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BRITISH CULT CLASSICS - Dracula: Prince of Darkness / Special Edition Blu-Ray Review and Competition

2012-02-19T11:21:00.000Z

Hammer fans are certainly in for a treat this year as StudioCanal unveil the results of their restoration project with the studio. A total of 30 films are currently being given the love and attention they have long craved for in a joint effort to restore Hammer's back catalogue being coordinated between StudioCanal and major studios such as Warner, Columbia and Fox. Dracula Prince of Darkness is the first fruit of this labour to see release on dual format Blu-ray and DVD, following on from StudioCanal's splendid high-definition release of Quatermass and the Pit last year.

Released in January 1966, on a double-bill with another highly regarded Hammer classic Plague of the Zombies, it was one of a package of films that Hammer produced in association with 20th Century Fox, Associated British and Seven-Arts and their recently signed combined contract ensured that Hammer remained in production throughout 1965 and 1966. Fox would release the films in the American market while the deal with Associated British would see Hammer product released through their ABC chain of cinemas. In the summer of 1965, four films squeezed into the modest stages of Bray Studios, keeping the facility busy at a time when it was becoming increasingly expensive to run and because, at the time, Elstree was unavailable. Producer Anthony Nelson Keys wisely saw the economic sense of making Dracula Prince of Darkness back to back with Rasputin - The Mad Monk, using the same sets and a repertory company of actors in both films.

These films were followed into production by two lower budget films, with Plague of the Zombies sharing resources (the same sets again redressed) and several actors with The Reptile. Hammer had experimented with double-bills for some time and had made profitable use of standing sets for a number of productions. The box office success, in 1964, of their last double-bill The Gorgon and The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb indicated that the approach could still pay dividends while saving money.

Christopher Lee, who had last played the Count in Dracula (1958), was persuaded to return to the role after seven years for a number of related reasons. His three year tax-exile in Switzerland hadn't proved quite as lucrative as he'd thought and despite completing a number of European productions and making the journey back to Hammer to occasionally co-star in the likes of The Pirates of Blood River (1962), The Gorgon (1964) and She (1965), he decided to return to England on a permanent basis in 1965. As Jonathan Rigby elaborates in Christopher Lee - The Authorised Screen History, Lee had commented at the time about his Swiss dalliance, "it appeared that what little I had gained was being thrown away by the restrictions on my freedom to work. I was going through a form of nervous breakdown."

Hammer also promised him a substantial star vehicle as recompense for agreeing to risk further typecasting as the Count and that opportunity eventually materialised as the offer to take the eponymous role in Rasputin - The Mad Monk when he arrived at Bray in April 1965 to start shooting. The script for Dracula Prince of Darkness had its origins in writer Jimmy Sangster's original sequel The Revenge of Dracula, written shortly after the success of his adaptation of Dracula in 1958 but then shelved either because of economic reasons or as a result of Lee's continuing reluctance to play the part again.

A sequel of sorts, co-written by Peter Bryan, Edward Percy, Sangster, an uncredited Anthony Hinds and allegedly with input from actor Peter Cushing, emerged as Brides of Dracula in 1960 but this had not featured Lee and had only briefly mentioned the Dracula character. The screenplay for Dracula Prince of Darkness is credited to John Sansom (Sangster using his pen name while returning to Gothic horror after a period of writing psychological thrillers for Hammer) and John Elder, the pseudonym of producer-writer Anthony Hinds, and various stories circulate as to why Dracula, and therefore Lee, has no dialogue throughout the entire film.

Lee maintains that the dialogue was so bad that he refused to perform it and it was removed from the script entirely, whereas Sangster, in his Inside Hammer memoirs states that "I didn't write him any dialogue. Chris Lee has claimed that he refused to speak the lines he was given. Or you can take my word for it. I didn't write any." However, according to the BFI's Screenonline, internal memos reveal Lee had agreed to record a television trailer and it was blessed with such a poor script that director Terence Fisher then decided that the part would be best played without dialogue in the film.

... the cost of a new roof for the Cushings

As per the usual process, Hammer were required to submit their script to the BBFC prior to shooting. Their relationship with the censor had soured considerably during the making of The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) and Hammer had struggled to get the film accepted by the Board and awarded an X rating. The censors demanded heavy cuts to the film's violence and gore and the film remained in a trimmed version until these sequences were eventually restored for a 1994 BBC television broadcast.

When Nelson Keys sent the script of Dracula Prince of Darkness for approval, BBFC reader Frank Crofts dismissed it as, "a silly piece of cack." Secretary of the Board John Trevelyan made his objections clear in March 1965 that the studio would need to take great care about a number of scenes in the film. He wrote to Hammer with his concerns about the film's much vaunted ritual murder (a decapitation in the original script was eventually dropped) that revives Dracula; the use of screams and excessive blood; Dracula's throttling of one of the other male characters; a character eating live flies (Ludwig played by Thorley Walters) and the staking of Helen, played by Barbara Shelley.

Budgeted at £220,000, Dracula Prince of Darkness commenced a six week shoot at Bray on 26 April 1965 with director Terence Fisher shooting on four stages for the interiors and on the backlot, where production designer Bernard Robinson erected the front of Castle Dracula and the connecting bridge. Filming certainly had its fair share of hazards. During a pivotal scene where Helen is staked through the heart, Barbara Shelley swallowed one of her fangs and was forced to recover it by drinking salt water because it was the only set of fangs the make-up department had for her. While completing the filming of the Count's demise on the ice covered moat of Castle Dracula, Lee lost one of his red contact lenses on the salt covered set only for make up man Roy Ashton to retrieve it, refit it to the actor and inadvertently end up getting salt into his eye. Lee's stunt double Eddie Powell almost drowned during the making of the sequence when, as Dracula, he disappeared under the fake ice into ten feet of water and couldn't find the air bottle he needed to allow him to breathe underwater during the take.

The film opens with a recap of Dracula's death in the 1958 classic, lent a voice over from Andrew Keir who had been cast as the 'vampire expert' Father Sandor in the new film. As the documentary Back to Black reveals, the footage, shot in a completely different ratio to the Techniscope that Fisher was using on Dracula Prince of Darkness, had to be masked with smoke effects to disguise its origins. Payments were also made to Peter Cushing for the reuse of his appearance in the flashback and, according to Wayne Kinsey in Hammer Films, The Bray Studio Years, this covered the cost of a new roof for the Cushings. Incidentally, the end result suggests to the viewer that we have entered a waking dream, a rather fitting opening to what is in effect an adult fairy tale of a film.

After an introductory scene for Keir's Sandor in which he establishes his credentials as the Van Helsing savant figure by rescuing an innocent young woman from the superstitious rituals of the local villagers, the film seems to settle into a formula, one identified by both Marcus Hearn and Mark Gatiss in the documentary, which essentially involves a group of English travellers, the couples Charles (Francis Matthews) and Diana (Suzan Farmer), Helen and Alan (Charles Tingwell), who find themselves abandoned at Castle Dracula. The film then goes on to establish the first of many often convoluted methods of reviving the Count and devising ingenious ways of despatching him by the closing reel, after having ruffled the feathers of the repressed tourists visiting his castle or, in the case of Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), revealing the hypocrisies of Victorian society itself.

As Peter Hutchings observes in his monograph Terence Fisher, "this is a minimal, stripped down version of the Hammer formula" and one that would inspire the standard structure that Hammer would apply to most of its Dracula cycle from here on in where Lee would simply appear, in a series of diminishing returns, as a brooding evil figure with little or no dialogue. Yet, this figure could be seen closer in relation to the more animalistic qualities of Bram Stoker's original character.

However, Fisher at least inaugurates this cycle with a great deal of style and panache. His camera glides around the beautifully lit interiors of Castle Dracula, generating a great deal of tension as the English couples spend a very disturbed night under the Count's roof. There's some understated humour too. When Dracula's manservant Klove (a suitably sinister turn from Philip Latham) makes his presence felt and serves the travellers their dinner, Charles asks the whereabouts of his master and is reliably informed that he is dead and that "my master died without issue, sir... In the accepted sense of the term."

He's without issue for at least 50 minutes of the film until, in a moment of delicious Grand Guignol that caused something of an outrage on release, Klove murders Alan, hangs him upside down (symbolising the inverted cross) over the scattered ashes of his master and then slits his throat. Fisher builds the tension through a precise and methodical approach, appeases the censor and still manages to make the scene one of the grisliest in a Hammer film, and brings it all to a climax with the Count's hand scrabbling up out of a mist-enshrouded sarcophagus. An interesting reading of this ritual and its aftermath is offered by David Pirie in Heritage of Horror: "Alan becomes Dracula; the mild, pompous Victorian is transformed into the wildly sensual voracious anti-hero who immediately claims Alan's wife Helen as his first victim."

"... a lack of clarity about Dracula"

The film is dotted with many powerful scenes. The fight between Dracula and Charles and the appearance of the undead Helen is brief but well choreographed on Bernard Robinson's elaborate sets and is beautifully lit and shot by cinematographer Michael Reed. Barbara Shelley certainly shines in the film, and Paul Leggett, in Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion, notes her ability in the role as "Helen's prim repressed former self is changed into demonic sexuality." Leggett notes that Helen is the most interesting of the central characters in the film, encapsulating Fisher's exploration of repression and how "Dracula has unlocked the buried forces already inside her." This reaches its apotheosis in the contentious but powerful scene at Sandor's monastery when Helen, now a vampire, is captured by the monks and Sandor stakes her. Father Sandor is also an interesting figure. A determined religious man who sets out to demonstrate to Charles the nature of pure evil, he epitomises Fisher's fascination with ritual and how adhering to it can often have its own inherent dangers. Gregory Waller sees Sandor "demonstrating how ritual can become the murderous tool of superstitious ignorance or the means of resurrecting evil."

Shelley is superbly feral in the sequence, physically very strong, but the scene has evoked some critical views from Nina Auerbach and S.S. Prawer that Helen's staking is tantamount to a depiction of gang-rape. Both Hutchings and Leggett suggest this as an acceptance of the scene's figurative meaning rather than its literal meaning. Hutchings sees the vampire Helen's struggle as a symbol of female resistance to the male authority figure, a challenge to male characters such as Sandor and his ilk, and as a counter to the passivity of female vampires in Fisher's Dracula (1958). Leggett observes: "The writhing, screeching figure at the end bears no resemblance to the original Helen. Her staking, for Fisher, is her purification, her release."

There are also some borrowings from Bram Stoker present in the film. Ludwig is Sangster's version of the Renfield figure manifested here but a key scene is Dracula's seduction of Diana, an analogue to the Count's similar entrapment of Mina Harker in the original novel. Here, the Count bares his chest, slits open a vein and entreats Diana to suckle at his breast. A powerful scene, sexually very symbolic, it caused the censors no end of consternation back in 1965 and Nelson Keys had to reassure them that they would only show Dracula's invitation to Diana to lick his blood and not the more sexually provocative act of licking itself.

It isn't as energetic a film as Fisher's Dracula and it unfolds at a very sedate pace, taking its time and using the wider Techniscope canvas to create mood and atmosphere. As Peter Hutchings remarks in Terence Fisher, this is a less innovative film than the first Hammer Dracula and more of an exercise for Fisher to expand and build upon the mythology and imagery he created in the original film. Strikingly, the film encounters a problem in reviving Dracula and then not providing him with any motivation. Hutchings observes that the film, "reveals all too clearly a lack of clarity about Dracula and in so doing anticipates the increasingly marginal nature of the character in Hammer's later Dracula films."

Dracula has been revived but the intellectual dimensions of the man have been left behind in 1958's adaptation. Here, Lee is simply a snarling, hissing symbol of evil but he is at least providing it in one of Hammer's best looking films, a visual symbol among many others that Fisher marshals to his romantic cause. He's supported by a superb performance from Barbara Shelley and very capable character sketches from Keir, Matthews and Tingwell. James Bernard underscores with a thoughtful reinterpretation of themes from Dracula, combining evocative melodies with some theatrically inclined percussion, both providing pace and mood in equal measure.

About the transfer
There has been some concern about picture quality of the transfer and about the use of DVNR to eliminate film grain during the restoration. Hammer's restoration blog has responded and offered that "DNR used on the restoration was very light indeed, only on a handful of scenes, and only when absolutely necessary. We can also state that there were no blanket noise-reduction filters used at any point during restoration." However, some questions about the image quality linger and I can see both the positive benefits and the distractions regarding this restoration.

I thought that overall, this 2.35:1 1080p transfer, one scanned at 2k from the original camera negative, looked good in motion, with colour and contrast particularly strong. Primary colours such as reds, yellows, blues and greens are very well represented. The interiors of Castle Dracula are vibrant with moody lighting and the Black Park locations now look very lush and verdant. Michael Reed's Techniscope cinematography is given vivid life and fresh detail can be found in the set dressing and props that decorate designer Bernard Robinson's magnificent sets. Improved contrast, shadow and colour are the assets of this transfer and there is a definite scale to the film that is unique among the films in the Hammer Dracula cycle and that's down to how the set design, lighting and Scope photography come across here. The soundtrack is also of a much higher quality and the mono audio copes well with the bombast and subtleties of James Bernard's score while also ensuring dialogue is crisp and clear. A sturdy, often quite rich, and clean audio presentation.

Depth and detail in the image is modestly achieved compared to the superb image quality on Quatermass and the Pit. Many scenes look reasonably sharp while others look a little soft and lacking in detail. The concerns about a 'posterising' effect and the loss of highlighting grain, even as a result of Hammer's modest application of DVNR filters, may well remain valid for some. This is unlikely to please everyone.

For sure, this is bound to be compared with the work carried out on Pit and it does not meet those expectations. It doesn't have the levels of highlight, detail and depth demonstrated there and that inconsistency is something of a disappointment. However, these factors could partly be a result of restoring a film in Techniscope (and Pit wasn't shot using this format). This was a widescreen format that took the standard 35mm frame and halved it to achieve its 2.35:1 ratio and some commentators I've read feel that even under good conditions the picture achieved with this format can be softer, excessively grainy and less detailed.

Overall, this has to be balanced with the splendid colour, gamma and contrast that has been revealed and the elimination of the scratches, dust and damage that plagued previous editions. The film has never looked better and, despite the contentious issue of how the transfer has been filtered, is a vast improvement on previous DVD editions.

The restored film also has the original Associated British UK titles reinstated at the beginning and the end. The work undertaken to include these and the restoration process is also covered in the Back to Black documentary.

Special features

Commentary

Ported over from the Anchor Bay DVD of 1998, this features Christopher Lee, Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer and Barbara Shelley. A chatty, friendly group who clearly had good fun watching the film again and reminiscing about their times at Hammer. Plenty of anecdotes about the production and working with Terence Fisher.
Back to Black: The Making of Dracula Prince of Darkness (29:34)
Marcus Hearn looks back at the making of the film and is joined by Mark Gatiss and Jonathan Rigby to comment on the film's production and reception. There are also interviews with Barbara Shelley (she tells the lost fang story) and Francis Matthews who both extoll the virtues of director Terence Fisher. One of the more fascinating moments in the documentary is David Huckvale discussing the James Bernard score. There's also a look at the restoration process with technical manager Jon Mann at Pinewood, the problems of working with Hammer's Techniscope format and the reinstatement of the original UK opening and end credits.
World of Hammer: Christopher Lee (24:48 and 4:3)Another episode of the Ashley and Robert Sidaway anthology clips series exploring Hammer's production history. This time it's Lee's work for the company covered by the rumbling tones of Oliver Reed. Don't go looking for any serious analysis of Lee's career, just enjoy the clips.
Super 8mm Footage (4:39 and 4:3)
Smashing home movie footage, shot by Francis Matthew's brother Paul Shelley, of the climax to the film, Dracula's demise, being made on the Bray back lot. Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley, Francis Matthews and Suzan Farmer provide a commentary to the footage. Originally on the Anchor Bay DVD release, this is a lovely little time capsule.
Restoration Comparison (3:57)
A selection of sequences that compare the state of the original camera negative with the fully restored version presented on the disc.
Trailer (2:22)
The original trailer. Presumably the US one as this has a 'released by 20th Century Fox' credit on it.
Double bill trailer (0:36)
For a UK re-release, Dracula Prince of Darkness was coupled with Frankenstein Created Woman.

Original USA Titles

The Fox logo followed by the Seven-Arts - Hammer credit.

Original Theatrical Titles

This is where the original ABPC credit, inserted into the restored version, was sourced from.

Dracula Prince of Darkness
1966
Hammer / Associated British Productions / Seven-Arts / 20th Century Fox
StudioCanal Double Play Blu-Ray & DVD Special Edition / Cert: 15 / Catalogue No: OPTBD0634 / Released 5 March 2012

Blu-ray tech specs: Region B / Total Running Time: 90 mins approx / Feature Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 / Colour PAL / Video Codec: VC1 1080p / Audio Codec: LPCM / Feature Audio: LPCM / English Language

DVD Tech specs: Region 2 / Feature Running Time: 87 mins approx / Feature Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 / Colour PAL / Audio: Mono 2.0 / English languag

***********************

WIN! Dracula Prince of Darkness on Double Play Blu-Ray and DVD

Cathode Ray Tube has three copies of the DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS Special Edition to give away courtesy of StudioCanal. Simply answer the question below and submit your entry.

- This competition is open to residents of the UK only but not to employees of Studiocanal or their agents.

- Entries must be received by midnight GMT on Monday 5th March 2012

- This offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer and no cash alternative is available.

- No responsibility will be accepted for delayed, mislaid, lost or damaged entries whether due to system error or otherwise.

- Only one entry per visitor per day. No multiple entries allowed.

- The winners will be the first entries with the correct answer drawn at random.

- The winners will be contacted by email. The Blu-rays will be posted one week after the competition closes (unless delayed by postal strikes).

- The judges' decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

- Entrants are deemed to accept and be bound by these rules and entries that are not in accordance with the rules will be disqualified.

- By entering the free prize draw, entrants agree to be bound by any other requirements set out on this website. Entry is via email to frank_c_collins@hotmail.com. No responsibility can be accepted for entries not received, only partially received or delayed for whatever reason. Paper entries are not valid

Question: What was given away to cinema goers as part of 20th Century Fox's promotional campaign for the release of Dracula Prince of Darkness?

Email your answer to the question above, with your name and address, and we'll enter you into the prize draw.

COMPETITION: Hammer 'historicals' up for grabs. Win The Brigand of Kandahar and The Scarlet Blade on DVD

2012-02-12T17:09:00.001Z

Two of Hammer's rarer features, the historical adventures The Scarlet Blade and The Brigand of Kandahar made their DVD debut recently. Thanks to StudioCanal, you can win both films on DVD in our latest competition. Details below.

The Scarlet Blade, made in 1963, stars Lionel Jeffries, Oliver Reed and Jack Hedley and was directed by John Gilling.

In 1648 the civil war raged in England as the republican Roundheads clash with the Royalists, supporters of the deposed King Charles I. Allegiances split family loyalties, and intrigue, treachery and death overshadowed every household. Set against this troubled background the drama surrounds two families, the Beverlys and the Judds, and the conflicts that they face against each other and themselves.

An unlikely romance blossoms between two people from these opposing camps – one from the Roundheads, the other from the Cavaliers. Colonel Judd (Jeffries), a villainous anti-royalist loyal to Cromwell, is bewildered by his daughter Clare’s (June Thorburn) Royalist sympathies. Judd’s right-hand man Captain Sylvester (Reed) is an enforcer for Cromwell’s parliamentarians and also June’s boyfriend. Much to the consternation of Judd and Sylvester, Clare falls for Edward Beverly aka The Scarlet Blade (Hedley) a dashing Robin Hood figure leading the Royalist rebels.

John Gilling also directed The Brigand of Kandahar, made in 1965, starring Ronald Lewis, Oliver Reed and Duncan Lamont.

1880. British India. Robert Case (Lewis), a mixed race lieutenant, is unjustly discharged from the British Army. He joins the rebel Bengali tribesmen offensive led by Eli Khan (Reed) against the colonial enemy. They capture a foreign journalist and Case recounts his story of false accusation on trumped-up charges, instigated by the bigotry and racism of his commanding officers. Following a successful attack by the British against the rebels, Case is brutally shot by Colonel Drewe (Lamont), his accuser. The journalist returns home determined to report the true story of The Brigand of Kandahar.

Both films are presented in their original 2.35:1 scope ratio.

To win one set of both DVDs just email the answer to the following question, with your name and address:

Which three Hammer horror films did director John Gilling eventually make for the studio?

COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. Congratulations to the winner Alex Wilcock.

WORLD CINEMA CLASSICS: The Tin Drum / Blu-Ray Review

2012-02-03T14:28:00.000Z

It is suggested that the Oberhausen Manifesto, a declaration made by young German filmmakers at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen on 28 February 1962, was the impetus for the New German Cinema movement that rose to prominence between the late 1960s and the 1980s. Among the group that would eventually produce work within that period and would go on to receive international acclaim were Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Wim Wenders. The Tin Drum is certainly regarded as Volker Schlöndorff's greatest critical and commercial achievement. It is a key film in the New German Cinema, both epitomising a cinema that Stephen Brockmann, in A Critical History of German Film, describes as showing "the personal implications of politics" and underling the importance and success, with acclaim for The Tin Drum in the form of the Palme d'Or and an Oscar, of a national cinema to West German audiences.

Günter Grass's 1959 novel has been seen as a key text within Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the process through which modern Germany has attempted to learn to live with its past in relation to Hitler's rise to power and the Nazi co-option of cultural, religious and historical institutions. With Grass this was, at the time, a specific criticism and analysis of how Germany would legitimise itself again in its post-war rebuilding of society and politics in the 1950s and 1960s under the Christian Democratic Union government of Konrad Adenauer. As Peter O. Amds notes in Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum: "Grass saw in the CDU government a continuation of the Nazi past...[and] the post-war period was neo-Biedermeier, a restorative time in which people turned away from politics and comforted themselves with materialism and prosperity." The Tin Drum was not only Grass's reminder to Germans that they had to reconcile themselves with their Nazi past but that in order to do so they needed to examine democracy in the form of the CDU's policies.

A landmark in postwar German literature, The Tin Drum is a magical-realist, picaresque novel that uses political satire to confront German society of the 1960s with the legacies of its past. Told over three books, the central character is Oskar Matzerath, a child of dubious parentage, with two presumptive fathers in Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, born to Agnes Matzerath in the Free City of Danzig in 1924.

At the age of three he refuses to grow up, after observing and then rejecting the antagonism within his petit bourgeois Polish-German family, and he throws himself down the cellar stairs in order to arrest his physical maturation. On his third birthday he receives the gift of a red and white tin drum, a symbolic object that stays with him throughout the story, and also discovers that his piercing cry can shatter glass.

Through his narration, and his eyes as a child-adult, we witness the Third Reich's ascendancy and its attempt to seize the strategically important city of Danzig. Political lines are drawn within Oskar's family and Alfred, a German, sides with the Nazis while Jan, a Danzig Pole, remains loyal to his homeland. Oskar then tells of the suicide of Sigismund Markus, a Jewish toy shop owner, during the Kristallnacht ransacking of synagogues and Jewish businesses in 1938 and of the defence of the Polish Post Office, one of the first skirmishes in the Second World War, where Jan is caught up in the battle for the building with his fellow Polish citizens holding off against attacks by the SS and local SA units.

Oskar's mother Agnes, who maintained an affair with Jan during her marriage to Alfred, dies and Alfred marries Maria, a young girl brought to Danzig by Oskar's grandmother to work in Alfred's grocery store. Both he and Oskar have a sexual relationship with her, then she marries Alfred and becomes pregnant, giving birth to potentially what could be Oskar's son or half-brother, Kurt. Oskar leaves and joins Bebra's circus troupe of dwarfs who have been officially co-opted by the Nazis to entertain the troops on the front line at Normandy. He begins an affair with Bebra's mistress, Roswitha, but this is short lived when she is killed during the Allies advance into France.

In 1944, when Oskar returns to Danzig, he has to hide with his family as the Russians arrive and capture the city. His 'father' Alfred is shot by invading troops when he goes into seizure after swallowing his Nazi Party lapel pin to protect himself and avoid being revealed as a Nazi. At Alfred's funeral, Oskar decides to stop drumming and start growing again and throws his drum into the grave. After Kurt hits Oskar on the head with a stone, he starts to grow again and the family abandon Danzig.

"... all of a sudden he speaks into the camera"

At this point there is a parting of the ways between Grass's book and Schlöndorff's film adaptation. The third section of the book confirms that Oskar is narrating the story from the confines of an asylum, thus leaving the reader to question the veracity of the incidents related to them. Oskar is therefore an unreliable narrator in the novel but Schlöndorf chooses to end the film with the incidents of the second section of the novel and cinema audiences were left unaware of the actual source and circumstance of Oskar's narrative. In fact, in the original theatrical version released in 1979, Oskar's narration is ambiguously presented off screen, switching between the third person and the first.

In the director's cut, Schlöndorff restores a sequence, adding to one of the film's flights of fancy by recreating an orgy with Rasputin while Oskar's teacher Gertrude and mother Agnes read about his sexual exploits. In this scene we see Oskar look directly at the audience, into the camera, while continuing his familiar narration that threads throughout the film. Schlöndorff comments on this reclamation of the narrative in Geoffrey Macnab's recent article in Sight and Sound: "Here, all of a sudden he speaks into the camera. The fact that he is there reflecting on himself on screen provides the whole perspective to the story he is telling."

This is ironic given that the director's cut of The Tin Drum arrives in the aftermath of Grass's revelation, in his 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion, that at the age of 17 he was a member of the Waffen-SS, a Nazi fighting unit denounced at the Nuremberg trials. He had never made a secret of the fact that he was involved in the Hitler Youth movement and, at 16, had volunteered for duty on submarines but he had kept private his role in the Waffen-SS and only guiltily admitted the truth just as the memoir went to publication.

Schlöndorf, in Macnab's article, is rather pragmatic and sees this confession as yet another layer to the film: "He has been his own exorcist, like a lot of artists, through this trilogy and especially in this character of Oskar who is clearly a little schizophrenic. This is Grass's own childhood... that's what he grew up in and that's how he ended up wanting to partake in the war." In an odd twist the unreliability of Oskar as narrator is the role that many commentators have suggested that Grass must finally accept as his own.

The Tin Drum opens with Oskar (the amazing David Bennent) narrating the story of his conception and birth and begins with his grandparents. An image of his peasant grandmother Anna (the younger version played by Tina Engel), huddled over a fire in the middle of a field and having picked potatoes as she watches tiny figures on the horizon, is one of many that places figures into epic landscapes. It is a motif that Schlöndorff uses repeatedly in the film; the impressive crane shot of Bebra, the circus dwarf, waving farewell to Oskar; the Matzerath family on the beach; the tiny figures of Bebra and his troupe on the Normandy bunkers; and a closing shot of a similar peasant figure tending a fire as Oskar leaves Danzig by train at the end of the film, are some examples that come to mind.

Much of the opening is also shot on a Askania silent camera, giving the footage an over-cranked, speeded up silent film and newsreel aesthetic as Oskar's future grandfather Joseph, an army deserter, seeks shelter under Anna's skirts from military police. This is later supplemented by several uses of the classic iris in/out motif that allude to the passing of time in silent cinema narrative as Kashubian peasant life makes way for city life in Danzig where we see Anna (the older version now played by Berta Drews) and her daughter Agnes (a psychologically unsettling performance from Angela Winkler) selling geese and the development of the love triangle between Agnes, Alfred (Mario Adorf) and Jan (Daniel Olbrychski).

... a deft accumulation of visual symbols and objects

There are also numerous film references that Schlöndorff uses, including the silent comedy introduction of grandfather Joseph, the mimicing and satirising of Riefenstahl's chronicle of the Nuremberg Rally, Triumph of the Will (1934) and Oskar's schoolteacher emulating the shot of the nurse's broken glasses and open mouthed scream in Eistenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) among them. As Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis note in Volker Schlöndorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the "Movie-Appropriate" Schlöndorff finds an equivalent to Grass's manipulation of language, including the puns, allusions, metaphors and use of stream of consciousness in the book, and "Schlöndorff's use of leitmotifs demonstrates how the film maker can adhere closely to his literary model" by employing a deft accumulation of visual symbols and objects within the film.

The most permanent symbol is that of the red and white tin drum (the colours of the Polish flag), always present as soon as Oskar decides that he will not be part of the sinful adult world. As a symbol it bridges the child/man's obsessions, the way his identification switches from mother Agnes, and after her death, to his two 'fathers'. Its transformative power attempts to halt the affair between Agnes and Jan and heralds the deaths of Jan, in the Post Office attack, and then Alfred, when the Russians arrive in Danzig. In one scene, during the Post Office attack, the drum is perched on a cupboard, blazing with spectral light and causes the death of Jan's comrade and Jan's own eventual capture and execution.

Incidentally, grandfather Joseph's shelter under Anna's skirts is another visual symbol that is repeated throughout the film. It suggests a both a desire on the part of the child, particularly male, to return to the womb, to cease to be part of the adult world and of the child view of the world. Oskar's point of view is one of eternal voyeurism from beneath, looking up at the adult world around him, trying to fathom out the contradictions between his Polish and German relatives and the original Kashubian stock from which he is descended. We initially see Oskar in the womb, reluctant to emerge into the world. Like his grandfather, he later seeks shelter under his grandmother's skirts during a party at home and at the wake for his recently buried mother; again in his encounter with Maria (Katherina Thalbach) at the beach hut which sees his magnetic attraction to the young woman's naked body, his head plunging straight for her vagina. Later, this underworld exploration continues in Maria's bed when Oskar seduces her under the bedclothes with fizzing sherbert licked out of her navel.

And it is worth noting the prevalent use of groups of three in many of Schlöndorff's compositions. Naturally, he frames Alfred, Jan and Agnes together but this often switches to various combinations featuring Oskar too where the pattern of the love triangle is later repeated in the three figures of Bebra, Roswitha and Oskar and in the three way affair between Alfred, Maria and Oskar. This is perhaps Schlöndorff's visualisation of the eternal procession of the trinity, even of 'faith', 'hope' and 'charity'. It also underlines the triangular nature of the three ethnic groups in the film - the Germans, the Poles and the Kashubians - and what Moeller and Lellis see as "the dramatic shifts that have occurred in how the two peoples (the Germans and the Poles) have regarded one another" throughout history and where, in the film, each of the three ethnicities must chose which side they are eventually going to be on as the rise of Nazism permeates their society.

As well as this visual symmetry between the characters, we also have Oskar's role as observer and interpreter of the adult world. Schlöndorff has Oskar narrate much of the film, sometimes switching between first and third person, but there are also ways in which the director tracks Oskar in and out of frames in his role as observer. Many scenes in which Oskar is watching the unfolding events begin with his view point, the audience seeing directly what he sees, but often Schlöndorff will then position Oskar at the edge of the frame and then slowly pull back or move forward. The view point switches from Oskar to the viewer.

The audience takes over from Oskar as the observer and watches as Nazism feeds off what Stephen Parker describes as "the irrational impulses and destructive tendencies born of petty frustrations, greed and jealousies" of the adults around his central figure, adults naively manipulated by the monstrous reality distorting around them. It is Oskar's revulsion at this state of affairs which prompts his refusal to grow, the character with his red and white tin drum becoming the film's symbolic political rebel, a critique of petit bourgeois German nature and a mirror to the alienating effects on their ethnic friends and neighbours.

