Tag Archives: British

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

THE PRISONER (1967-1968), PART ONE

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Also see “The Prisoner, Part 2” and “The Prisoner, Part 3“.

The British series “The Prisoner” (1967-1968), starring and co-created by , is the model for cult television. It is an indirect sequel to a previous series, “Secret Agent” (AKA “Danger Man,” 1960-1962), which also starred McGoohan. By general consensus, “The Prisoner” ranks as one of the best, if not the best, example of science fiction as a television genre. The consensus, for once, is probably accurate, because “The Prisoner” is far more than science fiction, dispensing with genre expectations. We could also describe it as being psychological, surreal, allegorical, existential, countercultural, satirical, Kafkaesque, psychedelic, nightmarish, absurdist, comic bookish, supernatural, born from the spy genre (in a far more interesting breed than 007), and enigmatic. It’s still enigmatic today, with enthusiasts and critics compelled to attempt to express its mystification in the absence of creator McGoohan, who steadfastly refused to ever explain it. Even its reputation is aptly enigmatic; it’s heard about more than actually seen. “The Prisoner” often causes polemical arguments among many who have seen it and debate the chronological order of its seventeen episodes. It was created smartly and contrary to our priorities and agendas regarding television. To many of us, the series should be ongoing. In its blueprint stage, the goal of “The Prisoner” was always to end, and yet in its (for us) brief run, McGoohan crafts a saga that feels narratively and aesthetically accomplished. Comparatively, many series, after being cancelled prematurely, will feel unfinished, cheating its dangling audience. At the other end of the spectrum, many ongoing series have trekked on well past the point of what should have been a well-developed beginning, middle, and satisfying climax. “The Prisoner” was originally intended to be even briefer, but was extended in order to ensure an American market. In hindsight, “The Prisoner” might even be seen as an advance metaphorical commentary on that puerile abomination known as reality television: elastically taunting and playing with our concepts of reality, daily humdrum, juxtapositional narrative, and cryptic completion.

What we do know is the idea for “The Prisoner” sprang from McGoohan’s exhaustive workload on “Secret Agent.” In “The Arrival” (directed by Don Chaffey), its unnamed protagonist (McGoohan) quits the British Secret Service with no reason cited; but as we know, departing an intelligence position is hardly a done deal. Drugged and abducted by arcane forces, he  awakens …

Where Am I?

In the Village.

What Do You Want?

Information.

Still from The Prisoner (1967-1968)Whose Side Are You On?

That Would Be Telling. We Want Information.

You Won’t Get It.

By Hook, or By Crook, We Will.

Who Are You?

The New No. 2.

Who Is No. 1?

Continue reading THE PRISONER (1967-1968), PART ONE →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: HIGH-RISE (2015)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy, Sienna Guillory

PLOT: Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston) moves into an upscale high-rise tower block, designed by noted architect Anthony Royal (Irons), who also resides in the tower. The top floor houses society’s upper crust; the lower floors are where the more commonplace residents live (usually families). Laing resides in the middle. The tower has every convenience—pool, gym, a school and a supermarket—to meet residents’ needs, making it unnecessary for anyone to venture out into the outside world. When trouble develops with the building’s services, violence escalates as the residents form tribes to battle for resources.

high-rise-social

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Being based on one of J.G. Ballard’s seminal works alone might qualify it, though admittedly, there’s nothing weird in terms of presentation… in fact, it might be the most approachable Ballard adaptation since Empire of the Sun.  It’s warmer than ‘s Crash, but in terms of the subject matter, it’s just as unflinching.

COMMENTS: At first glance, Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of High-Rise may appear to miss the mark, being too focused on recreating period detail (Amy Jump’s script sets it firmly in the 1970’s, when Ballard’s novel was first published), but those who stick it out will find it an extremely faithful—and blackly funny—adaptation.

Nailing the time and place to a specific period helps establish the film as a cautionary tale, not unlike something that might be seen on television at the time (like a literary “Play for Today“), but also helps to achieve some of the distancing effect found in Ballard’s prose. It also sets the stage for the use of a certain well-known pop song of the time, first used ironically in a string quartet arrangement, then returning as a sad elegy.

