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Entries from Monday, April 28. 2008
CINEMA RETRO'S JOHN EXSHAW REPORTS ON A MEMORABLE TRIBUTE TO HAMMER FILMS WRITER/DIRECTOR JIMMY SANGSTER
JIMMY SANGSTER AT THE NATIONAL FILM THEATRE, LONDON
By John Exshaw –
The first time I met Jimmy Sangster, I remarked that he must
have endured a lot of leg-pulling over his surname during his days as Hammer’s
top scriptwriter. Jimmy looked up from his lunch, somewhat startled. “No,†he
said. “Why should that have happened?†“Well,†I replied, feeling I was stating
the obvious, “Sang is the French for blood, and you were writing all
these blood-soaked horror movies . . . Surely someone must’ve made a joke of
it?†Jimmy looked at me like I was the third loony from the left in some Hammer
opus before replying with finality: “No, no one’s ever said that before.â€
And, sad to report, no one mentioned it either at the
National Film Theatre on London’s South Bank on Tuesday 15 April, when Sangster
was guest of honour at an evening devoted to his long and remarkable career.
Billed as “Taste of Fear + Jimmy Sangster in Coversationâ€, the well-attended
event was hosted by Marcus Hearn, co-author of ‘The Hammer Story: The
Authorised History of Hammer Films’, and began with a screening of Sangster’s
first film as scriptwriter for Hammer, the 1955 short, ‘A Man on the Beach’,
directed by Joseph Losey and starring Donald Wolfit, Michael Medwin, and (of
course) Michael Ripper.
Based on a story by Victor Canning, it opens with a rather
Ealingesque casino robbery, in which Medwin does his best Alec Guinness
impersonation as a cross-dressing stick-up artist named Maxie. After deciding
that his partner (Ripper) is now surplus to requirements, Maxie manages to
shove both him and their car over a cliff, though not before sustaining a
gunshot wound himself. Having passed out on the beach, Maxie stumbles across a
gloomy beachcomber’s hut where he encounters a former doctor named Carter
(Wolfit). Self-obsessed and desperate, Maxie determines to kill Carter the next
morning in order to cover his tracks, but finds that the doctor has removed the
bullets from his gun during the night. Soon after, Maxie is apprehended by the
local gendarme on a routine visit. Only then does he learn what he was
too impatient to see before: that Carter is blind and therefore could not have
identified him.
An interesting curiosity, ‘A Man on the Beach’ set the scene
nicely for one of Sangster’s personal favourites, the 1961 chiller, ‘Taste of
Fear’ (known in the U.S. as ‘Scream of Fear’), directed by Seth Holt and
starring Susan Strasberg, Ronald Lewis, Ann Todd, and, as a suitably
sepulchrous red herring, none other than Christopher Lee. Speaking later on,
Sangster recalled, “I’d written five or six Gothics, and one week I remember I
went to see ‘Psycho’ and ‘Les Diaboliques’ . . . And they scared the shit out
of me, they really did! And I thought, hey, I can do that. So I went off and
wrote ‘Taste of Fear’.â€
Sangster, as he is happy to admit, has always preferred his
psychological thrillers (which include such early-Sixties’ titles as ‘Maniac’,
‘Paranoiac’, ‘Nightmare’, and ‘Hysteria’) to the “Gothics†for which he is best
known, although it’s an enthusiasm rarely shared by Hammer aficionados, who
tend to consider the convoluted, twist-in-the-tail plots and black-and-white
photography, however accomplished, to be rather less satisfying than the more
visceral, glorious Technicolor, blood-and-thunder approach which Sangster helped
to pioneer and which became synonymous with the company’s name following the
release of ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ in 1957.
Continue reading "EXCLUSIVE! LONDON TRIBUTE TO HAMMER FILMS LEGEND JIMMY SANGSTER"
57,000 Kilometers Between Us (France)
Among the more experimental entries representing France at Tribeca this year
is video artist and fashion photographer Delphine Kreuter's confident debut
feature 57,000 Kilometers Between Us (57000 km entre nous), a
disturbing and truthful look at how technology is the great atomizer of society.
The characters in this tale, all connected in random ways made possible only on
the internet, mediate their daily lives through the filter of webcams,
multi-character gaming, online chats, blogs and camcorders. They record, stare
and chat, but never connect.