Oskar is himself subject to this alienating process early on in the film. After he discovers his extraordinary ability to shatter glass, his is virtually crowned king for the day by the gang of local children he plays with and for a time he is the drummer boy that they follow. Schlöndorff underlines this by cutting from the rag tag gang and their leader to a Hitler Youth band marching down the street under attack from neighbours who see them only as an inconsequential irritant. Later, as a signal of the imminent reversal of this situation, when Danzig gradually falls under the shadow of the Third Reich, the gang of children turn on Oskar and he becomes an outsider, someone different to them and only fit for abuse.

When Oskar meets Bebra in the circus, his role of distanced observer is questioned and Bebra issues a call to arms: "Our kind must never sit in the audience. Our kind must perform and run the show, or the others will run us. The others are coming. They will occupy the fairgrounds, they will stage torchlight parades, build rostrums, fill the rostrums, and from those rostrums preach our destruction." A reflection of the imagery of the street gang and their drummer boy leader, and the idea of performance as defence, can be found in later sequences when Bebra marches his troupe and Oskar together over the Normandy beaches or has them entertain the Nazis in a French nightclub. Indeed, Oskar and Bebra share the creative/destructive impulses of those around them: Bebra makes glass sing, Oskar shatters it.

"... world history seen and experienced from beneath: gigantic, spectacular pictures held together by the tiny Oskar."

Oskar is often seen looking underneath or into space as if attempting to uncover a hidden truth or gain greater knowledge. As well as attempting to hide under his grandmother's skirts, he sits under tables to witness adultery or disrupts and subverts the Triumph of the Will style Nazi rally from under a rostrum. Schlöndorff's camera again emphasises the child viewpoint, angled low and looking up into the faces of adults or at Oskar's head height so that taller adults are simply represented in cut off form, sometimes headless in the frame. As ever, his point of view switches with alarming regularity.

At the start of the film, during the sequence in which he is born, rendered to great Gothic effect as Oscar is seen glaring malevolently from within Agnes's womb on a storm lashed night, we see birth from his perspective, with tilted angles and the faces of his two 'fathers' presented upside down. Later, his deliberate fall down the cellar steps is seen from multiple views, our view of him falling, his view of the cellar floor and then his view looking up from the floor as his mother and 'fathers' come to investigate. As Schlöndorff himself noted in Tagebuch zur "Blechtrommel": "I'm trying to imagine a film that... could become a very German fresco, world history seen and experienced from beneath: gigantic, spectacular pictures held together by the tiny Oskar."

Oskar is also the lynchpin around which much of the more baroque imagery of the film rotates. He is a trickster figure, the fairy tale picaro, a grotesque Tom Thumb who explores the Bakhtian carnival of life replete with its sexual degeneracy and gender chaos. The rituals of eating and the symbols of sex are at the heart of the film. This probably reaches its apotheosis in the sequence where Alfred, Jan, Agnes and Oskar are walking along the beach and a local fisherman, using a horse's head as bait, catches eels that he then offers to Alfred. The sight of the eels emerging from the head is one of the film's most visceral moments, perhaps symbolic of the unsavoury ideology lurking in this society, and Agnes's sickened reaction tips her over into an obsessive madness that begins in an argument with Alfred.

Her hysteria and refusal to eat the eels Alfed has cooked is only calmed by Jan's sexual ministrations but it ultimately leads to Agnes's gorging on eels and fish and a suicide after the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy. Peter O. Amds in Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's The Tin Drum sees this as "a perfect blend of those images that Bakhtin discusses under his 'banquet imagery'... eating, drinking, swallowing, wide-open physical orifices, primarily the mouth and the vagina in childbirth." The film is littered with such images, from Oskar's birth; his own penchant for screaming and shattering glass; the various community feasts and dinners; Agnes's fish-eating insanity, the rather phallic looking eels; and grocer Greff's soliloquy to the "tumescent, luxuriant flesh" of the potato.

The Tin Drum offers us a Fellini-esque exploration of the rise of Nazism where the central character is ambivalent, destructive, grotesque and immoral and yet, as Naomi Ritter in Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer Since Romanticism points out, "Oskar, the blue eyed dwarf, is both the perfect Aryan and the monster eliminated by the Nazis." His monstrosity is tempered by humanism, one in stark contrast to the lives within the economic and social structures now fertile enough for Nazism to flourish. It boasts an extraordinary performance from twelve year old David Bennent, whose magnetic eyes theaten to hypnotise the viewer from his first appearance in Schlöndorff's cinematic amalgam of the epic, the absurd and the intimate. A compelling, often blackly funny adaptation of what was considerd an unfilmable book, The Tin Drum's themes about generational and ethnic conflict, of cultures shaped by external repressive forces, are part of a film that Stephen Brockmann sees as "intended to demolish the myth of an unblemished, guilt-free beginning to post-war German history." It's not just post-war German history that we should be concerned with here, but that of post-war Western society itself and the nature of the forces that shape our future democratic consciousness.

About the transfer
The Tin Drum looks wonderful in this clean 1080p high definition transfer that retains the 1.66:1 screen ratio. Details of faces, clothes and objects is often gloriously rendered throughout the film and the contrast is robust, suitably inky and thick. The colour palette is captured extremely well, with reds popping out vibrantly amongst the browns, greens and blues and it certainly emphasises the superb, Expressionist cinematography from Igor Luther. It looks sumptuous. The lossless DTS Master HD 5.1 audio is crisp and clear, a great showcase for Maurice Jarre's equally bizarre score. Anyone wanting to upgrade or purchase this for the first time shouldn't be disappointed.

Blu-ray Special Features
Director's cut (2:43:12)
This fully restored, 1080p high definition transfer of the film includes 22 minutes of additional scenes that Volker Schlöndorff returned to the film after a Berlin film lab called him to ask him what he wanted to do with the 180, 000 feet of negative stored there. Sifting through the negative he decided to restore four scenes removed from the original cut for a Cannes Classics screening in 2010.
Theatrical cut (2:21:59)
Available on the Blu-ray and available in standard definition on the DVD.
Commentary with Volker Schlöndorff
Detailed and comprehensive audio track with the director that delves thoroughly into the making of the film and its rich tapestry of images and symbolism. He discusses the casting of David Bennent, the production itself, the abandoned sequel and some of the scenes he dropped from the film, including the now reinstated moment where Bebra and Oskar witness the murder of a group of nuns on the Normandy beaches. Well worth a listen.
Interview with Volker Schlöndorff 2011 (24:13)
Schlöndorff talks in detail about the new cut of the film and how it came about. He discusses the process and emotional impact of returning to the footage and bringing David Bennent and other actors back to loop the original dialogue for some of the restored sequences. You'll learn about the United Artists two hour forty five minute version which they required to be cut to the contracted two and a quarter hour theatrical length. When contacted by the Berlin film lab, he went back to the screenplay and was able to source the missing scenes from the theatrical cut and return much of the footage to the film in what he saw as an essential act of underlining "the locus and focus" of the film.

DVD only Special Features
Volker Schlöndorff on the making of The Tin Drum - Cannes 2001 (8:56)
Schlöndorff discusses the character of Oskar and the medical precendent for young children to stop growing if they suffer a trauma. He recalls that through a contact at Munich medical school he discovered young actor David Bennent, the son of Heinz Bennent (who plays Greff in the film), and whom he would cast as Oskar. He also reflects on the inspiration, for the colour schemes used in The Tin Drum, found in German painter Lindberg and how he incorporated a sense of realism into the film. Finally, much of the interview describes the approach taken by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière in adapting the Günter Grass book.

Grass apparently described the first draft as "too Cartesian and too rational" and asked Schlondorff and Carrière to consider injecting more irrational moments into the script because he didn't want the audience to believe "that history unfolds in a rational way." Schlöndorff suggests the reason why so much of the book didn't make it into the film and why the last third of the book isn't included is because this process would have resulted in a five-hour long film version. Grass objected to the film concluding with the end of the war in 1945 as he felt it perpetuated the "myth of the zero hour" that suggested that German history literally started from scratch at the end of the war when in reality those that had fought in the war were now bound up within the creation of the Federal Republic.
Volker Schlöndorff on the making of The Tin Drum - October 2001(16:22)
A further interview that covers Schlöndorff's work with Jean-Claude Carrière on adapting the book for the film. Again, he notes that Carrière managed to capture many of the dramatic punchlines of the book and that he also produced a wealth of drawings during the process of scripting. The conversation shifts to Angela Winkler and her portrayal of Oskar's rather strange mother and he also mentions the casting of Polish actors Daniel Olbrychski and Marek Walczewski; Heinz Bennent as the potato seller Greff; Mario Adorf as Alfred Matzerath and Charles Aznavour as the toy shop owner Markus.

The controversial beach hut encounter between a naked Oskar and Maria (which made the film the subject of a protracted 'child obscenity' case in Oklahoma that was eventually settled in 2001) is also briefly covered and Schlöndorff recalls how he had to convince Katharina Thalbach with a series of drawings to demonstrate to her how her modesty would be preserved on screen. The drawings were later instrumental to Schlöndorff's winning of the obscenity trail 20 years later. He highlights the international crew of Italians, Greeks and French that worked on the film, also provides some background to Maurice Jarre's score, to David Bennent's drum-playing lessons and the visual effects used in the film. Finally, he discusses the attack on the Danzig Post Office and how it connects with Grass's own research for the novel.

Trailer

The original theatrical trailer.
Booklet
Featuring brand new writing on the film by George Lellis and Hans-Bernhard Moeller, authors of Volker Schlöndorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics and the "Movie-Appropriate", as well as extracts from Volker Schlöndorff's diary, writing by Jean Claude Carrière and Günter Grass, illustrated with archival stills.

The Tin Drum
1979
Argos Films - Artémis Productions - Bioskop Film - Film Polski Film Agency - Franz Seitz Filmproduktion - GGB-14 - Hallelujah Films - Jadran Film
Arrow Academy Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD Edition / FCD510 / Released 30 January 2012 / Cert: 15 / 1.66:1 OAR / Colour / 1080p / Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video / DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio - German / Commentary: LPCM Audio English / English subtitles / Region B

A BIGGER SPLASH / Blu-Ray Review

2012-01-28T13:31:00.000Z

On 30 January, the BFI releases a dual format edition of A Bigger Splash (1974) to coincide with the Royal Academy's David Hockney show, The Bigger Picture, which celebrates the artist's fascination with landscape and presents his recent iPad drawings and a series of new films produced using 18 cameras, to be displayed on multiple screens. The 1974 film, directed by Jack Hazan, eschews much of the razzamatazz of the standard biopic or the strict trappings of factual documentary style and produces something that is part fiction, part fact, part documentary and part re-enactment. Its abstraction is perhaps a comment on how David Hockney was (and still is) partly a media construction while he also manipulates, in a very self-aware manner, the slippage between 'being an artist' and 'being himself' both in the public eye and in private.

Hazan, inspired by Hockney's series of double portraits in a catalogue shown to him by partner David Mingay, built the film up over a three year period. Starting in Spring 1971 and following in the wake of Hockney and his entourage, Hazan filmed them whenever time and funding permitted. He even re-mortgaged his own house to finance the film. Many of the sequences you'll see are scripted reconstructions (Hazan 'wrote' the film with Mingay) with Hazan often asking the artist and his friends to create and re-create specific sequences or restructure them to imply another meaning beyond that of the real incidents in Hockney's life. Hockney really didn't hold much truck with Hazan making this film and initially thought it all a bit of a joke, often making it difficult for Hazan to access both his private life and the whirlwind social scene that Hockney was part of. After he'd seen the completed film a distressed Hockney considered paying to have it destroyed, feeling that he had been betrayed and exploited not only by Hazan but by many of his friends.

"... his lover has left him, and he's deeply saddened by this. And that's the plot."

This re-construction/ de-construction aesthetic spreads throughout the film and charts the end of a relationship between Hockney and his lover Peter Schlesinger. It is an exploration of the depression that affected them both and of the effects on Hockney's friends and collaborators, essaying the frustrations that are evident in the production and exhibition of his work and the fortunes of gallery owners and curators such as John Kasmin, whose Kasmin Gallery we see, by the end of the film, was forced to close in 1972.

There are sequences that are fly-on-the-wall observations - for example, Celia and Ossie's fashion show for Quorum at Radley and footage of Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World contest (in which Derek Jarman fleetingly appears) - mixed with staged material to enable Hazan to shuttle the film back and forth between 1971 and 1974, using this form of analepsis to offer up dissections of Hockney's life and the breakdown of his relationship with artist-model Schlesigner. Indeed, as indicated in Adam Roberts's 2006 DVD interview with Hazan, he filmed Hockney requesting Peter Schlesinger to come over and help him work on the painting 'Sur la Terrasse' and then with his partner David Mingay inadvertently discovered, in the footage they'd shot, the starting point for the film's 'story'.

"I soon realised that (…) Peter was obviously, had been, David's boyfriend. And things had obviously gone wrong. It almost seemed like it was a ploy on David's part just to see him, that he wanted to actually paint him again, just to have him there. Anyway, I went back to the cutting room with my partner. We discussed this, and he said, well, there's the story, there's the conflict: David Hockney, and his lover has left him, and he's deeply saddened by this. And that's the plot." This rejection comes across in the finished sequence, where Schlesinger recreates the pose of the figure in the painting, keeping his back to a self-absorbed Hockney and remaining silent.

Many of Hockney's paintings are restaged throughout the film and as an addition to this aesthetic, Hazan records the creation of Hockney's 'Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)' which he struggled to complete in 1972 after the relationship with Schlesinger had come to an end in 1971. It is itself a construction, a reconstituted memory that Hockney has to put back together after he decides to reject the first canvas he attempts to produce. Even the scene of the first canvas's destruction was a recreation of the original moment, a melodramatic restaging scored to 'Nessun Dorma'.

All this points to a film that pre-empts much of the scripted reality television, or 'dramality' as it has come to be known, that exists today and where acting out storylines planned in advance by producers and directors has become a common practice. The Hills, running on MTV from 2006 to 2010, is often mentioned as a notable example as are the recent The Only Way is Essex (2010 -), Geordie Shore (2011 -) and Desperate Scousewives (2011 -). Back in 1974 this was quite an unusual way to structure what was essentially a piece of documentary film-making and A Bigger Splash is 'dramality' rooted in the US underground film-making culture of the late 1960s and Hazan's own experience as a cinematographer and documentarian.

The film opens with a telephone ringing, a sound symbolic of the conversations, negotiations and demands that often permeate the film, as Hazan bombards us with press cutting after press cutting, with colour supplements and newspaper coverage about the Hockney milieu all accruing the evidence of the cult of David Hockney, postulating that this has become a reality warped out of shape by saturation media coverage of the artist during the late 1960s and 1970s.

There is a staggered zoom into the the 1967 painting 'A Bigger Splash', a close up of the splash itself suggesting that the end of the relationship with Schlesinger has disrupted the once calm waters that Hockney and his friends enjoyed. The subjects of the film are then treated as 'stars' and named in conjunction with a montage of Hockney's etchings and drawings of his friends, presented as if they were actors. It is a film 'starring David Hockney' and, after Hockney saw a screening of the film in February 1974, even he objected to being categorised as a film star. It underlines one of the film's themes, an attempt to define the limits to which Hockney's self-invention can reach.

After the opening titles, we are told that it is June 1973 and Hockney is in Geneva. Hockney is seen talking to, and describing to us in a very flirtatious manner, handsome American Joe MacDonald, who was part of the Hockney entourage and would, like Schlesinger, model for the artist. In parallel, we switch to Hockney's loyal friend and assistant Mo McDermott waking up and, as we watch him shave, confirming that Hockney had phoned him and told him the relationship with Schlesinger was over. McDermott's observation, "When love goes wrong, there's more than two people suffer" succinctly summarises the film's ambitions as Hazan uncovers the shifting nature of friendships, both platonic and sexual, as they are affected by this bombshell.

It becomes a melodrama in which we see Hockney working through the turmoil of having his Powis Terrace flat in Notting Hill renovated, attempting to overcome his loneliness after the breakup with Schlesinger, and cope with an alienating trip to New York - all filtered through visions of his figurative portraits recreated as tableaux and dream sequences about the paintings of the young men that he observed gathering at the poolsides in LA. Much of the film is structured around a series of conversations, whether two people are facing each other on a couch, sat in a car, or chatting in a bathroom. Domestic spaces are the centre of gossip, contemplation and decision making. Hazan frames them simply, often using a single master shot to observe these moments.

Throughout Hazan does not proselytise about homosexuality and presents such desire in a significantly normalising way, as he recently reminded Little Joe magazine: “In this film our characters are gay and they behave normally - as a heterosexual couple would act. Which was novel to people. Back then, people didn’t know how gay people behaved with each other, even what a gay relationship was.” A Bigger Splash was one of the first British films to emerge after a period in which gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity had either found representation within the American underground film movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, in innovative works by Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol for example, or been tentatively acknowledged as cliched stereotypes in mainstream Hollywood films.

"an art/gay nexus"

For example, as well as A Bigger Splash's blurring of fiction and reality and its treatment of gay identity, there is a very self-reflexive Warhol-like moment when Hockney sits in his bedroom and watches himself on a closed circuit video camera. As John Wyver observes in his notes to this release, Hazan does pick up on many of the techniques, including fixed, locked off shots of people in domestic settngs, that were "most certainly learned from another group of films... Paul Morrisey's Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970) both produced by Andy Warhol, as well as the later Heat (1972)."

Underground cinema also certainly shared what Richard Dyer refers to as "an art/gay nexus... [where homosexuals were]... half-in, half-out of art circles themselves... [circles] who share their social marginality" and much of A Bigger Splash concerns itself with the superficial worlds of the art dealer, the gallery owner, the artist and the model that Hockney inhabited.

Contemporaneous to Hazan's film were adaptations of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1970), Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970) and the Isherwood inspired Cabaret (1972) and in Europe Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) and Death in Venice (1970), all of which performed variations on the politics of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identity in the 1970s. Hazan's film exists tangential to these films and in fact Hockney's friend, curator and art critic Henry Geldzahler, who features in the film, told Hockney that their mutual friend Anthony Page had described A Bigger Splash as 'like a real Sunday, Bloody Sunday.' Early in the film we also see Schlesinger at the Quorum fashion show, sitting in his reserved seat, and where, dressed in a sailor suit with his curly long hair, he looks like Björn Andrésen's Tadzio from Visconti's film.

Although it perhaps doesn't share the visual aesthetics of a Kenneth Anger film or describes gay identity as filtered through Hollywood, there is some commonality in how certain performance codes are used to express it. Jack Babuscio, writing in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, says Hockney: "exhibit[s] a special feeling for performance and a flair for the theatrical... by wit, a well-organised evasiveness, and a preference for the artificial Hockney manages a breakthrough into creativity."

As well as Hockney's 'performance' the film also focuses on the naked male body, whether it's Mo McDermott getting out of bed, Hockney taking a shower or the eroticised poolside, golden hued fantasies of Schlesinger with other young men. The most explicit moment in A Bigger Splash is the sex scene between Schlesinger and another man which was constructed long after the breakup with Hockney and bore no relation to Schlesinger's own personal relationship with photographer Eric Boman. Again, this reconstruction was only possible because Schlesinger had demanded he be paid for his participation in the film, underling the idea that he was an 'actor' in a drama.

According to Hazan in the 2006 interview with Adam Roberts, the sex scene was inserted at a later date into the film and was intended "to introduce a bit of... conflict, if you wish, between the film and the viewer, the film and the audience" as he felt that audiences that had previewed the film "didn't really know these people were gay." He was concerned that the audience could only see the stereotypes of the day, wherein many of the men in the film displayed "effeminate characteristics."

The scene provoked some typically hostile responses from newspapers who simply took the scene on face value as an attempt to spice up, for the gay contingent of the audience, what Alexander Walker in The Evening Standard perceived as a film about "a world that's small and sad." The film faced a difficult time when presented to the censors. It was shown during Critics Week at Cannes in 1974 but was then banned for a short period in Paris and Hazan had to battle with the BBFC who initially were reluctant to certify the film but then granted it an X rating. Even in 1988, Channel 4 made the decision to remove the sex scene for its initial broadcast of the film.

David Thompson gave the film a very positive review in The Times after the Cannes showing and Jack Babuscio was another of the film's few champions and could clearly understand the film's intent: "Hockney responds to his gay 'stigma' by challenging social and aesthetic conventions in life and art, Hazan's concern is to show the various ways in which his subject's private life affects his art – or how art records personal experience and determines our future. Thus, the film relates to the artist's work in much the same way as the paintings do to life."

Hazan's use of the double portraits in the film is an attempt to say something about the relationship between the artist and real life. Scattered throughout are tableaux vivants that mimic several of the double portraits, including the celebrated 'Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy' (Ossie Clark takes the cat to the Tate to see the painting) and one of Henry Geldzahler and his boyfriend, Christopher Scott. Hockney visits the couple in New York and finds them in their apartment in the exact pose they held for the double portrait. Frozen, they do not respond to Hockney's call, perhaps a signal that the artist has become caught in the artifice of his own his self-doubt and self-absorption. Later, in a strange fantasy sequence Peter Schlesinger finds himself in a recreation of 'Beverley Hills Housewife' featuring arts patron Betty Freeman. It's a bizarre, rather unsettling moment, culminating in Schlesinger pressed naked against a window watching a couple tuck into a meal.

Perhaps these encounters with the subjects of his work and the alienating quality of the sequences underlines the film's intense study of a London demi-monde emerging from the final hedonistic years of the 1960s into the grey, unforgiving and more paranoid world of the 1970s. Hazan accompanies this feeling of melancholy with shots of the rather dour, empty streets of Notting Hill and the bustling, anonymous blocks of New York. It's very apt that one scene of Mo McDermott desperately phoning Celia to try and track down the missing Hockney in New York is shot in front of a poster for Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue, a black comedy about an unemployed executive attempting to make sense of life in Manhattan.

Hockney's entrapment in his own world and a frustration about how he escapes from it (whether he goes to New York or LA to achieve this is debated in the film), accompanied by an austere score from Patrick Gowers, is perhaps A Bigger Splash's most enduring and powerful achievement. It is also a film with a intriguing puzzlebox construction about the real and the unreal, fact and fiction that importantly also paved the way for a British gay cinema that would come to flourish in the early 1980s.

About the transfer
Shot on 35mm and in Eastmancolour, the 1080p high definition transfer of A Bigger Splash is vivid and colourful. It perhaps doesn't provide copious amounts of depth but it is a solid, detailed picture. This can get very grainy, particularly in the scenes where Hockney is chatting to Celia, a scene where Celia is talking to Mo on the phone and in the orange light of the sex scene, but they are very moody, atmospheric sequences and perhaps deliberately shot as such. However, the paintings, the studio interiors and domestic spaces look very strong and detailed.

Robust colour is one of the benefits of this transfer with gorgeous reds and blues particularly standing out. Water and reflected light, flesh tones and close ups of faces in the pool sequences look particularly good. Some of Hockney's close ups provide loads of details in his face and clothes. The mono soundtrack is crisp and clear and as much of the film relies on subdued conversation it copes with this well and showcases Gower's score into the bargain. Overall, very good and worth an upgrade to Blu-ray.

Special Features
Love’s Presentation (James Scott, 1966, 25mins)
A fascinating black and white documentary that observes Hockney preparing and drawing the etchings in his Powis Terrace studio to accompany the 1967 publication of 'Poems of Cavafy' by Paul Cornwall-Jones of Editions Alecto. Studying at the RCA in the early 1960s, Hockney was introduced to the work of Greek-Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy and he'd already made several etchings having been inspired by his poems.As we hear and see in the documentary, his travels to Beirut provide the architectural background to a portrait of Cavafy and the rest of the imagery comes from drawings of pairs of young men in his Notting Hill bedroom and from a source he often returns to for his figurative work, male physique magazines. His reason for choosing to illustrate the love poems written by Cavafy is because, "I suppose I know more about love than about history."

James Scott's film (edited by Barney Platts-Mills with whom he co-founded Maya Film Productions, later to produce Bronco Bullfrog and Private Road ) observes Hockey etching into the wax surface of copper plates, dipping them in a bath of acid to bite the lines into the plate, then using aquatint techniques to produce tonal qualities and finally preparing them for high-pressure printing. As well as a fascinating exploration of Hockney using very traditional techniques to produce his fine line illustrations, we hear him on the soundtrack, explaining the methodology but also wandering off tangentially to muse about his own life.

There are some parallels to A Bigger Splash's exploration into his personal aesthetics and his affinity for America where he can get etching plates with plastic backing that speeds up the process and where he bought his camouflage pants in a Jack Frost surplus store in Santa Monica. It's also worth noting that this film and those of Pearce and Hazan often repeat the imagery of Hockney staring full on into the camera, underlining the performative aspects of him 'being' an artist.
Portrait of David Hockney (David Pearce, 1972, 13mins)
A much more abstract piece as Pearce constructs Hockney's daily activity by first observing at odd angles the periphery of life in the flat, the presence of Peter Schlesinger and time in the studio where one of his most evocative works is taking form, 'Mr and Mrs Clark with Percy'. There is a soundtrack dominated by off-screen telephone calls, conversations and musings as the camera takes quick shots of the objects and people in the flat. Schlesinger is seen briefly through the leaves of a potted plant, Hockney is observed working on the painting (and wonders why Ossie Clark chooses to put his cat in the picture rather than his baby).

The film is a fitting companion to Hazan's feature, capturing something again of the milieu in which Hockey worked in the 1970s and the difficulty in separating the personality, work ethic and loneliness of the artist wherein he says off camera (as it frames his blonde hair and owl-like glasses in close up), "you see, the way I look at myself is completely different from the way you look at me." Is he talking to Peter, or someone else, or to us in the audience?
Original film trailer
A very ominous voice over, sounding rather like Richard Burton, promotes the film as a kind of film-noir art thriller. "What makes him run?" it intones gravely about Hockney. "All he wanted was to be left alone to paint" it booms as each of Hockney's associates is paraded to us as a suspect in the collapse of the artist's world. Its pulp fiction aesthetics chime rather well with Hazan's ambiguous feature as it jumps backwards and forwards in time and attempts to pin down Hockney the man and Hockney the artist.
Interview with Director Jack Hazan (2006 - DVD only, 28 mins)
Adam Roberts's excellent and insightful interview with the director that originally appeared on Salvation's 2007 DVD release.
28-page illustrated booklet with essays and film notes
The superb booklet contains a John Wyver essay that explores further the way reality is manipulated in the film, the comprehensive Philip French review from Sight and Sound, a revealing biography of Jack Hazan from Michael Brooke and further notes on Love’s Presentation by William Fowler and archive notes on Portrait of David Hockney.

A Bigger Splash
Buzzy Enterprises and Circle Associates Ltd.
UK 1974
BFI Dual Format Edition / BFIB1137 / Released 30 Janaury 2012 / Cert 15 / Colour / English language, optional English subtitles / English PCM Mono 48k 16-bit / 105 mins / Original aspect ratio 1.85:1 / Region free

BRITISH CULT CLASSICS - Go to Blazes / DVD Review

2012-01-21T14:47:00.000Z

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year is Michael Truman's Go to Blazes (1962) and the London Comedy Film Festival will be giving a special screening at the BFI on January 29th, the day before its first ever release on DVD. Described by StudioCanal as a 'classic British comedy' and 'a lost gem', it emerged in the wake of a number of similar films, often attempting to capture something of the Ealing spirit, which cast the criminal class as rebellious heroes, forever seeking ways of continuing their habitual behaviour and subverting the establishment. In this genre we can see Go to Blazes as a companion to comedy films like Too Many Crooks (1959), Two Way Stretch (1960), The Wrong Arm of the Law (1962), Crooks in Cloisters (1963) and The Big Job (1965).

Go to Blazes was a production made at Elstree by Associated British Picture Corporation. ABPC not only made films at British studios but it also had the power to distribute them through the partnership it had with Warners and the ABC chain of cinemas which they owned. By the late 1950s, its film production was on the wane and it had turned its attention to television production at Elstree. Through its commercial television arm, ABC, it would go on to produce The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Avengers among many others and would eventually merge with Rediffusion to form Thames Television. Similarly to Rank, ABPC produced or co-financed a number of low budget films per year using a contract system of actors. It had its most notable successes in the early 1950s with The Dam Busters (1954) and Ice Cold in Alex (1958) but by the end of the decade was concentrating on comedies and 'teen' films.

The film's producer Kenneth Harper had a reasonable track record, having just produced The Young Ones (1961), a number of films with one of ABPC's most prolific directors, J. Lee Thompson (including the aforementioned Ice Cold in Alex and the acclaimed Diana Dors vehicle from 1956, Yield to the Night), Terence Young and Rudolph Cartier. Director Michael Truman had built a respectable career as producer and editor at Ealing, having worked on several of the films that Go to Blazes rather unsuccessfully harks back to, the crime caper and comedy stylings of The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers and Whisky Galore! Truman remains something of an anonymity. He is known to have entered the industry in 1934, then went on to produce training films for the army during the war and then joined Ealing as an editor in 1944. He worked on a number of films as editor, including Passport to Pimlico, became associate producer on The Lavender Hill Mob and then producer on Ealing classics The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Maggie.

The screenwriters were Patrick Campbell and Vivienne Knight. Campbell was a well known humourist and would later be known as a team captain opposite Frank Muir in Call My Bluff, having succeeded one of the stars of Go to Blazes, Robert Morley. Vivienne had been a publicist on most of the major Powell and Pressburger film collaborations and both she and Campbell would go on to write The Girl in the Headlines (1963) which was Truman's only other film as director, apart from Touch and Go (1955) made at Ealing. Campbell married Knight in 1966.

"everything stops for a fire engine"

The opening sequence of the film acts as a set up to its premise. After three crooks, Alfie (Norman Rossington), Bernard (Dave King) and Harry (Daniel Massey), complete a smash and grab raid on a high street jewellers the police, led by David Lodge's tenacious Sergeant, catch the villains in a sudden traffic jam as the vehicles ahead of their getaway car make way for a fire engine. The three men are already depicted as habitual criminal failures even before they are sentenced to two years and thrown in the back of a Black Maria. It is only when Alfie casually remarks that "everything stops for a fire engine" that they hit upon the brainwave to commit their next felony disguised as firemen with a fire engine standing in as their getaway vehicle.

After their release (with Arthur Lowe as the warder seeing them off HMP premises) they set out to put their plan into action. An abortive attempt to purchase a new fire engine from a gleaming showroom (run by one of British film's great bumbling comic reliefs, the scene stealing Miles Malleson) leaves the salesman re-enacting his childhood driving a vintage fire engine and the gang having to turn to theft (or is that a straight swap with a scrap engine) in order to secure their choice of fire engine.

However the best laid plans of men and fire engines don't always prove to be fool proof. Their first attempt to smash and grab a jewellers (with much made of the London locations as Alfie and Bernard drive the fire engine through Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square) fails as Harry is forced to hide from the police Sergeant, who arrested the gang earlier, in Colette's couture fashion showroom belonging to the said Colette (Coral Browne) and run with her assistant Chantal (Maggie Smith). While Harry is the butt of several jokes about the "eternal male" from Colette, the fire engine and its crew is meanwhile called to the aid of 'fish fancier' Derek Nimmo whose basement flat has flooded and who impatiently declaims to the fake firemen, "Well, don't just stand there, get yer pump out!" as his tropical fish collection is submerged.

