Cast: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser
France 2010
79 mins
Quentin ‘Mr Oizo’ Dupieux’s gamble of making a serial-killer thriller with a tyre in the role of the psychopath had Electric Sheep salivating in anticipation. It starts well, opening with a US cop in the desert warning spectators armed with binoculars that sometimes there is ‘no reason’ for what happens in films. Their entertainment programme begins when a tyre thrown away in the desert comes back to life and starts exterminating the animals in its path, blowing them up with the sheer force of its evil vibrations. So far so good, but all the deaths follow exactly the same pattern, so that it soon becomes very repetitive. Inventive cruelty is one of the essential ingredients of a good horror film and it is sorely lacking here. The tension and terror one could hope for fail to materialise, and it isn’t imaginatively surreal enough to hold the audience’s attention. A great idea, but ultimately a disappointingly underwhelming experience.
Rubber screens at Sheffield Showroom Cinema presented by Celluloid Screams on Tuesday 5 April and at The Ritzy (London) presented by Midnight Movies and Culture Shock on Friday 8 April.
Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.
Following apprenticeships at various London film studios, Nicolas Roeg worked his way up to camera operator on, among others, Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) before gaining writing credits on Cliff Owen’s A Prize of Arms (1961) and Lawrence Huntington’s Death Drums along the River (1962). It was as a cinematographer that Roeg established his reputation as a distinctive cinematic visionary. Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Franí§ois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1965) and Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) all in some way looked forward to Roeg’s own visually and thematically arresting work as director, where colour was used to symbolic effect to probe taboo subjects and linearity was eschewed in favour of complex time leaps and splintered narratives.
Beginning with Performance (1968, co-directed by Donald Cammell), a tale of identity crisis set amid London’s late 60s criminal underworld and taking in Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Roeg became the leading light of British film, establishing a run of films that remains unparalleled in contemporary cinema. Frequently focusing on characters cut adrift from their usual moral and physical surroundings, Roeg seemed unstoppable until first Bad Timing (1980) and then Eureka (1983) ran into problems with their uncomprehending distributors. The director found himself at odds with an industry increasingly resistant to his pioneering vision and tendency to shine a light on areas of the human psyche many would prefer left darkened.
Newly restored in 4K, The Man Who Fell to Earth will return to UK cinemas for a 40th anniversary reissue on 9 September 2016. For venue details check the Park Circus website.
In more recent years, The Man Who Fell to Earth has arguably emerged as perhaps the director’s most characteristic and richly rewarding work. Adapted from the Walter Tevis novel by Paul Mayersberg (who would also script Eureka), it’s a film that takes pleasure in resisting categorisation, retaining the science fiction origins of its source material while heavily accentuating Tevis’s less overt allusions to capitalism, corporate power (the film remains the closest Roeg has come to any kind of political statement) and the alienating effects of contemporary American society. The first non-children’s film that I can ever actually remember seeing, it is a work that seemingly contains all the infinite possibilities of cinema (often in a single frame), and I return to it periodically for inspiration and stimulation. It is not and never has been universally loved. It was cautiously received at the time by critics, as so many of Roeg’s films were: Nigel Andrews, writing in The Financial Times, accused it of having ‘enough ideas for six different films; and far too many, in my opinion, for one’.
Initially favouring Peter O’Toole for the central role of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who comes to a fertile earth in order to save the inhabitants of his own dying planet, only to become marooned as a potent cocktail of sex (courtesy of Candy Clark), gin and television slowly take control, Roeg instead dipped once more into a pop star pool that had proved so effective with Mick Jagger and Performance. Roeg became convinced that David Bowie, the recent subject of a BBC Alan Yentob documentary charting a tour of America of equally irresistible and infinite temptation, was in fact his Newton. The financiers (the film was among the first ever British-financed movies to be made in the United States) failed to share the conviction, expressing their scepticism as to whether the singer could actually act. Roeg remained undaunted, exclaiming, ‘what do you think he’s doing when he gets up in front of 60,000 people to perform?’ Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.
