Underneath Venice, there is a hidden forest. The forest was cut down over a thousand years ago in what is now Slovenia and the trunks were driven into the marshy soil of the 117 islands on which Venice was then built. Under the water, deprived of oxygen, the wood petrifies. Venice is a labyrinth, built on a dark stolen wood that has slowly, over the centuries, turned to stone. A city perfect for the darkest of fairy tales. A little red figure sits in a church. A little red figure crosses a bridge. But (to paraphrase Shelley) if Little Red Riding Hood comes, can the wolf be far behind?
Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 horror film has one of those titles, like Eyes Wide Shut, that at first glance appear naff, but in which every word takes on a different meaning during and after a viewing of the film. It is a warning, but one that we most commonly expect to be ignored: ‘Don’t Look Now but someone is staring at us’. The Italian title gives us a giallo feel: A Venezia… un dicembre rosso shocking, which, translated, means ‘In Venice… a Shocking Red December’ – a time, a place, a colour and an emotion. But to concentrate for a moment on the place: Venice.
Venice has provided an exotic location for historical romps, a Klaus Kinski vampire film, an Al Pacino Shakespeare adaptation and picture postcard backgrounds to several 007s as well as the recent Johnny Depp excretion The Tourist. [I must here declare my bias. I almost got a job as an extra on this film, but was turned down as (apparently) I resembled the lead actor and would have only caused confusion.] Working in Venice the last 10 years, I got used to turning a corner and walking onto a film set. I even had the ambiguous pleasure of seeing Donald Sutherland (a very tall man) preparing his role for the remake of The Italian Job (hence the ambiguity) at Campo San Barnaba. And yet Nicolas Roeg’s Venice is different and its difference is of a piece with the oddness of Don’t Look Now, which despite its recent elevation from cult gem to National Treasure (Time Out’s Best British Film Ever™) stills retains a gritty, mucky unusualness that no amount of praise can polish off.
Fundamentally, Don’t Look Now is a dirty film; a film of spreading red stains, of dripping liquids, of mud and blood and breaking glass. It is a messy examination of entropy: things fall and fall apart and we try to restore what can’t be repaired and recover what has already been irretrievably lost. And this filthiness comes with the city of Venice. When we first see Venice (aside from a brief shot of the sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blinds), we are in a trench with John Baxter, the bereaved architect played brilliantly by Donald Sutherland. He is supervising the restoration of a church and the workmen are drilling into the foundation, the petrified forest of the city’s substrata. ‘Tutto marcio,’ the disgruntled Baxter tells the Italian worker. ‘It’s all rotten.’ In a crucial change to the Daphne du Maurier short story, John Baxter and his wife Laura are not holidaying in Venice, rather he is working. Venice, for Baxter, is a building site, and not a good one. The church, San Nicolò dei Mendicoli (Saint Nicholas of the Beggars), has an unassuming, perhaps beggarly exterior, and (in a city that is almost all façade) has no great façade. Tucked away in an unvisited corner of Venice, not far from the prison at Santa Marta, the church was in the process of being renovated in 1973, providing Roeg with the scaffolding he needed. Roeg’s Venice is a wintry, dirty workaday city; a city of hospitals, police offices and off-season hotels. It is a city with a rat problem (still very much the case), a city of lost gloves on windowsills and a baby doll abandoned on the steps down to the canal. In the final funereal shot of the film, we see a huge pile of bin bags in the background, also awaiting disposal.
Baxter’s work of putting the pieces back together reflects the piecing together of the Baxters’ lives after the death of their daughter. The Baxters live in rooms of middle-class clutter, strewn with books, papers and half-empty glasses, unable to find their cigarettes. This messiness and Baxter’s work are also reflected in Roeg’s justly famous non-linear editing, which mixes up the narrative in such a way as to make us uncertain as to where we are and (crucially) when we are at any given time in the film. The past pollutes the present, as indeed does the future. But this messiness is all the point and Baxter’s and the viewer’s analogous urge to bring it to some coherence is literally a doomed project. Ultimately, things fall apart. When Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) collapses onto the dinner table at the restaurant, Roeg’s slow motion, unlike Peckinpah’s epic beautifying of violence, prolongs the agony, the moment of helpless tragic knowledge when we grasp at a world that is slipping through our fingers, the glass rolling off the tilting table towards the tiled floor. While restoring a mosaic in the church, Baxter is almost killed, when a falling beam destroys the scaffolding on which he’s standing high above the floor of the church. The mosaic tiles he had been meticulously examining are scattered to the winds.
The source of all muck and chaos is the muddy English pond of Christine Baxter’s accidental death. There are very few moments of horror in the Horror genre that live up to the meaning of the word. John Baxter’s grief-filled bellow, the freezing brown water (Roeg makes sure we hear John gasp as he plunges into it), the slippery muddy slope and the hopeless struggle to carry the girl’s small body to safety are moments of bungling, tormented pain, absolutely stripped bare of any staged dignity. This is Conradian: ‘the horror’. Later in Venice, a woman’s body will be pulled, knickers dripping, the soles of her feet, from a canal in a similarly undignified end to a life. There is a murderer on the loose. However, the film refuses to comply to generic requirements. The police investigation is essentially a red (there’s that colour again) herring. We might understand at the end what we were seeing but we won’t understand why. There are no resolutions. [SPOILER] Baxter’s own death is just another meaningless death in a long line of meaningless deaths. The true horror is that all death (and all life) is ultimately meaningless.
The beam of wood falls for no reason, just as we never fully understand how Christine came to drown in the pond. There is no angry ghost, no curse, no original sin to be punished and no demonic presence. We might seek meaning, motivation, an explanation, the way Baxter chases his Little Red Riding Hood through the forests of Venice, but in a universe as arbitrary as this, death is deprived of such comforts and does not follow a narrative arc, and our Little Red Riding Hood could just as easily turn out to be the Wolf.
John Hough’s British horror film The Legend of Hell House (1973) concerns the attempt of a small group of psychics and parapsychologists to exorcise the spooks of a notorious haunted house, using the latest scientific equipment. The summoning of ghosts via scientific analysis and electronic equipment could stand as a reasonable description of the activities of the film’s composer, Delia Derbyshire (yes, and Brian Hodgson, but I think by now it is fairly safe to say that in most cases where we see both names credited, it’s Delia’s work that will be making our jaws drop).