Until this point the film has been a fairly gentle caper. When Bernard realises they need to learn how to be proper firemen it's time to bring in Robert Morley as Eddie 'the Professor', a criminal boffin with a firestarter complex who finds novel ways of starting fires for his client's insurance jobs. Morley, like many of the comic actors making cameos in the film, livens the proceedings up whenever he's on screen. He's joined by Dennis Price as disgraced fire chief Withers, whose reputation is somewhat tarnished when he's discovered using fires as a handy way of acquiring certain luxuries like Savile Row suits and camel hair coats. Price capitalises on his well established suave insouciance as Withers and along with Morley is certainly one of the highlights of the film. When the gang decide to set a fire in Colette's in order to break into the bank next door, Morley visits the showroom to prepare his incendiaries and there is a delicious sequence of physical comedy between him, Browne and Smith as every attempt to set fire to the place is inadvertently thwarted by the two women.

It is only when the bogus firemen arrive to douse the flames and rob the bank that Chantal understands the nature of the subterfuge as she spots Harry on the fire engine, the 'Lord Hamilton' who has been dating her since he stumbled into the couturier's premises. This underlines one of the many subtexts of the film about identity and class. The criminals not only masquerade as figures of authority, wherein thieves become firemen and arsonists are promoted to professors to reflect the decline of deference between the lower and upper classes, but they also expose a further layer in the perceptions of class and identity.

Harry is not 'Lord Hamilton' but still regards his colleagues as 'the workers' when visually he is the bowler hatted gentleman in contrast to Bernard's figure of the spiv and Alfie's representation of foolish rogue. This difference between the men is first spoofed in the fire engine showroom when Harry pretends to be a Scottish laird looking to purchase a vehicle for his estate where Alfie and Bernard allegedly work as "my gillie and my beater." Identity, class and authority are doubly subverted when Bernard cases Colette's salon disguised as a police inspector and Eddie returns to it masquerading as Edward Mountbatten (no relation, apparently). Later, Colette recognises Bernard and Eddie when they turn up to put the fire out and raises the suspicions of the police Sergeant played by David Lodge. The subverting of class and institutions such as the police and fire services is something of a parallel to similar themes in the successful series of Doctor films of the period and the somewhat more raucous trajectory of the Carry On series.

"the criminal, like other professionals, works within the hierarchies of a traditional system"

Even though the film was made in 1961 it really reflects the previous decade. This class stratification is both a witty comment on how obsessed 1950s society had become about class and mobility and a retrenchment of pre-war class values that is used by characters take on new identities, without a qualm, in order to deflect deference. As Christine Geraghty notes in British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the 'New Look', "criminal comedies such as these provide fruitful material in considering how questions of class and merit are being made sense of and joked about in the late 1950s. Class characteristics indeed give the working class criminals an opportunity to outmanoeuvre those who are apparently above them in the system."

The post-war milieu is also epitomised by the two city gents decrying the lack of discipline and loss of Empire while onlooking as the gang abandon their attempts to help Nimmo's character. It is also revealed that Chantal is not the French girl she pretends to be when in a discussion with Colette about the poor state of their business her accent vanishes and a rougher, working class woman emerges as she suggests they burn the collection and collect the insurance, underlining the comedic way criminal activity in the film is portrayed as integral to the decade's gradual awakening from gender and social strictures. Little do they know that Eddie is about to take Chantal up on the idea of burning the place down.

The fashions at Colette's are aimed at the female classes that enjoy Ascot and Goodwood and Chantal's 'mock French' identity is perhaps a comment about the impact of Paris fashion and the 'New Look' introduced by Christian Dior. This is reflected in the parade of dresses presented to Eddie, as he pretends to be Mountbatten and offers to purchase the collection, and suggests that Colette and Chantal are representative of the post war period's attempts to re-situate women back into the domestic environment just as they were being recruited into the workforce in increasing numbers.

It's also worth noting the visual motifs of post-war reconstruction that inhabit the film. Director Turner chose to shoot in widescreen and in Technicolour, mainly on location, to perhaps underline that the film was intended to be a boisterous, colourful depiction of a country that had finally left rationing behind. The comedy emerges against a backdrop of highly recognisable (and exportable) London locations. On a number of occasions you can spot the rebuilding of the war-damaged city that was well under way and the spirit of new construction is no better emphasised in the brief sight of what looks like the building of the Hammersmith Flyover in 1961 as the gang and their fire engine make their escape with the loot out of the city.

Go to Blazes is an example of a British comedy film of the period which Geraghty suggests, "imagines that the criminal, like other professionals, works within the hierarchies of a traditional system and so draws him into the traditional, class-based world of the British state." The film seems to have been lost in the hinterland between the harder, political satire of earlier British films like Private's Progress (1956) and I'm Alright Jack (1959), its contemporary bedfellows like The Wrong Arm of the Law and the emergent Carry On cycle that had already seen the release of four films Carry On Sergeant... Nurse... Teacher, and Constable before 1962. The problem is that, at the same time, it tries to reflect the legacy of Ealing and sadly fails to recapture its spirit. What we end up with is a gentle caper, perhaps too gentle even for its own times, full of great British comedy actors such as Rossington, Price, Morley, Nimmo, Malleson, Lowe and Le Mesurier (blink and you'll miss both of the Dad's Army stars) and early appearances from Maggie Smith and Daniel Massey. Worth it to watch Robert Morley and Dennis Price steal the entire film, this film is best relegated to a rainy Sunday afternoon's viewing.

About the transfer
Go to Blazes is in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and represented in a fairly average transfer. It's Technicolour palette is a bit jaded looking here and there, with some colour quite vibrant at times, and the picture quality is soft and grainy. John Addison's jaunty score, a persistently chirpy little jangle that often threatens to suffocate the film, might leave you in a state of anguish after continually signalling to you the scenes where you should laugh heartily (or not).

Go to Blazes
Associated British Picture Corporation 1962
StudioCanal / Released 30 January 2012 / Cert: U / 80 mins approx/ Format: 2.35:1 Anamorphic PAL / Audio: English Mono DD2.0 / Subtitles: English HOH / Region 2

CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO: The Sensorites / DVD Review

2012-01-15T12:46:00.000Z

"I'll certainly never watch The Sensorites in quite the same way again," muses Toby Hadoke on Looking for Peter, a gem of a documentary that accompanies this month's release of the rather unloved Doctor Who serial from William Hartnell's first year in the role. In light of the backstory that emerges from Hadoke's research then certainly the details of writer Peter R. Newman's early life, including his wartime role as pilot and parachutist and experiences in Burma, add contextual colour to the themes of his Doctor Who story.

A former actor and director in repertory theatre, and writer for radio, his route to working on Doctor Who began with the television play Yesterday's Enemy, sadly no longer available in the archive, which was transmitted by the BBC on 14th October 1958. It featured a distinguished cast including Gordon Jackson, Barry Foster, Lee Montague, Burt Kwouk, Alex Scott and Terence Brook and tapped into Newman's war experiences, exploring the rather taboo subject of British war crimes. Newman explored the moral complexities of war that affected both sides of the conflict as British troops take over a jungle village in Burma and shoot innocent villagers in an attempt to 'persuade' a Japanese informer to surrender. However, when the Japanese recapture the village, the British commander and his troops are subjected to equally barbarous methods to force them to give up vital information to their enemies.

Newman's play was picked up by Hammer Films, a regular practice for the company which often looked at television subjects as suitable for adaptation for the cinema. Val Guest's film version of Yesterday's Enemy in 1959, headlined by the legendary Stanley Baker and with Gordon Jackson reprising his original role, was the culmination of a series of war films that the studio had produced from the mid to late 1950s, including The Steel Bayonet and Camp on Blood Island. It was a well received, if somewhat controversial, BAFTA nominated production and its critical success spurred Newman and Hammer to work together on a number of other, eventually unrealised, projects.

The Inquisitors, to be directed by John Gilling, about the impact of the Inquisition on a Spanish town was cancelled at the last minute. It is alleged that Columbia withdrew financing a few weeks prior to shooting when the Catholic church raised its objections about the film's subject matter. The sets, already built, were used on Curse of the Werewolf which then had its location switched from France to Spain. By the early 1960s, Newman's various projects had floundered at Hammer and as Marcus Hearn points out in the documentary, he was also pricing himself out of the market.

He commenced discussions with story editor David Whitaker about writing for Doctor Who in late 1963, just as The Daleks hit the nation's television screens, and during early 1964 he developed the story that would eventually become The Sensorites. He was formally commissioned to write the scripts on February 25th 1964 and it would remain his only contribution to the series. Intended as the conclusion to the first season of Doctor Who, The Sensorites was caught up in an ongoing discussion about which studios at the BBC were most suited to the programme's production. Producer Verity Lambert had been campaigning for some time to get the series moved from the rather primitive and restricted conditions of Lime Grove.

One of her arguments was that Ray Cusick's ambitious sets for The Sensorites would not be allocated the space they deserved at Lime Grove's Studio G and that as of April 1964, well into pre-production at that point, it was far too late to try and squash everything into Lime Grove which she felt was rather unsuitable for Doctor Who. She got her wish and the BBC's Planning Department gave her permission to use studios at Television Centre until a new home could be found for the programme. The Sensorites was eventually accommodated in TC3 for episodes one and two, with the fourth taped in TC4, and all the rest in Lime Grove D. When Sydney Newman eventually decreed (as a bluff to get the Planning Department to make their minds up presumably) that if the programme could not be found a permanent home he would be forced to cancel it, it was soon decided by the end of the season Doctor Who's new home would be Riverside Studios in Hammersmith and Planet of the Giants, opening the second season, would be the last Doctor Who fully produced at Lime Grove.

Mervyn Pinfield, the show's associate producer, was felt to be a director with the appropriate technical expertise to bring the visual scale of the The Sensorites to the screen and he helmed the first four episodes until director Frank Cox took over for the last two. It would be Cox's last work for the series before he went on to a solid career as a producer and director at the BBC. Pinfield certainly creates some palpable suspense in the first two episodes after the Doctor, Susan and his companions arrive on a spaceship from Earth in the 30th Century and find it debilitated by the inhabitants of the Sense-Sphere, the Sensorites. There's a fantastic opening shot where the occupants of the TARDIS are shown leaving through its double doors and entering directly onto the flight deck of the ship, something that must have been quite exciting for viewers at the time. Plenty of atmospheric lighting and minimal or no scoring helps to maintain the tension as they investigate the ship, meet the crew from Earth and have their first encounter with the telepathic Sensorites.

... a decent stab at what was Doctor Who's first attempt at depicting an alien culture and its inhabitants

The serial also shows off Cusick's design work rather well and here he goes for a palette that prefers the cluttered interior of an aircraft cockpit rather than the predictably slick and antiseptic regalia of most science fiction films of the period. The ship's corridors and bulkheads have his telltale use of rounded and curved forms and apparently he was inspired by Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia and Art Nouveau when it came to designing the Sense-Sphere's cities. Costume designer Daphne Dare and make up artist Sonia Markham created the appearance of the Sensorites and I still think, apart from the pulp SF indulgences of their domed heads and rather impractical rounded feet, that they and Cusick's set designs are a decent stab at what was Doctor Who's first attempt at world building and depicting an alien culture and its inhabitants.

There are subtle differences to each Sensorite, as noted in the DVD's production notes, but there still remains something in their conformity that nods to early 1960s perceptions of the Communist Chinese, garbed in the Zhongshan suits as worn by their leaders, especially Mao Zedong, as a symbol of proletarian unity and, by extension, of Chinese Communism itself to the Western imagination. The Sensorites also offer parallels with how the Chinese were depicted in films such as The Yangtze Incident (1957) where, as the so called Bamboo Curtain was drawn across Asia, Tony Shaw explains in British Cinema and the Cold War, "self segregation and containment inevitably encouraged a sense of mutual suspicion and hostility" and where popular culture could only offer audiences a second hand credibility to images of Cold War aggression.

Interestingly enough, the story's themes of the misunderstandings and xenophobia borne out of first contact, as well as internal government deceits and disputes, also chimed with China's failure, in the late 1950s and 1960s to establish diplomatic, economic and trade relations with the West. Their policy in the 1960s, according to Harish Kapur in China and the European Economic Community, "did not bear much fruit. Neither Western Europe in general, nor the European Community in particular, were ready to respond to Chinese overtures." Zedong also had internal disputes to deal with after his policy known as the Great Leap Forward met with a catalogue of failures and he was caught up in "a tug of war between the radicals and the pragmatists" when it came to deciding foreign policy.

It offers a further context to the fear of humans that the Sensorites telepathically communicate to Susan, explaining their attack on the humans because they fear that John's discovery of a supply of molybdenum on Sense-Sphere may lead to their exploitation and that contact with a previous Earth expedition had already proved to be a disaster. As the story progresses we discover that the Sensorite Council is divided about the presence of humans on their world. A faction plots to kill the humans and they also capture, kill and then impersonate one of their own leaders, the Second Elder. However, it is then revealed that a disease affecting the Sensorites is caused by the remaining crew members of the previous expedition, hiding in the city's aqueducts, who have introduced a poison into the water supply. Thus the story, like Newman's Yesterday's Enemy, shows mistrust and fear as a mutual failing and is a refreshing change from the morally black and white nature of previous stories in the first season.

Perhaps this is as much an expression of the chill that descended upon post-war British attitudes long before the thaw of the mid-Sixties. As David Kynaston notes in Family Britain, the Suez crisis of 1956 created a prevailing mood in the country that would continue to persist well into the 1960s and had shown, "Britain's inability to act independently of her American ally; the futility of clinging on to Empire; the ability of those in power to practise deceit." Those ever so British, and class ridden, survivors of the first expedition in the climax of the story attempt to maintain their war footing with the Sensorites even though there is no actual war and are a continuation of the "myth of Britain at war" as conservatism, the decline of Empire and Suez take their toll.

... plugging into the angst over the British loss of face in the Suez crisis and the blame game of the Yangtze Incident

The overriding problem with The Sensorites is that it can be downright dull when you get to episodes three and four and after managing to produce a very psychologically tense atmosphere and building up the appearance of the Sensorites in the first episode with a then very strange and surreal pay off as Ian spots one of the creatures balletically floating outside the ship. It's a great example of the visual and aural 'strangeness' of the programme and as noted the tangibly threatening atmosphere continues into the second episode.

As the TARDIS crew explore Captain Maitland's spaceship, the menace escalates with the mystery of the locked sections of the ship and the banished John, a mineralogist who has discovered the mineral wealth of the Sense-Sphere. Stephen Dartnell is so very good as the deranged John, putting across his psychological scarring in a memorably physical performance. You really feel for him when he finally breaks down in Barbara's arms. Equally, Maitland (Lorne Cossette) and fellow crew member Carol Richmond (Ilona Rodgers) carry the bizarre atmosphere further, remaining silent and unmoving when they are mentally controlled by the Sensorites boarding the ship.

We also get the series' first look at the use of telepathy with the Sensorites apparently able to influence and control human minds and this also allows Carole Ann Ford to fulfill some of Susan's original character development. Again, it's a subject that was much in vogue in the 1950s and University of London mathematician Samuel Soal had been testing participants in new experiments into precognitive telepathy during the war years and into the 1950s. Telepathy was also included as a subject matter in the original research into kinds of science fiction that might be reflected in a Saturday tea-time show undertaken by the BBC prior to Doctor Who's creation in 1962. Brainwashing was also a familiar anxiety from the period with assertions that the Chinese had perfected some techniques during the Koren War and that, starting in the early 1950s, the CIA and the Defense Department conducted secret research (notably including Project MKULTRA) in an attempt to develop practical brainwashing techniques. Released in 1962, John Frankenheimer's film The Manchurian Candidate - a Cold War drama depicting the son of a prominent, right-wing political family brainwashed as an unwitting assassin for an international Communist conspiracy - made the concept very familiar to audiences.

Carole Ann Ford gets much more to do here as Susan befriends the aliens through her telepathy and her independence from the Doctor adds a much needed bit of maturity to the part. Jacqueline Hill isn't featured much as she was given two weeks off during the production and was written out of episodes four and five. William Russell is as good as ever, even though he spends much of his time on Sense-Sphere in his sick bed during episodes three and four. Hartnell is thoroughly engaging as the Doctor in this too and he delightfully takes centre stage in solving the situation, taking charge on the ship and working out who is responsible for the poisoning of Sense-Sphere's inhabitants.

The big leap forward here, as the production notes observe, is the Doctor determines to solve the problem and sets out to investigate the aqueducts because he clearly wants to and is not driven by the desire simply to recover a fluid link or get the TARDIS lock back. There's a wonderfully paced montage sequence of him undertaking some forensic testing in episode three that livens things up a bit and where the vision mixing (presumably handled by Clive Doig) again underlines Pinfield's technical ability.

When the action moves to Sense-Sphere the story really does get bogged down and unfortunately the Sensorite politicking lacks some oomph. It becomes something of a turgid round of scheming Sensorites standing and sitting around and nattering in often slow paced and dull scenes. The later episodes set in the aqueducts are strong, atmospheric drama but the Sensorite power struggle hinges on Carol pointing out to the City Administrator that without their sashes it is hard to tell all the Sensorites apart. Couldn't he have already reasoned that one out for himself when he formulates his impersonation of the Second Elder?

The supporting cast are fine, where Stephen Dartnell particularly stands out and the deranged humans living in the aqueduct are convincingly realised, but unfortunately Maitland and Carol are probably the least impressive characters here. While Toby Hadoke may rightly mock The Sensorites poor status with fans (it "didn't even have the decency to get wiped so that we could mourn its loss and imagine how brilliant it must have been") there is, as he himself demonstrates, plenty to enjoy here. At six episodes it does outstay its welcome but there are at least three very good episodes here that are worth watching. For me, it is clearly the themes of the story, courtesy of Peter R. Newman, which remain strong too - fear of the unknown, xenophobia, mistrust between races - plugging into the angst over the British loss of face in the Suez crisis and the blame game of the Yangtze Incident.

Special Features

Commentary

Toby Hadoke once again moderates the unruly mob that consists of Carole Ann Ford, William Russell and Raymond Cusick who natter away on several episodes plus there are welcome visits from actor Joe Greig who played various Sensorites, director of episodes five and six Frank Cox, make-up designer Sonia Markham and human expedition survivors Martyn Huntley and Giles Phibbs.
Looking for Peter (21:19) - Toby Hadoke and Richard Bignell set out to uncover just who exactly Peter R. Newman was. Little is known about the enigmatic writer of The Sensorites and this sweet little documentary delves into Newman's career, including his work for Hammer and their adaption of his television play Yesterday's Enemy, and his family background. Along the way, in Who Do You Think You Are? style, Hadoke and Bignell raid public archives, consult Hammer historian Marcus Hearn and track down Peter's relatives to find out more about the writer and the man. What emerges is a fascinating, very bittersweet story of frustrated creativity tragically thwarted.
Vision On (7:03) - Clive Doig, BAFTA award winning television producer, sheds some light on his early career as a vision mixer, including work on early tests for the classic 'howl-around' Doctor Who title sequence. In a role he fulfilled for two years during Doctor Who's phenomenal growth from a fledgling series, Doig explains what exactly a vision mixer is responsible for in the television gallery of the 'as live' early days of television production. His memories take us from the making of the pilot episode; tales of sets falling down and cameras going AWOL; Hartnell's legendary fluffs ("he was sometimes impossible"); the husband and wife playing the Chumblies bringing their marriage problems into the workplace and to an admiration for the tenacious Verity Lambert. Lovely anecdotes.
Secret Voices of the Sense-Sphere (2:03) - More from Doig as he explains, briefly, the incidence of 'talk-back' on episode six of The Sensorites. Perhaps it might have been better to make this part of the Vision On featurette as it seems somewhat superfluous here hanging about on its own.

Photo Gallery

Great selection of black and white stills, including many of Cusick's striking set designs, but I've seen some good colour stills in print elsewhere including the Howe-Stammers-Walker book The Sixties. Are these lost or in the hands of private collectors unwilling to grant their use?

Coming Soon

Trailer for the forthcoming reissue of The Robots of Death, Tomb of the Cybermen and The Three Doctors in the Revisitations 3 box set.

Radio Times Listings

Listings and a profile of Hartnell from the magazine plus three of Ray Cusick's design drawings for the serial for various props and visual effects that were contracted out to Shawcraft.

Production Subtitles

Thorough and very detailed notes from Stephen James Walker.

Digitally Remastered Picture and Sound Quality

Once again those backroom boys at the Restoration Team do the early years of the series proud and create a stunning restoration of the materials held by the BBC.

Doctor Who: The Sensorites
2 | entertain / Released 23 January 2012 / BBCDVD3377 / Cert: PG
BBC 1964
6 episodes / Broadcast 20 June 1964 - 1 August 1964 / Running time: 149:33

SILENT RUNNING / Limited Edition Blu-Ray Review

2012-01-06T00:41:00.000Z

There's a moment in Silent Running, Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut of 1972, when the main character Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), now alone on the space freighter Valley Forge, contemplates his situation and idly glances at his Smokey the Bear Conservation Pledge. And that's not a euphemism. The Pledge, a poster from a 1954 campaign, is pinned up on the wall of his room. It features Smokey, the mascot of the US Forest Service, who became a children's favourite through campaigns, cartoons, books and toys and asked successive generations to look after the forests and animals.

That moment is symbolic of Lowell's desire to return to a simpler, more innocent life, one where mankind and nature live in harmony. One where mankind hasn't devastated the Earth and shot the remains of the planet's fragile ecosystem into deep space. Daft as it may sound, but Lovell wants to be a child running through the forests of Earth again, protecting the environment as all good little boys and girls were asked to do by Smokey. During his darkest moments of self-doubt, he even imagines himself back on a restored Earth.
Viewing Silent Running today it projects a strong, if simplistic, message mixed with a nostalgia for the period in which it was made and yet postulates a problematic hero in Freeman Lowell, a caring botanist who murders the rest of his crew when the order is received to destroy the remains of Earth's flora and fauna held in domes aboard the Valley Forge. This murderous revenge on the conservative views of his fellow crew members is carried out by a figure often dressed in quasi-religious robes as Joan Baez's distinctive vocals warble away on the soundtrack. Baez was by the end of the 1960s one of the first musicians to incorporate social protest within her ouvre and the two songs featured here are clearly of their time and may not be to most viewers' tastes. Couple this with the child-like innocence of the three drones who end up being Lowell's defacto companions and you have a film that is often achingly sentimental, sometimes illogical and yet poses questions about the 'hippie' ethics of the period, our perceptions of environmental crisis then and now and man's relationship to both machine and nature.

Naive, innocent, simple Silent Running may seem. Sentimental, definitely. However, some of that sentimentality and charm comes from its director, Trumbull, whose first shot at directing this was. He describes Silent Running as his student film and in many ways it feels like his equivalent of both John Carpenter's own college project Dark Star (1974) - minus the satire - or Lucas's THX 1138 (1971) - minus the pretension.

It was also his response to the adult and somewhat glacial tone poem of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on which he had worked as an effects supervisor alongside his colleague from Graphic Films, Con Pederson and British effects veterans Wally Veevers and Tom Howard. Silent Running was a project that evolved as he was working on Kubrick's film and it was never his intention to direct it.

The opportunity to get the film made came about as a result of American cinema's New Wave and its impact on the old, and rapidly fading, Hollywood studio system. Like many of the major studios, Universal were impressed with the success of Easy Rider (1969) and, encouraged by the prospect of increasing profit margins, they offered young directors an opportunity to make low-budget films each at a $1 million price tag. They created a five picture deal to include The Last Movie (1971) from Dennis Hopper, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), PeterFonda's The Hired Hand (1971), Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971) and Trumbull's Silent Running.

Trumbull's original script was rewritten by Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn (later both co-writing The Deerhunter), Steven Bochco (writer/producer of Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue) and the film went into production in February 1971 with further revisions to the script by Trumbull. A rapid 32 day shoot took place on location using the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, standing in for the space freighter, and in an aircraft hangar in Van Nuys which represented one of the bio-domes.

Despite Trumbull's inexperience as director, the film is driven forward by a number of elements. There's a rather good central performance from Bruce Dern as botanist Lowell that traces the man's questionable role as 'eco-warrior' and his descent into loneliness and madness; several superb effects sequences including the detailed models of the ship and the bio-domes accompanied so triumphantly in the opening titles by Peter Schickele's score; and the 'lived in' look that production designer Wayne Smith brings to the interiors of the space freighter Valley Forge indicating that Silent Running was probably one of the first films to reject the clinical environs of Kubrick's clean looking future and anticipate the science fiction grunge of Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) several years later.

'... a memory of an environment and an ecology that no longer exists'

Silent Running also emerged at a time when the interest in environmental concerns was gathering momentum and it, along with several other dystopian science fiction films of the period such as Soylent Green (1973) and Logan's Run (1976) could be seen, as Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann suggest in Ecology and Popular Film, as a response to the establishment of the annual eco-awareness Earth Day and Nixon's formation of the Environmentmal Protection Agency in 1970.

The films "embrace a memory of an environment and an ecology that no longer exists on their Earth - an eco memory. At the same time, though, these films reflect a nostalgia for a world that still does exist for its viewers, both in the 1970s and today." It's perfectly captured in one of Lowell's moments of eco-polemic: "It calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth... and there were valleys. And there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in - you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies, and there was fresh air... and there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed enclosures blasted some millions of miles out in to space."

As mentioned above, Trumbull's film was one of a clutch of science fiction films that, according to Lincolm Geraghty in American Science Fiction Film and Television, indicated "the prophetic impulse of 2001 and Star Trek was a false dawn, as their glittering visions of interstellar space travel, alien life and super technology appeared tarnished by America's economic recession, impending defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and increasing social division and unrest." A reaction to the independent creative spirit of the New Wave in cinema from Lew Wasserman at Universal, itself a conglomerate owned by MCA, Silent Running challenges some assumptions about the impact of the counter-culture on mainstream society.

It depicts Lowell as a saintly Francis of Assisi figure gathering all of nature about him but who then murders his colleagues, descending into guilt ridden isolation. He then turns to the technologies he rejected, as symbolised by the three robot drones, to replace their lost human companionship which he now desperately craves. That he understands that machines are required to sustain nature, to ensure the last bio-dome survives, signals the way that the hippies of the 1970s, depicted as individualistic and radical, eventually became the baby boomer 'me generation' who took up careers in businesses that fueled the economic boom and bust of the 1980s.

In the end, Lowell understands that he is unable to return to the Earth not just because the government have given up all hope of recovering the Earth's biosphere (due to cost cutting) but also because he has blood on his hands too. He's as guilty of destruction as they are. As Murray and Heumann suggest, the film proposes that "technology is necessary to save 'nature'" and the only way Lowell can do that is to programme one of the drones to act as caretaker to the last remaining bio-dome and send it out into the ocean of space. Underlining this admission, there is a constant juxtaposition throughout the film of the natural world of the bio-domes, filled with flowers, trees, rabbits, birds and turtles to the corporatised technological images of the spaceship's interiors and exteriors plastered with American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Dow (ironically the chemical company that produced and manufactured the napalm and Agent Orange defoliant dropped on Vietnam) and Polaroid logos.

"And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anybody ever found it."

His relationship to the drones is another instance of returning to childhood where, echoing Trumbull's own affection for Donald Duck cartoons, he names and anthropomorphises the three drones as Huey, Louie and Dewey. Vivian Sobchak, in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader perfectly summarises the transformation that the three unprepossessing robots undergo as Lowell interacts with them more and more, especially after he has to programme one of them to perform surgery on him or later teaches them to play poker with him.

Trumbull's evolving view of them "becomes progressively sympathetic and subjective, suggesting the merest hint of an animate life of some kind tucked away in their circuitry." After the deaths of the other three crewmen, he begins to intercut Lowell's subjective view of events with that of the drones, suggesting a gradual sharing with the viewer of intertwined human and machine observations. This is partly achieved through Lowell's skewed point of view shots and what the drones see replayed through monitor screens.

Despite the illogical nature of some of the film's ideas, including the failure of Lowell (whom we assume is a qualified botanist) to understand that photosynthesis in plants needs sunlight after the trees mysteriously start to die, and some likely ambivalence to Baez's rather earnest songs on the soundtrack (in themselves a call to a purer, greener age), the film's final scenes would surely melt anyone's heart. As his superiors close in on the Valley Forge, after he has used 'silent running' stealth tactics to evade them, and Lowell comes face to face with his own pathology, he sends Dewey off into space to manage the flora and fauna with a battered old watering can, the can's dented surface covered in images of children playing in green fields and forests. This tainted 'eco-warrior' then blows himself and the ship up after uttering one final recall to childhood: "You know when I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anybody ever found it."

The same can be said of the film itself. After opening to critical praise, the film suffered at the hands of Universal's marketing department who thought word of mouth would put bums on seats instead of putting their hands in their pockets for some marketing spend. It disappeared from view until television showings generated a new found appreciation. Alas, Universal showed the property little respect and had the further temerity to plunder its effects sequences for episodes of their Battlestar Galactica television series in 1978. Ironically, the origin of Star Wars' R2-D2, inspired by the drones Huey, Dewey, and Louie from the film, was one of thirty-four similarities between the two films cited in the copyright infringement legal dispute after 20th Century Fox and Universal counter-sued each other over Battlestar Galactica.

The film is held together by Dern's rather powerful performance as an 'eco-warrior'. You might find it hard to entirely sympathise with Lowell because of his violent resolution to the threat posed by his fellow man, on the ship and on Earth, both of whom reject the continuation of the natural world. Dern is supported by charming performances from Mark Persons, Steven Brown, Cheryl Sparks and Larry Whisenhunt as the drones, Trumbull's glorious visual effects and Peter Schickele's score that embraces both the brittleness of Baez's acoustic folk-protest and the more pessimistic tones of electronica.

However, it is Lowell who underpins the film's environmental convictions that the technological and natural worlds are in many ways compatible but they may not necessarily require an intervention from mankind in order to evolve. Lowell's ire at his colleagues is perhaps even more relevant some forty years later when nearly a dozen species have become extinct thanks to pollution, aggressive over hunting, habitat loss, poaching and agricultural development. Trumbull's message in the bottle has been found again with this timely Blu-Ray release.

About the transfer
Masters of Cinema have provided the disc with a very clean, restored 1080p transfer. Colour is robust with the blues and reds of the uniforms looking particularly good. Flesh tones are natural and are in keeping with the softer tone of the picture and the presence of requisite film grain. It's a handsome transfer that has plenty of detail - in the sets, clothing and in the detailed model shots of the Valley Forge - and it handles well the juxtaposition of the textures of the natural world, as housed in the domes, with the design of the ship interiors. Even though it's forty years old there is a pleasant amount of detail in a very film-like image. The original mono soundtrack has been preserved in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless format and it handles the dialogue, Schickele's terrific music score, the Baez songs and the sound effects with aplomb. There's even an isolated music and effects only track on offer too.

Special features
Commentary
I first encountered this track back on the Canadian/US DVD release of the film and it was a pleasure to reacquaint myself with this conversation between director Douglas Trumbull and his lead actor Bruce Dern which was originally recorded back in October 2000. As well as telling us about how the film was greenlit, he provides a lot of technical information about the visual and practical effects in the film particularly. He also talks briefly about working with Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey and the odd relationship he had with him. Rather amusingly, he used to get calls from an irritated Kubrick whenever Trumbull was credited with sole responsibility for the effects on his film in the press and media. Trumbull adamantly claims here that Kubrick did not actually work on the effects for 2001 even though he takes credit for them on screen.