Beginning with stock NASA footage of a space rocket leaving earth before cutting to a vessel - assumingly jettisoned from the rocket - crash-landing back to earth in a New Mexico lake, Roeg and Mayersberg frequently undercut the genre elements of their material (in fact they don’t seem especially interested in the novel at all) in favour of thematic juxtapositions and kaleidoscopic cross-cultural allusion. In one of the more overt, a randy college professor later seconded into Newton’s expanding business empire (the alien arrives on earth with a small stock of gold rings that he swaps for cash and with a number of futuristic product patents that will allow him to amass a fortune), Bryce (Rip Torn), is seen lingering over an image of Brueghel’s Icarus. The Man Who Fell to Earth also incorporates W.H. Auden’s contemplation of the Greek myth (‘the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’), emphasising Roeg’s interest in the notion of watching and being watched.
When Newton takes his first tentative steps on earth he is observed by an unknown spectator, who will again later appear at the alien’s bedside once he has undergone a series of painful and incapacitating medical examinations. Newton himself turns voyeur. Initially using television to learn about his new planet and humankind through the medium’s multiple images and signals, he fashions a wall of television screens to which he ultimately becomes addicted. Television helps fuel Newton’s increasing paranoia, with Roeg and Mayersberg suggesting that the modern technological age of observation and endless consumerism is corrosive. There are elements of this also perhaps in the film’s incredibly prescient presentation of an increasingly global America nostalgic for its past (the music of Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and the flashbacks to sequences involving early pioneers, glimpsed by a weary Newton from his limousine), yet enthralled to the point of obsession by the notion of its future. The Man Who Fell to Earth concludes with a shot of the crown of Newton’s head, an image similar to that of Turner in Performance just before Chas puts a bullet through it, revealing a man utterly broken and adrift, who has undergone the process of becoming human only to discover, to his cost and that of his homeland, what a wilfully destructive race we are.
This review was first published in April 2011 for the UK DVD release of the film by Optimum.
Cast: Rudolf Hrušínský, Vlasimil Bfodský, Václav Neckář, Jitka Zelenohorská
Czechoslovakia 1969
94 mins
Because Menzel’s film is explicitly set during communism, it is hard not to focus on the bitter reality of the situation.
Those who know Jiří Menzel from his Oscar-winning debut feature Closely Observed Trains (1966) may find Larks on a String (1969) disappointing. Unlike the earlier film, Larks is in colour, but this attribute only serves to accentuate the ugliness of the film’s drab and bleak setting: a scrap metal yard in 1940s Czechoslovakia. Here, hard labour is the means of re-educating opponents of the new communist regime: a group of female prisoners who attempted to defect to the West, and a collection of men who are guilty of middle-class origins. Happily, Larks is a comedy, and so not entirely as oppressive as it sounds.
There are two types of humour in the film: political satire and romantic comedy. The satire would be more enjoyable if it were not so direct. In The Party and the Guests (1966), for example, Jan Nemec created a metaphor for authoritarianism in a party where the guests were implicitly forbidden to leave. In this abstract context, it was easy to identify and condemn the hypocrisy of the host and the guests who tried to win his favour. Because Menzel’s film is explicitly set during communism, it is hard not to focus on the bitter reality of the situation: despite the prisoners’ attempts to identify and laugh at the absurdity of their situation, the ultimate power of the authorities to control their lives makes the film more tragic than comic. This is particularly so because the film focuses mainly on the prisoners: the villains in power make occasional appearances, and so can only be occasionally mocked.
The two-stranded romantic comedy is by far the most winning element of the film. Angel, the soft-hearted guard in charge of the female prisoners, marries a young Roma girl named Terezka. Her difficulties in adapting to married life, and particularly to a fixed abode, make for some enjoyably playful scenes. There is also a romance between two prisoners, Pavel and Jitka. As the male and female prisoners are supposed to be kept strictly separate, their relationship calls for ingenuity. The underlying faith in the determination of the individual spirit brings a much-needed element of optimism to the film.
