Format: DVD

Release date: 27 October 2008

Distributor: 4Digital Asia

Director: John Williams

Writer: John Williams

Cast: Koichi Sato, Tae Kimura, Kiki, Akira Emoto, Kazuyoshi Kushida

Japan 2006

98 mins

Western fairy tale meets Eastern repression in John Williams‘s compelling, albeit derivative, noir-ish exploration of the human soul’s murky depths. Taking its cue from Alice in Wonderland means that some of the journey might be familiar but the non-linear approach leads down some intriguing rabbit holes. Yes, it rips off Donnie Darko‘s macabre bunny Frank amongst other things, but it effectively uses film conventions to blur the boundary between the real world and the fantasy of fiction.

Office drone Arisu (Sato) trudges through the rat race in Tokyo with his marriage to Chisato (Kimura) merely part of the routine. His only distractions are the horror novels by Jo Kuroda that give him nightmares but tell of a tempting other-world known as Darkland. As Kuroda is about to release a new book, Arisu’s wife disappears and so a mystery begins. Clues from a creepy man in a rabbit costume (Emoto) lead him to seedy brothels and puzzling private detectives, as well as back through his own memories of an affair with the sensual Kayoko (Kiki) at the remote Starfish Hotel.

The story seems simple but Williams frequently jumbles things up, throwing in Kuroda almost as a narrator and often questioning whether certain events are real or just part of Arisu’s imagination. As Arisu is a Kuroda fan, is he fantasising about cheating on his wife or merely constructing his own story to fulfil his dream of being a writer? While the plot strand about the missing Chisato is neatly concluded – though one criticism is that there are a few too many endings – Williams keeps his final shot ambiguous, hinting at another level of interpretation, and, as a result, the film knocks around the viewer’s subconscious for days afterwards.

As you may have guessed, Williams is not native to Japan – in fact he’s a Welshman – but having lived there for a number of years he has developed a deep understanding of Tokyo. # Where many filmmakers would simply fill the screen with bright neon lights and the familiar skyline, Williams is far more interested in what lies at the heart of day-to-day life in the metropolis and he’s not afraid to delve into its dank alleyways. The director cites cult writer Haruki Murakami as a major influence – Murakami’s novel Dance Dance Dance also features a squalid hotel of sin – and Williams’s Tokyo is one of cold isolation and disillusionment with a repetitive office job, sharing Murakami’s criticisms of modern society.

Arisu’s journey into his darker, more primal desires could be considered a tamer Eyes Wide Shut but Williams is Lynchian in style; the slow, deliberate pace is similar to the woozy Mulholland Drive although Starfish Hotel is much more accessible. Despite a lack of originality the film is both an intriguing mystery, complete with a desperately unknowable femme fatale, and a compelling study of how we can live out dreams, or become other characters entirely, when engaged with works of fiction, making this not just a typically ‘Eastern’ film but a wholly universal one.

Richard Badley

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 October 2008

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: Joseph Losey

Titles: The Go-Between, The Servant, Accident, The Criminal, Eva, Mr Klein, Sleeping Tiger, The Big Night

1952-1976

‘Trouble with Women’ might be a good title for this somewhat random collection of Joseph Losey’s films, featuring seven of the 26 he made between 1952 and 1976. In every film except the last, the focal point is a troubled male lead whose life is complicated by a foolish or wicked woman. Birds – more trouble than they’re worth, eh? In spite of this simplistic view though, once Losey got his shit together in the 1960s he gave us several unique and memorable films.

The first film in the collection, The Big Night, is noir to a fault. None of the male characters are sympathetic and the female characters are only there to react to the men. There is plenty of grim nocturnal city atmosphere to pass the time. But the dark thrills, such as they are, are undermined by the rather clumsy and prurient interest in ‘social problems’ that Losey tends to show in the early films.

Sleeping Tiger is funnier than anyone except maybe its star Dirk Bogarde intended. Dirk is the attitudinous juvie d. stirring things up behind his shrink’s privet hedge in Walton-on-Thames. As always with mid-century nutjobs, it turns out to have been his mum and dad wot fucked him up. I refer the reader to David Cairns’s blog Shadowplay for the last word on this period piece.