After admitting that he was nearly broke after working on the effects for Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, he also chats about his career since Silent Running and the various films he had in development during the 1970s and 1980s and which all fell by the wayside when studio management changed or their investments were re-prioritised. Dern comes across as very laid back, rather in awe of what Trumbull achieved with the film considering the budget and tight schedule. He provides background on getting the part and working with the actors he knew from The Actors' School who played the other crew members as well as an appreciation of the film's central philosophy. Well worth a listen.
The Making of Silent Running (50mins)
A vintage documentary from director Charles Barbee that goes into great detail about the production of the film as it was being made on board the decommissioned aircraft carrier Valley Forge. We see director Trumbull on set working with his actors, including Dern, as well as helping the four double-amputees who perform as the robot drones in suits made by Trumbull's dad, Don. His father also helped build the go-karts and we get to see the opening scene of the go-kart chase being shot. Plenty of interview footage with all the participants, including production designer Wayne Smith, and behind the scenes material about the model effects shooting and the recording of the Joan Baez songs.
Silent Running by Douglas Trumbull (31mins)
A Laurent Bouzereau produced interview from 2001 that focuses on Trumbull and covers quite a bit of the information from the commentary about the script development and subsequent making of the film but is nonetheless still a valuable addendum.
Douglas Trumbull: Then and Now (5mins).
Very brief piece that takes up the story post-Silent Running and his work in the effects industry. It also explores his attempts to turn back the tide of multiplexing that dogged the exhibition of films from the early 1980s onwards. With support from Paramount, Trumbull attempted to develop his 60fps format Showscan as a way of turning a visit to the cinema into an immersive event. It also explores the filming and designing of Back to Future - The Ride which combined all of Trumbull's ideas for immersive cinema.
A Conversation with Bruce Dern (11mins)
Dern discusses his involvement with the film, the film's central character and themes and working with Trumbull.
Trailer
Booklet - Complete with essays from production designer Wayne Smith, cinematographer Charles Wheeler and composer Peter Schickele, this book is full of archive images from Trumbull's personal collection.

Silent Running
Universal Pictures - Trumbull / Gruskoff Productions
1972
Masters of Cinema Limited Edition / Eureka Entertainment / Released 14 November 2011 / 89 min / Cert: U
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC / 1080p / 1.85:1 / DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 / Subtitles: English SDH / Region B (locked)

CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO: UNIT Files Box Set - Invasion of the Dinosaurs & The Android Invasion DVD Review

2011-12-30T16:24:00.000Z

The 1970s were a strange time and both Doctor Who stories featured on the latest DVD release capture something of that peculiarly paranoid decade. As Matthew Sweet suggests in the documentary accompanying Invasion of the Dinosaurs, even the writers working on Doctor Who during that decade weren't immune to chucking social commentary into the mix to provide a counterpoint to Pertwee's flamboyant action man about town and Baker's time traveling bohemian.

With Barry Letts and Robert Sloman making room for transcendental environmentalism or Brian Hayles cheekily raising an eyebrow at the European Union and the miners' strike, the series was at its most 'political' in the early to mid 1970s. This is despite the fact that it's taken a few decades for Terrance Dicks to grudgingly acknowledge that "anything a writer thinks or feels is bound to come out in his work" and that such a subtext existed within the series he was script-editing. Perhaps he wasn't as left leaning as his old mentor and friend Malcolm Hulke who, out of all the writers working on the show, made such a virtue out of wearing the colours of his social conscience on his sleeve.

Hulke clearly delighted in the fact that Doctor Who provided him with an opportunity to both reflect on the turbulent times in which the series was being made and on his own roots in the Unity Theatre, a politically motivated social national theatre movement founded in the 1930s. Its affiliation with the Communist Party influenced the Unity to pursue "an artistic policy based on a realism that demanded that the plays it presented should explain the world better" and "a means of politically conscious self-expression that was collective and provided a solution to individual alienation," according to Colin Chambers in The Story of Unity Theatre. Perhaps Hulke found a similar atmosphere of collective expression working with Dicks and Letts at the time and felt he could explore the shades of grey that attend the grand schemes of scientists, the military, government and individuals, whether on the right or left, within a science fiction series. He certainly wanted to "explain the world better" on a Saturday tea time.

...what would happen if Britain was ruled by a Vichy-style government

Invasion of the Dinosaurs emerged from an original pitch in December 1972 called Bridgehead from Space, wherein the Doctor and Sarah return to Earth after aliens have invaded and occupied a deserted London. Hulke seemed keen to explore the ramifications of appeasement and what would happen if Britain was ruled by a Vichy-style government as British politicians are forced to concede to alien demands until gradually the entire globe is handed over. However, Letts decided that it required an additional element to make it more palatable as a Doctor Who story and, with the success of the Drashig puppet effects in Carnival of Monsters in the back of his mind, considered instead a story featuring dinosaurs.

This was not unreasonable as, since the 1950s at least, the sub-genre of dinosaur films had been a staple of the B movie circuit and many a children's matinee. Certainly, the radioactive monster swimming in the Thames in The Giant Behemoth (1959), the dinosaur emerging from the Irish Sea to devastate much of London in Gorgo (1961) and the dinosaurs that fight with cowboys in turn of the century Mexico in the Valley of the Gwangi (1969) are all distant cousins to Letts's idea. Hammer's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth had only been in cinemas two years previous to the development of Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Amicus were already developing their adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot that they would release in the following summer of 1975. Dinosaurs were, it seemed, still the currency of British fantasy.

Dicks discussed this idea with Hulke and, as of January 1973, the script was retitled Timescoop and featured a London threatened by dinosaurs rather than aliens. Sadly, Letts didn't get the dinosaurs he really deserved for the serial and the visual effects provided by Clifford Culley looked poor even by 1974's standards. Hulke was also not happy with the retitling of the serial to Invasion of the Dinosaurs, preferring his working title of Timescoop. He and Dicks then fell out after the first episode was contracted to Invasion which seemed a bit of an affectation especially after the Radio Times gave the game away by using the whole title.

"let's not dip the Welsh in toxic chemical gunge... let them eat Quorn"

The real star of the show remains Hulke's script and characterisation and the consistent incorporation of a number of themes that he had already explored to some degree in The Silurians, his rewrite of David Whittaker's Ambassadors of Death, as well as his scripts for Colony in Space, The Sea Devils and Frontier in Space. While viewers may well have enjoyed the environmental homilies of The Green Death - where as, the documentary suggests "let's not dip the Welsh in toxic chemical gunge... let them eat Quorn" - Hulke was more interested in how far to the left or right many high minded middle and upper class campaigners would go in pursuit of their ideals. How misguided do you have to become in order to contemplate holocaust as a solution to mass consumerism and corporate greed, over industrialisation and population explosions?

He was in the end simply tapping into the underlying paranoia of the decade and a deep sense that the governing of Britain had gone seriously awry in 1974. Yes, Invasion of the Dinosaurs does explore the extremes that some in power would embrace to solve the perceived problems of overpopulation, as explored in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, and the environmental disaster predicted in the Club of Rome's Limits of Growth but it's also a 'state of the nation' piece. The likes of Sir Charles Grover and General Finch are the extreme versions of eco-guerrilla Professor Jones in that they are prepared, rather like the ecoanarchists who found their idol in Unabomber Ted Kaczinski in the late 1970s, to get their hands very dirty indeed.

However, as Heath's government ploughed on through terrorist attacks, strikes, sky-high oil prices and the three day week, Hulke also uses Grover and Finch to represent those within the government and the military that were determined to reverse the verdicts of the centre right in power and those on the far left. With the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in the summer of 1973 declaring what we all knew was already happening - "the precipitate decline of British imperialism within the internationalist capitalist framework" - it seemed the general consensus was that Britain was on the brink of collapse. Grover's Operation Golden Age was therefore an attempt not only to frighten the middle classes with kidnapped dinosaurs but also, by rolling back time, reclaim a romanticised version of Empire and beat the so called 'British disease' by reversing the effects of industrialisation and over population.

Curiously, with figures like Grover and Finch fighting back against this decline, Hulke also manages to preempt the paranoia surrounding the various military coups that were mooted in 1975 and that saw American commentator and CBS journalist Eric Sevareid suggest that Britain was "sleepwalking into a social revolution" where "some kind of backlash is building up." Hulke's General Finch is a precursor to Sir Walter Walker, a former NATO commander-in-chief who sweet talked a number of grandees and money men into supporting a military coup against Wilson's government. Grover, as Minister with Special Responsibilities in London, likewise could resemble the figure of Sir Val Duncan, chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc, who gathered a gang of right-wing industrialists together one evening in April 1975 and proposed a similar coup and support for a coalition government. Hulke knew which way the paranoid wind was blowing it seemed.

"take the world that you've got and try and make something of it"

In this light and of equal interest is the sub-plot involving the chosen few stashed away on fake spaceships travelling to a New Earth - one that will actually be created by Grover and Finch's Operation Golden Age out of the Earth they've allegedly left behind. Among their masses in suspended animation are the 'celebrity' Elders - Ruth (or eco-MP Lady Cullingford), Adam (or novelist Nigel Castle who has taken to handicrafts) and Mark (famous athlete John Crichton). They are all disciples of Grover's indoctrination and their journey resembles a Workers Revolutionary Party summer camp in space (all clad in denim). Perhaps this was Hulke's nod to the 1970s vogue for celebrity endorsement of the Socialist Labour League (later renamed the Workers Revolutionary Party), under the leadership of the controversial Gerry Healy. Healy persuaded many actors, writers and directors to gravitate towards the League, claiming among his membership the likes of the Redgraves, Troy Kennedy Martin, Ken Loach, Frances de la Tour and Tony Selby. Even Slade played at their fund raising activities.

You can see how a political ingenue like Captain Yates, who sees the world as "all too complicated and corrupt," could get swept up in all this sort of business. However, it is corruption of the worst kind that hoodwinks those on the ship into believing they are about to emerge onto a new world when in fact it will be the Earth allegedly returned to a purer age after the murder of billions of humans. Hulke's position about much of this is clear as he has the Doctor, in the final episode, tell Yates that the alternative is to "take the world that you've got and try and make something of it." He also recognises that Grover was completely mad but that his intentions were honourable by realising that the planet might "become one vast garbage dump" and that in the end it is man's greed that has brought it to the brink. Perhaps it's also a metaphor for the failures of the Heath and Wilson governments and wherein the British crisis was seen by Correlli Barnett in The Collapse of British Power as "brought down upon the British by themselves."

To add verisimilitude to all these political shenanigans, there's even a 'reminder' room where Mark and the others chuck Sarah in front of a monitor screen when her conditioning goes a bit wonky. Again, this is another familiar trope from Hulke who used similar moments like these to provide political context within Colony in Space and Frontier in Space. Nothing like footage of the Yom Kippur war and the student riots in 1968 to inspire the masses and prevent dissension in the ranks. Perhaps we should all spend an hour in the 'reminder' room just so we can forget the dinosaurs and relish in a fascinating script that has plenty to say about the times in which the programme was made.

Episode one, under the truncated title of Invasion, is now available to watch in a colour version that approximates the original. This is not as sophisticated as the work completed on Planet of the Daleks or the Dad's Army episode 'Room at the Bottom' simply because the chroma dot information in the black and white telecine version was incomplete. Only the red and green colour signal information was recoverable, requiring the missing blue signal information to be approximated by the Restoration Team. It may not be up to the standard required as the picture is rather noisy but it's perfectly acceptable viewing for those curious to see the episode in colour and the restored black and white version is available on the disc too. This opening episode makes a virtue of the early morning location shoot by Paddy Russell and her film cameraman Keith Hopper and is a moody, atmospheric depiction of a deserted London under martial law. Pertwee and Sladen are on great form and when the Doctor and Sarah are arrested for looting it gives Pertwee the chance to lighten the drama with some comedy as an army officer attempts to take some mug shots of him. Some inadvertent humour springs from the pterosaur attack in the deserted garage and where Pertwee and the puppet effects do a passable impression of Rod Hull and Emu.

This story also heralds the return of UNIT, the Brigadier, Yates and Benton. Yates particularly is given more to do in this serial and plays an active role in the Operation Golden Age conspiracy, with Richard Franklin managing to display some skill when required to flesh out the character here as one torn between his duty and his naive beliefs. Dicks also adds some continuity from The Green Death and suggests that Yate's experiences in that story have had some bearing on his recruitment to Grover's eco-anarchism and his betrayal of the Doctor. Touches like these and the brief scenes that show how much faith the Brigadier and Benton have in the Doctor when both of them are under pressure from General Finch to arrest him underline that old cliche of the closeness of the UNIT 'family'.

Although Grover and Finch are positioned as the villains of the story, Hulke goes some way to making them sympathetic and Noel Johnson imbues Grover with a great deal of charm as he attempts to explain to anyone who will listen to him about why he is trying to return the Earth to a purer age. Johnson manages to portray a man who is also trying to convince himself that the murder of millions is justifiable and his hypocrisy is reflected in Ruth's own rather immoral solutions, either brainwashing or death, to Sarah's interference on the ship. There's also some effective support in these scenes from Carmen Silvera as Ruth, Terence Wilton as Mark and Brian Badcoe as Adam. John Bennett is excellent as the steely and resolute Finch. Peter Miles and Martin Jarvis as Whitaker and Butler, the scientists providing the timescoop technology to carry out Grover's vision, are used sparingly but put in memorable performances. Both seem to be involved in the scheme for their own ends and clearly have little interest in Grover's ideals.

This is a tightly made, pacy story and the only real longeur is the extended chase sequence that takes up most of episode five but as is now noticeable with six part stories from the era they clearly aren't sustainable beyond four episodes, often requiring padding or a new sub-plot to carry the story forward. Sarah's entrapment on the fake spaceship ensures that the story remains interesting despite the less than effective dinosaur puppets that, upon making their own appearances, do tend to distract from the characters and plot that Hulke has been developing. By the time you've stopped laughing at feeble dinosaurs that can't raise their heads and bend their knees you'll find it hard to get back to the story proper. But do try because it's worth it.

Special Features

Commentary

Moderator Toby Hadoke is joined by director Paddy Russell for episodes one, four and five. She can come across as little terse to begin with and the conversation doesn't flow as a result but it was a good decision to use episode five's drawn out chase sequence between the Doctor and the army as an opportunity to get Paddy chatting about the early days of television. She warms to her subject, via Hadoke's own persistence, and there is some interesting anecdotal material about working with Rudolph Cartier and Sydney Newman on the Quatermass and 1984 productions in the 1950s. Episodes two, three and six feature actors Peter Miles and Terence Wilton, script-editor/writer Terence Dicks and designer Richard Morris in a lively and often hilarious series of exchanges.
People, Power and Puppetry (32:41)
Dr. Matthew Sweet impressively steers our attention away from the elephant (or should that be the dinosaur?) in the room - this being "the one with the dodgy dinosaurs" - and concentrates on the virtues of Mac Hulke's script and characters. Producer Ed Stradling and co-writer Sweet return to the political and social dimensions of the superb What Lies Beneath documentary that accompanied the DVD release of The Silurians, to focus again on another Hulke story that chimed with those "strange days, indeed" of the 1970s. Sweet takes us through the genesis of the scripts for the final Pertwee season, the commissioning of Hulke and the development of his original idea. This half hour explores Hulke's era-specific themes about the moral consciousness of alternative politics and the unease about the establishment and the military. As well as Dicks, there are reflections from Terence Wilton and Peter Miles about the power of personality and the bonkers 'Operation Golden Age' plot. The late Barry Letts and director Paddy Russell also discuss how important was the credibility of the characters to the story and the effectiveness of good casting. People, Power and Puppetry concisely covers the production too, including Cliff Culley's puppet effects; the location filming; casting; the introduction of the Whomobile and an actual example of that media shibboleth - the series' oft mentioned wobbly sets.
Billy Smart’s Circus (1:43)
Back in the day, you'd see Doctor Who barge its way onto other children's programmes like Disney Time and Blue Peter or in this case a television broadcast of Billy Smart's Circus. This clip comes from an edition broadcast on January 6th, 1974. This was a week before Dinosaurs started transmission and offered viewers a preview of Pertwee's Whomobile and is a salutary warning about appearing with children, animals and custom built, three wheeled vehicles.
John Levene Commentary (10:13 on Episode 5 only)
'Gentleman Johnny Bingo' on falling over properly, how to handle a machine gun, 'Venusian oojah' and the price of crockery.
Deleted Scenes (4:49)
Some interesting little finds including a section cut from the first episode prior to the TARDIS's arrival and the edits made to episode three.
Doctor Who Stories: Elisabeth Sladen Part 1 (13:58)
This is bittersweet. Originally shot for The Story of Doctor Who in 2003, many of you who have read Lis's recently published autobiography will recognise most of these recollections, including the CSO knickers story. Lis recalls her audition and Pertwee's resignation, working with Kevin Lindsay, Lennie Mayne and Nicholas Courtney. The shadow puppet titles and interstitials are rather delightful.
Now and Then (13:44)
Another labour of love from Richard Bignell as he revisits the extensive locations used throughout the serial. Little time capsules all of their own, this edition underlines how some parts of London have since changed. A handy guide if you've got a spare day out in London and you're short of anything to do.
Photo Gallery
Great selection of production stills. Plenty of Pertwee hi-jinks and gurning.

Production Information Subtitles

David Brunt's often amusing text is a perfect companion to the various episode commentaries. Informative and witty and therefore worth paying attention to.

Coming Soon Trailer

Or... how to make The Sensorites look really gripping

Radio Times Listings

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The Android Invasion is often seen as the odd one out in Season 13's excess of Gothic mayhem but it actually sits rather well with a number of other stories when you start to examine its genre roots. Rather like The Seeds of Doom and Planet of Evil, it owes much to the science fiction films of the 1950s, such as The Thing From Another World, Forbidden Planet and in the case of this serial, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Generically, with its use of English village locations and defence installations, it has often been stylistically compared to The Avengers and, with its plot concerning the replacement of human beings with android doubles, borrowing from the 1950s science fiction paranoia of the aforementioned Body Snatchers. As such, the story recycles the xenophobic anxieties of 1950s science fiction films which were considered a denial of the power of the military/industrial complex to defend ourselves from invaders who looked just like us. Contemporaneous to The Android Invasion, as the disc's production notes reveal, the concept of the android duplicate was also a fixture of popular films and television such as The Stepford Wives and The Six Million Dollar Man.

Its story of an alien invasion conducted by the Kraals via stealth and the copying of key personnel working at a defence station in the English home counties reflects some of the more fantastical elements - particularly those perennial favourites of deserted villages and doppelgangers - from certain spy-fi adventures series of the 1960s, including The Avengers episodes 'The Town of No Return', 'The Morning After' and 'They Keep Killing Steed', the Department S episode 'The Pied Piper of Hambledown' and Danger Man's 'Colony Three'.

The Android Invasion is perhaps an homage to these and other ITC action adventures series and that comes as no surprise because writer Terry Nation had spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s script writing and editing on The Avengers, The Champions, Department S and The Persuaders! amongst others. Both Barry Letts and Philip Hinchcliffe considered action adventure a staple part of the series' format and, according to Jonathan Bignell and Andrew O'Day's Terry Nation, they saw Nation as someone who could "draw on his skill in crafting scripts in this genre" as in the 1970s the Doctor Who format drew "closer to the action drama he had written in the 1960s in which intelligence operatives dealt with mysterious threats to national security." The Doctor/Sarah partnership in The Android Invasion certainly echoes the crime fighting duos dealing with diabolical masterminds featured in the dramas that Nation had worked on, particularly The Avengers, as a series in which, Michael Bracewell noted, ‘the underground of popular culture and the hidden precincts of Cold War paranoia were compressed into a Looking Glass world where nothing – to satirical ends or not - was ever quite as it seemed.’

... a Cold War paranoid figuration of bodily invasion, infiltration and contamination

With this in mind, Hinchcliffe and Holmes commissioned Nation to come up with a story that didn't feature his Dalek creations on November 29th, 1974 and to develop an initial idea called 'The Enemy Within'. In February 1975, he provided full scripts for what had then become 'The Kraals'. The doppelganger theme was originally to feature androids that were mirror images of the humans they were replacing and the Kraals were an insectoid species but both of these concepts were considered either too complex or expensive to realise on screen.

By July 1975, and the start of production, the serial was titled The Android Invasion and Holmes had worked with Nation on reshaping the story, adding much content for the Kraals in the process and having to replace Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart's intended role in the script with the character of Colonel Faraday because Nicholas Courtney was already committed to other work. Ironically, Faraday was then played by Patrick Newell, probably best known to viewers as Mother in the Tara King episodes of The Avengers, adding further resonance to Nation's action-adventure homage. Unfortunately, he's only present in the final episode and comes across as something of a buffoon, a quality that had crept into the characterisation of the Brigadier on a number of previous occasions.

Mysterious threats to the nation's security were as much part of the paranoia of the 1970s as the military coups and the decline of Britain that had flavoured Invasion of the Dinosaurs. As Andrew Pixley noted in his archive feature in Doctor Who Magazine 193, The Android Invasion's depiction of a fake English village set up on an alien planet to use as an android training ground picked up on the Cold War supposition "of espionage training centres in different countries where agents were coached to the extent that KGB agents could become perfect English gentlemen to infiltrate another country as 'sleepers'." In a recent New York Post article, according to Boris Korczak, a former double agent who worked for the CIA, spying on the KGB from 1973-1980, "some of these training schools were located in small towns in the southern part of the Soviet Union. They were exact replicas of American suburbs where the bulk of KGB agents were deployed during World War II."

At roughly the same time as this serial was transmitted, Prime Minister Harold Wilson was being conspired against by MI5 and CIA agents who believed that he was in effect a KGB 'sleeper'. Various defectors had claimed that during the 1960s that Wilson had 'replaced' his predecessor Hugh Gaitskill, the alleged victim of a KGB assassination plot, at the behest of communist supporters. That MI5 took this seriously, when it clearly wasn't true, is a measure of the Cold War paranoia still rife within Britain of the late 1970s and their smearing of Wilson increased his own state of paranoia immensely.

The Guy Crayford character (a suitably jittery performance from Milton Johns) is surely a symbol of this rampant insecurity of the times, brainwashed into believing his hijacked ship had crashed and that the Kraals had rescued him. It is Crayford's memories of the village and the defence station that provide the training ground for the duplicate androids. Crayford is therefore the literal form of a Cold War paranoid figuration of bodily invasion, infiltration and contamination. He's so paranoid that you're also left to question his credentials as an astronaut. Sadly, the evidence that the Kraals had deceived him, revealed by the missing eye and eyepatch business in the final episode, doesn't work in the story but then again, and this is stretching a point, brainwashing techniques could have persuaded Crayford his left eye was missing even when it wasn't. You are left to wonder how Crayford would not know he had 20:20 vision and if he bothered to wash his face at all.

Sarah takes a tumble and loses her face

On closer scrutiny, The Android Invasion does offer its own little contribution to the Gothic subtext of the Holmes and Hinchcliffe era. It revisits a major Gothic theme: the doppelganger. The symbol of the doppelganger, here used when the alien Kraals construct android replicas of military personnel including RSM Benton and Harry Sullivan, the Doctor and Sarah, is as much a Gothic trope as the mummies, monsters, catacombs and dark castles of Pyramids of Mars and The Brain of Morbius.

The theme has its roots in the the literature of duality, most potently evoked in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray, where at their heart these stories are about changes or losses of identity. The androids of the Doctor, Sarah, Benton and Harry exemplify this slippage of identity, the fragmentation of the self as their human counterparts are confronted by an 'other' version of themselves. Emily E. Auger observes, in Tech-Noir Film, that the aforementioned use of androids in The Stepford Wives depicts "humans reduced to 'blanks' which the viewer reacts to with horror because they have been introduced to the 'originals' and know what has been lost." Hinchcliffe and Letts build this into that rather effective cliffhanger to episode two when the duplicate Sarah takes a tumble and loses her face and the introduction of the 'evil versions' of such well loved characters like Benton and Harry.

While the subtexts in the story are interesting, the actual plot is full of holes. As well as the eyepatch nonsense there is also the question of how the Doctor's android is reactivated at the climax of the story when it was made clear that the Doctor had deactivated them all in a previous scene. It seems the root of this failure of logic lies in the fact that Barry Letts ran out of time to tape the scene in which the Doctor explains this and both he and Hinchcliffe had to abandon it, hoping that viewers wouldn't notice. The Kraal invasion tactics are also a bit of a mess. The Kraals intend to wipe out humanity with a virus communicated by a handful of androids in a village in three weeks. Surely three weeks will give the Earth plenty of time to instigate quarantine procedures? Why create a fake village to do this if you have, as suggested, an invasion fleet? Why not create an airborne virus rather than entrust it to a group of androids who have a tendency to fall over, lose their faces and get electrocuted? And where does Styggron's fellow Kraal, Chedaki (the one played by Roy Skelton and sounding rather too much like Zippy from Rainbow) disappear to after the Doctor puts the kibosh on the planned invasion? Look too closely at this and it doesn't hold up that well.

A shame because The Android Invasion does have its moments. It too has a very atmospheric and mysterious opening episode and makes very good use of location filming throughout. The opening set up with the village, the malfunctioning UNIT doppelganger (Max Faulkner getting a bit of the limelight) throwing itself off a cliff and the trigger happy androids ("is that finger loaded?" is a smashing ad-lib from Tom) is eerily appealing and wonderfully sustained. In the pub scene in the first episode, Letts generates palpable tension as he cuts quickly to each immobile android's face in close up as Sarah and the Doctor watch them come back to life. He handles the location filming very well, especially the action sequences, and Tom and Lis are as reliable as ever, further underlining what a smashing Doctor/companion team they were, despite Tom's very obvious throat problems. However, even though Letts's film and studio work is particularly good, his money-saving use of CSO abounds and various interiors are simply defined by plonking actors in front of out of focus stills and augmenting locations with radar antennas and rockets using the process. They slightly cheapen the look of a well mounted production that offers some diverting escapist fare.

It's also both a delight and disappointment to have Ian Marter and John Levene back in the cast as Harry Sullivan and RSM Benton. As a consequence of Hinchcliffe reducing the prominence of UNIT and their role in contemporary Earth based stories, they aren't used very much and neither character shines in what would be their final appearances in the show. I also have to agree with Hinchcliffe in that the Kraals don't really work as monsters. The masks aren't bad but even Doctor Who could claim better make-up effects at the time and the downside is that there isn't room for subtlety in the performances from Martin Friend and Roy Skelton as Styggron and Chedaki as they have to get their characters across through often quite immobile masks. In their scenes together, they also do tend to hang about and bicker a lot about which is the best way to invade the Earth. Perhaps they should have had a word with Terry Nation and between them they might have made their minds up.

Special Features
Commentary
Toby Hadoke is joined by producer Philip Hinchcliffe, actors Milton Johns and Martin Friend and production assistant Marion McDougall to mull over their time making this four part serial. There are very occasional lapses into silence but overall this bowls along with plenty of anecdotes from all assembled including: Friend and Hinchcliffe discussing the difficulty of working with the Kraal masks; Johns recalling his working relationships with both Troughton and Baker as the Doctor and McDougall offering an appreciation of the role of production assistant in the making of television during the 1970s.
The Village That Came to Life (30:56)
Nicholas Briggs dons his anorak and prowls the village of East Hagbourne and wanders the rooftops at the Health Protection Agency (during filming it was formerly the National Radiological Protection Board) in Harwell to bring us the behind the scenes story of The Android Invasion. He even finds time to pop into the local pub and embarrass some of the locals who were children when the Doctor Who crew came to film in their village. The commissioning and production of the story is covered in reasonable detail with Letts, Hinchcliffe, Martin Friend and Milton Johns discussing the story, its themes and its often logic defying moments. And for the geeks out there, check out the title sequences all styled using The Avengers typeface.
Life After Who (29:35)
Quite frankly the best reason for buying the DVD apart from the actual story itself. A wonderful interview with Hinchcliffe that covers his career post-Doctor Who, taking in his work at the BBC, ITV and as an independent onsuch drama series as Target, Private Schulz and The Charmer, single plays Take Me Home and Friday on My Mind and his overseeing of Taggart and Rebus while controller of drama at Scottish Television. His interviewer is his own daughter Celina, herself a television industry professional, and this makes the whole thing both delightfully personal and satisfyingly detailed.
Photo Gallery
Good selection of images, including set designs and Tom and Lis autographing on location.
Weetabix Advert
TV advert for a Doctor Who themed promotion. Character Options eat your heart out. Or your Weetabix.

Coming Soon Trailer

Still making The Sensorites look good...

Radio Times Listings and Weetabix packet promotions in PDF format

Subtitle production notes

Nicholas Pegg provides the notes on this story and a fact-filled set of subtitles they are too.
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Doctor Who: UNIT Files Box Set
2 | entertain / Released 9 January 2012 / BBCDVD3376 / Cert: PG
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
BBC 1974
6 episodes / Broadcast 12 Jan 1974 - 16 Feb 1974 / Running time: 147:15
The Android Invasion
BBC 1975
4 episodes / Broadcast 22 Nov 1975 - 13 Dec 1975 / Running time: 98:11

MAGIC TRIP - Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place / Blu-Ray Review

2011-11-27T18:30:00.000Z

The 1960s, the 'Sixties', the 'swinging Sixties' are all such overworked, resampled, redited constructions that it is now becoming harder and harder to understand the real implications of that titular decade. As Gerard DeGroot so succinctly puts it in The Sixties Unplugged: "Nostalgia for the Sixties is strong because so much did not survive. Revolution was never on the cards. The door of idealism was opened briefly and then slammed shut, for fear of what might enter."

Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's film Magic Bus examines one of those brief moments of idealism and mythology, when writer Ken Kesey decided to take a group of men and women, his 'Merry Pranksters', across America, from West to East in a 1939 International Harvester school bus and to the shining beacon of post-war American optimism, the 1964 World's Fair. As much as the film chimes with DeGroot's claim that the door of idealism closed, the film is also about the opening of those Huxlian 'doors of perception' as it traces Kesey's involvement in drug trials of LSD and how, as former Kesey associate and 'prankster' Robert Stone reveals, this "psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the Cold War."

Magic Trip is by turns a fascinating time capsule, positioning Kesey as a figure on the crossroads between the Beat movement and what would become the hippie movement of the late 1960s, and yet is something of a reality check about the mythologising of Kesey and his merry band who by his own admission were "too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies."

The psychedelic visions conjured up in Tom Wolfe's reportage of the trip in 1968, the much vaunted 'new journalism' of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, are countered by the documentary's depiction of the group as a rag-bag collection of rather middle-class, preppy types decked out in uniforms of red, white and blue. Their aspirations and ideals are chaotic, their political principles are often frivolous and at worst tainted by ignorance of the social upheavals going on around them. The glamour turns out to be rather tarnished.

The film opens with the claim that the early 1960s was still very much an extension of the 1950s - with America simultaneously bedazzled and bewildered by mass consumerism and nuclear-age anxieties - and suggests that Kesey "lit the fuse" for what became the manufactured 'flower children' version of the 1960s. Kesey is depicted as a happily married, all-American boy and a highly respected athlete and Stanford graduate. A number of key points emerge here in the narration (by Stanley Tucci) where the observation: "he loved the magic trick of speaking through other people" not only underlines the importance of his very successful early career as a writer with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, but also his role as 'guru' to the group who joined him on that bus trip to the World's Fair.

Allegedly, Kesey packed in writing because he felt making films and tapes was more productive. Judging by the state of the footage that he and the Merry Pranksters produced on their trip, it does make you wonder why he bothered. As Tucci's narrator notes, the footage was beset with "technical problems". Notably, none of them knew how to use the masses of film and sound recording equipment that was taken aboard the bus to document the voyage of discovery and, for most of the time, many of them were too stoned to even be bothered. Over 100 hours of footage and un-synced audio, with only some of it shown at the Pranksters post-bus trip 'acid test' parties but most of it collecting dust in Kesey's Oregon barn until now, reconstructs the journey in the film.

