By Adrian Smith
Odeon
Entertainment are continuing their quest to bring a mixture of sought after and
totally obscure titles to DVD with generous extras here in the UK.
Goodbye Gemini (1970) stars
Martin Potter and Judy Geeson as twins in a complicated and suspiciously
incestuous relationship. They are 20 years old but they roam and play in their
large Chelsea townhouse like children, and what begins as childish pranks
escalate into something seriously disturbed. At that time Potter was fresh from
his success in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969)
whilst Geeson had made a big impression as a promiscuous schoolgirl in To Sir With Love (1967), and in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968),
espousing free love whilst skinny-dipping in a lake. Goodbye Gemini was directed by Alan Gibson shortly before he made
two Dracula films for Hammer. With his name attached, along with a supporting
cast including former Frankenstein’s monster Freddie Jones one might expect the
film to be a horror, but it’s not as easy to pigeonhole as that. The film could
more accurately be described as a psychological thriller, set in the tail-end
of the 1960s where post-Altamont and Charles Manson, the hippy dream has well
and truly gone sour. It’s a fascinating and terrifying film that crosses sexual
boundaries and pushes relationships over the edge. When we spoke to Martin
Potter he remembered the film well: “As an actor I was trained to tell truth. In
Goodbye Gemini there was this awful
scene where I was about to gas myself, having done something truly awful. There
was Hammer horror, where as an audience you didn’t expect Christopher Lee or
anyone else to explain what they were doing. It was just a genre of film. But I
do recall with Goodbye Gemini trying,
probably incredibly naively, to explain what this person was doing. I took it
all terribly seriously. I was trying to make it real for me. Whereas the
director was doing the film to pay off his mortgage!â€
Goodbye Gemini is
based on the 1964 novel Ask Agamemnon and features a great period soundtrack by
first time composer Christopher Gunning, who would go on to score dozens of TV
series and films, including the recent Oscar-winning La Vie En Rose (2007). There would appear to be very little
commercial appeal in this story of a brother and sister who love and kill
together, but thankfully this was a time of risk-taking and experimentation in
the British industry. They were even able to bring Sir Michael Redgrave on
board in a significant role as a politician who spends his evenings attending
the wrong kind of parties.
The
film was previously unavailable on any home format, and this DVD release
includes some superb extras. Of note is some previously unreleased behind the
scenes footage showing a large crew of British technicians hard at work. The
film also comes with an entertaining commentary provided by Judy Geeson and one
of the film’s producers, Peter Snell. The commentary is moderated by Mondo
Digital’s Nathaniel Thompson.
The Secrets of Sex (1969) is
a different beast altogether. Anthony Balch was best known in the 1960s as a producer
and distributor. He ran his own cinema, The Jacey in Piccadilly, and was a
great enthusiast for horror and exploitation. He helped bring the long banned Freaks into Britain, re-titled European
art films to appear sexier (When Girls
Undress was one of his) and also helped introduce Russ Meyer and Kenneth
Anger to the British cinema-going public. He was good friends with Kenneth
Anger, who he had met in Paris along with the Beat hero William Burroughs. His
first filmmaking efforts would actually be with Burroughs, with whom he made
two short films, Towers Open Fire and
The Cut Ups, both of which are
available on DVD for the first time as extras on The Secrets of Sex. Both of the films feature Burroughs and are
unusual hallucinatory experiences to watch, as one might expect. The Cut Ups features scenes originally
shot when Burroughs acted out scenes from his infamous novel The Naked Lunch. The footage has been
cut into fragments and meticulously reassembled in such a way that you find
yourself becoming hypnotised by the mesmeric quality of Burroughs’ repetitive
ramblings. A few years later Balch attempted to direct an adaptation of The Naked Lunch, with Mick Jagger in the
lead. Sadly funding fell through and the relationship was somewhat strained
between Jagger and Balch. Norman J. Warren, who went on to have success as a
director in his own right later in the 1960s, was friends with Balch and
assisted him in both short films. Cinema Retro recently spoke to Norman about
it:
“I
just assisted Anthony on Towers Open Fire,
carrying stuff about. I didn’t know what the hell we were doing! We went to the
BFI one day and he knew the people there, so got them to come along and be in
the film. They didn’t know what he wanted them for, and nor did I! We went to
loads of places and did things, but there was no script. The one time I didn’t
assist him was when he did his masturbation shot. He didn’t want any assistance
there! I didn’t know anything about that until I saw the film. (Balch set the camera up over his face and
then lay back on his bed and masturbated. Incredibly this got past the BBFC,
with Balch assuming they didn’t know what he was doing! – ed.) William
Burroughs was a very strange man, and he didn’t say much. He was out of it most
of the time I think! He would just sit in the corner. He was a very quiet
person. I
assisted with the editing on The Cut Ups.