The music is great from here on, with Malcolm Arnold the first of three notable composers to do the business in this collection. We also start to see Losey’s inspired way with interior shots, often framed by mirrors, doorways, windows in a disorienting or distancing way.

The Criminal is something of a mess. I felt a lack of clear purpose or point to this pioneering exercise in Brit crime. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your reaction to the somewhat brutish appeal of Losey regular Stanley Baker as leading man. For me, he is a charmless version of Sean Connery in this role. Played by a different kind of actor, the troubled criminal trying to hang on to his big-shot status in changing times could have been an intriguing study of a man adrift. Jean-Paul Belmondo, say, might have made the character less dull without losing the tough guy act. But there are pleasures to be found here, particularly Jill Bennett and Murray Melvin in small roles. Composer Johnny Dankworth is now on the team: his distinctively British version of cool school jazz makes everything seem more stylish. And from time to time we can enjoy Losey’s cinematic imagination in the framing of a shot. The pathos of the closing scene in a desolate snowy field is endowed with a Fellini-like monochrome beauty. Otherwise not much here for the arty viewer.

Things start looking up with Eva: Losey goes Gallic, with a star turn by Jeanne Moreau and a score by Michel Legrand. It stretches credibility and is a bit unpleasant but pretty compelling. By the 1950s, it was quite usual for the themes of sexual domination and cruelty so beloved of filmmakers to be given a specious veneer of psychological sophistication. Not cruelty but sadism – oh, that’s OK then. Losey had demonstrated a fondness for pop psych in Sleeping Tiger, where Dirk’s insouciant amoralist rather unconvincingly breaks down when pressed to reflect on his unhappy childhood. In Eva, by contrast, Losey and cast really pull out the psycho-stops, and we sit back to enjoy the carnage. The subject matter is reminiscent of La Dolce Vita, though perhaps the influence went both ways, for Eva‘s cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo went on to work with Fellini on 8킽.

We then have three highly original and perfectly realised films. The reason why these films are so much better than what came before is quite simple: Losey’s screenwriter was one of the great dramatists of the century, Harold Pinter. The Servant and The Go-Between seem to me beyond praise or criticism (In the former, we get the great bonus of Pinter’s own cameo appearance – if he hadn’t had other priorities he could have had a great acting career).

More controversial is Accident, in which the tendrils of desire draw together jeunesse dorée and married dons and wreck everyone’s lives. Another classic Dirk performance at the centre, and at last Stanley Baker comes into his own. Great score by Johnny Dankworth, and the accident scene is all the more jarring in contrast to the composed Oxford setting of the film.

Completely different from any of the other films in the collection is the French-language Monsieur Klein. Losey handles a sinuously odd storyline about the fate of Jews in Vichy France with considerable subtlety: the calm with which he depicts the net closing around Monsieur Klein makes this all the more effective as a story of scarcely credible events invading the normal lives of ordinary people. Even a third of a century after the fact, it must have touched a few nerves in French cinemas.

Losey’s quality control was too unreliable for the mantle of great filmmaker to fit comfortably, but he did make several inspired and brilliantly realised films, each of which is in its own way quite unique. A more satisfactory collection would concentrate on the British films Losey made from 1962 to 1967: The Criminal, Eva, The Damned (not the Visconti film), The Servant, King and Country, and Accident would fit together wonderfully, and I guess you could throw in Modesty Blaise for a bit of light relief.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: DVD

Release date: 3 November 2008

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Johnnie To, Ka-Fai Wai

Writer: Ka-Fai Wai, Kin-Yee Au

Original title: Sun taam

Cast: Ching Wan Lau, Andy On, Ka Tung Lam, Kelly Lin

Hong Kong 2007

89 mins

Notoriously off-the-wall Hong Kong directors Johnnie To and Ka-Fai Wai reteam for a surreal swipe at police procedural movies. After tackling a number of genres, most recently with the comic adventure Running on Karma in 2003, the pair delve into the world of mental illness and schizophrenia – but in a fun way. Though Mad Detective could be considered gimmicky, To and Wai’s matter-of-fact approach means the perspective of the title character feels like cold, hard reality and Ching Wan Lau’s troubled performance makes it believable.