"gave us a new way to look at America and it stirred us up"

It was while Kesey was in New York attending the 1963 Broadway run of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that he and his friends saw the construction of the World's Fair site and decided they would like to come see it upon completion. Gibney and Ellwood contextualise this with the shocking assassination of Kennedy, the symbolic loss of innocence that Kesey and his cohorts would set out, but ultimately fail, to preserve in their journey to experience the "American landscape...the heartscape."

Ex-marine Ken Babbs, art student Paula Sundstren, pregnant Standford philosophy professor Jane Burton, Page Browning, Mike Hagen, Chloe Scott, George Walker, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and Cathryn Casamo all joined Kesey on the trip to New York in the repainted bus. Many of them were re-named, so Jane became 'Generally Famished', Paula was renamed 'Gretchin Fetchin', Cathryn was 'Stark Naked' and Hagen known as 'Mal Function'. Kesey also acknowledges that Jack Kerouac's On the Road, "gave us a new way to look at America and it stirred us up" and there's some great TV footage included of Kerouac reading the book. Kerouac's character Dean Moriarty was modelled on Neal Cassady, a speed freak who rather alarmingly ends up driving the bus on the East bound leg. As one of the Pranksters observes, "Wow, he looks like my dad. And my dad is going to drive the bus."

The ramshackle journey commences with the bus running out of gas just outside Kesey's house and then breaking down at La Honda. Jane Burton recalls it as being "the exact opposite of a pleasure palace" and as the trip continues some the women decide that the rather misogynistic tensions and drug-fueled paranoia are too much to cope with, resulting in several of them abandoning the bus at various points in the odyssey. On arrival in Los Angeles, Kesey presciently acknowledges the death of an old Hollywood that it is unable to keep the door closed on "the possibility of us doing anything new." He sees the trip as a way to define the soul of America in 1964 and to "open up like a camera and see it clearly for a moment."

Perhaps Kesey didn't quite realise how open that camera would be and that this experiment would include casualties like Cathryn Casamo who would end up in a psychiatric hospital. It was also an experiment informed by Kesey's LSD experiences and one of the film's most interesting sections is a recounting of his participation in the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme at Stanford. He was paid $25 a day to take LSD, to allegedly test the drug as a treatment for insanity and depression, and Gibey and Ellwood mix a recording of Kesey's experiences with animation and archive footage to describe his experiences. He would later lace a bottle of orange juice with the drug and introduce the Merry Pranksters to another kind of trip when the bus is temporarily stalled by a lake in Arizona.

In a charmingly unfortunate way Magic Trip also shows how politically naive the group were. Around them, the rest of America and Europe were locked into the anxieties of the Cold War and on the home front domestic and foreign policy entrenched an ideological rigidity that escalated the war with Vietnam, fuelled the upheaval of the civil rights movement and the pressure on Lyndon B Johnson from black Americans demanding social and political change.

When the bus pulls into Arizona, the home state of controversial right wing conservative Barry Goldwater, who was then running against Johnson for the presidency, driving the bus in reverse down a street is the extent of their displeasure at Goldwater's opposition of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his aggression towards the Soviets and the Chinese. Later in the film, the bus arrives in New Orleans and the Pranksters, as Mark Stafford notes: "dive in a lake outside New Orleans before realising, with mounting paranoia, that they are the only white guys there, swimming in the wrong part of a racially segregated lake." Their reaction, as he continues, is to sheepishly turn tail, gather their things and get back on the bus.

One of the underlying themes that Magic Trip only partially articulates is the idea that while Kesey and his friends may well have "lit the fuse" for the libertarian excesses of the hippie movement, from which a counter-culture would eventually propel forward various civil rights movements into the next decade, the ultimate result of this would be a return to conservative values espoused by Ronald Reagan's governorship of California in 1967 and his presidency in the 1980s. It's amusing that Reagan pops up during the film when the establishment is seen to react hysterically over the LSD experience and just as popular media, in the form of the Dragnet episode shown here, reacts against the perceived threat from drug culture.

"a loaded gun impossible to aim"

However, the 'bad trip' so frequently associated with LSD intake is not shied away from and it is rather disturbing how after a visit with Kesey's friend, writer Larry McMurtry, 'Stark Naked' is arrested after she goes missing. You feel a bit sorry for McMurtry as a bus load of proto-hippies turns up on his doorstep and proceed to take over his house. She is karted off to a hospital and the last we hear is that a friend rescues her and takes her back to San Francisco. An unpleasant aspect of this episode, apart from her mental breakdown after her 'acid test', is the arrogance of certain male companions who declare "we sort of abandoned her" and that "anybody that couldn't hold their shit together" was deemed unfit to continue. It seemed to fuel paranoia about who was going to be left behind next and left uncriticised the rather demeaning view of women that the men in the group had. By the time they meet up with Ken Babbs' Vietnam veteran friend, even the pregnant 'Generally Famished' is beginning to feel that their trip is turning into a bit of a folly. I think anyone would be worried if your driver was a babbling, speed freak like Neal Cassady and your companions were stoned out of their heads. The gradual unravelling of the group and the disappointment with the World's Fair underlines Kesey's eventual rejection of the liberating nature of his 'acid test' as "a loaded gun impossible to aim."

Arriving in New York, the film is full of images of throngs of curious pedestrians and late night parties. One of Kesey's inspirations, Jack Kerouac, is a guest at the party and it's clear that as a chronicler of other people's madness he was a rather conservative recluse and the film shows him somewhat reserved, quiet and rather aloof from the Pranksters' merry-making. "He was not enthused with our craziness," comments one of the Pranksters. Here they are also joined by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the film explores Ginsberg's relationship with Cassady which had lasted off and on for twenty one years and briefly traces the roots of the hippie movement to come in Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady and the Beats. An exploration of Cassady's strange psyche is certainly the film at its most informative and interesting.

The ironic footage of a Dupont presentation 'Better Living Through Chemistry' at the World's Fair provides a corporate and consumerist counterpoint to the freedom of the Pranksters and to their eventual meeting with Dr. Timothy Leary whose approach to investigating the benefits of hallucinogens such as LSD is far more sober than their own. The footage of the Fair is fascinating just from a cultural standpoint. One section depicts General Motors' Futurama II ride which envisages a science fiction world of the future where it was proposed we might even live underwater. The end of the 1960s was not just a far cry from the Disneyfied materialist life of the future as seen at the World's Fair but was also nothing like the vision the Pranksters and Leary wanted. Kesey ended up in jail and retired to his Oregon farm and Leary was discredited as the economic downturn at the end of the decade "combined with Nixon's election to office on a 'law and order', anti-counterculture platform, dealt Sixties utopians a double dose of harsh reality" according to Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle in Imagine Nation: the American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. As Robert Stone, visiting the World's Fair and seeing its futurist dream, aptly puts it, "It was over before it began."

The last half hour of the film covers the return journey from New York, leaving Cassady and others behind, an hallucinogenic trip next to an idyllic lake in Canada captured in vibrant 16mm footage, and the subsequent tensions on the bus as the seven couples aboard indulged in 'free love'. It also offers Kesey to comment on his optimistically utopian ideas and that these ideas acknowledge "Goldwater and his bunch are scared... there's something happening that is scaring these people" as footage of the Pranksters picking and arranging flowers is intercut with the infamous 'Daisy' Democrat ad, of the little girl dismantling a flower as a nuclear bomb goes off, that Johnson ran against Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential campaign. Again this reflects DeGroot's idea that political and corporate America were afraid of "what might enter" the culture and here too Reagan is seen as "terribly frightened by LSD" and Dragnet's Joe Friday is on the case too, arresting blue and yellow painted hippies on prime time television.

Although Kesey wanted to be rid of the whole bus trip experience, it lived on through 30 hour screenings of the material that had been recorded across America. Saturday night 'acid-tests' became a regular occurence and eventually the Grateful Dead became their back up band. In 1965, Kesey organised the Acid Test Graduation, a big reunion party for everyone the Pranksters had ever initiated, to be held at an abandoned San Francisco pie factory. For him, it was time to go "beyond acid," and he told his fellow Pranksters, "it's no longer 'Can you pass the Acid Test?,' but 'Did you pass the Acid Test?'" However, he was then busted by the police for marijuana possession and here this is revealed through great news footage, samples of the beautiful pages of his jail journal and his willingness to trade-off on the two-year sentence. "You don't get anything free, everything bruises something," he told a reporter when asked if his drug experiences had come with a cost. After serving his time Kesey retreated further into family life in Oregon and struggled to write as the hippie counterculture grew and then withered around him.

This is a thought-provoking film, capturing a time and a place through a structuring of the bus footage, home movie material, newsreels and audio recordings. It's often quite rambling but that's seems in tune with the ramshackle nature of the external and internal journey that the Pranksters and Kesey endured. The bus is finally seen decaying, rusting and overgrown on Kesey's estate as a symbol of that lost innocence. As the camera explores the rotting structure, Kesey reflects on the soundtrack "The only big mistake we ever made was thinking for a while that we were going to win. We developed vested interests in the victory to come. We began to parcel off into little groups... whether it's feminism or politics, or money or religion. Whatever it is, everybody's jumping up and down in front of it until nobody can see it clearly any more." It's an anticipation of how countercultural interests would develop in the 1970s and a reflection of how Braunstein and Doyle view the historicising of the period where, "the countercultural mode reveled in tangents, metaphors, unresolved contradictions, conscious ruptures of logic and reason; it was expressly anti-linear, anti-teleological, rooted in the present, disdainful of thought processes that were circumscribed by causation and consequence." For one brief summer, Kesey and his Pranksters were the "divine losers" who explored one of those strange tangents and Magic Trip certainly captures the essence of that, good and bad.

Special features

Commentary with directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood

Absorbing and very informative feature-length track with the directors and well worth a listen if you're interested in the production and how they transformed the hours and hours of footage into what became Magic Trip.

Audio Clip of Ken Kesey being Administered LSD (50mins)

The full stream-of-consciousness audio from Kesey's participation in the CIA's experiments with LSD. This plays over a repeating cycle of colour and black and white images.

Interview with Alex Gibney (37mins)

Warren Etheredge of The High Bar interviews documentary maker Alex Gibney about the film and its themes. Great little featurette that explores drug culture and Kesey's status as icon of the counterculture and the intentions of the film as an immersive experience.

New Tempo: Stimulants (25mins)

Absolutely wonderful to find an edition of New Tempo added as an extra feature here. This was an ABC arts show that ran for six editions in 1967. This edition looks at the effects of drugs, particularly LSD, on perception in an interview with R.D. Laing and was directed by Jim Goddard and produced by Mike Hodges.

Deleted scenes

Eleven deleted scenes of various lengths

VOD Trailer

TV Spots

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place
A&E Indie Films / Phoenix Wiley 2011
StudioCanal Blu Ray OPTBD 2027 / Released November 28th 2011 / Ratio: 1.85:1 / Dolby Digital DTS 5.1 / Colour / Region B / Running Time: 107 mins / Cert:15

THE TYRANT KING - The Complete Series / DVD Review

2011-11-19T01:31:00.000Z

Last month, when I reviewed Regan - the Armchair Cinema pilot for The Sweeney - I mentioned The Tyrant King, in passing, after noting that maker Euston Films was formed from the conviction of its founders that drama could be made completely on film by a unit within Thames Television.

This strategy emerged out of a number of changes affecting the commercial television industry in the late 1960s. The Pilkington committee of 1960 had imposed a high 11% levy on advertising placed with ITV. The committee also had great influence over the creation of the Television Act of 1964 from which the Independent Television Authority gained more regulatory powers over scheduling and programme making, and levies on advertising revenues were increased. Britain's economic downturn of the late 1960s impacted on the advertising industry just as the advent of colour in 1969 also forced the ITV franchises to spend more money, certainly on technical facilities and upgrading. Advertising rates for the new colour services had not yet been negotiated and in a highly competitive market that was in recession this meant that a company like Thames had to start making colour programmes for the same amount of money as the black and white productions it was currently making. With falling revenues and rising production costs, Thames considered a number of options to make and deliver their programmes.
One of these was to implement an idea that had its roots in the mid-1960s - namely to create a subsidiary that would make television all on film rather than videotape. Influenced by the all-film action dramas being made by ITC and ATV, over at ABC directors Jim Goddard and Terry Green and writer Trevor Preston had already suggested the creation of ABC Nucleus, a small experimental group who would produce work on 16mm film, a gauge that had been used to film inserts on location for video taped drama but had never been considered as the format for an entire drama's production.

It was this idea that was revived at Thames when several dramas were commissioned to test the water, including the three directed, produced and written by Mike Hodges and Trevor Preston which would inspire the creation of the Euston Films subsidiary in 1971. Hodges had previously worked with Jim Goddard at ABC on an arts programme Tempo which he claims "was important in a different way. Being an 'art' programme, we could be very experimental in our film making techniques. I learned a lot from the directors (Dick Fontane, Dennis Postle and James Goddard) I was able to employ on the show."

Mike Hodges weaves something altogether more sinister from the proceedings

He also knew writer Trevor Preston, a writer-researcher working on the films about Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Charles Eames, Ornette Coleman and others he made for Tempo, which often used the flexibility of 16mm and the freer documentary style Hodges had developed on World in Action. One of the first experiments with shooting drama entirely on film was the six part children's serial The Tyrant King, adapted by Preston from Aylmer Hall's book. Preston was no stranger to writing for children, having completed a ten part adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1967) for ABC, produced by Pamela Lonsdale with whom Preston would later co-create Ace of Wands (1970-72). He'd also contributed a four part story, 'The Big Freeze' to Southern Television's first season of Freewheelers in 1968.

Aylmer Hall, the pen name of Norah Eleanor Lyle Cummins, was the writer of several adventure stories for children in the 1950s and 1960s and her book The Tyrant King - A London Adventure was published by London Transport in 1967 with illustrations by Peter Roberson. Presumably it was commissioned to encourage the use of the bus and rail services across London as it essentially consists of a detective story where the clues are possibly located in notable landmarks and places in and around the capital city.

The Tyrant King is on the surface a conventional adventure story in which three children overhear a sinister conversation and then follow the clues to a mystery across some of London's tourist spots. However, this is far from conventional children's television and, beyond the traditional trappings of middle class kids meddling in criminal machinations of adults, Mike Hodges weaves something altogether more sinister from the proceedings in his penchant for cinematic editing and composition and by marrying his images to a blistering prog-rock soundtrack. He creates a distinctively surrealistic edge to a standard set-up.

The first episode 'Scarface' basically sets up the mystery and the series' house style. It is summer in the city so cue London buses, bobbies, pigeons and tourists in Trafalgar Square and a parade of the Household cavalry (there'll be lots and lots of imagery of bearskin-wearing Grenadiers clogging up the episodes later too). However, this is edgily soundtracked with 'As You Said' from Cream's 1968 Wheels of Fire album and the sequence takes us to a hotel room which is being searched by a strange, and rather camp, black gloved figure who steals a wallet and a stack of papers hidden inside a radio still calmly announcing 'what's on' in London. This is Uncle Gerry and he's played by the gloriously eccentric Murray Melvin.

A burst of The Nice's 'The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack' from the eponymous album accompanies the opening titles of each episode (a zoom into a billboard with the series' title and credits pasted up on it), and is repeated quite often throughout and it has to be said becomes a bit wearing after you've heard it for the umpteenth time across six episodes. After further travelogues of London streets, we are finally introduced to Bill Hallen (Eddie McMurray) and his sister Charlotte (Candy Glendenning) and their friend Peter Thorne (Kim Fortune) - played by said troupe of young actors fresh from the Italia Conti Stage School so we are told.

Bill's allegedly the hip one, whose wardrobe often defies description, and he appears to have been modeled on several members of The Monkees at once. Charlotte sports some fabulous mini-skirt and leather boot combinations but as we'll see she tends to be reduced to the victim being chased by a threatening looking Philip Madoc. "It's all discoteques and clothes with you two" as the sensible one, Peter, describes them. He's the one into photography who wears the (tight) trousers. When Peter's trying out his new telephoto lens (which gives director Hodges an excuse to do some nice zooms and pulling of focus and demonstrate the versatility of 16mm) they all decide that the deserted looking house across the way, "full of paintings and weird gear" and allegedly haunted, might be perfect for an afternoon's sleuthing.

"Did you see that schoolmaster with the ginger wig!"

The three enter the house (a beautifully atmospheric location) and overhear Uncle Gerry arranging some kind of rendezvous with an unseen person over the telephone. Much of his overhead dialogue about "London's public places are so stiff with tourists and screaming kids that no one will ever notice us" and "I've studied the old beast of the tyrant king" is later sonically manipulated and layered into the soundtrack, adding even more of a dream-like, psychedelic edge to the visuals. As they overhear this plotting, Hodges frames them in a corridor with the bizarre ornament of a Buddha whose hands and tongue move of their own accord. His close ups of the figure, its tongue darting in and out, are suitably nightmarish. There's also a fantastic tracking shot as he follows the three children crossing Richmond Lock Footbridge after they leave the house and try to puzzle out where Uncle Gerry's rendezvous will take place. Where is the aforementioned 'tyrant king'? Matters are complicated by the recovery of the wallet from the old house and its connection to the villainous Uncle Gerry.

And so begins a tour of London and its suburbs as they try to track down the 'tyrant king', taking in a riverboat ride down the Thames, a visit to the Tower of London (among the Beefeaters and ravens, Bill has time to utter the priceless line, "Did you see that schoolmaster with the ginger wig!") and an encounter, at St. Paul's Cathedral, with the glowering presence of Philip Madoc as Scarface. Hodges attempts to make the original remit of Aylmer Hall's exploration of London more interesting by layering on internal monologues from the characters, snatches of Uncle Gerry's dialogue and dollops of prog-rock. The Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's sequence goes a bit mad with the intercutting of people climbing steps up to the dome, steps up to the entrance, bits of slow mo and lots of The Nice.

While trying to work out if Scarface is in league with Uncle Gerry ("nobody with a voice like Minnie Mouse would have a face like Desperate Dan"), they engage in a game of cat and mouse with him across London in second episode 'Don't Walk - Run!' What would be a standard escape from a villain's clutches is scored to Pink Floyd's 'Astronomy Domine' and more cut up and processed dialogue. There's a brief respite at Bill and Charlotte's rather luxurious house (something out of a 1970s colour supplement which tells you a great deal about the class of the characters), where the highly imaginative Bill decides it's no use going to the police because he reckons they deal with people claiming they've had "tea with Martians" or seen "murders in laundrettes" everyday. Their bus ride round 1960s London streets and landmarks is tinged with nostalgia (spot the 2001: A Space Odyssey poster on the corner of Piccadilly Circus) and scored in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner to The Moody Blues' 'Dr. Livingstone, I Presume.' Hodges also drops in a section of the Floyd's 'Corporal Clegg' over hand held images of parading Grenadiers, providing a weird counterpoint entirely in keeping with the 1960s vogue for period and military clothing underlined by Bill's cry of "wot fantastic gear!"

Our three detectives (Bill in a fetching pink and yellow ensemble, Charlotte in hot pants and Peter in denim and even tighter trousers) turn up at Buckingham Palace for a rather prolonged scene mingling with the tourists, afterwards pop over to Westminster Abbey and then, prefaced by a sequence of eerie slow motion shots intercut with archive footage of World War 1, they briefly bump into Scarface at the Imperial War Museum. Peter's dad (Edward Evans) then takes them up to the South Bank (with the merits of the Hayward Gallery and the NFT described as "a cross between a monster egg box and a concrete gun turret" as the Floyd's 'Jugband Blues' bounces and crashes on the soundtrack) and then the top of the Shell Building.

At a skating rink Peter discovers a map hidden inside the wallet and the illustrations on it yield further summery escapades at Hampton Court and Kew Gardens. Hodges shows off his flair again with some choice editing and hand held camera work on the chase at the end of 'Don't Walk - Run' wherein Scarface corners Charlotte (now in a cerise mini) in the glasshouses at Kew. The Kew sequences offer a summer idyll, leant some appropriate atmosphere by The Moody Blues 'Legends of a Mind', turned into nightmare as Hodges slowly builds the tension through a montage of shots of Scarface, the two boys and Charlotte and more tracks from Pink Floyd and Cream where 'Let There Be Light' and 'Sunshine Of Your Love' and 'Pow R. Toc H.' create a feverish intensity to the final chase. It's a great scene.

"After your performance with Monsieur le Coq, I'm not sure I should let you out."

In episode three, aptly called 'Nightmare', unbeknownst to them, Scarface follows the three children back to Bill and Charlotte's house (a bus ride rendered threatening in tone by 'Dawn' from The Nice) and Hodges taps further into this mood when he plonks a dream sequence into the episode full of overdubbed whisperings, crash zooms onto Charlotte's toys and Madoc doing a rather evil laugh into camera and intoning, "Aren't you a friend of Gerald Gould?" as Charlotte relives her experiences of the day at Kew and St. Paul's. Cue more Pink Floyd too and that creepy tongue pulling Buddha. I'm not sure that Charlotte isn't still having nightmares when we witness breakfast in the Hallen home. Peter's dolled up in a psychedelic kaftan affair, his father (Vernon Joyner) is sporting an unfeasibly Paisley shirt and tie combo and his mother (Carole Boyer) is resplendent in a searing orange and yellow smock. And Scarface is phoning them up and asking for Gerald Gould. "This is getting a touch nasty," declares Peter.

All three tear off to the British Museum, listen to a commentary about the Elgin marbles and meanwhile Scarface turns up on Mrs. Hallen's doorstep claiming to be doing a survey for the SAGRIS (Society for Autonomous Group Research and Independent Surveys). Ironically, this taps into the boom for market research as the 1960s ushered in new ways of thinking and new ideas about the consumer society so Mrs. Hallen was probably used to strange men ringing her bell and asking her personal questions. Scarface eventually finds out where the children have gone and sets off in pursuit. More lashings of Cream ('Passing the Time', 'White Room' and 'As You Said') accompany the various bus journeys around the capital and the kids turning the tables and trailing after Scarface to the Commonwealth Institute to gradually put together the clues from the map in the wallet.

Bill's rather wonderful turn of phrase, "So as the Yogi said to the Yeti 'don't play marbles with yer Dad's glass eye, we need it to look for Scarface'", opens the fourth episode 'The Turnover' after Peter's failed attempt to snap Scarface with his telephoto lens at the Commonwealth Institute. As Peter's Dad drags them all off to Greenwich, Scarface gets a chance to do a bit of breaking and entering. Look out for Mrs Thorpe, a warm and witty little performance from Shirley Cooklin (better known in Doctor Who fandom as Kaftan from 'Tomb of the Cybermen'). Hodges captures some lovely footage of Greenwich and the Cutty Sark and Bill offers us another of his bon mots as Mr. Thorpe suggests that he "could do a lot worse" than a career in the Navy to which he replies, "I would Mr. T but you know what sailors are!" Crash zoom onto Mr. Thorpe's reaction.

After the Thorpes discover the break-in, Bill suggests that Peter and Charlotte distract Scarface in London while he searches the old house again for further clues. Peter and Charlotte lead Scarface to the V&A and a lovely selection from The Stones' 'She's A Rainbow' as they divert him around the museum but Bill is prevented from exploring the house by the arrival of Monsieur le Coq (Vernon Dobtcheff) for extra French lessons. Yes, the mind boggles. As Bill struggles to conjugate his French verbs, Peter and Charlotte attempt to keep Scarface on the run around Hyde Park to the crashing vibes of The Nice's 'Tantalising Maggie' and some great visual symmetry from Hodges.

Mrs Hallen, lounging on the lawn reading Queen magazine, cries to Bill, "After your performance with Monsieur le Coq, I'm not sure I should let you out," when he attempts to sneak out of the house. Blimey, he was only conjugating French verbs, wasn't he? His penance is to take the dog for a walk as he explores the old house and for his troubles he has a nasty encounter with Uncle Gerry, with Murray Melvin once again in scenery chewing mode. The fifth episode 'Some Doll!' sees Gerry incarcerate Bill in the cellar of the deserted house. There's a rather pointed moment when Gerry removes a handkerchief from Bill's pocket and looks it rather disdainfully, in only the way that Murray Melvin could, and declares, "revolting!" Meanwhile, Peter (coming out as a member of the BBC West of England Light Orchestra Fan Club) and Charlotte look for the missing Bill. Fortunately, Bill's dog leads them to the scene of the crime and they all return home to inflate some plastic cushions (I told you this was odd, didn't I?) while contemplating their next move after decoding more of the strange map they have been following.

It gets odder. After a bus journey to the Horniman Museum and Gallery to fathom the doll's head illustration on the map, accompanied by some rather lovely shots of Westminster and a selection from The Nice's "Diamond Hard Blue Apples of the Moon' the three children pop down the Chislehurst Caves (a location with another Doctor Who reference attached, it's where they filmed 'The Mutants' in 1972). They join a tour of the caves overseen by a young guide (Rick Moulton) believing that they may find the final clue there.

For a moment I was convinced I'd put the wrong disc in the machine and we were watching Mark Gatiss's guilt-ridden cave tour guide, Mick McNamara of Stump Hole Caverns fame, from The League of Gentlemen. Mind you, the effect on Peter is a bit catastrophic as claustrophobia sends our young hero a bit doolally and Hodges indulges in some trippy visuals and sounds, including the Floyd's 'Interstellar Overdrive'. Recovering in the cafe, Peter and his friends are then confronted by Scarface who demands, "It's time we had a chat." He accuses them of stealing his wallet and there is a showdown with a school master (Angus Mackay) and the cafe owner (Eunice Black). Managing to give him the slip again, the three children contemplate the meaning of the baffling final clue on the map. Any excuse for some more bus hopping across London would be your correct assumption at this point.

Preston and Hodges wrap up the story in the final episode 'Meet the King' and which opens with an atmospheric two minute montage of London locations (with further extracts from 'Dawn' by The Nice adding a sinister and mystical vibe) before throwing a bit of a curve to introduce someone we haven't seen yet, a blonde haired woman who appears to have borrowed Deirdre Barlow's glasses. And if you thought Murray Melvin couldn't get any camper as the villain then check out his threads in the opening scenes as he hails a cab and sets off for the much mooted rendezvous he arranged on the telephone right at the start of the series. The rendezvous is with the blonde girl who has now taken to cycling through the London streets (oh, look there's the Albert Hall) to meet Uncle Gerry at the Natural History Museum for what turns out to be a drugs exchange, a rather bold piecing of plotting for a children's serial of the time it has to be said. There's a lovely mood created as the tracking shots of the woman on the bicycle are cross cut with the three children on the bus, Scarface on foot and the cab journey that Uncle Gerry takes, enhanced by The Moody Blues' 'House of Four Doors' on the soundtrack as Hodges' camera weaves around the streets of London. Who the woman is, who Scarface is and what the 'tyrant king' is I shall leave to you to discover but you'll have fun watching the connections fall into place to the accompaniment of more prog-rock.

The Tyrant King TV Times coverage - Open publication

There's no doubting that Hodges impressed Thames with his work on The Tyrant King as they were quick to commission two plays, Suspect (17/11/69) and Rumour (02/03/70), both shot on film and which he wrote, produced and directed for 'ITV Playhouse'. These confirmed that a subsidiary of the Thames operation, that could make drama all on film, as a viable strategy. It eventually came into existence in 1971 and was called Euston Films.

As a piece of children's drama The Tyrant King is something of a curate's egg. Beholden to its origins as a promotional vehicle for London Transport, the story is simplistic and the characters often stereotypical but Hodges fashions the material in very innovative ways, with cinematic visuals, use of sound and editing techniques. It can therefore be seen as an interesting curio that sits at the crossover of two periods in children's television drama. The 1960s saw a proliferation of adventure serials made for television, often nothing more than variations of the Blyton-esque formula but which eventually developed into action-adventure series that were the equivalent of those being made for adults. Freewheelers and Orlando were the first of these and certainly The Tyrant King, while more formulaic, anticipates the new-age fantasy orientated series that came later in the 1970s, as in Ace of Wands and Catweazle (all shot on film for London Weekend Television) for example. There are even glimmers in Trevor Preston's scripts of what Alistair McGown and Mark Docherty see, in The Hill and Beyond, as some of the strengths of children's drama in the 1970s where makers "carefully explore violence, race, parents, love and criminality."

Network has decided to mark the release of the series and its prominent use of prog-rock by presenting it in jewel case rather than a standard DVD case and with the DVD artwork resembling a vinyl LP. The only special feature is an image gallery which apart from the standard publicity shots also contains several images of Grenadiers in bearskin hats. The episodes have been newly transfered from the original 16mm source so the colour is fairly vibrant, adding to the rosy glow of 1960s nostalgia that the series will now cultivate for viewers who will only ever have seen this in black and white if they were around at the time.

The Tyrant King
Thames Television 1968
Network DVD - Web exclusive / Released 14 November 2011 / 7953519 / Cert: U / 1.33:1 / Colour / Sound: Mono / English / Subtitles: None / Region: 2 / PAL / 150 mins approx

BILL BRAND - The Complete Series / DVD Review

2011-11-13T19:27:00.000Z

Trevor Griffiths' compelling series Bill Brand finally gets a much deserved DVD release this month. The eleven episode drama focuses on a newly elected Labour Party Member of Parliament as he attempts to deal with the demands of his political career, his complicated family life and the assurance that his left-wing convictions survive within a Labour government clinging on to power. Many of the themes in Bill Brand are a synthesis of the single plays or episodes Griffiths had already written for theatre and television to that point, many reflecting his own background (one he described "of history, of cultures, of languages, of borders of class") and the personal conviction that drama - whether in theatre, television or film - should be capable of raising the political consciousness of a British working class audience.

At the time, he saw television in particular as a medium that could help him politically mobilise large popular audiences. Bill Brand can therefore be seen as the aims and fulfillment of a journey in television drama that Griffiths undertook from the 1960s onwards where, as Tony Williams noted in his review of the publication of the Bill Brand scripts Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand and Political Television Drama, "Griffiths aimed at his own definition of critical realism that distinguished between the surface appearance of the world and the hidden forces of power structuring class, gender, and racial relationships."

"... opening of socialism to the unfettered debate of ideas"

Griffiths was born in Ancoats, Manchester in 1935, a city and an upbringing that would feature heavily in his writing. An intelligent and precocious child, he passed his eleven plus and was enroled at a Catholic grammar school in Manchester, St. Bede's College. Although a good scholar, he also attracted the interest of scouts from a number of football teams after he represented England in schoolboy competitions. A scholarship eventually took him to Manchester University and at twenty he graduated with an English degree and then enlisted in the army. For a period, after demob, he taught at a private school in Oldham. The school became a focal point for the development of his political sensibilities, especially through the connections forged by his wife-to-be Jan Stansfield whom he met there. He became a member of the emerging New Left movement and it greatly influenced Griffiths' political thinking. As Stanton B. Garner outlines in Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History, it "registered its mark on Griffiths' life and work in a number of ways: through its opening of socialism to the unfettered debate of ideas, its historical and sociological emphases, its emphasis on education, its focus on culture as lived experience and its expanded articulation of the political roles of intellectual and cultural worker."

Bill Brand - TV Times CoverageOpen publication

The New Left's commitment to socialist humanism and Griffiths' early political experiences in the Manchester Left Club of the 1960s would influence his writing, allowing him to produce drama contextualised by, what Garner sees as, "socialist theory and aspiration... the lives of 'real men and women'" and "the revolutionary potentialities" of his characters' experiences. These ideas were first ignited when he joined the editorial team of Labour's Northern Voice and served as its co-editor, writing a number of articles and reviews for the paper. After taking a part time teaching job at Stockport Technical College, he eventually became a full time member of the Liberal Studies Department (a role the character of Bill Brand also occupied in the series), a group of radical educationalists who devised a curriculum offering its students an unorthodox approach to teaching about class, race, nation and trade unionism. He was almost fired for teaching Lady Chatterley's Lover to a class of nursing students.