By the time Hodgson and Derbyshire left the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, they had already collaborated on a number of other projects, moonlighting under the pseudonyms Nikki St. George and Li De La Russe. It was under these names that the pair worked on the first White Noise album (which shares with the Hell House soundtrack a tendency towards orgasmic breathiness) and on the Standard Music Library album that would later provide most of the music for ITV’s The Tomorrow People. But this was the first thing they worked on under their own names, and at Hodgson’s own Covent Garden studio, Electrophon.
Back at the Workshop, Derbyshire was known to have had a particular lampshade, favoured for its peculiar sonic properties. I don’t know whether she was able to take it with her when she left (in lieu, perhaps, of a gold watch) or if she found some sort of replacement, but one of the most uncanny sounds to be heard in The Legend of Hell House is distinctly reminiscent of those she found by removing the attack velocities from that lampshade (in the manner of Pierre Schaeffer’s cloche coupée) and leaving the dreamy susurrus of plaintively modulating noise to drift on in its wake. This sound, usually heard first pitched down then pitched up, is probably the film’s most common leitmotiv, acting almost like punctuation, denoting time passing, a sonic ellipsis.
Throughout the film, there is no meaningful distinction to be drawn between music and sound effects. Even the ostensible theme tune opens with a plangent woodwind motif that echoes the squeak of a rusty gate. This little trill acts like the opening to another world, welcoming in a stuttering electronic rhythm, pulsing with tribal energy, its ons and its offs never entirely stable. An organ stabs out its chords somewhere in the background, more wood wind floats in with a vaguely jazzy sensibility, only serving to destabilise the tonality even further.
The Legend of Hell House was released in the same year as Nigel Kneale’s TV movie, The Stone Tape, similarly about an attempt to apply scientific method to an apparently haunted house and scored by Derbyshire and Hodgson’s old boss at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Desmond Briscoe. But whereas The Stone Tape is rallied around a certain blokey rationalism, Hough’s film is always escaping the bonds of its thin veneer of scientific reason, suffused with a barely suppressed sexuality that seeps out in physical manifestations of ectoplasm and the rhythmic throbbing, the electric murmuration of Derbyshire’s music. It was those same sounds that led to an electronic signature tune Derbyshire composed for a BBC sex education programme a few years earlier being rejected as ‘too lascivious’.
In William Peter Blatty’s Faith Trilogym all three films use the outré scenarios as a starting point for engaging discussions of faith and humanity.
In 1973, The Exorcist briefly became the most profitable film of all time, beaten by Jaws a couple of years later. Depending on whether you count Jaws as a horror film or a thriller, The Exorcist can be said to be the most successful horror film ever made. Naturally, not long after its release, the studio wanted a sequel, but neither writer/producer William Peter Blatty nor director William Friedkin was interested. This led to Warner Bros commissioning the risible Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, which was damned by critics and was listed as the second worst film ever made (following Plan 9 from Outer Space) in Michael Medved’s book The Golden Turkey Awards.
William Peter Blatty, needless to say, disowned the sequel; he was approached by Warner Bros after Exorcist II was completed to help promote the film, which he’d had no involvement with, and famously told the producers that he’d only be prepared to re-edit and redub the dialogue of the film if they wanted to release it as a comedy! Blatty himself hadn’t wanted to do a direct sequel anyway at this point and instead wanted to script an adaptation of his 1966 novel Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane, hoping he could interest Friedkin in directing it. While considering this project, Blatty rewrote much of the book and republished it as The Ninth Configuration in 1978, before directing the film himself a year later. Blatty went on to consider The Ninth Configuration to be the true sequel to The Exorcist. He then wrote the novel Legion in 1983, which he adapted into film as The Exorcist III in 1990, turning his series into a trilogy. Although not a direct sequel to The Exorcist (he wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane first), The Ninth Configuration shares some of the themes of his most famous script, and if you compare the plots of all three movies (which also all feature actor Jason Miller in decreasing amounts of screen time) you can see how they complement one another.
[SPOILER ALERT] If you haven’t seen all three films, the following paragraphs contain spoilers.
The Exorcist tells the story of a young girl who is possessed by a demon and a priest who has lost his faith but regains it in sacrificing himself to save her. The Ninth Configuration is about an astronaut who has become terrified of going into space due to the absence of God in the void, and his relationship with a Vietnam veteran who has created an alternate personality to avoid his past but conquers it by killing himself. The Exorcist III is about an undead killer possessing the bodies of the mentally ill and a cop who has lost his faith in humanity but regains it by killing his best friend. By making connections that weren’t actually present in The Exorcist, both Blatty and his fans make a case for these being direct sequels – Lt Cutshaw in The Ninth Configuration may be the unnamed astronaut at the party in The Exorcist that possessed Regan MacNeil informs, ‘You’re going to die up there’; and Exorcist III misremembers the relationship between police officer Lt Kinderman and Father Karras in the original as being best friends, when in fact they only meet once in the film and three times in the novel. Regardless of the direct connections between the films, each concerns the battle between good and evil, and the influence divine and demonic forces have on the world. Each film also has existed in at least two versions, although the director’s cut of Exorcist III was supposedly destroyed by the distributors.
Although memorable for its shocking content, The Exorcist is Blatty’s finest work because of the variety of fascinating three-dimensional characters whose lives intersect and are all touched by the demonic possession of Regan MacNeil. For that reason, the producer’s cut released in 2000, titled ‘The Version You’ve Never Seen’, is perhaps better than the original cut, if only because we get to spend a little more time with all the characters – although the additional CGI superimpositions of the face of Pazuzu on top of existing footage was a somewhat ill-advised addition by Blatty. The sequels suffer in comparison by having too many characters – The Ninth Configuration – or too few – Exorcist III. However, all three films use the outré scenarios as a starting point for engaging discussions of faith and humanity, which complement and add gravitas to each plot.