Lau plays the eccentric Inspector Bun, an instinctive policeman who is able to re-enact murders to learn the killer’s identity. His record is exemplary but he finds himself shunned when he cuts off his own ear in front of his retiring Chief. Five years later, an old colleague, Inspector Ho (On), needs Bun’s help in solving a series of bloody robberies possibly perpetrated by an officer who went missing along with his gun. If Bun’s special abilities weren’t weird enough, he can also see an individual’s ‘inner personalities’ and suspects the AWOL officer’s former partner, Chi Wai (Lam), who is represented by seven very different characters.

It all has the potential to be extremely confusing, but the directors keep things coherent, mostly through some simple camera work but also by concentrating on the central plot rather than getting carried away with Bun’s unique skills. The film’s early scenes are deliciously strange – witness Bun carrying out robberies with just his finger as a weapon, or urinating on one of Chi Wai’s personalities as a means of questioning – but To and Wai are wary of pushing it too far and disappearing into absurdity. This isn’t like a typical superhero movie that wallows in the dark, depressing world the cursed hero inhabits even though Bun clearly has problems, convincing himself he still has a wife until the ‘real’ one shows up to check he’s still taking his medication.

This is Ho’s story more than anything and the film is keen to contrast his method of policing with Bun’s. Ho is in awe of Bun, and tries to emulate him, but he’s shackled by the need for evidence whereas Bun is free to pursue his gut feelings. Mad Detective is about throwing away the rule book and replacing logic with emotion – even if that emotion is totally inexplicable. The story is very much about solving the case from each of these perspectives, a case that has similarities with To’s earlier PTU (2003), also concerned with tracking down a missing gun.

Mad Detective might not be as assured as To’s recent solo efforts – the harsh, backlit cinematography isn’t as polished as in Election (2005) – and the plot itself, lazily descending into the usual Mexican stand-off, doesn’t yield as many surprises as Bun’s barmy investigation, but it’s compelling to follow. Once again this is innovative, fearless filmmaking from To and Wai, who can tackle even the most bizarre of subjects – and prove there’s always method to their madness.

Richard Badley

By the same director, see alo: Triangle

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 August 2008

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Jaromil Jireš

Writers: Jaromil Jireš, Ester Krumbachová¡, Jirí Musil

Based on the novel by: Ví­tezslav Nezval

Original title: Valerie a týden divu

Cast: Jaroslava Schallerová¡, Helena Anýzová, Jirí Prýmek, Jan Klusák

Czechoslovakia 1970

73 minutes

‘It’s nothing… Just a hanging man.’ Whatever else it may be, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is probably not best approached as a horror film. Valerie’s little world is replete with crypts and cobwebs, resurrections and beastly transformations, and features a notable Max Schreck copyist. It also evokes the lusty peasant world of bosoms barely contained by ruffled white cotton that serves as counterpoint to undeath in so many Hammer productions. It even has some of the colour and texture of The Wicker Man. But there is no Edward Woodward figure here, traumatised by the reign of misrule. Valerie, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, is oddly matter of fact and accepting of the deep strangeness that envelops her. Thus, the dangling corpse of the priest who has tried to molest her is all in a week’s work for Valerie. It is as if, innocent as she appears, she already has an inkling Father Gracian will emerge hale and hearty from a coffin at some point anyway. Perhaps even that he will turn up again in the film’s flailing song and dance finale, incarcerated in a giant bird-cage in the middle of a forest.