Second Run’s release comes with liner notes by leading academic Peter Hames. Although his essay at times feels like a barrage of information, it usefully outlines the numerous collaborations between Menzel and writer Bohumil Hrabal: Larks was based on one of Hrabal’s short story collections of the same name. There is also a brief contribution from Jaromír Šofr, the film’s cinematographer. He explains the impact of censorship on Larks, which was ultimately banned after the Warsaw Pact invasion brought the Prague Spring to an end. Larks was not released until 1990, when it won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Best of all, the DVD includes an extra feature: a short video piece by Menzel himself, specially made for this release, where the director talks about Larks, communism and film in general.
This review refers to the original DVD release of the film by Second Run in 2011. The special features are the same as included on the new box-set edition. For a full list of extra contents, visit the Second Run website.
Writers: Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, Lucio Fulci
Original title:E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilí
Cast: Catriona MacColl, David Warbeck, Cinzia Monreale
Italy 1981
87 mins
Among fans of graphic, visceral horror, there are few names as highly regarded as that of Lucio Fulci. Thirteen years after his death, Fulci is still considered one of Europe’s most important purveyors of cinematic terror and his greatest films are regular fixtures in fans’ and critics’ best-of lists. In a career that spanned nearly half a century, Fulci directed more than 50 feature films as well as a number of documentaries and had countless credits as screenwriter, producer, assistant director and special effects technician. His extensive filmography includes a variety of different genres, from comedies, musicals and Westerns to historical dramas and soft-core erotica. Although his efforts in these fields were occasionally excellent, Fulci’s best (and best-known) work was in the horror genre. It is there that he made his lasting contributions to international cult cinema.
The pinnacle of Fulci’s career came in 1981 with the release of The Beyond. The second part of a conceptually linked trilogy that includes City of the Living Dead (1980) and The House by the Cemetery (1982), The Beyond is the tale of an abandoned Louisiana hotel situated over one of the seven gates of hell. As the hotel’s new owner, Eliza Merrill (Catriona MacColl) must deal with the supernatural visions and manifestations that begin when she starts to renovate the old building. One of the workmen is severely injured after he sees something in one of the upstairs windows, while the plumber has his eyes gouged out by a thing in the cellar. Eventually the dead begin to rise, as the hotel expands its malign influence. With the assistance of the sceptical Dr McCabe - played by Italian cinema stalwart David Warbeck - Eliza must find a way out of the growing nightmare.
As this synopsis suggests, The Beyond features plenty of Fulci’s trademark graphic gore, including the notorious crucifixion scene and a Scanners-style head explosion, perpetrated on a young child, no less. Suffice to say, it is not a film for the squeamish. Not all of these episodes work as well as they might, most noticeably the ‘spider attack’ scene, in which the special effects are laughably poor, despite being generally excellent throughout the rest of the film. Like Dario Argento in Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), Fulci uses The Beyond‘s basic storyline as a means of connecting his increasingly grotesque and terrifying set-pieces, paying little attention to the overall structure of the film. This has led to a certain amount of hostility from first-time viewers, frustrated by Fulci’s refusal to maintain a linear progression or a solid internal logic. However, he does succeed in his primary goal of presenting the horror film as a nightmare, where little makes sense but everything is inherently frightening. He is ably assisted in this by Sergio Salvati’s excellent cinematography and Fabio Frizzi’s score, both of which help to establish the atmosphere of unease that filters through the entire film.
The chances are that fans of Euro-horror and cult movies - or just ambitious horror films in general - will already have sampled the alien delights of The Beyond, but anyone who hasn’t could do worse than pick up Arrow’s forthcoming Region 2 special edition. Wisely, Arrow have managed to include the extras from the earlier Grindhouse-Anchor Bay edition, including the MacColl and Warbeck’s commentary track, recorded shortly before the latter’s death. On top of this, we have a new and near-flawless print of the film itself, a commentary from Fulci’s daughter Antonella, new featurettes on MacColl, co-star Cinzia Monreale (a.k.a. Sarah Keller), SFX technician Giannetto De Rossi and Fulci himself. One final question remains, however: why is the opening sequence in black and white, as opposed to the sepia tones seen in the Sergio Salvati-approved Grindhouse edition?
Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimetres per Second is having a belated DVD release on March 14. With only one feature film, three shorts and one medium-length work to his name, Makoto Shinkai is a thirty-something animé director who has generated far more praise than his relative youth and short career would seem to deserve. Dubbed the new Hayao Miyazaki by the animé press, this is something of a misnomer as the two directors have very little in common other than creating films with greater emotional depth and a more singular vision than those of their peers. However, while Miyazaki works primarily in the nostalgic fantasy genre for a child/family audience, Shinkai makes thoughtful, austere films that tap into contemporary concerns about humanity’s relationship with technology and how it both connects and separates us from the people around us. While 5 Centimetres per Second is slightly underwhelming compared to his previous two films The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star, his films at their best show a director who has a genuinely affecting visual aesthetic that recalls the live action films of Andrei Tarkovsky. It is this sensitivity to form and place that have earned the director his reputation, cemented by the fact that his first two shorts were made by the director almost entirely by himself on a home computer.
A beautiful but unkind young professional from Seoul goes back to the remote island where she grew up for a break. There she is reunited with her sweet-natured childhood friend Bok-nam, married to a violent man and badly mistreated by his family. Bok-nam bears the beatings and indignities she is subjected to for the sake of her daughter, but one day, a tragic event tips her over the edge and she turns from subservient wife into violent avenger.
Directed by Yang Chul-soo, this South Korean feature debut has the feel of a folk or fairy tale. Denouncing the oppression of women in Korean society, it tells a compelling story, but the characterisation is two-dimensional and it comes across as very heavy-handed. That said, it is interesting to note that the film shares similarities with another South Korean film released the same year. Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid was another slow-burn Korean film about the exploitation of a lower-class woman that culminated in a stunningly extravagant, violent dénouement. Considering also Yang Ik-joon’s Breathless (2009), it seems that what may come across as excessive to Western audiences is in fact a strong response to an acutely unfair and brutal state of affairs in Korean society. For further explanation of the context and the real events that inspired the film, see an extract from a promotional interview with Yang Chul-soo below.
Both Bedevilled and The Housemaid follow a similarly unusual structure, proceeding at a slow pace for most of the film until the abuse of the central character erupts into a spectacularly violent ending. In Bedevilled, the sudden change of tone makes the blood-splattered finale all the more shocking. Although flawed, Bedevilled paints an intriguing portrait of a woman faced with the most extreme injustice and creates an original and engaging horror heroine in Bok-nam.
Virginie Sélavy
PROMOTIONAL INTERVIEW WITH YANG-CHUL-SOO
To what extent is Bedevilled inspired by real events?
Yang Chul-soo: There were three shocking cases that shook Korean society, which had given me inspiration. First was the KIM Boo-nam case in 1991 when KIM, a 30-year-old woman, murdered a man who used to be her next-door neighbour and raped her when she was 9 years old. Second was the KIM Bo-eun/KIM Jin-gwan case in 1992 when KIM Bo-eun, with the help of her boyfriend KIM Jin-gwan, murdered her stepfather who had abused her sexually for 10 years. And the last was a case where a large group of high school boys had sexually abused two junior high school girls, who were sisters, in Milyang for over a year. Out of around 40, only three assaulters had received a mere 10 months’ sentence, and the police mishandled the case, one officer implying it was the girls’ fault. All three cases had extreme results because the bystanders showed no concern.
Why have you decided to tackle Korean women’s social status in your first feature film?
Women in Korean society are the weak, but they are not the weak kind. Women are discriminated against and have obligations under the feudalistic customs, but Korean society has in fact been maintaining itself as it is and developing because there are mothers who strived to protect their families. In reality, women and mothers are mostly given supporting roles, so I wanted to have a woman as the main lead in my film. The film is a personal dedication to my own mother and all the mothers in Korea.
Can you say some words about the gender politics of the movie?
I’m not sure how to describe this but although the film deals with gender issues, I had not considered politics in it. I only mirrored out the general relationships between Korean men and women that I had noticed, but without any political views. The film shows a complex aspect of the men oppressing the women, the suppressed women putting the men on a pedestal while oppressing another woman, and that woman to take revenge against those women and men. I believe this sort of evil circle happens because humans, regardless of their sexes, are weak beings.