These elements are perhaps best exemplified by the reoccurring themes of sacrifice and confession in each film. Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) – a very literal deus ex machina, whose brief appearances in the film and novel bookend the story – dies in his attempt to exorcise the demon from the young girl in The Exorcist. Father Karras (Jason Miller), whose wrestling with faith and ability to connect with other people are some of the major plot points of the story, commands the demon to enter him instead and tries to destroy it by hurling himself through a window down the infamous long flight of steps. As we will see in Exorcist III, this sacrifice was vain, but at this point he has at least succeeded in curing Regan through his compassion rather than (in comparison with Merrin) his accomplishments as an exorcist, and as he lies dying on a cold street in Georgetown he is absolved of his sins through silent confession by squeezing the hand of another priest, Father Dyer, who administers his last rites.
The Ninth Configuration is set in a remote Gothic-style mansion (supposedly owned by a former horror film star), which has become a sanitarium for Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD and other mental afflictions. The idea of the traumatised Vietnam vet is something that has become almost tedious as a cinematic plot, following the likes of Oliver Stone’s various films on the subject and the Rambo franchise, but was a topic of more subversive films in the 60s and 70s. By presenting much of the dialogue as humorous, Blatty seems to place the film within the tradition of irreverent war comedies such as Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) and M*A*S*H (1970). In the 1960s, a comedy by William Peter Blatty would not have surprised anyone: before The Exorcist he was best known for co-writing the screenplay for Blake Edwards’s A Shot in the Dark (1964), the first sequel to The Pink Panther (1963), which set the template for all the sequels in the 1970s and beyond (making Clouseau the lead character and introducing Herbert Lom’s Dreyfuss and Burt Kwok’s Kato to the franchise). However, post-Exorcist, Blatty was famous for penning an Oscar-winning horror screenplay, and The Ninth Configuration sits in between horror and comedy with the set, mise en scène, lighting and atmosphere all comfortably evocative of the horror genre while the absurd dialogue is comedic. One could argue that much modern horror is unsuccessful because it treats horror as absurd, and the curious and atypical mixing of the tropes of each genre makes The Ninth Configuration a hard film to like or indeed sit through for nearly two hours.
The Ninth Configuration is released in the UK on Blu-ray on 25 April 2016 by Second Sight.
The variety of patients being treated in the story include a character (played by Jason Miller) who wishes to perform the works of Shakespeare entirely cast with dogs, and the aforementioned astronaut who has dreams of coming across the crucified Christ on the Moon and believes that God is in fact a giant foot. It’s worth noting Terry Gilliam’s giant foot first appeared in Monty Python’s Flying Circus three years after the publication of Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane, and many of the set pieces here are Pythonesque and similar to sketch-based comedy, which makes the running time somewhat hard to stomach. However, the scenes between Kane (Stacy Keach) and Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) are excellent and make the entire production worth watching, allowing for the self-indulgence elsewhere. Unlike the dramatic scenes of exorcism in The Exorcist and Exorcist III, no physical manifestations of the power of God or the devil are visible on screen here, beyond the architecture of the asylum and outside of Cutshaw and Kane’s subconscious; the latter dreams of the three crosses at Golgotha on his way into the asylum, a scene thankfully cut, as it originally had the three crucified making jokes about their predicament. Themes and lines of dialogue in The Exorcist and Exorcist III first appeared in Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane, such as an exchange between Cutshaw and Kane about the evil/goodness in the world, transposed to Father Dyer and Regan’s mother in The Exorcist, and references to the demon Legion from the gospels first appeared in another dream sequence in Kane.
As the plot continues, we realise that the lead character of The Ninth Configuration, who we believe to be Doctor Kane, is actually his brother Col Vincent Kane, who has taken on the identity of his sibling, with the acquiescence of the actual doctors (indeed the first doctor we see in the facility is also a fake, played by Blatty himself) to help cure him of his guilt over a massacre he committed during the war. His ultra-violent nature reasserts itself during a bar fight where Cutshaw is being tormented by Hell’s Angels, and, depending on which version of the film you watch, he either dies from wounds received during the fight, or stabs himself to atone for his sins. Like Karras, who kills himself at the end of The Exorcist to destroy the actual demon he now has inside him, Kane kills himself (in the original cinematic release and Blatty’s definitive 2002 DVD version), or allows himself to die (the 1998 ‘director’s cut’), to protect the world from his potential evil. Like Karras, Kane has acted as confessor to the various disturbed individuals he has taken on the role of doctor to, and he believes the ‘shock therapy’ of his death will help them deal with their own afflictions.
The third of William Peter Blatty’s protagonists whose surname starts with a ‘K’ (which, if you want to read anything into it, is the Arabic letter signifying ‘He wrote’, bearing in mind that the opening scenes of The Exorcist take place in Iraq) is Lt Kinderman, promoted from minor character from the first drama to the lead in Exorcist III. The character of Father Karras has taken the opposite journey, going from lead in The Exorcist to a minor one here, who apparently didn’t appear in the film at all in the cut initially presented by Blatty to the studio before they asked him to reshoot and add certain scenes.
Exorcist III is set in Georgetown, 12 (novel) or 17 (film) years after the events of The Exorcist and the same number of years after the execution of the ‘Gemini’ killer, a serial murderer fashioned after the real life ‘Zodiac’ in San Francisco (the subject of a film by David Fincher in 2007 and the inspiration for the villain in the first Dirty Harry in 1971). Now, over a decade after his death, the killings have resumed and his victims are people associated with the original exorcism. Lt Kinderman is back on the case, and having failed to satisfactorily solve the death of Burke Dennings in the first film (in the novel, it’s revealed that he knows Regan is the killer but defers to the clergy to deal with the problem), he is dealing with the legacy of that murder. His investigations lead him to an asylum – a location also common to all three films as Karras’s mother is also institutionalised prior to her death – where a formerly catatonic patient is revealed to be Father Karras, who is being kept from death by the spirit of the Gemini killer (played by Brad Dourif), a spirit that also takes possession of other, more ambulatory patients and uses them to perform his executions.
The original cut, more faithful to the novel, which Blatty presented to the studio as The Exorcist: Legion, was mainly a two-hander between Kinderman and the Gemini, and this still forms most of the second half of the film. However, Jason Miller was brought in to provide a more obvious visual reference to the resurrection of Karras, and Nicol Williamson added in the character of Father Mourning, another exorcist who arrives, like the original’s Merrin, in the final act. The addition of Miller is a welcome one, but Williamson, whose equally failed exorcism includes egregious scenes of fire and serpents, undoes much of the psychological horror that this film excels in. As Williamson was most famous for his hysterical (in every sense of the word) performance as Merlin in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), his acting style, combined with the addition of the number ‘III’ to the title unfortunately links this film more explicitly with Boorman’s dreadful Exorcist II, something Blatty was trying to avoid at all costs.