According to the prevalent interpretation of the film, Valerie does indeed know, because what we see are the fantasies of a girl on the verge of womanhood. The Freudian/surrealist shtick is definitely there: we open and close on Valerie viewed from above asleep; very near the beginning we see drops of blood fall onto daisies under her feet, and so forth. So the hoydens on whom Valerie spies frolicking in the river, dropping fish into their décolleté, or sweetheart-cum-brother Orlík, or the bewildering array of parental avatars who alternate between bloodless ghouls, and buff young objects of desire, are all pretty much a function of Valerie’s particularly lurid family romance. But, while there is certainly a lot of voyeurism and projection going on, it would be a shame to simply explain the film in this, or in any other way. Why does a band of flagellants burst onto the square with a sudden fury, lash the water of the fountain, give chase to Orlík, then just as suddenly saunter off with their arms round each other, carousing merrily? Why does Father Gracián (Jan Klusák building on the range of camp creepiness already evidenced in The Party and the Guests) bear down on his doe-eyed prey, sashaying and ripping open his cassock to reveal a necklace of big pearly tropical seashells? One might as well ask why Christopher Lee looks the way he does as he leads the cortège/bacchanale that will end with Edward Woodward as chicken in a basket.

The film does, however, realise a world that is all its own by virtue of its intense vision of colour and texture. Father Gracián’s necklace, then, while not straightforwardly symbolic of anything, can be read against some of the film’s most insistent visual preoccupations. The shiny white shells against wiry black chest hair repeat, texturally, the glint of teeth between bearded yet rosy lips. Engorged (red) life palpitates next to (white) dead matter; and it is not always easy to say which is more beautiful, which more disquieting, or indeed which is which. Costume designer Helena Anýzová, who manages to pack at least three roles into one of only two outings as an actress (she also appears in The Cremator), pretty much runs the gamut. As Valerie’s Grandmother, she seems to have been run over by a giant paint-roller while her bone china-white house was being decorated. As ‘Elsa’, essentially a vampirically rehydrated Grandma, all rosy lips and lush red hair, she is a more alarmingly rapacious prospect. Yet, as Valerie’s long-lost mother, she radiates the same ruddy palette as Elsa. The family reunion scene has, at one and the same time, all the innocence of an old GDR television fairy tale adaptation, and all the disquiet of the phrase ‘a still unsplit pomegranate’ issuing from the sweeping black cape and white gloves of a vampire-priest haranguing a group of docile virgins from a beetling pulpit.

In one of the film’s most strikingly composed shots, Valerie sits down to eat with Grandmother and Father Gracian at a table in a meadow above a lake. Her ‘innocent’ white, the matt emulsion of her guardian, and the greasepaint against black of the priest, all stand out weirdly against a magnificent backdrop composed of equal bands of lime and slate, pre-storm iridescent, as meadow and lake are captured in a dramatically flattened depth of field. The film revolves around this sort of intensity of tableau. Director Jires shows scant regard for notions of continuity of location, or normal rules of shot-reverse-shot. It would be impossible to map Valerie. Yet the persistent idiosyncracy of vision – saturated colours, dramatic angles and deep shots framed by intervening branches and cobwebs – fashion a little world that is fully realised within its own terms and will haunt many a viewer.

Stephen Thomson

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 September 2008 (John Carpenter box-set out on Oct 6)

Distributor Optimum

Director: John Carpenter

Writer: Frank Armitage (John Carpenter’s pen name)

Based on: a short story by Ray Nelson

Cast: Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster

USA 1988

93 mins

A commerce-crazy America with a widening gap between rich and poor is the backdrop of John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi action movie They Live. John Nada (Roddy Piper) is a homeless labourer who, amid mass economic disenchantment, discovers an alien conspiracy to use Americans as commodities while they live off the fat of the land masquerading as humans.

While following a group of people posing as religious preachers, Nada finds some specially-designed sunglasses that allow him to see subliminal messages such as ‘obey’, ‘marry and reproduce’ and ‘this is your god’ embedded into advertising, television broadcasts and on money itself. More importantly, the glasses interfere with electric rays that disguise the skeletal-like aliens as humans, enabling him to tell the imposters from real people. As it happens, some people are in on the conspiracy, notably the police and the rich, and they are suitably rewarded for aiding the status quo with inflated bank balances, promotions and other material elements of the American Dream.