Wheatley and Jump are very respectful to the source material, while also fleshing out things that weren’t quite as explicit in the book. There’s some attention paid to the women and children (the period setting explains the sexism and misogyny shown by some male characters), and while there is no direct explanation of the cause of the mini-society’s devolution, there is a strong hint that it could be a social experiment running its course. As the film ends with a broadcast of a Margaret Thatcher speech, there’s a political dimension as well, which some might scoff at. The recent Brexit vote might cause one to rethink that.tom-highrise1

NOTES:

  • “The Ballardian” interviews Ben Wheatley about the film.
  • Portishead did the elegaic version of Abba’s “S.O.S.” for the film. It was not intended for a separate single release, although the band did approve a video in honor of recently murdered British politician Jo Cox.
  • Producer Jeremy Thomas has spent over 30 years attempting to bring J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise to the screen. After projects with and , fell through, he finally hit paydirt with Ben Wheatley.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A wonderfully weird oddity with moments of genius, just not quite enough of them.”–Alex Zane, The Sun (contemporaneous)

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR (2016)

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“A funeral director searches for purpose in a job that consistently incapacitates him with grief.”

Ed Carter (Director) and Nicholas Eriksson (Director of Photography) are currently trying to build support for a more ambitious and costly project, Ellston Bay. You may find more information about the film and also contribute to it on their Kickstarter page.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

1960 EXLPOITATION TRIPLE FEATURE: BEAT GIRL, HIGH SCHOOL CEASAR & DATE BAIT (1960)

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America in the 1960s and 1970s hardly had exclusive rights to juvenile delinquent exploitation trash films. With Beat Girl (1960), the U.K. delivered the goods in one of the sleaziest examples of the genre. Having a cast including Christopher Lee and certainly helps, as does a John Barry score (his first).

“This could be your daughter,” screamed the ads; rather hypocritically, one might add, since the movie’s ambition is to titillate and to exploit its Beat Girl Jennifer (Gillian Hills, who would show up later in Blow-up and A Clockwork Orange). Or, perhaps the ad was meant for Donald “If she wasn’t my daughter, perhaps I might…” Trump.

Ignored by constipated architect daddy Paul (David Farrar) and hating his twenty-something French floozy wife Nicole (Noelle Adam), Beat Girl decides to get revenge by going to the local coffee shop to cruise for beatnik-styled man meat. She sucks on a popsicle, dances to jazz music (!), smokes cigarettes, and gets drawn into the dark side of caffeinated pheromones by Daddy-O J.D. (a young Reed, in full ham mode) and a strip club manager with sordid eyebrows ( Lee, of course).

Still from Beat Girl (1960)We learn that our favorite Hammer Horror Count, being the perpetual predator that he is, had previously sampled Nicole, turned her into a stripper, and now plans to repeat his pattern of debauchery on poor Beat Girl. Chris’ Dracula comparatively seems like a misunderstood, chaste monk.

Beat Girl is dank and grimy enough to have originally earned an X certification. Predictably, the family melodrama and obligatory reformation scene are secondary to Hills and Adam strutting their stuff and shaking their go-go assets. Although tame today, it’s still an entertaining hoot, stylishly directed by veteran Edmond T. Greville.

As close to a “star” as the drive-in circuit had, John Ashley shows suitable angst as Matt Stevens, the High School Caesar, which means (as it should) that he’s the bad guy. Helpful hint for next time you’re watching Bill Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”: Brutus and Cassius are the protagonists. Director O’ Dale Ireland gets it right. Channeling the old Bard himself, his High School Caesar is a bit of a soap opera: it’s more about rise-to-power than fast cars, fisticuffs, or shootouts (although this being trash cinema, there are, of course ingredients of all the above).