Cast: Anne Parillaud, Arthur Dupont, Thierry Frémont
France 2010
79 mins
One year on from the violent death of her son, Sarah (Anne Parillaud) is still clearly not the full shilling. Medicated and disconnected, she is sleepwalking through her job as a nurse. She is sent home to get some clearly needed rest, and driving down a narrow country lane she runs, literally, into Arthur (Arthur Dupont), a young man apparently running from a burglar he caught in the act, a bloodied lunatic (Thierry Frémont) who dogs them with his car as she tries to drive him to safety. Two police at a roadblock had indeed warned her earlier about a housebreaker in the area, but Arthur isn’t telling all he knows, and there are worse crimes than burglary…
Clocking in at a lean 79 minutes, Caroline and Eric du Potet’s In Their Sleep is a creepy little psycho-thriller that makes the most out of comparatively little; it has a location or three, some cars, Eric Neveux’s effective (Theremin!) score and a small cast, but exploits these resources to great effect. The du Potets have clearly spent some time working out their tale and how best to tell it; information about the characters and what’s going on emerges gradually in well-timed flashbacks, and as much through visual clues, physical acting and expression as through the minimal dialogue. While much of the business of the film will be familiar to genre fans (home invasions, chases, moonlit attacks, narrow escapes) it is made more interesting by the psychological dynamics. None of the characters appears to be quite in their right mind, and, as the title suggests, In Their Sleep is preoccupied with different states of consciousness: insomnia, death and coma, being knocked out and coming to. From the start, it has a fractured waking dream quality, where terrible unexplained things can happen in broad daylight, and from then on nobody has the full picture, and the truth remains elusive. We know more than any of the people on screen, but the filmmakers aren’t above screwing with our perceptions either.
Sarah and Arthur are the heart of the film, both are damaged in their own ways, and it’s their relationship that gives the film some bite and depth. She clearly begins to see a substitute son in Arthur, and can’t stop her maternal instincts overcoming her reason. He begins to find something in her that he clearly needs. It’s a goddamn Freudian minefield, and well played by Parillaud and Dupont as they swing through states of distrust and affection (and a queasy sexual attraction).
It’s a class act, and relatively restrained, which may be a problem for anyone expecting anything along the lines of Switchblade Romance or Frontiers, who may be disappointed by the paucity of overt violence or visual hysteria. But it walks its own path, the understatement just makes some scenes more unsettling, and while In Their Sleep is essentially just a neat low-budget thriller along the lines of many others, Arthur and Sarah will linger in the memory.
Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders
USA 1941
106 mins
Having left Germany and his wife - the Nazi-sympathising Thea von Harbou - behind, Fritz Lang was soon well established in Hollywood. Although he was never allowed the huge budgets that he’d been given at UFA to make Metropolis (1927) he applied his talents to many successful genre films - Westerns like The Return of Frank James (1940) and crime dramas such as You Only Live Once (1937) and Fury (1936). He later became one of the key directors of film noir.
Man Hunt is an espionage thriller with a twist. Shot in 1941 and released six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is a pro-war/anti-neutrality piece of propaganda. It was one of a cycle of films produced despite an act of neutrality that prohibited such overt anti-German sentiments - although the Lease/Lend Act of March 1941 had officially confirmed US support (financial at least) to the Allies.
Introduced by the title ‘Somewhere in Germany shortly before the war’, the film opens with Captain Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) carefully preparing his rifle, setting the sights and lining up Adolf Hitler in the cross-hairs. He fires an empty chamber, tipping his hat, having achieved his ‘sporting stalk’. The challenge, he later explains upon his capture, is merely to get close enough to the target to kill and not actually fire. ‘The sport is in the chase, not the kill… I no longer kill, not even small game,’ he explains to the none-too-impressed Gestapo. The Nazis try to get Thorndike to sign a confession saying he was working for the British government. He escapes and finds himself the quarry of a less sporting stalk.
What follows is a studio-bound 39 Steps-style extended chase sequence as Thorndike is pursued by a determined bunch of Nazi spies from Germany to London to Bognor Regis. But the ‘high concept’ is not what makes this a great film, if anything it is one of the film’s flaws - a McGuffin so big it distracts rather than merely setting the plot in motion. Despite (or perhaps because of) its propagandist purposes little is made of real anti-Nazi sentiment. Rather than questioning the more ‘serious’ issues such as German expansionism, suppression of political opponents or anti-Semitism, Thorndike merely ridicules Nazi salutes and expresses distaste at beheadings.