However, since the director’s cut of this film is lost (and, to be honest, there’s little difference between the various cuts of The Exorcist and The Ninth Configuration), we have to consider the version of Exorcist III that is available. Generally it’s a success, with genuinely creepy murder scenes and more of the memorable dream sequences – including a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as a blind man in heaven – that pepper all three films. Blatty has always written excellent dialogue, and here Kinderman is dryly witty throughout as a world-weary cop who has seen too much suffering to have any faith in humanity any more. The final scene of the 2000 producer’s cut of The Exorcist and the novel sees Kinderman and Father Dyer start a friendship, the conclusion of which (with Dyer’s murder by the Gemini) is seen here. Unfortunately, the actors who played these roles don’t reprise them; Lee J. Cobb died in 1976 and William O’Malley (a priest in real life), who was infamously slapped across the face by William Friedkin before he rolled camera on the climactic scene in The Exorcist, gave up acting after his one performance. The new Kinderman and Dyer are well cast though, George C. Scott is terrific as the savant-like detective in a crumpled coat and old car (Blatty wrote The Exorcist in the same year that Columbo was picked up for a series) and Ed Flanders is a fine replacement for O’Malley and one of four actors returning from The Ninth Configuration.
At the end of Exorcist III, Karras regains possession of his body and commands Kinderman to shoot him – suicide by cop – once more facilitating his own death to destroy the demon within him. In The Exorcist, Regan is possessed by a variety of personalities, albeit all the same demon, while in Exorcist III, the one personality inhabits a variety of bodies, reimagining the possession by Legion in the gospels. The suicides of the two Karras – at the end of his original life and his resurrected one – remind us of the pigs in the Bible destroying themselves in a river when the demons are driven out by Jesus.
In the other sequels, Karras and Dyer weren’t the only priests from the original to return – Max von Sydow reprised the role of Father Merrin in flashback in Exorcist II and Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd took over for Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist in 2004 and 2005 (the most extreme version of an Exorcist film existing in two versions). While these extrapolated prequel adventures of Merrin should generally be avoided (although Dominion has its moments) William Peter Blatty’s ‘faith trilogy’ is one of the most fascinating triptychs on film. The Exorcist is a genuine masterpiece in terms of directing, casting and writing (if not approaches to directing actors), The Ninth Configuration isn’t to my personal taste but it is an intriguing film, and Exorcist III, while a slightly odd and low-key conclusion to the trilogy, is an under-rated thriller that is well worth seeking out.
If watching the three films is slightly unsatisfying overall, due to the changes of pace, style and cast, there are other potential Blatty sequels and remakes in the wings, ignoring such recent homages as Possessed (1990), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Last Exorcism (2010) and The Rite (2011). Blatty has mooted a TV mini-series remake of The Exorcist to adapt all 320 pages of his original novel and wishes to collaborate again with Friedkin on an adaptation of his gripping new book The Redemption (a.k.a. Dimiter – another project of his with two different names), which again mixes elements of faith and unbelief, good and evil, light and darkness and tells the tale of a once evil, somewhat supernatural assassin, who becomes good during a terrible mission in Albania and goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The book is told somewhat obliquely in the style of The Third Man, and in my opinion The Redemption is a better thematic sequel to The Exorcist than The Ninth Configuration. So, if Friedkin and Blatty do bring this to the screen, then perhaps an even more satisfying trilogy (or tetralogy) will have been achieved than the one we have already.
For all the horror on screen in Blatty’s trilogy, the titling of this series as his ‘faith’ trilogy (by the writer himself and others) is apt. While short-sighted religious groups damned The Exorcist as being demonic on original release, the film and its follow-ups by the author actually champion faith in humanity and in a higher power represented by the conquering of evil and the appreciation of the sublime in the world around us. In the original novel, Blatty describes a moment shared by Fathers Dyer and Karras before the latter has his life destroyed by demonic possession: ‘The burnished rays of the setting sun flamed glory at the clouds of the western sky and shattered in rippling, crimson dapples on the darkening waters of the river. Once Karras met God in this sight. Long ago. Like a lover forsaken, he still kept the rendezvous.’ The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III aren’t books and films to convert a non-believer like me to Christianity, but they contain enough intrigue and beguiling storytelling to make readers ponder the questions they raise.
William Peter Blatty’s novel The Redemption was published in the UK by Piatkus Books on 3 February 2011 and is available in paperback and Kindle formats.
For me, film festivals are all about new films, so I normally shun retrospectives honouring classic films or deceased directors. The Berlinale’s presentation of eight Shibuya Minoru films was a special case: while all of the films were from the 1950s and 60s, they will have been a new discovery for most audience members, since Shibuya’s work has never been available on DVD outside Japan. A retrospective of Shibuya Minoru was screened at last November’s Tokyo FILMeX and picked up by Ulrich Gregor for the Berlinale’s Forum section. At the Berlinale, it seemed that audiences shared my prejudice against old films: the three Shibuya screenings I went to attracted a respectable showing, but the cinema was far from packed. It was a testament to the quality of Shibuya’s work that the screening ended with applause, even though the director had passed away some 30 years ago.
Shibuya’s 1960s films share some features with the work of Ozu Yasujiro, a more familiar name from this period. The characteristically low camera height would have felt normal to domestic audiences who sit, eat and sleep close to the floor; for Western viewers, this lower-level perspective on the action is unusual. Similar to Ozu, too, is Shibuya’s recurring theme of family relationships in a changed, and still changing, post-war Japan. The similarities end here, though: while Ozu tended to focus on quietly pleasing aesthetics, and tenderly moving portrayals of parent-child and husband-wife dynamics, Shibuya’s films are a livelier affair. They are marked by their humour, from light comic banter to satire. Yet because Shibuya’s films treat relevant topics, they are more than just entertainment: they complete the portrait of 1950s and 60s Japan, rounding out Ozu’s lyricism with silliness, sexuality, and even despair.
