation 101, we learn that he grew up in an orphanage, lending a degree of heart string-tugging empathy to his otherwise rather crazed desire to prove himself a Big Man by excelling in his chosen field.)

A stalwart TV and theatre actor whose sparse genre credits include ‘The Blood-Stained Butterfly’ (1971), Sbragia meanwhile manages to bring real gravitas to his potentially clichéd role here, whilst Infanti (an Italio-exploitation regular, perhaps best known for appearing in the Sicilian segment of ‘The Godfather’) is charismatic as hell as our louche antagonist. If the ability to care, at least distantly, about the fate of our characters is key to success within the “triumph against all odds” framework within which ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ positions itself, then safe to say, Massi and his cast pass the test with aplomb.

What sets ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ apart above all though is its spirted rejection of the all-consuming cynicism which defined the polizziotesci sub-genre. Entirely devoid of sleaze or sexual content, the film also features remarkably little violence, to the point where it could almost count as family friendly viewing - a circumstance which perhaps accounts for its low standing amongst Euro-crime fans.

Indeed, not only do we get to marvel here at the unique-within-the-genre sight of a machine gun-toting bank robbery gang NOT flipping out and massacring civilians, but I believe that the only death which occurs prior to the film’s conclusion is actually that of Merli’s aforementioned partner, killed solely as a result of our hero’s stupidity!

As startling as this avoidance of bloodshed may seem however, there is of course narrative purpose behind the film’s restraint. In stark contrast to the slavering, animalistic bastards who usually serve as the villains in these movies, Infanti’s Il Nazzardo, rocking a series of variations on ‘70s coke dealer chic, cuts a suave, even attractive, figure. A stylish, morally equivocal rogue, he has that whole “honour among thieves” thing down pat, even reprimanding his gang members at one point for showing insufficient respect to the Police Commissioner by calling him rude names. (“He too is a man… he’s just on the other side from us,” Il Nazzardo insists.)

By ensuring that Infanti and his gang never do anything really bad, the filmmakers allow him to retain a degree of sympathy, allowing his inevitable confrontation with Merli at the film’s conclusion to play out as a sporting contest between mutually respectful equals, rather than as the desperate, self-destructive fight for survival more commonly encountered in the final feel of a poliziottesco.

A notion which owes more to tales of Arthurian chivalry, or to traditional judai geki samurai films, than to anything you’d expect to find in a modern crime drama, it is this very yearning for a more old-fashioned, good-natured approach to cinematic masculinity - perversely crow-barred into the middle of one of the most nihilistic sub-genres known to man - which ultimately makes ‘Poliziotto Sprint’ so memorable, and, in its own weird way, so infinitely charming. Oh, and, yeah - nice car chases too.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

--- 

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