The film really picks up when we reach London. The city becomes a wonderful Hollywood concoction of shadowy, foggy cobble-stoned streets, pearly-clad singing cockneys with ridiculous accents and some very odd-looking fish and chips. Joan Bennett’s perky Jerry Stokes may have had the same voice coach as Dick Van Dyke (‘5 quid lumme’) but it is in the interplay between her common (possibly toned-down prostitute) street waif and Pidgeon’s incredibly decent upper-class man-of-leisure that the film gets interesting. Bennett went on to star in two of Lang’s out-and-out American masterpieces, The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), but her character here is far removed from the femmes fatales she was to play in the later films.
The unbalanced relationship between the two develops as Jerry turns from reluctant assistant to aspirant lover. Thorndike condescends to treat her with respect (his snooty family less so) and even eats fish and chips without cutlery. But she is always a child who does not understand the serious world of adults and tragically fails to realise that in 1940s Hollywood - as with the white man and ‘Indian girl’ in Westerns - relations between upper-class men and low-class women can never be. The prostitute can be good, beautiful and even noble but she can never get her man - the best she can hope for is to give up her life for him.
Man Hunt is not in the same league as the greatest moments of Lang’s German period (1931’s M, of course) or the very best of his US films, partly because Thorndike is too unquestionably decent. He has none of the revenge-driven dark side of Glenn Ford in The Big Heat (1953) or Spencer Tracy in Fury, or Edward G. Robinson’s struggles with his subconscious in the afore mentioned films starring Joan Bennett. But for the middle 40 minutes at least, the same genius that made those films can be seen at work.
Writers: Miloš Forman, Jaroslav Papousěk, Ivan Passer, Ví¡clav Sasek
Original title:Lí¡sky jedné plavovlí¡sky
Cast: Hana Brejchoví¡, Vladimír Pucholt, Vladimír Mensík, Ivan Kheil
Czechoslovakia 1965
81 mins
Miloš Forman’s bittersweet comedy drama is a gem of the Czech New Wave.
A Blonde in Love (Lí¡sky jedné plavovlí¡sky, 1966) is a gem of the Czech New Wave. As Czechoslovakia’s communist censors relaxed their hold on culture in the 1960s, directors still had the benefit of 100% state funding for their films, but with greater freedom of expression. Some directors took advantage of this freedom by making stylised, fanciful films that would previously have been condemned as avant-garde. For other directors, the most exciting part of the liberalisation was the permission to make films about everyday life, warts and all, rather than idealised propaganda pieces. Within the Czech New Wave, a distinctive strand of filmmaking emerged: fiction films that were strongly influenced by documentary, but which also highlighted the absurd in everyday situations. As Miloš Forman was the most prominent representative of this approach, it became known as ‘The Forman School’. Based on a true story, and featuring many non-professional actors even in leading roles, A Blonde in Love typifies the Forman School’s successful combination of fiction, documentary and comedy. Its candid portrayal of young love led to problems with the censors in Australia and Argentina. But this same candidness and humour also made the film immensely popular both domestically and internationally: it is among the most successful films ever made in the former Czechoslovakia, and was only the second Czech film to be nominated for an Academy Award.
The blonde in question is Andula, a young woman who lives and works at a shoe factory a remote little village where there are 16 women for every man. The film follows this endearing character as she naívely navigates sparse romantic terrain. The factory manager, worried about his employees’ future, organises a dance, and convinces the army to send some men. To the girls’ disappointment, it is middle-aged reservists who arrive to socialise with them. Andula’s eye turns to the band’s young pianist from Prague, and her bittersweet love story begins.
Showcasing the black humour for which Eastern Europe is rightly famed, it is the film’s most poignant situations that have the most comic potential. When Andula visits the pianist in Prague, his scolding mother won’t let them sleep together. He is forced to squeeze into his parents’ bed, where he has an endless, and endlessly comic, argument with them about who has the most duvet, who should sleep on the join in the middle of the bed, and above all, about the unwanted visitor. Unfortunately, Andula can hear their argument clearly, and is crying alone outside the door.