Yopparai tengoku (Drunkard’s Paradise, 1962)
This was the first Shibuya film I saw, and the one with the most sobering conclusion. At first, Drunkard’s Paradise portrays drinking as a minor (and entertaining) vice: its worst effects are embarrassing behaviour, a diminished bank account and an overnight stay in a prison cell. But the film also explores more serious potential consequences of drinking, through a believable scenario involving four central characters: a father and son, the son’s fiancée and a famous baseball player. When one of these characters becomes violent after drinking, it brings about a dramatic change in the lives of all four. One of the problems explicitly addressed is that at that time in Japan, drunk people were not held responsible for their actions.
Drunkard’s Paradise can become oppressive at times, as its characters are crushed by needless tragedy. The audience is rewarded, though, first by the film’s opening comic scenes, and later by complex character development. Although the film’s premise seems designed to show that alcoholics bring unhappiness on themselves, the film is not so simple or moralising as this. All four characters are sympathetic, inviting the audience’s compassion: their justifications can always be understood, if not accepted.
Kojin kojitsu (A Good Man, A Good Day, 1961)
After the bleak black and white images of Drunkard’s Paradise, the saturated colour of A Good Man, A Good Day was a welcome surprise. This was a film more uniformly comic in tone, although it too addressed important social issues, this time of class. The good man in question is an eccentric mathematics professor who wears his shoes on the wrong feet and ignores people who don’t interest him. This doesn’t help his daughter’s marriage prospects: her fiancé’s family is none too sure about hers.
The film’s even tone is more reminiscent of Ozu than Drunkard’s Paradise, but with Shibuya’s characteristic dash of comedy: the professor is unimpressed by his daughter’s fiancé until the young man has the nerve to call him an ‘old fart’. This points to the film’s satire on status: although the professor is venerated at the university, he only gains wider respect when he wins a prize from the Ministry of Culture. In a nod to contemporary reality, the professor’s daughter is adopted, having been orphaned by WWII bombings: this too is a source of prejudice against the family. Unlike Drunkard’s Paradise, though, A Good Man, A Good Day ends happily.
Daikon to ninjin (The Radish and the Carrot, 1964)
All three films that I saw happened to include the prolific actor Ryu Chishu in the role of the father. His acting capabilities were showcased beautifully, as the fathers are quite different in each film: a drunk, a scholar, and an ordinary man with a secret. Ryu also appeared in almost every one of Ozu’s films, but The Radish and the Carrot has an even stronger link to this director: it is based on an unfinished script that Ozu was working on just before he died. It is the story of a family man who disappears, leaving his wife and four daughters wondering whether he has run away or been kidnapped. Only in his absence does the man’s family really start to think about him, considering their relationship to him, and what secrets he might have. The film’s title stems from his daughter’s comment after he leaves: they think of him as ‘a radish or a carrot on the kitchen floor’ – necessary, then, but unremarkable. The film teaches us not to take our family for granted, certainly, but it also recognises that family can be a burden on us as individuals.
Purveyors of lo-fi psych Sic Alps have just released their third album, ‘Napa Asylum’, on Drag City. With themes that range from reincarnation to magic and schizophrenia, the trio’s new offering is a collection of lyrical and bittersweet tunes with addictive killer hooks. For more information and to download the album, visit the Drag City website. Below, Noel, Mike and Matt tell us about their favourite films.
Noel
1. Blind Beast (1969)
This Japanese film by Yasuzo Masumura must be one of my favourite films of all time. Why this is so is a mystery to me as I really don’t relate to the subject material at all. A blind sculptor goes to check out a nude life-size sculpture of a woman that he becomes obsessed with. She’s a struggling model and he convinces her to come back to his ‘studio’ to work on a piece. She is kidnapped and held captive in this bizarre warehouse (with no light) where the artist’s mother has been forced to take care of him. Each of the walls is covered in oversized body parts, one with ears, one with noses, one with arms, one with legs, etc. (I suppose there are more than four walls in the montage). In the middle of the room is a giant 50-yard-long sculpture of a female body that eventually becomes the terrain for a gradual descent into sado-masochistic sensory deprivation which escalates to result in mutilation and eventually a double suicide. I really have little interest in these sorts of themes but the film’s heavy tones and campy way just work. I’m glad that my nightmares are much tamer than this.
2. Stripes (1981)
This is one of the few VHS tapes that my folks purchased and had around the house while I was a kid. I was way too young to understand a lot of this kind of comedy at the time (‘Oh, I’m sorry, it must be all that cough syrup I had for breakfast…’) but I caught onto it in a strange way. It made me realise that Bill Murray is one of the most hilarious comedy actors of my time and helped me to develop a very skewed and irreverent view of the military at a very young age. I think I’ve seen this film 1,000 times.
3. Zachariah (1970)
Remember when you saw a young Don Johnson in A Boy and His Dog and kinda freaked out? Rewind five years and you’ve got DJ co-starring in this bizarre and wonderfully flawed psych-out Western, directed by George Englund. You’ve got cameos from the likes of the James Gang, Country Joe & the Fish, Doug Kershaw, and… wait for it… ELVIN JONES! EJ’s bit is brief and he plays the owner (and ‘man in black’) of an isolated mountain top saloon (the outside walls of the building are covered in skulls). Inside, the James Gang is playing but Elvin gets an itch and wrestles the drummer from his stool to take over and take a dominating drum solo for what seems like a solid, sweaty and monumentally cinematic five minutes! Just afterwards, there is a pretty important gunfight with the aforementioned DJ… no spoilers here. I’m serious, this film exists.
Mike
4. Mean Girls (2004)
Classic early Lindsay Lohan jam. Perfect for a rainy day.
5. Broadway by Light (1958)
Photographic short film of the lights of Times Square from the American photographer/satirist William Klein.
6. Eat the Document (1966)
By D.A. Pennebaker. I love to edit film and sing Bob Dylan songs.
Matt
7. The Hours and Times (1992)
Beatles fact or fiction? A short (60-minute) film that ponders the rumour that a 1963 pre-Beatlemania vacation to Barcelona by John Lennon and Brian Epstein may have involved a little more than just a little rest and relaxation. That the two went on holiday is fact. What happened in those four days is where this film takes some interesting liberties. Acted with nuance, its strengths lie in three-dimensional characterisations and solid dialogue. Ian Hart would play John Lennon again in Backbeat, but his handling of the role here is far superior.