He briefly joined the Labour Party in 1964 and then, from 1965, worked at the BBC's office in Leeds as a further education officer where he gradually turned his attention away from journalism and considered writing plays. As Edward Braun suggests in British Television Drama, during this period Griffiths was able to acquire an understanding of the way the BBC operated, "of the structures of control in broadcasting" and gained practical experience of directing studio based discussions about education for the series Something to Say. In 1967 Tony Garnett initially considered one of his first commissions 'The Love Maniac', a play that explored the impact of a radical teacher on a comprehensive school and conflicting concepts of education, for The Wednesday Play but it never went into production. Although Garnett then purchased it for future production at London Weekend Television under the Kestrel Films banner he and Ken Loach had established after leaving the BBC, it didn't materialise again until 1971, abridged and renamed 'Jake's Brigade' and broadcast on BBC Radio Four.

With early theatre plays such as The Wages of Thin and, what is considered his breakthrough, Occupations - that explored the concepts of revolutionary action and mobilising the working classes against a backdrop of the conflict between Italian Marxist theorist Gramsci and Soviet agent Kabak at the Fiat factory occupations of 1920s Italy - both first performed at the Stables Theatre Manchester in 1969 and 1970, it wasn't until 1972 that he returned to writing for television during his last year at the BBC in Leeds. In 1969, BBC Radio 4 had broadcast his sixty minute play, The Big House, about the unfair dismissal of an engineering worker but the half hours he wrote for Granada's Adam Smith (1972-73) were under a pseudonym to get round the BBC's rule preventing writers penning scripts for 'the other side'. The road leading to Bill Brand is somewhat circuitous but Griffiths continued to engage with the genre staples of television drama, those that used period and historical recreations or contemporary views of health (his much lauded Through the Night in 1975), education and law and order, but usually reversed or challenged much of the received wisdom or conventions of genres. A number of theatre and television productions form links to the eventual commissioning of Bill Brand.

To begin with, the BBC contracted him to provide a script for one of their historical, period pieces The Edwardians (1972-73). The series focused on the careers of nine historical Edwardian figures, including Baden Powell, E. Nesbitt and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His installment, 'Such Impossibilities' would have focused on Tom Mann, a Labour union leader involved in the Liverpool transport strikes that brought together dockers, railway workers and sailors, as well people from other trades. It paralysed Liverpool commerce for most of the summer of 1911. Mann is a figure who would also receive several references in Bill Brand. "Griffiths envisaged this as a corrective to the view of history conveyed by the rest of the series," notes Edward Braun in British Television Drama and he saw these historical and political events directly connected to the industrial action that was crippling the Heath governement of the time. Producer Mark Shivas requested changes to the script and Griffiths refused. Shivas rejected the play, citing high production costs as the actual reason it was shelved.

Then in 1973 came The Party, a play commissioned by Kenneth Tynan after he had seen Occupations in Manchester. Tynan was then the literary manager of the National Theatre and Griffiths's play at the National starred Laurence Olivier in his last stage role as Glaswegian Trotskyite John Tagg. Its setting is the home of middle class TV producer Joe Shawcross during the student demonstrations of May 1968. The play becomes an extended debate between opposing views of Shawcross, Tagg and two others, Andrew Ford and Malcolm Sloman. D. Keith Peacock, in Thatcher's Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties sees the play as "an acknowledgement of the significance of political theatre" that "combined the personal and the political" to discuss "the potential for imminent socialist revolution in Britain." The play explores, through Tagg, how such a revolution could be conducted and also highlights Griffiths's methodology in presenting Marxist linguistic discourse to a mainstream theatre audience who were then left to choose, rather like in the ending of Bill Brand, between the various political view points raised by the play.

... to "reach far deeper into the Labour Party's collective psyche"

Three other key television plays intersect with the developments in his writing in 1974. All Good Men (Play for Today, BBC, 31/01/74) initiated the long term relationship with actor Jack Shepherd and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and was written at the request of Play for Today script editor Ann Scott as a hurried replacement for a production that had fallen through. A seventy five minute drama using limited sets, no location filming and a very low budget was commissioned and Griffiths wrote it in six weeks. Ironically, with the miner's strike forcing Heath's government into a state of emergency and the three day week, television broadcasts were curtailed at 10.30pm and the play had to be reduced to sixty-three minutes to fit into its slot.

A further irony, not lost on Griffiths, was that the play focused on a Mancunian Labour minister about to be elevated to the peerage, Edward Waite (played by Bill Fraser as a Wilsonian type) being interviewed by a documentary maker, Richard Massingham (Ronald Pickup) and who, during this process, becomes entangled in a debate with his son William (Jack Shepherd) about the differences between Labour idealism and pragmatism. It is the Labour grandee's pragmatism that reveals Waite's role in voting against the strikes of 1926 when William questions him as to why the promised Socialist revolution never really happened. Dennis Potter, in the New Statesman, praised All Good Men for "some of the sharpest, most telling and intelligent speeches ever heard on television." Edward Braun sees the play and Griffiths as both attempting to "reach far deeper into the Labour Party's collective psyche" and the themes, especially that of betrayal of your ideals, are eventually explored in even more depth in Bill Brand, particularly with the eventual fate of Chief Whip Maddocks.

This was followed by 'Absolute Beginners' (BBC, 19/04/74) a segment of the series Fall of Eagles. Again, for Griffiths this was the first time that he worked for producer/director Stuart Burge and with whom he would later collaborate on Bill Brand and on his later adaptation of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1981). Burge was appointed producer on Fall of Eagles after a number of the plays in the series had already been commissioned and planned, tracing the fall of the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Hapsburg empires between the nineteenth century to the start of World War I and Lenin's rise to power. Burge approached Griffiths to write 'Absolute Beginners' because, as Garner quotes him in Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History, he wanted "a demonstration in the series of what was happening in the undergrowth, in the revolutionary world."

Indeed, the completed episode is a vital antidote to the series romantic and sentimental nostalgia for the dwindling of European privilege and one which Griffiths welcomed in a popular period piece, allowing him to "put a bitter pill inside that sugar-coating." His script does not compromise and he diligently traced the complex web of "factions, strategies and counter-strategies" as Lenin manoeuvred his way to power during the Second Congress of the Russian Socialist Democratic Labour Party in 1903. As Tony Williams notes in his review Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand and Political Television Drama "the episode also touched upon a common theme in Griffiths' work, namely the contrast between the humane ideals of any revolutionary process and the necessity for hard leadership essential to final success as well as unforeseen negative consequences that could emerge in the future." These processes, encapsulated in an equally unsentimental performance from Patrick Stewart as Lenin, are also circumscribed by the paradoxes of the political and personal absolutes within the public and private realms that are a hallmark of Griffiths' writing. Bill Brand would use essentially the same template to explore Labour Party politics in 1976.

In the same year, Granada also adapted his play Occupations (01/09/74), which had previously been restaged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1971 where, serendipitously, Patrick Stewart had played Gramsci's opposition Kabak, a Lenin-like figure sent to keep an eye on the subversive Fiat workers. The television version, reducing its two hour plus running time down to seventy-five minutes, also reunited Griffiths with actor Jack Shepherd, playing Gramsci, and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

... "seething with discontent over the betrayal of socialism since 1964"

Enter Stella Richman. Richman, a former actor whose career in television production started back in 1960 when ATV gave her the chance to create a script development department devoted to single plays, was one of the highest paid women in the industry by the time she had become Programme Controller of London Weekend Television in 1970. There she oversaw the commissioning of Upstairs Downstairs (1971-75) and produced work by Dennis Potter, Alun Owen and Roy Minton. After a falling out with LWT in 1972 it was, however, her eventual role as an independent producer, in association with David Frost, on Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1974) for Thames and Clayhanger (1976) for ATV, that led to her involvement in Bill Brand. Richman and Griffiths apparently met on the night of the 1974 General Election. She had seen The Party and wanted to work with him and as the results came in they discussed a potential drama about a young Labour MP elected to Parliament under a minority government. John Wyver, in his essay on the Bill Brand screenplays, quotes Richman speaking to the Daily Express: "Suddenly the idea came and I asked him if he would like to do a series about the beginnings of the life of a Labour MP. We sat up until three in the morning trying to get the bones of something. Within a week he had the notes on paper. The man has the mind of a filing cabinet. It is the equivalent of a novel."

Griffiths clearly wanted to reflect a Labour Party that was in decline and struggling with the demands of the unions and its own left and right factions. At the time, Heath's Conservative government had been dealt a terminal blow by the miners' strike ballot, adding further to the woes of the three day week and the declared state of emergency of December 1973. By February 1974 it had forced an election on the proviso of 'Who Governs Britain?' Wilson's declining popularity (he also fought the Election under enormous strain within a very divided party) and Labour's loss of votes during the campaign underlined that both parties were having to shift their ideological positions. The Election seemed to mark the end of post-war consensus and a polarisation of politics with Heath and Wilson simply reduced to running something akin to a popularity contest. The result was a hung parliament and because Heath failed to secure sufficient Parliamentary support from the Liberal and Ulster Unionist MPs, Wilson returned to power for his third term.

In the October 1974 election Labour ended up with a majority of three and support among trade unionists had seriously declined. This was further exacerbated when the 1975 referendum over Britain's membership of the European Union not only precipitated the eventual breakaway of Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and David Owen and Wilson's eventual resignation in March 1976 but it also ushered in the more conservative leadership of Callaghan. He took power at a time when the Labour movement was, as Martin Pugh so eloquently puts it in Speak For Britain!, "seething with discontent over the betrayal of socialism since 1964, antagonised by government foreign policy, and pervaded by feminism and the social thinking of a younger generation." Bill Brand therefore examines an MP's experience at constituency and Parliamentary level from Griffiths' own perception and experiences during a period when the Labour Party was split between the revisionist right and the radical left.

Working against the background of the 1974 elections, Griffiths wrote and researched for a full two years and then, with Richman and Stuart Burge on board as producers, offered the project to Verity Lambert at Thames. Both she and Controller of Programmes Jeremy Isaacs gave Bill Brand the green light and Griffiths was allowed a great deal of control over the production of the series and according to John Wyver and Michael Poole, he described it as one of the “one of the most fruitful that he has encountered within television” where there was “a very collective shape to the whole enterprise.” However, it was not without its problems. Originally scheduled for a post-News at Ten 10.30pm slot, because Thames' schedulers were ambivalent to another drama series about a Labour MP after the recent showing of Granada's The Nearly Man in the summer of 1975, the production crew and writers objected en masse to Isaacs about this poor scheduling. He then managed to persuade Thames to run the series in a 9.00pm slot in the summer of 1976. Budgetary problems caused by an overspend on the sixth episode and a requirement to then record the remainder entirely in studio also meant that Griffiths had to condense his story to eleven episodes rather than the planned thirteen.

Bill Brand commenced transmission with its opening episode 'In' on the evening of 7th June 1976. It introduced Bill Brand (Jack Shepherd), the Labour candidate for a by-election in the fictional Leighley area of Greater Manchester and placed him within the oppositional axes of Griffiths' themes. At constituency level, he is a Trotskyite Liberal Studies lecturer negotiating his way through local politics dominated by old guard Labourites, who cling to party rules and regulations, such as his agent Alf Jowett (with Allan Surtees providing a wonderful performance) and the regional executive headed by Frank Hilton (Clifford Kershaw). They clearly frown upon his appearance ("Oh, Christ he's got a blue suit on") and radical ideas but believe he'll eventually settle down. The relationship between Alf and Bill is one in which Alf has to remind Bill how to conduct himself now he's an MP and how to reconcile himself to the neutralising effects of his role. Later, Griffiths adds flesh to the Alf Jowett and Bill Brand relationship during 'Resolution', the sixth episode set at the Party Conference and reveals that, as Braun suggests, Alf symbolises "the continuity of belief and struggle within the Labour movement." We learn that Alf is in effect a more mature version of Bill, disaffected with the Party's failure to enact the socialist agenda and emotionally divorced from wife and children. He has already worn the badge of compromise that Brand will eventually struggle to accept.

Brand, rejecting the idea of 'settling down' makes his stance clear, as a radical seeking to effect change from within, during a radio interview: "I’m a socialist…I actually believe in public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. I actually believe in workers’ control over work, community control over the environment. I actually believe that the real wealth of any society is its people. All of them, not just the well-off, the educated and the crafty. Which I suppose makes me a democrat too." This dichotomy illustrates well the ideals of younger party members who believed, during the 1970s, they had an opportunity to reshape or alter the traditions of the Labour movement and here Griffiths indicates that the series will explore the main character's attempt to retain his principles as he is confronted and frustrated by entrenched Party politics both at constituency and Parliamentary level. It's interesting to note that as Brand visits his constituency workers and headquarters his disillusionment with Party process has already become evident. He's uncomfortable glad-handing, supping tea and eating sandwiches with the Party faithful and offers to his chairman Frank Hilton: "I'm glassy eyed with boredom. We've perfected the process of ruthlessly reducing what we do to its fundamentally trivial elements. You'd think an Election could be about something more significant than the price of sugar or the availability of George Hudson's van."

"You made the bed, comrade..."

Contrasted with this are the personal relationships that Brand has with his parents, his wife Miriam (Lynn Farleigh) and his lover Alex (Cherie Lunghi). Bill's invalid father is an analogue of Griffiths' father, an injection into the script of personal and generational verisimilitude, where in episode two 'You Wanna Be a Hero, Get Yourself a White Horse' Brand recalls that his father slaved away as a chemical process worker cleaning out acid vats, just as Griffiths' own father had, and was, "A very honest man. Tool-made for exploitation. A fair day's work for a fair day's... Proud of his lad who was given the chance to go to the University. He never talked politics." Bill's parents see their son as someone different from them and somewhat emotionally distanced. This is expanded upon in the crumbling marriage with Miriam, a disaffected wife used during the campaign to maintain the image of the candidate's traditionalist values in the face of a cynical media ("I didn't marry you to put in appearances," she snaps), and his love-life with Alex which seems to be an open relationship conducted around a series of negotiations and reconciliations between their own personal politics and Brand's career as an MP. Both women are the focus of a debate about the shifting nature of male and female roles in domestic and working lives as well as offering something of a feminist critique of Brand's slippage and reversion to patriarchal stereotype, especially as he is inculcated within the Party machine. As Alex so succinctly puts it in the first episode, "You made the bed, comrade..."

This is all shot as a mixture of studio and OB video, opting for a realism that combines elements of documentary which are then counterpointed with a number of conventional, almost soap opera, elements in the story. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg establishes Brand's Northern roots with typical images of factory chimneys and textile mills. When Brand visits his ill father there are shots of back to back housing, a factory chimney and in the foreground Brand's car embellished with Vote Labour posters. The night of the election appears to use actual locations for the committee meetings and announcement of the results. Later, in episode three 'Yarn' Brand supports local workers occupying a textile mill and in episode five 'August for the Party' he goes to teach at a summer school. Again, this is all recorded on location as OB video.

Episode two also sees Brand's transfer from constituency politics to his new role as MP in the House. Much of the episode latches onto Griffiths' theme of an individual's unswerving principles pitted against those that will settle for compromise and tow the party line. We see the mechanics of the House in action with Brand expected to support the Party and the government despite his own opposition to a Bill that would see many more become unemployed. When he meets Tory MP Waverley (Richard Leech), he's told "your lot don't understand business. Wrong people at the helm." Quite a prescient nod to the market driven politics that Thatcher would usher in after her election success of 1979. Waverley regards the House as a "damned assembly line" and this is what ultimately Brand discovers when he votes against his own Party and is hauled in front of the Chief Whip Maddocks (Peter Copley) and the Regional Whip Paxton (Frank Mills).

Paxton warns Brand that "we expect your cooperation. These are perilous times" and demands total loyalty to the government of the day. Brand also moves into a house with other Labour Left politicians Tom Mapson (Richard Butler) and Winnie Scoular (Rosemary Martin) and who all implore him to join the Journal group. This is, according to Tony Williams, a nod to the Labour Tribune newspaper which in the 1960s and 1970s had an influential role in the politics of the day. It attacked the Wilson government over a number of issues, particularly when it didn't directly condemn the Vietnam War and when it agreed to join the EEC. When Heath was in power it opposed his successful entrance into the EEC and his industrial relations policies. It also took part in the 'no' campaign on the European referendum of 1974.

Brand opposes joining the Journal group on the grounds that several of them operate in high levels of a government that continues to prop up "the crumbling edifice of British capitalism." One of those politicians is Minister for Employment David Last (Alan Badel) whom he later encounters in 'Yarn' after bringing the plight of the textile workers in his constituency to his attention. Last, according to Tony Williams, is based on Labour leader Michael Foot. One of the best scenes in the early episodes is between Last and Brand in a hotel room as they relax after a day of negotiating with those at the occupied mill. Brand attempts to reconcile himself with "sell out" Last, a man who is likely to offer him a job as his parliamentary secretary, who was "part of an earlier great refusal." Brand concludes that "now there's nobody where you were and nobody where you are."

Another aspect that's worth noting is how media - television and radio particularly - appears as a metatexual commentary or spectator to the events of the series. Brand is interviewed by a radio journalist in the opening episode, we see TV cameras outside the Town Hall and overhear the results of the election in his mother's front room and when Lindsay-Hogg cuts back to a shot of a very tired looking Alex who has clearly stayed up into the night to hear the results. In 'Yarn' Brand sides with the textile workers' occupation and, much to the chagrin of the Party, makes the headlines in a Sunday paper. In episode four 'Now and in England' Brand is the victim of a media sting during a radio phone-in interview after a newspaper rings ups and attempts to question him about his stance on abortion after helping a constituent seek one through private means when a Catholic gynaecologist (Robert Hardy) refuses to carry out the procedure.

There are interviews for television programmes littered throughout the series, Last and Brand are later seen in various television debates, and this is explored further in episode six, 'Resolution' which plays the drama out during the Blackpool Conference and shifts between the received wisdom of the media coverage of the Conference floor, via OB broadcasters and technicians, and Prime Minister Watson (Arthur Lowe as a Wilsonian figure), the manoeuvring behind the scenes and what the politicians and commentators actually intend of their performances. It cleverly points out the differences of interpretation, of how information is presented and meaning is received in what Brand calls "exemplary essays in stage management." This use of media to frame the drama harks back to the use of the television producer figure in The Party and the documentary maker in All Good Men.

By 'Now and in England' the personal and the political are becoming more and more intertwined. Brand and his wife Miriam are filing for divorce and the marriage is over. The relationship with Alex continues to open up many of the debates about personal and sexual politics that run through the series and in a brilliantly executed scene Brand and Alex discuss their thoughts about sleeping with the same sex and the repression and intolerance she has encountered in her meeting with a gay and lesbian group earlier in the episode. These intimate moments are the dramatic links between the analysis of constituency and Parlimentary politics but they also colour them. Brand is seen as a repressed man who believes his personal life can be managed through rational resolution. As Tony Williams notes, "sexual politics does play an important role in this series and this is neither accidental nor sensationalist since it parallels the impotence of many characters trapped in the realms of Parliamentary procedure and Labour Party loyalty." 'August for the Party' underlines the need for Brand to preserve his public respectability with a witty sequence where Alf, his agent, decides he must compromise and be seen as a good constituency MP by attending cheese and wine parties, opening fetes and, most ironically and clearly against his own awareness of gender politics, judging beauty contests. It's interesting to note that as Brand becomes more and more frustrated with the Machiavellian dimensions of Parliamentary procedure, his sexual potency is also compromised and his relationship with Alex deteriorates.

Many of the examples of radical political and gender tolerance that Alex provides offer a foretaste of the kind of broad spectrum political resolution that saw gays and lesbians finding common ground with the miners during the 1984 strike. There are also further explorations of the independence of women in the series, represented through Alex particularly, who categorically refuses to take on the role of wife after Brand's divorce from Miriam, and in the character of Winnie Scoular, herself battling against the patriarchal forces within a very male-dominated Parliament. In 'August for the Party', the fifth episode, these figures are joined by Angie Shaw, the wife of a middle class Labour candidate, Bernard Shaw (who can be seen as a Blairite figure) and who articulates a desire to seduce Brand.

Griffiths places this in contrast to Brand addressing a female audience at Ruskin College, attempting to articulate the importance of gender and sexuality within politics even though his own grasp on such matters in prejudiced by the repression that haunts his personality. The revisionist and divisionist aspect of the Party is also emblematically made with the appearance of the donnish Home Secretary John Venables (Peter Howell) at the end of 'August for the Party'. Brand will later clash with Venables, in 'Tranquility of the Realm', over an anti-terrorist Bill which he is expected to support as per the party line. He leaves himself very vulnerable and concerned about the cause and effect of his actions after a spectacular speech, which pleads for the British to allow the Irish to manage their own problems, leads to violent personal attacks. This not only rouses the ire of the press and his own constituents but it also leads to the end of his affair with Alex who now feels she has become a "surrogate wife."

The end of the series is highly prescient and Griffiths, writing episode ten 'Revisions' before events actually overtook the Labour Party in 1976, postulates that the revisionism of figures like Venables and Last and their internecine dealings with the Right of the Party, after the resignation of the Prime Minister Watson, will lead to an ousting of 'traditional' figures such as Alf Jowett as the right wing of the Party reasserts itself through Venables to the detriment of David Last. This predicts Callaghan's time as Prime Minister where as Garner notes in Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History, "support from the Centre-Right gave Callaghan victory over the Leftist Micheal Foot."

At the time, Griffiths captured explicitly what would happen if the Right of the Party came into ascendancy. He even has Venables concoct a Thatcherite style policy to use unemployment to combat inflation as he shunts Maddocks, who questions Venables' revisionist 'new deal', into the Lords as a pat on the back for services rendered, and then silences recalcitrant and radical trade unionists such as Willie Moores (Ray Smith), the AGWU leader. As Martin Pugh acknowledges in Speak for Britain! the adoption of some of these tactics by Callaghan, "proved fateful... Labour's repudiation of Keynesianism and full employment effectively legitimised the adoption of full-blown monetarism by the Conservatives in 1979... it also meant the abandonment of the kind of social policies desired by most Labour supporters and the end of the social contract with the unions."

The last episode 'It's the People Who Create' sees Brand, his position at Westminster left ambiguous and unresolved, accommodate an agit-prop theatre group who give a performance at his Leighley Labour Club. It brings the series back to square one and to Griffiths' own intentions for the drama - forging connections and presenting ideas at the socialist realist level, arguably within a working class context, and avoiding "middle class, guilt ridden hang-ups." The theatre performance is perhaps a metatextual acknowledgement of Griffiths' own desire to use drama to subvert its own conventions, where melodrama, for example, both informs and raises awareness of the audience about the political and historical aspects of the series. The series ends with Griffiths leaving political choice open to both characters and audience. As Tony Williams offers in his review "the conclusion is open ended, placing hero (and audience) at an intellectual crossroads. Political struggle can not be fought only on the national level. It involves an international approach culturally, historically, and politically. At this point, Bill is at the half-way point of his development. He can either commit himself to a broader type of struggle or remain skeptically removed from it."

Bill Brand offers a compelling examination of what happened to Labour at the end of the 1970s and provides an often startling counterpoint to a post-Blair/Brown Labour Party and government. Griffiths writes with great truth and wit about what he calls "the actual tissue and texture, of the social democratic processes within a major party. About which people know next to nothing." After watching these eleven episodes you'll perhaps be wiser about the issues that drove the Labour Party into its frustrating decline during the Thatcher and Major years and wonder why prime time drama doesn't rigorously engage with such ideas and concepts at this level today, employing writers like Griffiths to explore the ramifications of socialist realism in the 21st Century. Essential viewing if you enjoy an intelligent and clear presentation of political ideas within a drama populated by sympathetic characters and situations.

Bill Brand - The Complete Series
Thames Television 1976
Network Releasing - Website exclusive / Released 14 November 2011 / Region 2 / PAL / Running Time: 550 mins approx / 1.33:1 / Colour / Cert 15

YVES SAINT LAURENT: L'AMOUR FOU / DVD Review

2011-11-06T02:11:00.000Z

Released in cinemas on 7th November and coming to DVD on the 14th November, Pierre Thoretton's documentary L'Amour Fou charts the 50-year relationship between fashion designer legend Yves Saint Laurent and his lover and business partner Pierre Bergé. It is a curious beast. The decadent and extravagant public life of the couple, that perhaps befits those grandees of a world wide fashion empire, is presented and contrasted with Bergé's philisophical confessional that attempts to familiarise the audience with the private life of the designer and his lover, one that was rarely ever allowed public space. Visually arresting, mixing interviews with archive footage and a staggering wealth of black and white and colour photography, the film raises questions about our attachment to objects and their real value and asks us to examine our emotional and nostalgic attraction to people, places and possessions.

As Bergé very soberly explores the nuances of his relationship with the deeply troubled designer - a shy man, haunted by depression and a dependency on alcohol and drugs - their life together is also literally deconstructed as director Thoretton gathers these revelations during the preparations for the 2009 auction of the amassed treasures and art collection that are stuffed inside each of their homes. There is a feeling that as Bergé slowly empties his soul so the various homes also unburden their walls of each sculpture and painting as all are carefully removed and sent to Christie's for what was dubbed the 'sale of the century'. As Bergé reflects on the slowly diminishing collection, "It no longer means anything. The works will fly away like birds and find some place to perch."

... a remembrance of things past that celebrates the bond between them

Thoretton structures the film very well. Bergé provides the candid recollections of his love life with Saint Laurent, one that became increasingly difficult as substance abuse took hold of the designer, while Thoretton's camera glides through each of their homes, allowing you to drink in the rich opulence of their lifestyle, the significance of the art works collected over fifty years - the Manet, the Brancussi, the Goya, the Mondrian and the Matisse - and understand how both men set the tone of cultural life in Paris during the 1960s and 1970s. Thoretton then occasionally injects archive interviews with the painfully shy Saint Laurent and shows the slow dismantling of this jewel encrusted empire as the valuers of Christie's invade these personal spaces and empty them.

What emerges about the collection is that it was put together through the sheer love for pieces that the men shared. They didn't follow trends, although there is some lovely archive footage of Bergé and Saint Laurent clearly delighted that Warhol has come to visit and they've acquired a set of his portraits of YSL, but instead supplemented inherited works with pieces purchased from friends such as Picasso, Giacometti or Dali. Each home represents their equally strong personalities and the collections are described by Philippe Jullian as a "sublime hotchpotch of works of art" and the Proustian nature of the documentary, a remembrance of things past that celebrates the bond between them as well as the notion that art triumphs over the destructive power of time, is very clear and constant.

Saint Laurent was so inspired by Proust that he often referred to himself, and assumed an identity for travelling incognito, as Swann, one of the central characters in the first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The couple later bought Chateau Gabriel in Normandy, several miles east from where Marcel Proust himself used to vacation from 1907 to 1914. Furthermore, the use of a Proust questionnaire, its roots stretching from a popular nineteenth century English literary convention to the current lists of questions asked of celebrities in all of the fashionable glossy magazines, is later captured in archive video footage where very briefly we see a playful, revealing set of responses (the one to "your favourite quality in a man?" is "body hair") from a bearded, grinning, flirtatious Saint Laurent, shedding a very welcome bit of light on a figure who remains almost ghost-like throughout the film.

Ironic, in a film which is introduced by Saint Laurent claiming that "every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live" but then shows Saint Laurent as a survivor of depression and abuse, quoting Proust to suggest that "the splendid and pathetic family of the neurotic is the salt of the earth."After the documentary opens with 2002 press coverage of Saint Laurent's retirement and the closure of the House of Yves Saint Laurent and, later, shows Bergé's funeral eulogy, the camera delicately picks out the personal objects in their Paris home and sweeps through the beautiful rooms, images and objects haunted by the past and the future, as Bergé reflects on their eventual destination of the auction house. For him the objects are not as important as the life and homes he shared with Saint Laurent and where Warhol and Jagger came over to hang out. He begins to elaborate on Saint Laurent's parting statement with a detailed discussion of the man's rise to prominence in the fashion design world.

Saint Laurent had already demonstrated his creative talents as a young boy but while his family supported his artistic endeavours, he felt ostracised from school and society. He didn't fit in - being, tall, skinny and somewhat effeminate was the antithesis of the macho culture that surrounded him - and he eventually made his way to Paris in 1953 on the back of a student fashion award, enroling in the couture school at Chambre Syndicale. By 1955 he had become an assistant at Christian Dior, his work eventually considered so good that he became Dior's assistant designer. When Dior suddenly died in 1957, Saint Laurent, at the age of only 21, became his successor as the House of Dior's couturier. Bergé recalls how both of them, as yet unaware of each other, attended Dior's funeral and that "it was a sign of fate that we should have been brought together." As Bergé points out, Dior's death anticipated a crisis within Paris fashion and there was enormous pressure on Saint Laurent to meet the expectations of the House of Dior and the fashion press. He had nine weeks to put together a collection and eventually launched the Trapeze dress, a softer version of the Dior New Look, that secured his international fame. The press coverage and archive footage here depict a painfully shy young man trying to cope at the centre of a media circus.

"It worked out very well"

Bergé first met Saint Laurent as he was putting this collection together and later got to know him after a dinner arranged by Harper's Bazaar and where, he claims, "that the first darts of love's arrows struck us." However, all was not well at Christian Dior. Saint Laurent's later collections in 1958 and 1960 didn't go down well with the critics nor with the owner of Dior, textile magnate Marcel Boussac. Boussac had been using his political influence to protect Saint Laurent from conscription into the French army, then fighting Algerian nationalists. Boussac fired Saint Laurent shortly after and nineteen days into his army career, Saint Laurent had a breakdown and his later treatment, using dangerous levels of addictive sedatives, at the Val-de-Grace mental hospital is often seen as the trigger to his later dependency on drugs and alcohol and his increasing reclusiveness.

Bergé arranged to sue Dior and, meanwhile, with the support of an American backer the first YSL collection was shown in 1962 to positive reviews. A second collection, some six months later, firmly established the House of Yves Saint Laurent. They went from strength to strength and Saint Laurent's work not only reflected the mood of the times but also offered women the kind of read-to-wear clothes, sold through the company's Rive Gauche stores, that heightened their new sense of emancipation in the late 1960s. Highlights included the Mondrian dresses and the Pop-Art collections from 1965 and 1966, the introduction of the Le Smoking tailored tuxedo, safari jackets for men and women, and work that displayed African and Moroccan influences. There is plenty of footage of these collections interspersed throughout the documentary. "It worked out very well," as Bergé recalls and with that Thoretton employs a montage of YSL wedding dress collections set to the Wedding March as if to underline the success of this partnership, in both business and love, between Saint Laurent and Bergé.

Bergé uses Mondrian as an example of how and why they started their art collection. "We would never have imagined owning a painting by Mondrian," he offers as he recalls the Mondrian dresses of 1965. Their move to the Rue de Babylone apartment precipitated a collecting of art treasures and Bergé reflects that "little by little we were lucky enough to be able to acquire [them]" over a period of 20 years. He goes on to detail how they purchased certain works and as he does so Thoretton parallels this with footage of these precious items now being valued and removed from the apartment for the auction. The documentary shifts to other properties, as the partnership between Bergé and Saint Laurent flowered and then began to wither. The most astonishing home is the lavishly Moroccan styled house in Marrakech, Dar el Hanch, where the jaw dropping interiors influenced by ancient riads and their tadelakt plaster and zellige tiles, give way to courtyards and pools lined with avenues of palms and exotic plants. It was a joyful existence it seems and one shared with life-long friends such as Betty Catroux and LouLou de la Falaise. Both women illuminate how the relationship between Saint Laurent and Bergé actually worked, providing brief fragments about their emotional life that much of the documentary skirts around, something that stems from Bergé's own reluctance to talk about their intimate private lives perhaps.