Second Run’s DVD comes with informative liner notes written by Michael Brooke, commenting on the film’s themes, political significance, international reception and influence. There is one significant gap in this account, though: it fails to explain the context and nature of the Czech New Wave. It is also disappointing that the DVD itself contains no special features. An interview with Miloš Forman would have offered welcome insights into life and filmmaking under communism.
This review refers to the original DVD release of the film by Second Run in 2011. The special features are the same as included on the new box-set edition. For a full list of extra contents, visit the Second Run website.
Cast: David Warner, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Stephens, Irene Handl
UK 1966
93 mins
Morgan Delt is a troubled artist. His muse has deserted him. His wife has deserted him. His politics have deserted him. Even his sanity is deserting him. Morgan is a suitable case for treatment. Karel Reisz gave Morgan treatment - cinematically speaking - in 1966.
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, or to give it the shortened American release title, Morgan! is an adaptation of an original 1962 television play by Wakefield-born Marxist writer and painter David Mercer entitled A Suitable Case for Treatment (starring Ian Hendry as Morgan and Keith Barron). Morgan is a script steeped in Marx and more importantly, the theories of R.D. Laing, whose claims included that the roots of schizophrenia were to be found in the family, and by extension, in society. He developed ideas of anti-psychiatry and claimed, for example, that ‘madness’ could be seen as a sane response to an insane world and argued such positions as: ‘Who poses the greater threat to society: the fighter pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima or the schizophrenic who believes the bomb is inside his own body?’
These ideas of Laing’s set in store a whole ideological wave among counter-culture ‘rebels’ in search of individualism, essentialism and anti-bourgeois life choices in the 60s. The generation who had just missed the ‘angry young men’ were now in thrall to the ‘it’s-ok-to-be-crazy in this insane world which our parents made’ attitude - a disposition that many misfit 60s characters displayed. The cultural battle cry was for authenticity of experience.
Concurrent with this anti-psychiatry of Laing’s was the interest in the disorientating effects of an LSD trip, which were likened to episodes of madness and were considered to be an entry point through the ‘doors of perception’. A cycle of visionary, anti-psychiatric, psychotropic oddball anti-hero films emerged in the mid-1960s to early 1970s, among them: Marat/Sade (1966), The King of Hearts (1966), The Trip (1967), I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), Catch 22 (1970), Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), End of the Road (1970), Family Life (1971, script by Laing and Mercer), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying those Terrible Things about Me? (1971), The Ruling Class (1972), Harold and Maude (1972) and later, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
Morgan comes at an interesting intersection of filmic cycles in British cinema; cycles in which Czech-born director Karel Reisz had immersed himself. Reisz was, along with Lindsey Anderson and Tony Richardson, a veteran of the short-lived Free Cinema movement, which sought to bring a more poetic realism and a nouvelle vague-ish tone to socially concerned British commercial cinema. The Free Cinema movement had emphasised the marginal, the communal and the youthful in its documentary mode of filmmaking in films such as We Are the Lambeth Boys, Mama Don’t Allow, O Dreamland and Every Day Except Christmas. Free Cinema was itself much influenced by the Griersonian mode of documentary filmmaking as well as the British ‘social problem’ films, which had developed in the 1930s with works such as The Citadel and There Ain’t No Justice and carried on after the war with Cosh Boy, The Lost People or Good Time Girl.
This conjunction of cinematic verisimilitude and fictional narrative caused several of the Free Cinema directors to accept the challenge thrown down by Richard Hoggart in Sight&Sound to ‘expand the legitimacy of the limits [they] had imposed themselves… and take the opportunity to bring the “public†life of a young person into the “personal life†- to extend the “film essay†type of Free cinema project into the imaginative breadth and deeper artistic intentions possible in a full-length feature film’. So taking this on board, along with the ethos of location shooting, Reisz went off to Nottingham to shoot Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which became part of the canon of British New Wave (Social Realist or Kitchen Sink School) films, a cycle that had begun with Jack Clayton’s 1959 film, Room at the Top, and ended with Lindsey Anderson’s 1963 This Sporting Life. By that time, a wholly different zeitgeist dominated: Tom Jones, James Bond, the pill, ‘youth’, Beatles, Pop Art, Mod style, Swinging London, Carnaby Street, working-class mobility and, most important of all, the return of American investment. Soon, all of these youthful subcultures were to be blended and then superseded by the utopian ideal of an opted-out counter-culture replete with its own gurus and heroes such as Theodor Rozsak, Timothy Leary, Norman O. Brown and the aforementioned R.D. Laing.