After a lengthy, yet stripped down, fight scene, Nada convinces his buddy John Armitage (Keith David) to try on the glasses too, and together they find others who have also been enlightened and attempt to beat the system. The film’s high point comes with Nada and Armitage’s trip to the other side, when they pose as alien sympathisers and stumble upon an underworld of decadence and indoctrination. The ideas are simple enough, but they bear a resemblance to the methods used by repressive societies the world over – systems which Carpenter felt were beginning to take over his own country.

The thinly-veiled social commentary of the piece seems a little heavy-handed by today’s standards, with lines such as ‘We all sell out every day, we might as well be on the winning team’ delivered by those whose acquiescence to the aliens has served them well. But this camp dialogue is part of the film’s charm. Even at the beginning of They Live, when Nada looks out over his impoverished surroundings to the skyscrapers that lie beyond and declares, ‘I believe in America, I follow the rules’ – a faith soon tested by his world-shattering discovery – we believe him.

The B-movie aesthetic is used as a vehicle for the social commentary, and black comedy penetrates the film throughout. In fact, Carpenter sweeps aside political preaching to allow the film to finish on a note of humour when the aliens are finally revealed for what they are.

The DVD features a short ‘making-of’ documentary, also made in 1988, which
is worth watching for the hilarious sequence about Piper, a professional wrestler who Carpenter cast after meeting him at a wrestling convention. Piper tells the interviewer: ‘I’ve been electrocuted, I’ve been stabbed three times, I’ve been in a plane crash, I don’t know how many car crashes.’ Carpenter muses: ‘He seems to have lived life…’

Lisa Williams

The John Carpenter Collection, including Halloween, The Thing, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, Escape from New York and Prince of Darkness, is out on Oct 6. They Live is available from September 22.

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 October 2008

Distributor Scanbox

Director: David Lynch

Writer: David Lynch

Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Judith Roberts

USA 1977

85 mins

The re-release of Lynch’s debut Eraserhead is a prime opportunity to re-visit this idiosyncratic masterpiece! Lynch claims that, in all the years since the film appeared, no reviewers have come anywhere near to his own interpretation of the film. I have no intention of trying to suss what was happening in The Head of our dear Mr Lynch, yet I shall attempt to give some impressions of my own.

Eraserhead sets the tone for Lynch’s career, the Emphasis upon 1950s Americana, the many dreamlike slow-motion scenes with constant industrial rumblings and hissings always subliminally present. The place is hideous, the homes and interiors depicted in the film are hideous – you can almost smell the damp and the grease! And yet, these images are also exquisitely Beautiful in their hideousness… A kind of Beauty from Hell!

The film opens with the Main Character Henry out in the eternal cosmos limply jettisoning a sperm from His mouth (‘In the beginning was the word’). Within a cosmic egg awakens a Vulcan Type character, deformed and of evil appearance, who noisily cranks the gears of machinery. There is a sense of this figure being at the heart and centre of the creative forces of the universe… but Lynch depicts even this figure as being reflective of the diseased and claustrophobic Industrial squalor that the rest of the film is steeped in.

Henry is the archetypal fool, Nature’s plaything and tool, who bumbles through the film’s dark byways without any conscious realisation of what exactly may be happening, with his dorkish backcombed high-style hair, haunted glare, uneasy manner and ill-fitting suit! Henry is trapped within a constantly oppressive mechanical nightmare – the view from his room… a desolate brick wall! … A fitting symbol of his future. Even the chicken at the family dinner is a man-made mechanistic parody of Death made life. Getting his girlfriend mysteriously pregnant is somehow part of this grinding, creaking nightmare of life, and the resulting baby, which he is left to care for after she freaks out and leaves, is the most hideous Alien slimeball, cackling and taunting him in the night.

Lynch plunges Henry through various convoluted, highly symbolic mini-adventures, all with a strong theme of hopelessness and Nihilism. As is characteristic of much of Lynch’s work, there are scenes embedded within the film which may be nothing other than some twisted dream. Such is Henry’s encounter with a Woman who lives in the room opposite: his bed becomes a Bath of milk into which they both sink. Coming as his masculine force is being relentlessly crushed by the pressures of being left alone to tend the creature, this scene feels very much like just a fantasy.