The purchase of the equally stunning Dar es Saada, their Marrakech guest house, where they started living in 1975, marks the point at which Saint Laurent descended into drug and alcohol addiction. The designer was under extraordinary pressure to produce two haute couture collections and two ready-to-wear collections each year and, as Bergé observes of Saint Laurent, he "always thought that if he found a way to escape, he'd take it. And he did." The final half of the documentary not only looks at the launch of his range of perfumes, with Opium being criticised by the Chinese-American community for its negative associations with a drug that wiped out numbers of their population, but also the detrimental effects of Saint Laurent's jet set lifestyle and partying.

Bergé recounts that by March 1976 their relationship had deteriorated with Saint Laurent regularly returning home in a terrible state. He temporarily moved to a hotel and went back to Saint Laurent several times until he decided enough was enough and moved out altogether, living at the Lutetia Hotel, apparently at the end of the street and to remain close by. Thoretton contrasts archive images of Bergé supervising the crating up of his belongings in 1976 with the similar actions of the auction house at the Rue de Babylone apartment.

We also get some insight into Bergé's philanthropic, cultural, and political interests, marked by a perhaps questionable endorsement of President Mitterand and Bergé's clear commitment to gay rights and AIDS research. He supported the association against AIDS, Act Up-Paris and in 1994, he participated with Line Renaud in the creation of the AIDS association Sidaction, becoming its president in 1996, a position he still holds. Former French culture minister Jack Lang saw the love between Bergé and Saint Laurent as one that "had an emblematic value" and that offered younger gay men "both courage and power." This is further underlined when you understand that the $480 million raised by the sale of the collection, the exchanging of gravity defying amounts of money which the last half hour covers in some detail, is not for personal gain but to support Bergé's creation of a new foundation for AIDS research.

As the auction is prepared, Bergé reflects on Saint Laurent's eventual withdrawal from the world, his increasing depression only momentarily lightened by the rapturous welcome of his latest collections. "Fame is the dazzling mourning of happiness," seems to sum up Yves Saint Laurent, according to Bergé who tried to bring the designer out of his sorrow and solitude but admits that in his role in the partnership, "I knew my place. We never crossed into each other's sphere." Those last reclusive days were spent at Chateau Gabriel, where Saint Laurent and Bergé had commissioned Jacques Grange to decorate it with themes inspired by Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This is complimented by footage of a ravaged looking Saint Laurent taking his final bow, serenaded by Catherine Deneuve, at his last show in January 2002.

Thoretton's documentary clearly leaves you wanting more. Much as the various houses are stunningly beautiful before they are emptied of their contents, it would have been even better if more details and insight into the personal lives of Bergé and Saint Laurent had been forthcoming. There is a feeling that they both do not wish to emerge from behind the fortresses they have constructed. Saint Laurent and Bergé were joined in a same-sex civil union known as a Pacte Civil de Solidarité shortly before Saint Laurent's death but the film makes no mention of this. Although the cameras lovingly trace across these interiors, the love between the two men is only ever fleetingly articulated and often the film struggles to raise itself above being an exercise in merely recording these places before they vanish.

Mind you, ever the pragmatist, Bergé offered his view of their civil partnership in a 2009 Telegraph interview, "We did it not for romantic reasons but because we had lived 50 years together: it was about achievement, and I had fought for it to be possible, so that homosexuals would be allowed to leave things to their partners." For Bergé it seems there always has to be some kind of rationalisation in the face of death and while the film does create some empathy for Saint Laurent's inability to deal with the pressures of his career it keeps placing the subject out of reach just as you think you might be able to see beyond the opulent lifestyle.

Alas, this also clashes with a feeling that you are watching extremely rich people sublimate their anxieties by spending vast amounts of money on art objects, no matter how much they love them and how beautiful they are. The documentary's unfortunate arrival during an economic melt down caused by a banking system that probably sponsors Christie's sales and whose executives still have disposable income to make such purchases leaves it open to an accusation that it is simply celebrating avarice. Emotionally, it feels a little too cool and elusive and at worst could simply be met with indifference because the ghost of a celebrated designer never manages to acquire substantial enough flesh. That would be a shame because Yves Saint Laurent was one of the most important designers of the last 50 years and he deserves his reputation.

Special Features

Monsieur Saint Laurent, As Seen By The People Who Worked With Him (11:50)
Anne-Marie Munoz (Director of Saint Laurent's studio), LouLou de la Falaise (fashion accessories designer), Paule Monory (studio assistant) and Jean-Pierre Derbord (chief tailor) discuss the typical Saint Laurent design process and techniques.
Homage to Mondrian by Yves Saint Laurent (3:06)
Brief exploration of how Saint Laurent transformed Mondrian's aesthetic into the iconic dresses from 1965 with Alain Tarica and Jean-Pierre Derbord.
Yves Saint Laurent - The Tuxedo Suit (2:37)
A look at another iconic design, the tuxedo suit, with Jean-Pierre Derbord.
55 Rue de Babylone (4:44)
A short vignette showcasing their apartment in Paris with commentary from the interior designer who helped them decorate it, Jacques Grange.
5 Rue de Bonaparte (5:53)
A look at Bergé's apartment with his accompanying commentary.
Le Chateau Gabriel (6:39)
The Gothic mansion that served as a final retreat for Saint Laurent with commentary from interior designer Jacques Grange.
Marrakech (3:56)
The undeniably beautiful residence in Morocco explored by interior designer Jacques Grange.
An Art Collection as Seen By the Dealers and Experts (7:20)
The collection is appraised by various art and antiques experts and dealers.
Marcel Duchamp's 1921 Ready-Made (4:19)
During the press conference for the Christie's sale, Duchamp's Dadaist Belle Haleine art work is singled out. It eventually sold for €7.9 million.
Francisco Goya's Luis Maria de Cistue y Martinez Goes into the Louvre (3:25)
The return of Goya's work to the Louvre, offered as a gift on behalf of the late Yves Saint Laurent and prefaced by a speech from Bergé.
Trailer

L'Amour Fou
Les Films du Lendemain / Les Films de Pierre / France 3 Cinéma / Canal+ / France Télévision
2010
StudioCanal DVD / Released 14 November 2010 / Cat No: OPTD2073 / Cert: PG / Feature Running Time: 99 mins approx / Region 2 / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 / Colour PAL / Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1 & Stereo 2.0 / French language with English subtitles

THE CONVERSATION / Special Edition Blu-Ray Review

2011-10-30T15:02:00.000Z

Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), is a subdued, existential and ambiguous exploration of the limits of private and public responsibility as personified in the character of surveillance expert Harry Caul (a mesmerising, career-best performance from Gene Hackman) when he becomes embroiled in a conspiracy involving an unnamed corporation and its chief executive, the anonymous Director. The film becomes both a complex guessing game about the real intent of the two people who work for the corporation, Ann and Mark, that he has been hired to eavesdrop on as well as the gradual unravelling of Caul, an intensely lonely and pathologically private man. He finds his moral judgement, fueled by a refusal to become involved in the work he does and the repercussions of a previous surveillance job, questioned by the revelations on the sound recordings he makes of Ann and Mark's meeting in Union Square.

Caul initially believes, from listening to the surveillance tapes, that Ann (an ambiguous figure who could be the Director's wife or daughter) and Mark are attempting to cover up their affair from the corporation's Director (Robert Duvall). It is intimated that when he discovers their tryst he will kill them - "he'd kill us if he got the chance." However, when the Director's assistant Martin Stett (Harrison Ford) attempts to take delivery of the sound tapes in the Director's absence, Caul begins to suspect something more insidious and threatening. After a visit to a trade show for surveillance experts, where he again bumps into Stett, he invites his colleagues and two women back to his workshop. One of the women, Meredith, stays overnight and apparently steals the tapes at Stett's request. Harry decides to intervene in a hotel room rendezvous, as detailed on the tapes, and eventually discovers, contrary to what he had assumed from the tapes, that Stett, Ann and Mark have conspired against the Director and are about to murder him.

"... the deceptiveness of appearances"

The film can justifiably be seen in context with a number of other conspiracy thrillers released during the same period - from The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976) to Capricorn One (1978) - and which all seem to share the same themes rooted in the anxieties created by the number of assassinations in mid to late 1960s America, the extension of the Cold War via Vietnam, the invasion of privacy and the assaults on public freedoms the 1970s ushered in. As Paul Cobley also notes in Justifiable Paranoia, these films share "a concern with the deceptiveness of appearances, the way the familiar becomes threatening" and operate within "a complex and contradictory political struggle ...[where]... Nixonian and anti-Nixonian paranoia enjoyed a symbiotic relationship."

The idea for The Conversation emerged in the mid-1960s when director Irvin Kershner sparked Coppola's interest in the technologies used for surveillance and espionage. In Gene Phillips's Godfather: the Intimate Francis Ford Coppola it is acknowledged that Kershner discussed with him the long range rifle style microphones that are seen in the superb opening scene of the film, shot in San Francisco's Union Square. It was the idea that a person's private conversation could be recorded at such long distance and in a very public place that inspired Coppola to research further into the methods and technologies that an expert in surveillance would use and then to develop a story about a central character who does it for a living.

According to Phillips, Harry Caul was partly based on a man called Bernard Spindel, known as the "ace of the bugging business" in a Life profile from 1966 and was described in the article as an "expert pilot, consummate lock-picker, foreign adventurer, electronics wizard and the No. 1 big-league freelance eavesdropper and wiretapper in the U.S." Not only does Spindel's obsessiveness correlate to the character of Caul but it also informs one of the other characters in The Conversation, Harry's competitor Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield) who declares, just as Spindel does in the Life profile, he tapped his first telephone at the age of 12.

"... no James Bond stuff"

Coppola also found inspiration in the legendary San Francisco private detective Hal Lipset, famed for bugging an olive in a Martini, who is name checked during the film and served as Coppola's technical adviser. In Patricia Holt's Bug in the Martini Olive and Other True Cases from the Files of Hal Lipset, Private Eye, Lipset recalls, "I told Francis I’d oversee the technical aspects as long as we used state-of-the-art equipment - no James Bond stuff - and tried to show how a real surveillance might work. What you see in that movie is the best of the field at the time with only one fib - the pocket tape recorder does not have a playback function - and one exaggeration: the parabolic mike is too large to use secretly."

Coppola fused these two real-life parallels with much of his own background and where Caul's intense privacy and religious guilt partially serves as an analogue to Coppola's own. We learn in Caul's bizarre dream sequence, after the party at his workshop, that like Coppola he was a lonely, sickly child, and the character's visit to confession and the film's use of religious iconography also equates with Coppola's own Catholic upbringing. Coppola was also fascinated by gadgets and Phillips reveals that, "as a teenager young Francis even planted a hidden network of microphones behind the radiators in his own home so he could eavesdrop on family conversations."

The Conversation therefore offers an exploration of an individual's potential power over others and the impulse to listen to conversations, with the Coppola/Caul/Lipset/Spindel figure electing, as Lipset offers, to "never to enter into a conversation and so never have to bear the responsibility for what you say or hear. But once you hear something, even if you’re an eavesdropper like Caul, you’ve heard it. You know it. Now what are you going to do with it?"

The script for The Conversation was developed as early as 1966 but was placed on hiatus as Coppola completed production of Finian's Rainbow (1968). This confirms that the film, when released shortly after the Watergate scandal, was not a direct response to the contemporary anxieties and political scandals of the day. Rather, its complex meditation on the demarcation between the private and the public, and on corporate and state paranoia, is a coincidental but appropriate reflection. Shooting began on the film on November 26th 1972 and was completed March 19th 1973, many months before the Watergate break-in, and was, as Coppola envisioned, more of a commentary about a state "that employs all the sophisticated tools that are available to intrude on our private lives."

"... a depressing and difficult part to play"

The film was made as part of a deal with Paramount after the success of The Godfather (1972) gave Coppola some leverage to get unmade film scripts into production and principal photography began on a revised version of the script he had originally presented to Warners back in 1970.

The shoot was fraught with problems. Famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler began shooting on the complex opening scene set in Union Square where Harry and his team watch and listen in to Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest) walk around the square and observe a homeless man sleeping on a bench before going their separate ways. However, Wexler soon found himself at loggerheads with Coppola, arguing that shooting and lighting such a complex scene - two actors on location with extras in a crowded public space covered by six cameras and long range microphones - was almost impossible to achieve.

As Phillips documents in Godfather: the Intimate Francis Ford Coppola the technicians brandishing the long range mikes on the rooftops around the square were arrested by the police who thought they might be snipers attempting to kill Coppola, Wexler had huge problems keeping the cameramen out of one another's sight and he also poured cold water on Coppola's further location choices. Coppola responded by closing the picture down for ten days and replacing Wexler with Bill Butler, with whom he had worked on You're A Big Boy Now (1966). The director also found his relationship with Gene Hackman under strain as the shoot continued with Coppola allegedly finding Hackman rather aloof and Hackman often struggling to 'get' the character of Caul and recalling, "It's a depressing and difficult part to play because it's low-key. The minute you start having fun with it, You know you're out of character."

And, of course, this is as much Walter Murch's film as it Coppola's. Once shooting had been completed, Coppola more or less handed all the footage to Murch and trusted him to complete the film. He spent a year assembling the cut, guided by regular monthly notes from screenings with Coppola. This was Murch's first credit as a film editor, previously having worked as a sound editor creating a stunning soundscape through a mix of synthesised and processed natural sounds (as well as co-writing the screenplay) for George Lucas's THX 1138 (1971), sound mixing and editing on The Godfather (1972), American Graffiti (1973) and then mixing and editing The Conversation in 1974 while Coppola was hard at work on The Godfather Part II.

The Conversation ushered in the new era of film sound and elevated the importance of a film's soundtrack to the development of narrative and character. Murch is credited with 'sound montage' on the film and has indicated that not only was this his own tip of the hat to the way sounds were brought together by the Musique Concrete school in Paris but it was also a way round his nonunion status at the time. In Vincent LoBrutto's Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound he describes his time as a graduate at USC as a period of self-revelation in that he "somehow managed to swallow the ohms and the microvolts" and indulge his teenage passion for sound and sound editing.

Indeed, his obsession with the plasticity of sound makes its way into the film and becomes an additional trait of the Harry Caul character. As Murch manipulates the film's soundtrack and picture so does Harry as he edits the Union Square tapes. Murch slowly builds layers of picture and sound, as an analogy to the similar editing processes that are constantly going on within Harry's own head, to arrive at Harry's own shocking conclusion about what he actually heard on the tapes he's recorded and manipulated, about the deceptiveness of an 'ordinary' conversation. During the editing process, both Murch and Coppala saw The Conversation as an homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) in which a fashion photographer explores the abstraction of photographic images in order to expose what seems to be an innocent rendezvous in a park and reveal that it is in fact the location of a recent murder.

This is also married to some of the connections that Murch himself forged during the editing process, with him suggesting to Coppola that Meredith, one of the women invited back from the trade show, be implicated in the theft of the sound tapes, providing a more convincing link between the trade show, Meredith's seduction of Caul and Stett's intentions. Murch also turned Caul's meeting with Ann in the park, underlining Caul's initial desire to rescue her from the Director's clutches, into the dream sequence in the finished film, heightening Caul's anxiety and guilt stemming from the deaths of three people on a previous surveillance job. Finally, the twist ending, where we and Caul are provided with a different interpretation of the recording and the line "he'd kill us if he got the chance", was constructed by Murch during the editing process and used a discarded line reading from Frederic Forrest. This shifted the emphasis of meaning in the line to properly ensure that the audience understood Caul's realisation that it was not the intended murder of Ann and Mark by the Director he had been party to but vice versa.

"a single instrument for a single, lonely man"

Murch's work is both crucial to how sound is manipulated and attached to images in the film making process and in the construction of plot and the internal dynamics of character. We see and hear the Union Square sequence replayed and reconstructed or used in flashbacks as the central tenet of the film is gradually exposed. The soundtrack emphasises the ephemeral nature of sound, of what is momentarily hidden and revealed, what truths Caul's work provides to his clients, through Murch's sound mixing and editing. The corruption of the recordings that Caul makes in Union Square, where Murch uses synthesisers to turn voices inside out and retains the static break up inherent in the original soundtrack made for the film on three mikes, works in tandem with David Shire's minimal piano score, "a single instrument for a single, lonely man" as Murch describes it in his commentary on this set.

As Caul breaks down the recordings from Union Square and attempts to work out the inferences in the conversation between Mark and Ann, the central character spirals into paranoia and this is emphasised by the gradual disintegration of the score. Shire's piano is warped and distorted electronically, its atonality marking out Caul's own disintegration as he realises his assumptions about the conversation are wrong and that he is now the one being spied upon. Often Shire's piano and a number of sounds on the soundtrack blend or overlap, bridging scenes while at the same time adding a dissonance to them. When Caul meets Ann in the lift at the Embarcadero, after feeling uncomfortable in his first meeting with Stett, the piano distorts into a speeded up tape noise as the scene cuts from his claustrophobia to Caul worriedly re-examining the tapes.

The soundtrack's dual role of obfuscation and revelation is completely in parallel with Coppola's own visual expression in the film. Wexler's footage from Union Square is retained in the celebrated opening sequence as the camera very slowly tracks into the crowds and the footage flips between crisp cinematography and a simulation of surveillance footage complete with cross hairs. The figure of the mime who apes the various people around him, and at one point imitates someone's dog, is perhaps a sinister emblem of the distortions and reflections that occur throughout the film, visually and aurally, and the limitations of communication. The jazz music on this scene's soundtrack prefigures Caul's own retreat into music where, much like the mime simulating the passing crowds out on the street, he plays a saxophone in time with the jazz records he listens to in his apartment and the outdoor scene also features the song that Ann sings on the surveillance tapes that triggers Caul's paranoia when he visits his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr) and she sings the same song.

... his exteriority to the rest of the world

Indeed, the mime also stands next to Caul in the Square, copies his movements and follows him, suggesting that the real Caul is hidden and only outward appearances can be traced or recorded. Union Square reappears throughout the film in other simulations, encompassing a map on a blackboard and an architect's model on display at the surveillance trade show, prominently in frame as Caul and Stett encounter each other in a mirrored lobby area. Caul's pathology is symbolised in the veil like plastic raincoat he wears throughout much of the film, a translucent shield he uses to protect himself from interference, to maintain privacy just like the two-way mirrored windows of the Pioneer Glass van which the team uses to survey the Square or the telephone booth from which he calls the Director. In the scene with Amy he lies about his age and never removes his grey, plastic coat as she tries to ask him questions about what he does and how he behaves.

Caul and other characters are partially obscured during the film in a series of recurring visual motifs - Caul is momentarily plunged into darkness on the bus ride home after leaving Amy; as Caul and Stett first meet and walk to the Director's office they disappear behind a smoked glass screen; when Caul goes to confession he talks to a priest (an eavesdropper just like Caul) who only gradually appears when the camera tracks into the black screen between them; and when Caul slowly peers into the car outside the Embarcadero in a misty restaging of the dream sequence in which he saw her murdered, he gradually sees Ann and then realises the implications of what he has witnessed. During the party at Caul's loft workshop, Caul is also pressured into revealing how he bugged a union official by Bernie Moran but refuses to reveal his methods, becoming a blurred out of focus figure behind a plastic screen in the room. In the aforementioned dream sequence, Caul talks to Ann through a fog and relates a near-drowning incident during childhood and then witnesses her murder very briefly through translucent drapes. We later see the Director's murder shown through drapes, his head suddenly shrouded in plastic as Mark attempts to suffocate him.

These are all devices to emphasise his estrangement from others, his difficulty negotiating the borderline between the private and the public, the secular and the religious and, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), his similar status as an outsider, his moodiness and exteriority to the rest of the world. There is a suggestion that Caul wants to save Ann from the Director's intentions but when the truth is revealed to him, as he peeps into her car, Coppola and Murch emphasise that her persecution is just Caul's delusion, one constructed from his own work as an editor desperate to find the story in the mesh of narrative games, visual and aural ambiguity. This final journey begins with the sequence in the hotel room as Caul bugs the next room in which Ann, Mark and the Director finally meet. Caul is not only obscured by the room's net curtains as he sets about his task but his face is completely distorted and broken down by a frosted glass screen. He is, like the scenario he has created about Ann and Mark, a vague impression seeking some form of clarity from his own delusion.

While the technology he uses provides that truth what he finds simply makes him hide under the bedclothes when he partially sees the murder through the frosted glass on the balcony. Coppola's tip of the hat to Psycho (1960) informs much of this sequence, with Shire's music and Murch's sound taking on some of the characteristics of Bernard Herrmann's score for the film and Coppola's use of quick cutting recalling the virtuoso editing of the shower sequence. This homage, one suggested to Coppola after Murch recalling an incident as teenager trying to flush porn magazines down the toilet to hide them from his father only to have them guiltily reappear after his father flushed it, is particularly evident when Caul gains entry to the scene of the crime and, after flushing the toilet in the bathroom of an otherwise suspiciously clean hotel room, is presented with all the bloody evidence he needs.

At the surveillance convention we also see Caul trying out a closed circuit camera system and not only does the screen momentarily reflect his face back to him but it also reveals that Stett is shadowing him. The movement of the surveillance camera is duplicated at the film's conclusion when Caul, having stripped his apartment looking for the bug that presumably Stett has planted, is observed in much the same way by Coppola's own camera movement, underlining Stett's warning that, "we know that you know and we are watching you." By the conclusion of the film even Caul's religious faith has diminished, his statue of the Virgin Mary (both an emblem of his Catholic faith and his desire to reach out to Ann) reduced to rubble in his desperate attempt to turn the tables on the powerful corporation. With Caul shown retreating to his saxophone in a room utterly torn to pieces, Phillips notes in Godfather: the Intimate Francis Ford Coppola, that "Harry is trapped from within by the coils of his unravelling psyche" and that he has failed to escape from a state of moral paralysis.

About the transfer
There are inconsistencies in this transfer and some of those are obviously stylistic, in which Coppola uses the Wexler footage to emulate surveillance camera images for example, but there are short sequences where the picture is quite soft while the rest of the film is sharp and detailed. The dream sequence is very grainy but I suspect that the fog is an optical effect added on to the scene and the footage is a generation down. That said, the transfer demonstrates all other film grain appropriately and crisp detail is best served up in the close ups of faces and objects.

Contrast levels do fluctuate and can be blueish rather than inky black in some scenes. There are occasional specks of dirt on the transfer but they very rarely show up. The colour palette is muted but it seems very appropriate to the texture and atmosphere of the film. If you don't own a previous DVD version of the film then it is definitely worth investing in as this is a solid transfer. As an upgrade from the previous DVD it may be more questionable. Some reviews have suggested that the Lionsgate Region A Blu-ray is marginally better. Murch's superb sound gets a DTS-HD 5.1 mix and very good it is too, robust and full and with the Union Square scene acquiring real dimension and Shire's crystalline piano motifs and the film's dialogue benefiting the most. The original mono is there for purists too and sounds excellent.

Special features

Francis Ford Coppola commentary

It is absolutely essential that at some point you listen to both commentaries on this disc. Coppola covers much of the detail I've included in this review and so much, much more about the genesis of the film, the writing process, the making of the film including the shoot with Wexler and his replacement with Bill Butler, his relationship with Hackman, the casting and screen testing, the structure and editing of the film and the development of the character of Harry Caul. Coppola never disappoints in his commentaries and if you've admired his candidness, detail and thoroughness on the Apocalypse Now and The Godfather discs you can expect the same here.

Walter Murch commentary

Perhaps not as intense an experience as Coppola's track, with Murch being more measured in his discussion of the film, but nonetheless a wonderful insight into Murch's collaboration with Coppola on the film. If you are as fascinated as I am by the sound design and editing on the film then this is an absolute treat to listen to.
Cindy Williams Screen Test (5:02)
Williams, who eventually played Ann, is actually shown testing for the role of Amy, a part that went to Teri Garr in the film.
Harrison Ford Screen Test (6:45)
Again, Ford reads for the role of Mark, that eventually went to Frederic Forest, but actually ended up getting the role of the Director's assistant, Stett. He tests on location at Union Square.
No Cigar (2:26)
Coppola introduces and narrates over a short black and white student film of his from 1956, No Cigar. The relevance here is his connection to the character that his Uncle plays in the film whom Coppola sees as an early template for Caul.
David Shire Interviewed by Francis Ford Coppola (10:57)
A short but sweet chat between the film's composer Shire and his director. Shire plays sections of the score on an upright piano and sheds some insight into his methodology putting the music together with the film. He reveals that he was able to record the music and have Coppola play it on set to set the mood and define the characters. He also analyses the way the music becomes part of Murch's sound design for the film.
Then and Now (3:43)
A brief tour of the locations in San Francisco, comparing them as they were in 1973 with how they look today. The final, amusing shot is of that toilet in the Jack Tar hotel, looking just as it did in the film, awaiting the hotel's demolition.
Gene Hackman Interview (4:04)
Archive footage from the set of the film, recorded in 1973, where Hackman briefly explains his approach to the character of Harry Caul.
Script Dictations (49:23)
Audio recordings of Coppola reading sections of the script, presumably for a production secretary to type up, accompanied by stills, clips and actual script pages.
Close-Up On the Conversation (8:39)
Another archive featurette, filmed on set as Coppola shoots the party sequence at Caul's workshop, the surveillance trade show and the climactic moment when Harry tears his apartment up hunting for the bugging device.
Trailer

The Conversation
1974
The Directors Company, American Zoetrope / The Coppola Company / Paramount Pictures

StudioCanal Blu-Ray / Released 31st October 2011 / Running Time: 114mins / Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 / Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4 / Region B (locked) / HD Standard 1080p / Dual Layer BD50 / Colour / Audio Codec: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, LPCM 2.0 Stereo, LPCM 2.0 Mono, German LPCM 2.0 Stereo / English Language / German Language / English Subtitles / German Subtitles / Cert: 12

FROM 'ATVLAND' IN COLOUR - The History of ATV Centre, Birmingham / DVD Review

2011-10-24T13:33:00.000+01:00

This fascinating 2 disc DVD set explores the creation and history of the ATV Centre in Birmingham and looks back at the wealth of television programmes produced in its studios and from the region affectionately known as ‘ATVLand’. Using archive footage, some of it not seen for half a century, and newly recorded interviews (over eleven hours worth) with production staff, continuity announcers, presenters, journalists and actors, From 'ATVLAND' in Colour serves as both a nostalgic reflection on an unprecedented era of British television production from the regions, that sadly no longer exists, and as an important record of how home-grown television developed as a mass entertainment medium in the last half of the twentieth century.

Television fans and historians Greg Halpin, Lee Bannister, Mark Bridgewater, Peter Raven, Stephen Thwaites and Peter Thomas, who collectively make up the ATVLand.net team, produced this DVD tribute to the Birmingham based ITV franchise in collaboration with ITV Studios Ltd and The Media Archive for Central England (MACE), the screen archive for the Midlands in the UK that holds a searchable 70,000 strong collection of film, tape and digital material. The DVD runs for five hours across two discs and tells the story, chronologically, of how the ATV Centre was built and operated with a focus on local programmes rather than the bigger budget television being made by its sister studio ATV Elstree and Lew Grade's international television arm, ITC.

'Auntie Jean' Morton introduces 'Uncle' Cliff Richard by rubbing a boomerang

Part 1, An Exciting New Facility, explores the origins of ATV through a mix of new video interviews with former employees, producers, actors and presenters and colour and black and white archive footage. Narrator Lee Bannister, holding all five hours of the retrospective together with a very personable and detailed commentary, begins with ATV's arrival, as one of the first ITV franchises to get on air in September 1955, providing both the London weekend service and the Monday–Friday contract for the Midlands. The Midlands service commenced on 17th February 1956 and introduced viewers to that now iconic 'double eye' symbol.

Technical services and production was shared in Aston between ATV and ABC and, as Shaw Taylor, director Peter Harris and producer Barbara Bradbury explain, there were difficulties sharing facilities and crew, including the inequalities of bonus payments. Live broadcasting was the norm and everything went out from a converted cinema in Aston Cross. "It was quite an odd place," recalls Crossroads actor Jane Rossington, combining both an office block and the converted cinema with producer Harris remarking on Lew Grade's penny pinching by piggy backing onto the telephone lines coming into the post office next door.

The Aston studios were responsible for Lunchbox with Noele Gordon, quiz shows Tell the Truth, Dotto and Pencil and Paper (all with Shaw Taylor) and, for those of you of a certain age, the children's show featuring two koala bears, Tingha and Tucker (there's a lovely clip of this as the presenter 'Auntie Jean' Morton introduces 'Uncle' Cliff Richard by rubbing a boomerang... ahem).

Of course, soap opera Crossroads was its most high profile programme at the time and the early episodes were all made at Aston from November 1964. Rossington provides plenty of anecdotes about the early days of the serial, including an honest admission that the sets would shake if you leaned against them and pointing out the extra time required in lighting for monochrome cameras and the on-the-hoof editing requirements of live television.

Appropriately, Part 1 also initiates a look at the production of local news that is then refreshed and developed throughout the five parts of the documentary. Presenter of ATV Today Reg Harcourt explains how local news gathering was achieved in the early days of television and that he often made frantic dashes through rush hour traffic to get filmed reports back to ATV Aston to go on air by 6pm. ATV Today provided a then innovative magazine format with a news bulletin at the top of the programme and with Harcourt covering crime and, later, politics.

By 1966 the advent of colour and the 625-line PAL system also meant that studios would have to be re-equipped and the regional transmitters upgraded. In 1967 the new broadcasting licences were awarded with regulations stipulating that the Midlands broadcasting area would become a single contract. This led to the reorganisation of ATV, losing its weekend share of the London region to London Weekend and Thames, but then being awarded the full week's contract for the Midlands. These changes also instigated the planning and construction of ATV Centre, a purpose built, state of the art television facility on Broad Street, bringing all the disparate parts of ATV production spread across Birmingham under one roof. As Jane Rossington points out the Aston studios were also showing their age with the sound of water dripping from the roof and into buckets causing the production of Crossroads some amusing disruptions.

"The bar! The bar! The ATV bar. I spent my life in there"

There's a fascinating dip into the past, using lots of archive footage, as the documentary takes time out to look at the proposed site of ATV Centre and the area's former role as an industrial and entertainment hub. It also goes into great detail about the specifications of the new centre, showing how the complex was planned and equipped. However, that probably didn't include the rodent problem as, according to Peter Harris and Barbara Bradbury, it was infested with rats from the nearby canals when it first opened.

The first 625-line transmissions from the Centre were continuity announcements in July 1969 and by November 1969 colour transmissions began from Studio 3 with ATV Today. Studio 1, the biggest of the production areas, went on to become the home of shows like Crossroads, The Golden Shot, New Faces and Bullseye. An interesting view again comes from Jane Rossington who saw the canteen at ATV as a brilliant way to do business: "the wonderful thing there was a feeling that if you had a brilliant idea for a show, you'd be sitting next to somebody who could probably make that happen. Almost within a day you could go from having this brilliant idea to it starting to happen." The canteen was also complimented by a bar. "The bar! The bar! God, heaven. The ATV bar. I spent my life in there," admits Tiswas presenter and producer Chris Tarrant who goes on to explain that many of the Tiswas scripts were cobbled together, much the worse for drink, on a Friday night spent in the bar.