8. Out of the Blue (1980)
Dennis Hopper’s third feature as director (in fact ‘hijacked’ from original producer Raymond Burr, and filmed during an admittedly low point in his personal and professional life), this is an unflinching study of the failures of the 60s generation and the irreparable ill-effects they have on the youth of the late 70s. It’s a sure bet that Linda Manz’s performance here is the reason why she was picked to play an unhinged mom in Harmony Korine’s Gummo (yes, consider this a double recommendation). Tough, dark, visceral.
9. Safe Men (1998)
One of the biggest sleepers of all time. My introduction to Sam Rockwell, Paul Giamatti, Steve Zahn, and Mark Ruffalo. A hilarious case of mistaken identity set in the Jewish-mafia-ridden town of Providence, R.I. Wait, that doesn’t make any sense, you say? This one is off the charts on its own logic, but by no means is it insufferably ‘weird’. On the contrary, the themes are quite ordinary, but the dialogue is hilarious and the premise is just enough off-kilter to allow for characters like Giamatti’s ‘Pork Chop a.k.a. Sasha’.
10. Withnail and I (1986)
This is a Mike and Matt favourite for what should be obvious reasons.
After giving us the bubblegum quirkiness of Kamikaze Girls and the candy-coloured melodrama of Memories of Matsuko, Tetsuya Nakashima returns with Confessions, a superbly accomplished, original take on the revenge tale, adapted from the debut novel by Kanae Minato.
Yuko Moriguchi is a meek teacher who decides to quit her job after the death of her four-year-old daughter. But before she leaves, she lets her class know that she believes her daughter was killed by two of the students. Knowing that the law won’t help her, she constructs an intricate revenge against them. Masterfully scripted, surprising, convincing, chilling, provocative, Confessions is an impressive achievement. Below, the laconic Tetsuya Nakashima answers Virginie Sélavy’s questions about his focus on young characters, his use of colours and his interest in female characters.
VS: What attracted you to Kanae Minato’s book?
TN: The novel is basically a monologue and the characters are full of hatred. These two facts attracted me.
Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko were also adapted from novels. Why do you like to base your films on books?
It was just by pure chance. For me the characters in these novels happened to be in tune with modern life and attractive.
Narratively, Confessions is a very unconventional and complex film, with the use of successive points of view offering different angles on the story. Were you interested in experimenting with structure and narration with this film?
It was thought to be extremely difficult to make this novel into a film. But I believed it was worthwhile to try all the more for this expected difficulty.
The film works almost like a diabolical clock, everything ticking towards the fulfilment of Yuko’s revenge. Is that the effect you wanted to create?
My purpose in making this film was to dig down the inner side of Yuko Moriguchi, rather than investigate further the fact of her revenge.
It is a fantastic study of cruelty, a theme that is already present in Memories of Matsuko to some degree. Is it something that you’re particularly interested in?
I’m always more fascinated by the faults of people than by the good. Not only cruelty, but also weakness and superficiality, frivolity, etc., are fascinating.
The film offers a brilliant and chilling dissection of the dynamics of the teenage group and peer pressure. The vision of young people presented in Confessions is quite disturbing. Do you feel it reflects Japan’s anxieties about its youth, or more generally anxieties of modern societies?
I spoke with many young people in order to make this film. I have the impression that they are exposed to fear and they feel scared. And they don’t understand the cause of the fear.
It also seems to me that Confessions parodies teenagers’ self-obsession and sentimentality in some ways. Is that fair to say?
What they say in the film are not necessarily their true feelings and intentions. The best way to enjoy this film is to imagine and speculate what they really want.
How did you select the soundtrack? Why the choice of Radiohead, Boris and the XX?
I happened to listen to them all while I was writing the script and thought they were nice.
Confessions is a much darker film than Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko.
The style of image is due to the contents of the film, so stylistic changes are natural with different films.
All your films show a great attention to colour, and in Confessions the colour palette is dominated by blues.
I tried to get rid of colours as much as I could and to control them so that the film would be dominated only by the cold atmospheric blue and blood red.
In Confessions, Kamikaze Girls and Matsuko, you focus on strong, unconventional female characters. Why this interest?
Probably I just like this type of women…
In Matsuko and Confessions, they are more specifically unfortunate, tragic female characters, but while Matsuko suffers and doesn’t really fight back, Yuko turns into a frighteningly masterful avenger. Were you interested in a more active, and more morally ambiguous, type of female character in Confessions?
Both Matsuko and Yuko have strengths and weaknesses. And they both make bad decisions in life. I love them for being really human.
How was the film received in Japan?
It was a huge hit and I received variety of reactions and responses, which made me happy as I wanted it to be that way.
How did you react when Confessions was selected at Japan’s official entry in the Best Foreign Film category of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards?
Very surprised! But it didn’t make it to the final…
Pamela Jahn and Alison Frank send their first report from the Berlinale. Check this section for more on the festival in the coming days.
Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, 2010)
The title of Monte Hellman’s feature comeback after 20 odd years could serve as a tag line for the 61st edition of the Berlinale. The official programme is patchy as ever and relies on a number of high-profile American headliners in the competition, with the Coen brothers’ True Grit leading the way, while Hellman’s Road to Nowhere sadly only screened at the European Film Market. Deftly blurring the line between cinema and reality, the film depicts a young director shooting a crime drama based on a true story, using the actual locations as a source of inspiration. During the shoot, he falls in love with his lead actress, who uncannily resembles the real-life crime’s femme fatale, and soon things get alarmingly tangled up, especially in the mind of one imaginative member of the crew. Although there is no denying that its decidedly artificial touch and wooden dialogue make this a flawed film, the director’s approach feels way more complex, intriguing and worthy of attention than the equally film-focused Silver Bullets/Art History, Joe Swanberg’s latest Mumblecore outing, about a troubled filmmaker sabotaging his own work out of jealousy and creative frustration, which screened in the Forum strand. Ultimately, Road to Nowhere amounts to a series of bravura noir scenes in which the tension and emotion sometimes build up too slowly, but a great meta-B-movie feel and fitting cinematography make it an enjoyable watch. PJ
The Devil’s Double (Lee Tamahori, 2011)
A more rigorous yet not necessarily more rewarding genre treat was Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double. The film pulls us headlong into the hubris, immorality, waywardness and brutality that dominated the life of Uday Hussein, the elder son of Saddam, in his heyday before and after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Tamahori focuses on Uday’s efforts to recruit a body double to protect him at public appearances, following his father’s example. Uday finds the perfect match in Latif, an army lieutenant and former school mate, who has no choice but to consort with the devil. Latif has a hard time watching Uday’s brutal and humiliating actions, and matters become complicated when he gets off with one of his boss’s favourite lovers. Based on a book by the real Latif Yahia, the film paints an uncompromising picture of Uday, and recounts events that may or may not have happened. Dominic Cooper plays both Uday and Latif, a double role that is used as much for cheap comic effects as to create an air of captivating, effortless cool. This is backed up by a punchy soundtrack and top-notch production design, which cover up the flaws in the narrative and characters. For what it’s worth, The Devil’s Double shows that a different view of the Iraq war is possible, from a different end of the aesthetic spectrum. PJ
Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)
Ten-year-old Laure moves to a new flat with her parents and little sister. When the neighbourhood kids assume from her clothes and haircut that she is a boy, she doesn’t correct them, and introduces herself as Mikaël. In its aesthetics, this film is primarily about childhood, and the instinctively tactile, visual and direct way that children interact with the world: cuddling with their parents or tumbling about together in physical play, sensitive to the shapes, colours and textures of their stuffed animals, dress-up clothes, markers and modelling clay. Outside the apartment, when Laure plays with children of her own age, adult concerns of gender begin to intervene: the boys playing football look like miniature men, with their shirtless swagger and high-fives. While Laure does her best to adopt these mannish mannerisms, the point is not that she is a garçon manqué. It is that society focuses on the unimportant trappings of gender, like make-up and dresses, forgetting that more important human qualities are not unique to either gender. Laure’s father, for instance, is kinder and gentler than her mother. In Sciamma’s world, everyone should have the opportunity to play, be creative and show affection, whatever their sex. AF
Dance Town (Jeon Kyu-hwan, 2010)
Jung-Nim and her husband live in Pyongyang, and the little we see of their life together seems happy, unusually affectionate even. The husband’s job allows him to travel and bring home foreign products unavailable in North Korea, like pornographic DVDs, which they watch together. When a neighbour snitches on them, Jung-Nim’s husband is arrested: his last words to her come in a phone call, instructing her to escape to South Korea, where he hopes to join her later. When she arrives in Seoul, the South Korean government gives Jung-Nim a fresh start, but she can’t stop thinking about her husband.
Some of Jung-Nim’s new friends are curious about the difference between the two Koreas. Foreign audiences may also choose this film out of curiosity, and it does offer an engaging portrait of daily life in Seoul. But this film will resonate most for its universal themes about urban life and immigration. Some locals are jealous that refugees seem to have it easy, with a free apartment and stipend from the government. Jung-Nim, while grateful, seems underwhelmed by the advantages of life in the South. If you are lonely (as many urban dwellers are), nothing else matters. AF
‘Go on! Run your balls off!’ shouts Sister Agatha, when her village-men turn in fear as the Turkish military fleet approach the Italian shores of Otranto. She is MarÃa Casares, best known as Death in Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), bellowing insults at the men who have tortured women from her convent as a wonderful, naughty nun in Flavia the Heretic (1974), directed by Gianfranco Mingozzi. She’s looking forward to their comeuppance. We’ve also seen her enjoying a baptismal release of her bladder en plein air on the hillside and introduce Sister Flavia to the pleasures of holy swaying on your haunches while kneeling in prayer. ‘How many rude things can we make nuns do?’ ask the producers of exploitation sub-genre nunsploitation. Arguably, any exploitation-style efforts to engage our social consciousness are dumped, despite the producers’ claims that the films are based on ‘actual’ historical events. Flavia the Heretic is loosely based on the slaughter of the Catholic martyrs by the Ottoman Turks in Otranto in the late 15th century. But this simply provides a historical backdrop for a whole lot of sleaze. The central characters are revenge-driven, misandrous women. In Killer Nun (1978), directed by Giulio Berruti, with a nod to giallo, the anonymous antagonist snarls to her priest at confessional that she is haunted by traumatic abuse and wants to avenge herself on all men; Flavia too wants revenge for the patriarchal limitations placed on her – her only options are marriage, either to the church or to a man. These films became famous in the 70s when they were shredded and banned for their overt extreme violence and sexual deviance. They currently enjoy a reprieve as recently uncut versions have become available on DVD by distributors such as Shameless Screen Entertainment.
As an excuse for porn, the unleashed repression of nuns is a good one. There are scenes upon scenes of nuns jumping at the chance to indulge their passions: ‘no woman could berate sex completely!’ is the subtext. It is a delicious moment when Anita Ekberg as Sister Gertrude in Killer Nun changes her clothes en route into town and transforms to familiar on-screen Amazonian siren – she sits in a bar, black-stockinged and smoking an impossibly long cigarette to twangy lounge music. She eyes up a wooden but fairly good-looking man at the bar and so the taboo-busting money shot ensues when we see Ekberg enjoy carnal gratification after what we can assume has been some time. Not just that, but the old man she’s going to sneak home to later is, in the eyes of the Catholic church, somewhat important. In (Flavia the Heretic, medieval Italian nuns loosen up after they give shelter to female members of the Cult of the Tarantula who are on their annual bender. The nuns are influenced by the women’s hyper-sexual trance state and reel around, shedding their garments and rubbing themselves against columns and each other – and so on to the whole wealth of cheeky spectacles to be had in women-only convents.
Within this fairly formulaic titillation are some imaginative sequences. Nuns dealing with the seepage of their desires is an opportunity for some vibrant visions where their uncensored hankerings come to the surface. The success of these scenes is mainly due to some good pairings of cinematographer and soundtrack composer. In Flavia the Heretic, Alfio Contini (The Night Porter, 1974) teams up with composer Nicola Piovani. After everything goes wrong in the bedroom (Flavia wants to go on top but her new Turkish lover does not want to be dominated), Flavia gets high on mind-bending incense and the vision that follows is a montage complemented by a haunting electronic occult-folk soundtrack: Sister Agatha rises from the dead grinning insanely, blood pours from stigmata, a nun bound to a cross is juxtaposed with a suspended disemboweled cow, a nude gamine woman crawls into the carcass, another sister is outstretched on a table, mock-devoured by more naked people. All this could suggest female subjugation – woman as meat, if the actors/characters didn’t look like they were having so much fun. Play-biting and tousled hair flowing from wimples is not sinister. Rather more, this is a stylised stirring flesh feast.