With all of these influences and cultural winds in the air - and at the tail end of a cycle of Swinging London films - Reisz entered into the world of Laing and counter-culture cinema with Morgan. The tagline for the film makes the proposition clear: ‘Can one charming madman save the only thing in the real world that’s lived up to his best fantasies?’ Having opted out of the relatively sane world of art-making and gallery commerce, the working-class Morgan (David Warner) is in the throes of an existential, post-divorce mental breakdown. Still obsessed with his wife Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave), he spends most of the film stalking her, erratically appearing in her house and interfering in her new relationship with a very bourgeois gallery owner, Charles Napier (Robert Stephens), Morgan’s art dealer.
Morgan’s fractured personality soon regresses and becomes fixated on a new alter ego - that of a gorilla. He dons an ape costume and enacts the creature’s sounds and movements, which helps him to function in what he has come to believe is a more authentic, less complicated, primitivist mode of existence. It is a coping mechanism by which he can navigate and manage the ‘mad’ world of bourgeois respectability and repressive behaviours. He feels that only his mother, an unreconstructed Stalinist, has any genuine values, but she feels that Morgan is a sell-out. She refuses to ‘de-Stalinise’ and reminds Morgan: ‘Your dad wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to a public school in a chain gang. He was an idealist, was your dad.’
A failure as an activist son, a failure as a bourgeois husband, a failure as an artist and a failure as a respectable member of society, Morgan’s anguish - and protest - takes the form of living in a car covered with Soviet propaganda posters outside of Leonie’s house, creating hammer and sickle shapes in a dog’s coat, pulling a gun on Napier, hectoring a policeman with a rant about Trotsky’s death, kidnapping Leonie with the aid of his dad’s wrestler friend, blowing up - not fatally - Leonie’s mother with a bomb hidden under the bed and dressing up as a bellowing gorilla. He gate-crashes and wrecks Leonie’s wedding day to Napier by scaling the walls of the building in full ape regalia, í la King Kong, hoping to scoop up Leonie, his Fay Wray.
Morgan’s disturbed character lurches from sweet and charming naí¯f to thundering, raging gorilla beating his chest and trumpeting his fury. The film uses intercuts from Tarzan and King Kong films to make montages that emphasise the extent of Morgan’s fantasy life. At one point he muses: ‘If I’d been planted in the womb of a chimpanzee, none of this would have happened.’ The real world is to Morgan a jungle, as it seemed for many in the counter-culture. In the 60s, action and individual expression were more highly prized than motivation or conformity.
The characterisation of Morgan Delt is handled superbly well by David Warner - although it was Vanessa Redgrave who was nominated for a best actress award. In one of his most memorable and iconic roles, he brings a great deal of sympathy and warmth to the character - a character who should be seen as preposterous, annoying, disturbing and downright dangerous, and entirely undeserving of our empathy and support. Yet support and empathy his audience gave him, and Morgan is one of the great characters in the annals of counter-culture anti-heroes. The fact of his being creative - a mad artist type - gives him further cultural cachet. More than a relic of the period, Morgan is an interesting insight into the zeitgeist of the counter-cultural 60s.
In the final chapters of the film, Morgan (the gorilla), after trashing the wedding party escapes and ends up hallucinating on a Thames barge, finally being unceremoniously dumped on a bank side pile of scrap metal where he has his major and final psychotic episode. In the next scene, we see him in a countryside insane asylum working in a flower bed where he is busy planting a hammer and sickle garden shape. He receives a visit from his beloved ex-wife, who informs him that she is pregnant with his baby. Like the man said, ‘The freak shall inherit the earth’.
James Evans
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