There's a great promotional film at the end of Part 1 'Announcing the new ATV colour area' with news footage of the 'ATV Colour' girls, a be-sashed group of ladies sent out to local events to promote the service, and a very enthusiastic listing of the areas covered by the new Oxford transmitter. The new Centre officially opened on 19th March 1970 in the presence of Princess Alexandra and various ATV and Birmingham Council bigwigs. Some of the footage from the opening, the dinner and her visit to the set of Crossroads is present.

Parts 2 and 3, The Dawn of Colour and The Colour Hey Day take up the story and show how colour programmes were produced at the new Centre. In much the same vein, using new interviews on video interspersed with rare colour and black and white archive footage, the documentary specifically looks at the development of Crossroads, for example. Here, Jane Rossington introduces the main cast, including Noele Gordon ('Nolly') and Roger Tonge, and the original premise of two feuding sisters as well as a brief breakdown of the adrenaline charged working day at the new studios. She recalls having to improvise a scene with her fellow actors Sue Hanson and Zeph Gladstone when one episode was under running. This entailed them all ad-libbing like mad while trying on wigs for nearly two minutes in Vera Downend's hair dressing salon at the motel.

There's also some ATV Today news footage of Noele telling the viewers how thrilled she was to win the ITV Personality of the Year Award in 1972 and footage from 1975 of the wedding that featured her character, Meg, and actor John Bentley playing Hugh Mortimer. Peter Harris and Chris Tarrant also share some very amusing stories about actor Ann George, who played the legendary Amy Turtle. Tarrant refers to her as "the queen of Birmingham", continually mobbed in the streets, and goes on to discuss a scene featuring Amy, Meg and a hoover that will have you chuckling away. Also look out for Noele chatting about the programme's anti-smoking campaign. Think Acorn Antiques's soap diva Bo Beaumont (aka Mrs Overall) and you'll see where Victoria Wood got her inspiration from.

Part 3 covers, with copious amounts of footage from ATV Today, the public reaction to Paul Henry's Benny character, the death of Roger Tonge, the fire that destroys the motel and the eventual sacking of Noele Gordon. There's a great clip featuring 'Nolly' from current affairs show Format V to which I'll return to later and footage of the protest at her sacking by novice reporter Bill Buckley (later of That's Life) and his 'Meg Is Magic' musical tribute outside the doors of ATV. Sadly, it wasn't quite magic enough to bring her back.

"keep 'em peeled"

Presenters Bob Warman and Wendy Nelson introduce an extended look at all the productions coming out of the Centre, now buzzing with activity, and its commitment to providing a local service to the Midlands. ATV Today, commencing at the Aston studios in 1964, was seen as a flagship local news programme, connecting ATV to local community interest stories. Part 2, with input from Reg Harcourt and Bob Warman, covers the development of ATV Today, from using one sound film camera to cover the whole of the Midlands with an office run by 3 people to the establishing of a hive of news coverage run by a crew of 30 reporters and staff, including future New Faces presenter Derek Hobson, Gwyn Richards, Sue Jay, Anne Diamond and the aforementioned Chris Tarrant.

Tarrant was shifted onto the more lighter items, or "the upside down beer drinkers" as he refers to them. He amusingly remembers "the bloke who shared his house with a Shetland pony" and another "who went to bed with a pigeon on his head." Following on in this style there's the legendary reporter John Swallow and I'm sure his item on an entire family's addiction to Planet of the Apes will certainly crack a smile. Mother of said family describes them as "little monkeys" as we see them walking down the streets in an early example of cos-play gone terribly wrong.

There's more of Swallow too when he later brings us the vicar who specialises in sound effects, not only producing from the pulpit the sounds of a train pulling into a station but also a motorbike. Swallow is, much to his own bemusement, asked by the vicar to "hold tight" as he sits behind him for the imaginary bike ride.

Warman reminds us that they covered all the big stories too - the Birmingham pub bombings, the disappearance of John Stonehouse, the Lesley Whittle kidnapping and the strikes out at Longbridge - and reflected the changing times with two presenters, one male and one female, on the programme. Wendy Nelson also takes some time to reflect that even though the programme was put together in a mad scramble, it was a highly regarded and award winning one. Another celebrated programme from ATV was Police 5 with Shaw Taylor. From its origins as a five minute filler in ATV's London schedules in 1962, only intended to run six weeks, it transferred to the Midlands and developed into a programme that the police saw as a valuable way of reaching out to witnesses of crimes and ran for 30 years, even spinning off into a children's version, Junior Police 5. Taylor is a delightful interviewee and recalls various cases that the programme solved, with Taylor even sending a thief a signed photograph after he'd been caught via Police 5, and the origin of his famous catchphrase, "keep 'em peeled."

The next programme that Parts 2 and 3 focus on is Tiswas, devised in 1973 by announcer Peter Tomlinson as a filler between programmes on Saturday mornings, which would develop into a full length programme helmed by Chris Tarrant and John Asher, later joined by Saturday Scene's Sally James when Asher left, and featuring Trevor East, Peter Tomlinson, Bob Carolgees, Lenny Henry and John Gorman amongst others. Tarrant would eventually become its producer by the sixth series. As original producer Peter Harris notes, it started out with a budget of £300 per show, sharing the same studios as ATV Today, and provided a slot for bought in cartoons and serials. Again, the documentary provides lots of anecdotes from Tarrant, Tomlinson, Harris and Carolgees on how the series progressed, the beg, borrow or steal manner of production, accusations of the programme setting a bad example to kids with its custard pie throwing and hurling of water mayhem, and how it gradually became a networked programme and triumphantly returned after the ITV strike of 1979.

Tarrant also recalls his narration duties, often double entendre in style, on a documentary series called Stop Look Listen, produced as part of ATV's commitment to programmes for schools and colleges which also included Good Health, Alive and Kicking and Over to You. ATV's regional output also included Farming Today (a clip features a vibrating cultivator), the networked Angling Today, political programme Left, Right and Centre and Gardening Today with Bob Price and the fruity voiced Cyril Fletcher. As Warman notes, the lack of such regional programming today reduces the opportunities for reporters to gather experience in other areas of interest. Part 3 also focuses briefly on Format V, a current affairs programme that devoted more time to subject matters that ATV Today couldn't give space to, and Miss ATV, a regional variation of the Miss World beauty contest which Warman attempts to defend against today's political correctness. One edition of Format V, called 'Nolly', features Noele Gordon talking to Wendy Jones, defending Crossroads against... shock... horror... unprofessional standards. "It's a terrifying business to be in Crossroads," she unwittingly admits. Probably something Paul Henry and Jane Rossington would still agree with, presumably.

Part 3 also takes some time to discuss the relationship with ATV Elstree and the feeling that the Birmingham centre was "second best" to the studio handling glossy, all film action series, amusingly highlights the artistes rates at the adjoining Holiday Inn enjoyed by those working at ATV (Tarrant tells an hilarious story about Frank Carson sharing his hotel room with The Bachelors and Jim Bowen recalls Stevie Wonder's surreal appearance in the hotel bar), and the various union disputes that affected production and transmisison of programmes. This includes the strike by EETPU (Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union who handled electronics in the studios), NATTKE (National Association of Theatrical, Television and Kine Employees) and the ACTT (Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians) that kept ITV screens dark for eleven weeks in 1979. The roots of this dispute lay in the demarcation of roles between technical staff and on-screen talent as Reg Harcourt, Bob Warman and Diana Mather recall.

As Part 3 concludes, the fortunes of Noele Gordon and Crossroads are also connected with the IBA review of the ITV broadcasting licences at the end of 1980, for contracts beginning on 1st January 1982. The programme was often regarded by the IBA itself as substandard and some would argue that the shake up at Crossroads was an attempt to try and raise its production values in light of the renewal of the franchise contracts. ATV was successful but the IBA ordered then to reorganise their facilities, including ATV Elstree, so that they would concentrate them more within the region. As part of this process, they were told to rename themselves. The newly-named Central Independent Television took over from ATV on 1st January 1982.

"a Betamax recorder and an iron wi' no plug on it"

Parts 4 and 5, A New Era and The End of an Era consider the period of production overseen by Central and the slow demise of the Centre. Although many of the ATV production personnel from in front of and behind the cameras remained and it felt like business as usual, both Bob Warman and Wendy Nelson recognise that changes at board and executive level ushered in a new ethos, one that was more concerned with the business of making money and not necessarily the making of television. The distinctive ATV branding was literally removed overnight, in what Bob Warman describes as the history and heritage of the region's first television broadcaster being "almost criminally scrapped", and thrown in a skip. Audiences and programme makers clearly weren't keen on the replacement branding, the Central globe that later became the 'cake' or 'aspirin', and it took some time to establish the company's new vision.

With the parent company Associated Communications Corporation having to divest nearly 50% of its share holdings, the new ethos extended to the renaming of ATV Centre to Central House and the new owners of the company commencing construction on new studio facilities at Lenton Lane in Nottingham. After it opened, large scale television production gradually shifted to this new studio and away from Broad Street. Lenton Lane was initially beset with problems when its production of an East Midlands news programme was halted for a time by industrial action. This stemmed from disgruntled ex-ATV Elstree employees registering their unhappiness about their enforced relocation to Nottingham.

While the larger television productions did eventually gravitate towards Nottingham in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Central did reorganise much of the original ATV Centre on Broad Street and invested in new equipment and control rooms, lighter cameras and 1 inch tape machines as was standard for the time. Both Bob Warman and Wendy Nelson reflect on how news gathering changed as digital services arrived and Nelson's role shifted from reporter to editor. This eventually led to the company's new owners, Carlton, one of the winners in the 1991 ITV franchise round, building a state of the art digital news gathering centre on Gas Street, Birmingham, and from which the region's news, of both the Midland's West and East areas of the franchise, would be transmitted.

The final episodes of the documentary trace these developments through the changes in the way many programmes were commissioned and made. These changes not only affected how the news was produced for the region but were also reflected in programmes like Bullseye, itself eventually transferring from Broad Street to the Lenton Lane facility. Host Jim Bowen regales us with some hilarious stories about how he got the compere's job (apparently by default when Norman Vaughan was rejected), of contestants passing out, Bullseye's infamous prizes ("a Betamax recorder and an iron wi' no plug on it") and having to magnetise the 'bendy Bully' giveaway to prevent it from falling over.

The eventual demise of Tiswas in 1982 is featured and interviews with Chris Tarrant and incoming presenter Gordon Astley suggest that perhaps the final series was one series too far. When Tarrant moved on from Tiswas he went on to the production of Saturday night adult show O.T.T. He still believes it had its good points but it was cancelled when the Central management deemed it politically wise to capitulate to complaints about the show. According to Wendy Nelson this originated from the chairman's wife who disapproved of the nudity in the show.

Part 5 also covers the slow death of Crossroads which, according to Jane Rossington, Central chairman Leslie Hill later regretted. Rossington believes that Central really didn't like the programme but couldn't get rid of it because it brought in money, presumably through advertising, that the new company wouldn't be able to survive without. She covers the retirement of producer Jack Barton, the various shake-ups by producer Phillip Bowman in 1985, his replacement by William Smethurst and the programme's metamorphosis into Crossroads Kings Oak.

On a positive note the documentary notes the increased commitment to news, to computer themed children's programmes like Magic Micro Mission and Broad Street's role in Children's ITV, with presenters providing live links to regional programmes across the ITV network. It aso looks at documentary programming offering perspectives on Midlands heritage and Asian and Rastafarian culture such as England, Their England, Here and Now and Contrasts. There is also some substantial coverage of the production of Spitting Image with interviewees Peter Harris and Barbara Bradbury and they tell of last minute panics when management thought they might have to veto sketches featuring the Royals when the Duke of Edinburgh was due to turn up and open the new Lenton Lane studios. Again, the documentary covers this with plenty of archive material, some off-air recordings and new interviews with presenters Jo Wheeler, Gary Terzza and Debbie Shore.

As Part 5 indicates, new Central chairman Hill also oversaw a period of downsizing with less and less large scale production booked into Broad Street's studios. Much of this branch and root reorganisation stemmed from the 1990 Broadcasting Act introduced by the Conservative government and designed to deregulate the industry, abolish and replace the IBA, and relax the rules surrounding franchise ownership and thus allow many of the mergers to take place between ITV companies that followed between 1992 and 2004. Times and technology were changing and the demise of Broad Street certainly reflects that period of Central's adoption of a new business model, including the building of the Central Court, Gas Street studios in Birmingham. By 1997, Central auctioned off most of the fixtures and fittings at Broad Street and closed the studios. Sadly, the end of an era in British television broadcasting.

This five part documentary is clearly a labour of love and is well written by Roddy Buxton, Peter Raven and Peter Thomas and brilliantly held together by producer Lee Bannister's narration. Although the new video interviews do tend to be of inconsistent quality, with some better lit and recorded than others, it's still remarkable what the makers, ATVLand.net, Tiswas Online and MACE have achieved and the sheer amount of material they've gathered to celebrate 'ATVLand'. There was obviously no budget to get their talking heads over to a decent location/studio and film them together and much of the material looks like it was acquired on-the-hoof over a long period of time. People are interviewed in gardens, restaurants, their offices and their homes but it is edited together well considering they had eleven hours of new material to plough through. They incorporate the archive material from ITV and MACE very well indeed and there is obviously a limited amount of material covering the capabilities of the centre as they have had to find creative ways of reusing some of it. However, I only detected a few obvious reuses of footage and it's inevitable, I think, that what exists would be used in this manner. Some of the little items produced for ATV Today are great time capsules, are often very funny and capture the spirit of local television news perfectly.

I think they've done a remarkable job with the resources they had available and have produced a vital, necessary and valuable document of the golden age of ITV regional production and any deficiencies in quality are more than made up for with the sheer amount and variety of information, anecdotes, rare archive footage and enthusiasm for the subject matter. Essential.

You can see many archive clips used in the documentary and purchase the DVD directly from MACE

If all this archive material has whetted your appetite and you have a particular interest in Midlands heritage and history then why not take a look at MACE's previous DVD release The Black Country 1969 which features a number of ATV programmes. There's an excellent review of the DVD by Anthony Nield at The Digital Fix.

Special features
The DVD set contains a PDF of the 1974-75 ATV Yearbook, basically a promotional document that records the regional broadcaster's output - drama, children's, news, light entertainment, local programming - over the year and the network's other activities such as Lew Grade's ITC subsidiary, theatres, music publishing and er... ten pin bowling and telephone answering machines. A second PDF, This is ATV, originates from about 1980 and again is a comprehensive review of the programming that the network provides as well as a good background to how ATV developed.

'ATVLand' in Colour
The History of ATV Centre, Birmingham - The Most Advanced Colour TV Studio Of Its Time
ATVLAND.productions for MACE (Media Archive for Central England)
ScreenWM / EM Media / BFI / ITV Studios / Universaity of Lincoln

Released: 3rd October 2011 / Running time: 245 mins / Colour and Monochrome / 16:9 (archive footage 4:3) / Optional subtitles for the hard of hearing / Cert E

BRITISH CULT CLASSICS - Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs / BFI Flipside Blu-ray Review

2011-10-19T00:27:00.001+01:00

Further releases from the BFI's Flipside strand this month include the film adaptation of David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1974), a dark satire that explores sexual politics and fascist fantasy.
It is regarded as Halliwell's greatest success in a writing career that was considered radical and groundbreaking and included many works for television (The Wednesday Play, Play for Today, The Bill, Crown Court and even an unmade Doctor Who for the 'Trial of A Time Lord' season in 1986) as well as many plays for radio and theatre.

Little Malcolm's origins are rooted in Halliwell's own brief expulsion from Huddersfield College of Art where he studied between 1953 and 1959 and although Halliwell denied it, according to early collaborator and friend Mike Leigh, the central character of Malcolm Scrawdyke, an art student humiliated by his own ejection from college and plotting revenge, is seen as something of an alter ego or a self-portrait of Halliwell. He created the part for himself and it was one which he took in the original six hour long production at the Unity Theatre in 1965, directed and designed by Leigh.

Although the Unity Theatre version of the play was considered unsuccessful, later in 1965 it was revived and revised for the West End, playing at the Garrick Theatre. Directed by Patrick Dromgoole (who would go on to oversee a highly creative period of drama production as director and producer at HTV in the 1970s), this more concise version of the play starred John Hurt as Malcolm and cemented Halliwell's reputation and his influence on the alternative theatre scene in the 1960s. Hurt knew both Halliwell and Leigh from RADA where incidentally David Warner, who appears in the film version of Little Malcolm, was also a contemporary and it was a visit by Brian Epstein and the Beatles to the Garrick that would later sow the seeds of the play's film adaptation by Derek Woodward, another RADA contemporary, in 1973.

"... allow the actors the opportunity to perform and to capture that performance"

George Harrison, John Hurt and Derek Woodward approached director Stuart Cooper to direct, Harrison having seen and liked one of Cooper's documentaries, A Test of Violence (1970) about Spanish painter Juan Genovese and admired his work in progress on Kelly Country (1973) a film about painter Sidney Nolan made for the BBC's Omnibus strand. Having enjoyed the play at the Garrick, this prompted Harrison's backing of the film adaptation of Little Malcolm, his providing some of the incidental music as part of the score from composer Stanley Myers and, of course, setting him on the road to what would eventually become his film production company Hand Made Films. Harrison also made use of Splinter, a South Shields vocal duo who had been brought to his attention in 1973 and whose song 'Lonely Man' was considered appropriate for the film. They later signed to his Dark Horse label after Apple slid into financial chaos and the Beatles split up.

Produced by Apple Corps, the wintry six week shoot took place completely on location at an abandoned gas works and in the surrounding streets of Oldham. Cinematographer John Alcott, having just previously worked on Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, a film that thematically mirrors Little Malcolm in some ways, extemporised with the available locations and inclement weather conditions and made the best use of natural light with faster lenses and mounts. Cooper set out to retain the essence of the play and feared that any attempt to really open it out, as is the case with many film adaptations of theatre works, would dilute the performances and the characters. As he goes on to say in the notes accompanying this release: "My attitude was to allow the actors the opportunity to perform and to capture that performance."

The film opens first with with a voice over and then a moment of inner-monologue as Malcolm (John Hurt) attempts to get out of bed, the scruffy revolutionary considering that "it's no use just theorising about getting up. It's the act that counts." This immediately underlines one of the major themes of the films about political will as Malcolm becomes the leader of a movement, loquacious about its desire to act out its manifesto as the allegory progresses and yet, by the film's conclusion, he's back to square one, unable to act, politically and sexually impotent. His reflection about exercising the will also aligns the character to his Hitler-like charismatic control of the three misbegotten followers he recruits, Wick (John McEnery), Nipple (David Warner) and Irwin (Raymond Platt) as he plots to revenge himself against an unseen art college lecturer, Allard. Allard becomes a representation of the 'eunuchs', the conformist mass of society against whom Malcolm constantly rails in order to prove his masculine potency.

The squalid aesthetic of student life, their agitations and pretensions to overturn the status quo was always a central element of Halliwell's prescience about the oncoming student revolutions of the 1960s, anticipating the protests against Vietnam, their solidarity with the civil rights movement and an attempt to replace what they saw as capitalist, bourgeois liberal ideology. Little Malcolm reflects and parodies in particular the clashes between art students and higher education institutions with their perceived deficiencies of art education that often led to demonstrations and occupations of university and college buildings. Those studying on arts and media courses seemed to want something better from their institutions and their society and Halliwell creates a fantasy of protest that would eventually be synthesised within that typical 1960s concept of 'student power' while also accurately capturing the naivety and earnestness of the art student milieu. The development of Malcolm's Party of Dynamic Erection and its leader's own increasing lurch into fascism uncannily reflects how the Director of the Polytechnic of North London regarded similar protests in 1971 as the outpourings of "these student guerrillas of the Fascist Left."

"Hitler started with seven!"

With its fantasy revolution and deconstruction of male power the play and the film tap into some of the themes of Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar, the visceral violence of protest and power struggle in Golding's Lord of the Flies and the allegorical structure of Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968). The film particularly precipitates, as Yvonne Tasker notes in her essay to accompany the film, the cliches of 'power to the people' Marxist Wolfie Smith in Citizen Smith (1977-80) or even the students occupying Rigsby's bed sitting rooms in Rising Damp (1974-78), which could equally be seen as another satire on male potency. The establishment of the Party of Dynamic Erection, with the phallic symbol of Irwin's banner acting more as a vision of a collective male fear of women and the impotency that results from it, also articulates the film's representation of a particular phenomenon of the 1970s, of men struggling with their identities and, as E. Anna Claydon in Don't Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s suggests, of "men coming to terms with the concept that their place in society is uncertain."

The film depicts the three members of the Party as rather frightened of women, a point which the solo female character of Ann (Rosalind Ayres) provocatively confronts them with in the film's disturbing conclusion. This is immediately set up when Wick and Irwin visit Malcolm at the start of the film to bring him news of the inter-institutional meeting about his expulsion. Wick describes his encounter with the college's matriarchal figures,"Them two chastity belts on legs... that little Ackroyd's really vicious when she gets goin'. Nearly clawed me eyes out when I said we should back yer. Didn't she, Irwin?" The meek Irwin simply undercuts this male bluff with, "Aye, she nearly touched yer" and offers that even the mere touch of a woman is anathema to the maintaining of their collective Dynamic Erection. Wick's response of "I'd 'ave touched her," foreshadows his own sickening violence towards the threatening presence of Ann later in the film and the idea that women undermine male potency and the only way to deal with that is through violence.

Wick and Irwin are immediately set up as opposites - the former full of male braggadocio, the latter almost childlike, asexual - whereas Malcolm is presented as an angry but charismatic intellectual politico. When Malcolm and his cronies go to the pub to debate their next plan of action, their leader is seen to have no time for Ann sitting just opposite and dismisses her with an abrupt, "Ah, women!" And yet, as the film progresses, the relationship between Ann and Malcolm is seen as far more complicated. There is a tentative romance alluded to in which it becomes clear that Ann is actually in awe of Malcolm's reputation as a "real man", one that she eventually discovers isn't true, and Malcolm is completely inept trying to relate to her. When he goes home and has coffee with Ann he rails against his own inability to court the woman, "What is this block? What is it? Why am I so inhibited?" and he's reduced to small talk about kitchens and wallpaper.

Ann directly attacks the three men, an echo of the feminism that took on the patriarchal society of the times and when, as a result, gender roles underwent a problematic deconstruction. In reflecting this gender crisis Yvonne Tasker also ironically points out how this, and its relation to the film's title and use of the concept of 'eunuchs' to symbolise conformism and themes of male impotence, were outlined in Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, published in 1971. The shocking twist is that the film moves from a fantasy of male power, highly comic in tone, to a rather brutal, sickening assault on a woman who suggests they "resign all claim to being men", a claim Malcolm originally offers in the pub as a mark of failing to challenge another man, Allard.

In the pub, the revolution begins in finely judged comic style. When they form the Party, Irwin argues it cannot be run by three men but this is refuted by Malcolm's claim that "Hitler started with seven!" With the Party's manifesto declared as, "we're against the eunuchy, we're against the castrated wherever they are, against all of them who want to reduce us to their level", Malcolm suggests they kill Allard, become martyrs and exploit the situation. Watch Raymond Platt's reactions to this and the suggestion he could spend time in prison for the cause. He's wonderfully funny. Over a pint and a fag, they "rule out assassination" and instead plan to kidnap Allard and blackmail him by exposing Allard's affair with another woman in the pub, Margaret Thwaite. Interestingly, Malcolm here accuses Allard of wearing a mask to hide his true sensibilities and later we understand, in some of the monologues and voice overs in the film, that Malcolm is also afraid that his mask will slip and his admirers will see him for what he is, "a little man." Also note that masks act a significant symbol in the fantasy kidnap sequence.

"I'm a walking seismograph of sensual innuendo"

Hurt's performance is splendid, capturing the brief moments of self-doubt (at one point he is willing to abandon "all this Dynamic crap" in order to "get Ann") in those on-screen asides to himself and, in one of the film's stunningly exaggerated scenes, the sheer madness of his Nuremberg style rallying cry to his followers in the falling snow against the landscape of Oldham, it's phallic factory chimneys and chanting and cheers of non-existent crowds rendering it surreal and ridiculous.

However, the film is almost stolen by David Warner as duffel-coated aspiring writer Dennis Nipple who bursts onto the screen in close up immediately after a moment of Malcolm's late-night self-reflection, arguing with the film's 'hero' about the colour of a cordoroy jacket. Warner's physicality in the role, hood permanently up, eyes framed by NHS glasses, hands constantly thrust into the duffel-coat's pockets, offers the film a comedic reflection of Malcolm. This reflection is also key to Malcolm's belief in his own power trip in the later trial scene with Nipple. when the 'game' becomes reality.

Similarly verbose, Nipple is awkward and odd in contrast to the black coated Malcolm's hairy tempestuousness. A brilliantly realised character, summing himself up as a man who has a "keen perception of the world of the senses; sights, sounds, odours, tactile titillations. I'm a walking seismograph of sensual innuendo." Nipple argues that the jacket wasn't cordoroy but was of an imitation fabric, yelling at Malcolm, "you can't afford real cordoroy!" Warner gets several very amusing scenes like this, showing off Halliwell's extremely witty script into the bargain. Nipple challenges Malcolm's claim that he has not eaten for 48 hours by recounting a sublime tale of going on hunger strike ("to seek the unknown vistas of the 'allucinated mind") and seeing the gas works at night as a dark, hallucinatory vision. "Terrible place that gas works. If that's what it does to young mystics they ought to put a screen round it," demands Malcolm.

As Party Archivist and Minister of Records, Nipple criticises the current Party salute and suggests they go for something that he demonstrates as a very exaggerated, but entirely appropriate, Nazi salute. When he's forced to use the 'clawed hand' salute and swear allegiance to the Party there's a wonderful moment where Halliwell plays with the audience's expectations. How can anyone have the surname Nipple, you ask? As Wick recites, "I, Dennis Nipple...", Nipple interjects, "that's not my name!" The audience thinks the game's up. When Wick asks him what his name is, he continues "I, Dennis Charles Nipple..." During the fantasy tinged rehearsal of the kidnapping, Nipple's geeky appearance is enhanced by having to employ someone's mucky vest as a mask and the implied attack on Allard, here role-played by Wick, again underlines the real and later consequences of their child-like aping of male virility embodied by beatings, car chases and kidnapping.

The fantasy of the kidnap, conducted in an immobile, wrecked car, is enchanced by non-diegetic sound effects and subtle use of red and green light to suggest non-existent traffic lights. It's an hilarious piece of physical comedy from the ensemble cast that concludes with a dark rant from Malcolm as the film tips over from playful comedy and games into its much more sinister second half, the scene culminating with Wick, posing as Allard, offering his daughter to Malcolm because "she's ripe" and symbolically destroying Stanley Spencer's painting, 'The Garden at Cookham Rise' (Halliwell having a go at the symbols of privileged liberal bourgeois art education perhaps), as his fellow Party members scream uncontrollably "Smash it!" in anticipation of the far more horrifying attack on Ann that rings with their cries of "Punish!"

"you're the biggest virgin outside of a convent"

The exploration of male fantasy and self delusion continues when Nipple tells the story of his seduction of a black girl at a recent party, claiming of his attraction to women that he has a "a certain inner magnet that pulls them toward me." After Malcolm denies he even knows Ann and Wick claims to 'know' her intimately, Irwin simply unveils the Party symbol, a big phallus in a fascistic black-white-red colour scheme that "just needs to dry", underlining perhaps the film's searing conclusion where all four men hide behind such a symbol, with only their lurid fantasies (wet dreams, perhaps?) and denials maintaining its erection. At this half way point in the film, Malcolm also restates the Party's aims which have been simplified to the acquisition of power for its own sake and where justice, mercy, love, truth will be greeted by violence. "The final solution to the human question," as Wick eloquently puts it.

The 'final solution' is meted out to both Nipple and Ann by the end of the film. Nipple is put on trial for treason, where the verdict is either "guilty or very guilty" and, as a rival, he is ostracised from the Party for daring to expose the fantasy as distinct from the reality of the situation (he declares Malcolm "mad") and then Ann receives a punishment for daring to question the inadequacy of the man she bluntly offers herself to and then confronts ("you're the biggest virgin outside of a convent"). Even though she also pledges her help, Malcolm rejects it as a form of castration and her punishment is brutal and realistic (with Wick and Irwin convinced they've murdered her and then offering one of the very few moments of genuine male tenderness and fragility in the entire film) and is perhaps the only moment of realism in the film that can snap these deluded men out of their dangerous fantasy. Halliwell's message is also surely a warning to those who would obey such charismatic but impotent leaders. Malcolm's final countdown and inability to act, mirroring the opening of the film as he struggled to get out of bed, brings the film full circle as the "great leader" remains "petrified" and Cooper zooms in to Hurt's hooded, terrified stare and freezes the frame.

The film does not escape its theatrical roots and I suspect it never intended to if we bear director Stuart Cooper's comments in mind. The art student milieu is one that is recognisable and is used to synthesise the distinctions between adults and adolescents and explore a subculture where sexual and political differences were at their most fluid in the 1970s. It is a provocative and playfully surreal satire that examines power, gender and fantasy with the performances and larger-than-life characters driving these themes along to their devastating conclusion. Hurt, McEnery and Warner are particularly good, able to deliver very long speeches and remain utterly mesmerising, hilarious and terrifying.

About the transfer
The BFI does the film proud with a rather lovely high definition transfer of the 35mm negative from the Apple Corps archive. Boasting images with real depth and thick contrast, the details on faces, objects and clothes are exceptional. Look at the close-ups of David Warner and his duffel-coat or the vivid red scarf that Ray Platt sports to see how fine detail and glorious color sing from the screen. This beautifully shows off Alcott's color palette and use of shadow on the film's interiors and the very luminous quality he imbues on the landscapes of the film, be they the ruined gas works (the brick walls look as if you could reach out and touch then) or the wintry hills of Oldham.

The mono audio is for the most part very clear even though there are some intermittent moments of distortion. They're not particularly distracting but one of the inadequacies of shooting on location is betrayed in the trial of Nipple. It's conducted in what looks like an old council chamber and the acoustics are often so bad that it is hard to understand what Malcolm is saying in some scenes. It's a drawback of the original recording and not the fault of the soundtrack's transfer which is good and sharp in the main.

Special features
Original Little Malcolm trailer
Put Yourself In My Place (Francine Winham, 1974, 25 mins): fraught gender relations trigger a startling role reversal in this polemical comedy starring Judy Geeson
The Contraption (James Dearden, 1977, 7 mins): in a final act of defeat or defiance, a man (Richard O’Brien) builds a sinister contraption in a dark cellar
Illustrated booklet featuring original artwork and contributions from Stuart Cooper, John Hurt, Mike Leigh (who directed the debut stage production of Halliwell’s play) and Yvonne Tasker from the University of East Anglia

Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs
Apple Corps and Subafilms Ltd 1974
BFI Dual Format Edition / Released 24 October 2011 / BFIB1123 / Cert 15 / colour / English, optional hard-of-hearing subtitles / 111 mins / Original aspect ratio 1.85:1 / Region 0 / BFI Flipside title no. 020 / Disc 1: BD50 / 1080p / 24fps / PCM mono audio (48k/24-bit) / Disc 2: DVD9 / PAL / PCM mono audio (48k/16-bit) (Extras Dolby Digital 320 kbps)