In Killer Nun, Sister Gertrude believes herself to be the possible killer of patients in the psychiatric hospital she is stationed at. Her headaches from post-brain surgery have led to morphine addiction and unsettling blackouts. Her hallucinations are pieced together over a psychedelic score by Alessandro Alessandroni, who worked closely with Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone on Italian Western scores, and cinematographer Antonio Maccoppi. His soundtrack is what spotlights Killer Nun among other giallo fare. He uses a range of instruments including 12-string guitar, banjo, classical guitar, electric guitar, mandolin, early drum machine and others (Cinema Suicide blog interview with Tim Fife, Aug 2008) to produce an uncanny discordance suitable for a scene that reflects Gertrude’s drug-induced state. The sequence moves between Gertrude’s vision, a close-up of a unconvincing but gory brain operation, her overbearing mother, a nude man laid out in a morgue, who Gertrude bends down to kiss, and stoned Gertrude in her own bedroom in the hospital being resuscitated by one of the patients. The intercutting of realities to the giallo guitars peaks when the patient is bludgeoned to death and pushed out of a window, seemingly by ‘diminished responsibility’ Gertrude.
My reading of these films, then, is about an enjoyment of the sheer daftness of saucy nuns and the manner in which their over-spilling ardor is manifested in such bizarre ways. I think this is the way into the films, as opposed to tracing the closed misogyny in the narratives. I haven’t gone into the sprawl of gender issues here – where revenge plots experiment with women exerting their right to freedom without mapping out the society where it could exist: Flavia eventually punishes her father, but only with the protection of the Turkish soldiers, who in turn persecute her. Also, at one remove from this, arguably the Italian male filmmakers use the nun milieu as a framing device for their male gaze. But when Anita Ekberg sways beatifically across the screen it is difficult to imagine her being oppressed by anything.
Author Mary Horlock’s original, compelling debut The Book of Lies is like a murder mystery in reverse. It opens with 15-year-old Catherine Rozier’s confession, as she claims the crime of killing her ex-best friend, on a Guernsey cliff edge, and then spools backwards to ravel a tangled web of secrets, hidden truths and the suppressed history of the island under German occupation in WW2. Below, Mary Horlock explains why her filmic alter ego would be Totoro in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro. Eithne Farry
It’s difficult to explain why I want to be a giant, furry tree-dwelling monster, but My Neighbour Totoro just has that effect on me. Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, it was the first Studio Ghibli film I ever saw, and I’ve since worked my way through them all. I return again and again to My Neighbour Totoro for lots of reasons. There’s the beautifully drawn landscapes that jump alive at every turn, there’s the two sisters, Mei and Satsuki, and their wide-eyed wonder as they explore their new home, and then there’s the fantastical wood spirits that just happen to live in the trees next door.
It’s Mei who first follows two mysterious rabbit-like creatures through the undergrowth and into the hollow of a large camphor tree. There she finds the sleeping Totoro. He’s this vast bulk of fur, but Mei merrily bounces onto his belly and clings to him, giggling, as he slowly wakes up and roars like a gale force wind. I love the fact that she’s not at all scared of him, but instead just asks him his name.
Totoro is a completely surreal creation – a Cheshire cat mouth with bristling black whiskers, pointed rabbit ears, and despite his considerable girth he can perch on a branch like a wise old owl. And of course he has magical powers and makes seeds grow into trees overnight, and he can levitate over the earth on a tiny spinning top, and he has a Catbus. Oh yes, when Mei disappears and Satsuki asks Totoro for help he summons a grinning giant cat with a surprisingly spacious interior who bounds across the countryside to find little Mei.
I want to be Totoro and ride on the Catbus, and fly on a magic spinning top over endless rice fields. Who wouldn’t?
Mary Horlock
The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock is published by Canongate.
Much of what we see in Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is impressionistic and inconsequential, a shadow play of strange superimpositions and light dancing on surfaces. At the same time, much of the dialogue remains prosaic, and is delivered in curiously flat tones. As a result, a considerable amount of the narrative functions of the film are handed over to two elements of the soundtrack: the voice-over and the (mostly diegetic) music.
The major thematic concerns of the film are set in place by the contrast between the near-ubiquitous voodoo drumming and the brief fragment of Chopin’s Etude in E, Opus 10. The opposition here is not, however, the obvious one between white and black, reason and superstition, or Christian missionaries and voodoo priests – as the film soon makes clear, such boundaries are not nearly as stable as they may at first seem.
The Chopin piece comes to stand, rather, for a kind of absent big Other in a place where all moral authority seems to have collapsed. Paul Holland (Tom Conway) thus plays the romantic piano repertoire as if to force some dignity, some reserve upon himself in a desperate situation. The drums, by contrast, represent what Lacan called ‘lamella’, a sort of undead persistence, a horrifyingly plastic partial object; as such, the sound is associated as much with the baroquely polygonal lines of desire connecting almost all the film’s characters as with the voodoo ceremonial these nets get caught up in. As Slavoj Žižek says of the lamella, voodoo magic, as imagined by Tourneur, does not so much exist as insist.
On the other hand, there is the voice-over, which comes in two parts, both of which pertain to aspects of the Christian liturgy: the fraught confession of the nurse, Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), which opens the film, and the prayer that closes the film. But the voice-over does not cover the full extent, or even the greater part of the storytelling, with practically all the backstory being delivered in the form of song. The ‘Papa Legba’ song that we hear in the voodoo ceremony delivers the mythological background, while the family history of the film’s central half-brothers and the wife that came between them is sung by calypso singer Sir Lancelot, who makes a cameo appearance singing his ‘Fort Holland Calypso Song’, written especially for the film. Stripped of its original title, its perverse mystical associations – and sometimes even its writers’ credit – the tune would later become a major international hit for groups such as Peter Tosh and the Wailers, the Kingston Trio, and even Madness.
Robert Barry
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