It was a nightmare for the laboratory! I wasn’t there all the time because he
couldn’t afford to hire me all the time. I didn’t have anything to do with the
cutting, apart from joining bits and pieces together for him and finding rolls.
He had the soundtrack duplicated many times and then edited it and layered it
in. He had to physically cut the tracks together. The BFI asked me to supervise
the telecine transfer of The Cut Ups
many years later, as the sound and the picture were separate and they had to
match up. I remember watching it with the technician and he asked me ‘Is this a
joke?’!â€
Balch
had ambitions to direct feature films, but ultimately only managed two, The Secrets of Sex and Horror Hospital, both produced by
Richard Gordon, a British producer who moved to America in the 1940s and was
responsible for a number of films featuring Boris Karloff before coming back to
the UK. The Secrets of Sex purports to be both a depiction and a warning of the
terrible consequences of the age-old battle of the sexes. It plays as an Amicus-style
portmanteau film, with an Egyptian mummy, voiced by the booming Valentine
Dyall, linking the stories and providing the moralising. Balch has fun at the
expense of his predominantly male audience in this film. He continues the
experimentation he began in Towers Open
Fire, in particular in one infamous segment featuring shots of attractive
young people, mostly naked. We switch from one to another whilst Dyall intones
“Imagine making love to this woman. Imagine making love to this man,†over and
over. Balch himself was openly gay and does not shy away from the male and
female nudity throughout. Another mesmerising scene shows sexy Go-Go dancers
being pelted with soft fruit in slow motion by gun-wielding boys, before they
slowly sink to the floor in a writhing, sticky orgy of boys on girls, girls on
girls and boys on boys. One can only try and imagine the faces on the film
censors when they were confronted with this film. It did suffer some cuts,
sadly now lost forever, but it’s truly remarkable that this much survived. The Secrets of Sex is a good example
of just how film censorship was quickly adapting to a more liberal public
towards the end of the 1960s. When the film was first released in the US it was
re-titled Bizarre, and it’s not hard
to see why. Sadly Anthony Balch died in 1980 when he was just 43. One can only
imagine what he may have gone on to do if given the chance.
The
DVD is another sterling effort from Odeon. The picture quality is great, and alongside
the two short films mentioned above the film comes with a commentary from
Richard Gordon himself. Now 85 he has a remarkable memory and is full of
amusing observations on the film and his relationship with Anthony Balch.
Rounding
off this latest batch of Odeon releases is the Roman Polanski classic Repulsion, starring a beguiling
Catherine Deneuve alongside Hammer starlet Yvonne Furneaux and British film
favourites Patrick Wymark and Ian Hendry. The film was made in 1965 for Tony
Tenser, who more often produced sexploitation films and horror second features.
Working with a genuine artist like Polanski gave him real credibility, and the
awards and accolades that followed the film around the world more than made up
for the difficulties that he gave Tenser during the production.
Much
has been written about Repulsion
before, but if you haven’t seen this exciting and challenging film now is an
excellent opportunity. The DVD boasts a new widescreen transfer, a new
interview with Stanley Long (best known for the 1970s Adventures of… sex comedies, he was brought in as cinematographer
to replace Gil Taylor due to the shoot going over schedule and budget), a
documentary from the 1980s about Polanski by Clive James, and best of all for
fans, a commentary from Roman Polanski and Catherine Deneuve themselves.
Odeon
are doing an excellent job in bringing yet more great films to DVD, and their
mix of forgotten gems and genuine classics makes them currently one of the most
exciting distributors in the UK.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER GOODBYE GEMINI FROM AMAZON UK
(THE FILM IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS A DIFFERENT SPECIAL EDITION DVD FROM SCORPION IN THE USA. CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON USA)
CLICK HERE TO ORDER THE SECRETS OF SEX FROM AMAZON UK
CLICK HERE TO ORDER REPULSION FROM AMAZON UK