Eraserhead gets its title from a scene where Henry’s head is ejected by the sheer force of the Alien child’s own head sprouting forth from his shoulders, replacing and Erasing his own identity. His head is found by a young boy in an industrial wasteland and taken to a factory merchant where the brain is drilled out and used as rubber for the ends of pencils! The poor man’s intellect has been reduced to a symbol of pure nothingness, his creative force and individuality destroyed by the Evil offspring that is now completely possessing him.

Henry keeps a small worm reminiscent of his lost seed in a cupboard, the seed that was set in motion seemingly against Henry’s will by the sinister Demiurgic figure seen in the opening sequence. Opposite the cupboard is a Radiator, Henry’s only place of refuge and escape from the grimy cold monotony. Within it is the ‘LADY IN THE RADIATOR’, a kind of perverse, hamster-cheeked caricature of Marilyn Monroe, who sings a fantastic and haunting melody about everything being Fine in Heaven, as if she was the source of his salvation.

At the end of the film, Henry seems to be set free. By destroying the alien baby, Henry seemingly performs his only true act of ‘Will’ in the whole story. The Demiurgic figure Stares with Menace at Henry and struggles to maintain his grip on the grinding gears, now screeching and kicking forth masses of sparks, his face contorted in a grimace of pain as he strives to hold this world together. Destruction and creation are merged, and our hero realises that the source of heaven is within the light and heat of the Radiator Lady’s arms. Here he is at last absorbed, and mercifully released from the bondage of the dark creator’s world.

The film’s atmosphere was inspired by industrial Philadelphia, where Lynch had spent much time. In the interview included on the new DVD, Lynch states that when he arrived in LA he was overwhelmed by the light, compared to the oppressive gloom of Philadelphia. This may have something to do with the inspired choice of the Monroe-like figure, the star being associated with LA, as a source of Heavenly light.

Franz Kerola

Format: DVD

Release date: 8 September 2008

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Joseph H Lewis

Writer: Dalton Trumbo (front Ben Perry)

Cast: Sterling Hayden, Ned Young

USA 1958

77 mins

In the 1950s the western really came of age. The endlessly repetitive oaters and singing cowboys of the 30s were replaced by a fad for political allegory and greater psychological depth. The latter may well have been the equivalent of what Orson Welles called ‘dollar-book Freud’ but it certainly helped create some great films – from Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950) to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and many more – setting a standard that the revisionist westerns of the 60s, though interesting in their own way, would rarely equal. The political climate may have made overt political content (at least of a certain colour) difficult but many filmmakers were keen to make a point. The ‘liberal’ western High Noon (1952) written by soon-to-be-blacklisted Carl Foreman and Howard Hawks’s famous riposte Rio Bravo (1959) are perhaps the most famous examples.

Despite its lurid title and its standard plot (probably pitched as Shane meets High Noon – with harpoons!!!), Terror in a Texas Town stands as the epitome of these developments. Written by perhaps the most famous of McCarthy’s Hollywood victims, Dalton Trumbo (who, having served a year in prison and living in Mexico, gave the credit to Ben Perry), the film comes with a heavy dose of both psychology and politics.

The working men (the farmers) hold a meeting to discuss forming a united front against the greedy capitalist McNeil (Sebastian Cabot with a slimy Sidney Greenstreet impersonation) who is trying to force them off their land. A Swedish farmer, Hansen, believes that everyone should stick together; if they don’t: ‘I stick alone – by myself’, he declares. His determination leads to him being McNeil’s next ‘example’. His loyal friend and neighbour Pepe – a rather standard helpless Mexican character – witnesses his murder by McNeil’s man. Pepe then discovers why they want the land – oil.

Sterling Hayden (also famed for his run-ins with McCarthy, albeit with a different conclusion) stars as Hansen’s son George, the man who stands up for the townspeople against the hired gunman. But unlike Shane he is no gunfighter, perhaps even the antithesis of the western hero. He speaks with a strong (and strange) Swedish accent, carries a large unwieldy chest and wears a derby hat instead of a Stetson. He stands with the townspeople behind him and fights oppression with the tool of a working man – his whaling harpoon (a hammer and sickle would have been too blatant, I suppose).