'Nat,' a 14-year-old girl at the center of the story, is struggling to
connect to someone, anyone, given that her mother is caught up in a deeply
dysfunctional new marriage with a man who records every waking second of his
family's life on his camcorder for his blog on marital bliss, but becomes an
uncommunicative zombie once offline. Her real father is a transsexual, who
watches her via remote from her new home, where she is not welcome. Her only two
"friends" consist of a married man online with a baby fetish (he dons diapers
and sucks a baby bottle via webcam) and a teen boy, Adrien, dying of leukemia in
a hospital intensive care ward. It's with this last friend she is able to find
some form of simpatico, as they portray fantasy characters in an
alternate-reality game, acting out thinly veiled games of heroic battle and
rescue. His mother will not visit him even as he lay dying, preferring instead
to hold brief chats with him via webcam. The characters' lives all intersect in
some way that underscores the paradox of connectivity without connection, until
Nat breaks the cycle and decides to act on her feelings for Adrien the only way
she knows how. It's a moving and heartbreaking ending, if enigmatic.
Filmed in a jarring, hand-held style and alternating between digital video
and film, Kreuter creates the look of a distopic future squarely within the
present, which is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the entire film and
which gives it a quasi-documentary feel. It's that rarity of an experimental
film that manages to tell a story with clarity yet remain true to its form.
While it's doubtful this feature will get picked up by an American theatrical
distributor, if it shows up on Netflix, by all means grab it -- it's well worth
the 82 minutes of intensity. -David Savage
RIDE THE WILD SURF (1964) Fabian (Jody Wallis), Shelley Fabares (Brie Matthews), Tab Hunter (Steamer Lane), Barbara Eden (Augie Poole), Peter Brown (Chase Colton), Anthony Hayes (Frank Decker), Susan Hart (Lily), James Mitchum (Eskimo), Catherine McLeod (Mrs. Kilua), Murray Rose (Swag), Roger Davis (Charlie), Robert Kenneally (Russ), Paul Tremaine (Vic), Alan LeBuse (Phil), John Kennell (TV Commentator), David Cadiente (Ally), Yanqui Chang (Mr. Chin).
Ride the Wild Surf stands head and shoulders above all the sixties beach-party movies. This was an earnest and ambitious attempt by Hollywood to capture the surf culture and what attracted young men to the sport. There are no singing surfers or goofy motorcycle gang members in this film as it opens with a narrator explaining why young men from all over the world come to Hawaii to surf. Then the wave action takes over never letting up making Ride the Wild Surf the best Hollywood surf movie of the sixties. Kudos to a excellent cast, stunning photography by Joseph Biroc, and one of the all-time best pop surf songs “Ride the Wild Surf†sung by Jan and Dean over the closing credits. Fabian, Tab Hunter, and Peter Brown play surfers who travel to Hawaii to conquer the big waves at Waimea Bay and in the process take a step to becoming more mature adults. They also find romance with, respectively, Shelley Fabares, Susan Hart, and Barbara Eden. The film makes an honorable effort to portray surfers and the sport of surfing sincerely and to showcase the big waves of the North Shore of Hawaii. Though the story line to drape the incredible surfing action around is thin, the screenplay is peppered with some sharp and hip dialog while all the actors play their roles believably. Peter Brown and Barbara Eden are the most interesting couple as Eden’s perky lovelorn auburn-haired tomboy tries to melt the veneer off of Brown’s uptight college boy. Susan Hart, a local beauty with an overly protective mother, and wannabe pro surfer Tab Hunter make the most handsome duo though a blonde Shelley Fabares as a vacationing coed and the usually shirtless Fabian as a college dropout turned surf bum give them a run for the money. Jim Mitchum, who is the splitting image of his dad Robert Mitchum, makes a quietly menacing heavy. The movie is a smorgasbord of flesh as the boys are all tanned and muscled and the girls are curvaceous and bikini-clad.
Though handsome Fabian, Tab Hunter, and Peter Brown pursue beach babes when not in the water there is also a surprisingly strong “homo-erotic undercurrent†throughout. The scenes of these barechested surfers bonding or comforting each other while tackling the huge waves of Waimea Bay and the gals are nowhere in sight have become gay porn staples.
Ride the Wild Surf really excels showing what it takes to be a top-notch surfer and to challenge the big waves of Hawaii. Joseph Biroc expertly filmed real surfers including Mickey Dora, Greg Noll, and and Butch Van Artsdalen challenging the big waves at Banzai Pipeline, Sunset Beach, and Haleiwa. This footage is spread generously throughout the film climaxing with big wave thrills at the “King of the Mountain†contest at Waimea Bay. It is by far the most exciting and best surfing sequences in any Hollywood surf movie of the sixties. However, some of the scenes of the actors on their boards were filmed in a studio tank where one minute the water is like a sheet of glass and then all of a sudden it cuts to huge swells that come out of nowhere.
The shots around the island of Oahu are stunningly picturesque especially the scenes at Waimea Falls. The movie captures the beauty of the islands spectacularly. Trying to distance itself from the beach-party films there are no musical guest acts only Jan and Dean singing the hit title song over the end credits. Broadcast infrequently, Ride the Wild Surf thankfully is available on DVD. Click here to watch the original trailer Click here to order DVD from the Cinema Retro Amazon Store
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