His nemesis Johnny Crale (Ned Young with a villainous Humphrey Bogart impersonation) is a ball of existential and psychological torment. He embodies Freud’s ‘Todestriebe’ – or as McNeil calls him: ‘death walking round in the shape of a man’. As in many westerns, from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to The Wild Bunch, the taming of the West has rendered the gunfighter an anachronism, as his gal Molly tells him: ‘one man with a gun can’t make it anymore.’ Although he is missing his right hand, he has learnt to shoot with his left. However, it is an inability to cause fear that finally renders him ‘impotent’; and if the metaphor was not clear enough Molly spells it out – via Trumbo’s wonderfully unsubtle dialogue: ‘…you see, Johnny, it just doesn’t work anymore’.

It is directed by B-movie legend Joseph H Lewis, who earned the nickname Wagon Wheel Joe for his penchant for framing shots through the spokes of a wagon wheel, and such striking visual compositions in depth are much in evidence here. The gunfight – a preview of which opens the film – features a close-up of the gun in Crale’s holster with Hansen standing in the distance armed with his harpoon. At times though the strong style, great performances and seamless stock shots fail to hide the meagre budget – the town and saloon seem bizarrely empty, the set creaks and the look of the film occasionally foreshadows Lewis’s subsequent move into television – directing episodes of Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

It is heavy-handed for sure (Trumbo – here at his most ripe – and Lewis couldn’t possibly do subtle and nuanced) but also quite strange and wonderful. The quirky soundtrack with its sprightly theme – a mix of Spanish guitar and marching bugle – certainly adds to the weirdness. But it stands alongside Gun Crazy and The Big Combo as one of Lewis’s greatest achievement. It’s a small film that aims high (perhaps ridiculously high) and almost hits the target.

Paul Huckerby

The following western classics are also released by Optimum: Day Of The Outlaw, Doc, The Hills Run Red, The Hunting Party, Man of the East, Man of the West, Legend of the Lost, Navajo Joe, The Spikes Gang, Young Billy Young.

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 September 2008

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director: Michael Crichton

Writer: Michael Crichton

Based on: the novel by William F Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

Cast: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Victoria Shaw

USA 1973

88 mins

In the near future, a theme park has been created which lets visitors experience the past by interacting with living, breathing creatures. However, something goes wrong and before long the exhibits start killing the guests… If this sounds all too familiar, Michael Crichton’s film Westworld contains many of the same themes as his later novel Jurassic Park, except here the themed worlds (representing a Roman palace, a medieval castle and the Old West) are populated by androids rather than genetically engineered dinosaurs. In both cases, however, the moral of the story is the same – to quote Jurassic Park‘s character Ian Malcolm: ‘Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should!’

Tighter, darker and more thought-provoking than Jurassic Park, Westworld predicted both the big android films of the 1980s – Blade Runner and of course, Android – as well as the endless cycle of ‘slasher’ movies from the late 70s onwards. Yul Brynner effectively reprises his character from The Magnificent Seven as a gunslinging android in the ‘Old West’ world, but here, instead of an enigmatic leader who hires half a dozen gunmen to protect a village from bandits, he’s an indestructible killer who keeps coming back from the ‘grave’. It is difficult to explain why his performance in this film has been forgotten and it is a shame that it is often only remembered for the first (and limited) use of CGI in a movie. As a serial killer who keeps coming back from the ‘dead’, Brynner’s character precedes Michael Myers in the endless Halloween saga by five years, and as a taciturn, indestructible cyborg who has to be stripped of his flesh before becoming vulnerable, he precedes Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator franchise by a decade. By reprising an earlier character from his career who becomes an indestructible copy of his former self, dehumanised by reconstruction, he’s emblematic of the entire sci-fi/horror action genre, which keeps returning to its iconic characters and bringing them back from the dead/retirement over and over again.

The central idea of the film is how hedonism leads to barbarism: the three worlds of the theme park allow the visitors to murder and seduce the androids for entertainment with no moral repercussions, at least until the slaves inevitably rebel. In contrast with the dinosaur rebellion in his most famous work, Crichton doesn’t fall back on techno-babble about chaos theory and never tries to explain why the robots kill their creators and masters, and this ambiguity enhances the morality of the tale. The only survivor of the story is the one who has some guilt and reservations about shooting and shagging his way through the theme park. As the unlikely hero, the amiable comedy actor Richard Benjamin is well cast; the everyman who has to survive when tracked by a killing machine, he brings a playfulness to the humorous early scenes before the film turns into a thriller. In this film and his other movies of the 1970s such as Coma (1978) and The First Great Train Robbery (1979), Michael Crichton shows himself to be an excellent director before he gave up the craft for the more reliable paychecks of increasingly dumb airport novels. Benjamin became a good director himself in the 80s, giving fellow comedy actors Tom Hanks and Burt Reynolds the most underrated roles of their careers in The Money Pit and City Heat respectively.

Westworld was undermined by its terrible sequel Futureworld and the TV series Beyond Westworld, which was cancelled after three episodes, and this DVD release allows for a long overdue re-evaluation of the film as Crichton’s most successful combination of sci-fi, action and thriller, and as a pivotal genre movie that would provide a template for some of the most acclaimed films of the next quarter of a century.

Alex Fitch

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 September 2008

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director: Michael Anderson

Writer: David Zelag Goodman

Based on: the novel by William F Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

Cast: Michael York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter, Farrah Fawcett, Peter Ustinov

USA 1976

120 mins

The most relentlessly 70s of all 70s genre movies, Logan’s Run cast some of the most iconic actors of that decade – York, Agutter, Fawcett, Ustinov – in a sci-fi fable that swings between kitsch and the dystopian fallout of the summer of love. In the reasonably far future, some unknown disaster or war has quarantined the remnants of humanity within enormous sealed domes while the crumbling cities outside are being reclaimed by chaos and vegetation. To prevent overpopulation, the inhabitants are culled at the age of 30 in bizarre cremation ceremonies called ‘Carousels’, which are seen as a cross between a fireworks display and genuine reincarnation. Not everyone wants to die this way, and executioners called Sandmen track down the runners…

In the 1950s, Michael Anderson was one of Britain’s most successful and reliable directors, bringing seminal adaptations of 1984, Around the World in 80 Days and the story of The Dam Busters to the screen. However, relocation to America and an uncertainty on how to film genre fiction led to camp adaptations of the 30s pulp hero Doc Savage in 1975 and the controversial novel Logan’s Run a year later. The dark and prescient aspects of the book remain intact on screen – the amorality of a pleasure-seeking society, the casual sex and violence, the idea of limited life expectancy leading to feral children and youth-obsessed adults – and have even been improved on in the screenplay. Outré dialogue sticks in the mind – from the killer robot (which looks like a Blue Peter tin foil and cardboard project) that repeats the mantra ‘Fish, plankton, sea greens… protein from the sea!’ as it freezes unfortunate humans that stumble through its lair, to the impossibly old man who quotes from The Naming of Cats, the infamous book that would inspire Andrew Lloyd Webber’s slide into kitsch in the 1980s.

However, the tone of the film varies between thriller, satire, black comedy and farce and while the actors gamely do the best they can with the material, it’s a competition to see who comes across as the most confused on screen: the deranged computer running the dome, Farrah Fawcett’s forgetful plastic surgeon’s assistant or Logan himself (Michael York). Ironically, the most successful character is the one-note Sandman Francis (Richard Jordan), who sticks to his guns throughout, doggedly pursuing Logan across an increasingly bizarre landscape to fulfill his duty as a protector against overpopulation. Elsewhere, Peter Ustinov seems to have wandered in from an entirely different, much subtler film (perhaps the director was most comfortable with actors of his generation).

Occupying some kind of strange, belated middle ground between Hair and Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run is a dystopian vision that is most likely to be remembered for the tacky special effects and lurid deaths, as well as for being filmed in a shopping mall. In the right hands, this combination would produce a dark gem like Dawn of the Dead, but here it is no more than a historical curiosity.

Alex Fitch