Still from High School Caesar (1960)Unlike most of cinema’s juvenile delinquents, Matt comes from a well-to-do family, albeit a dysfunctional one that paves the path for some spoiled rich kid thuggery. (No, it’s not about Trump). High School Caesar rules the student body through fear, intimidation, and demonization of every person and demographic that he imagines his enemy. (No, it’s not about Trump).

After a rigged class election and plenty of strong-arming, things begin to go south as we head to Matt’s comeuppance. Ashley, giving a suave performance, makes it work, as well in his own tacky way as Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte (AKA “Scarface”).

Still from Date Bait (1960)If there wasn’t enough premarital sex and drugs in Caesar, Ireland more than makes up for it in his Date Bait, which could just as easily been titled Date Rape. This one’s the epitome of JD flicks, opening with the rock-n-roll lyrics “she’s my date bait baby, and I don’t mean maybe.” When the local dopehead Danny (Gary Clarke) gets outta rehab and hooks up with date bait Sue (Marlo Ryan), you know that switchblade-wielding beatniks, drag racing, testosterone-overdosed males clashing over breasts (squeezed into tight white sweaters), and run-ins with the law are not far behind. Of these three features, only Date Bait keeps intact all the trash genre stereotypes, which unsurprisingly means it was also the most successful of the trio on the drive-in circuit.

It’s not as well acted as Caesar (Sue’s parents, reading their lines, never rise above lethargy, even when lecturing her about her white trash boyfriend), and (per the norm) all the teens are played by twenty-somethings (it shows). On a pure entertainment level it’s probably more accessible to those who prefer their JD diet to be campy and cheap.

In the next week’s triple feature, we’ll zoom ahead a full year to… choppers, psychos, and damaged goods.

Bring your own pizza.

Canonically Weird (The List)

230. THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969)

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Recommended

“Nobody ever got the point about what it was about. What we were trying to say through all this laughter and fun, was that if they dropped the bomb on a major civilisation, the moment the cloud had dispersed and sufficient people had died, the survivors would set up all over again and have Barclays Bank, Barclay cards, garages, hates, cinemas and all…just go right back to square one. I think man has no option but to continue his own stupidity.”–Spike Milligan

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, , Richard Warwick, , , , , Dudley Moore,

PLOT: After a nuclear bomb is dropped on Britain, about twenty survivors prowl the wreckage, including 17-months pregnant Penelope and her parents and lover, who live on a still-functioning subway car. Aboveground, Lord Fortnum seeks the opinion of a doctor, who confirms his suspicions that nuclear mutation will soon turn him into a bed sitting room. When the chocolates taken from vending machines run out, the family makes its way to the surface, where Penelope finds herself engaged to the doctor, the mother turns into a wardrobe, and the entire family moves into Lord Fortnum.

Still from The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

BACKGROUND:

  • The Bed Sitting Room began its life as a one-act play, written by comedian Spike Milligan and John Antrobus in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
  • Promoters acknowledged the film’s limited commercial prospects by issuing a poster with the tagline “we’ve got a BOMB* on our hands” and the footnote (“*BOMB – a motion picture so brilliantly funny it goes over most people’s heads”).
  • The film bombed so hard, in fact, that director Richard Lester could not find work for four years afterwards, and when he returned to movies he toned down the absurdism of his early films and worked in a mainstream idiom, returning with the action-comedy The Three Musketeers (1973) and going on to direct blockbusters like Superman II (1980).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The BBC, tidy tuxedo on top his top half, sackcloth on the bottom, squatting in an empty television frame on a blasted salt flat to deliver exposition.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: BBC post-bomb broadcasts; dad’s a parrot and mom’s a wardrobe; a doctor living inside his patient

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Twenty very British survivors of the apocalypse go about their business amidst the rubble, despite mutations that gradually change them into furniture or bargain housing. This absurd anxiety nightmare about the Bomb could only have come out of the Swinging Sixties; it’s one of the weirder relics of an era when filmmakers felt it was their patriotic duty to laugh in the face of the imminent apocalypse.


“Trailers from Hell” annotated original trailer for The Bed Sitting Room

COMMENTS: The original play “The Bed Sitting Room” was written Continue reading 230. THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969) →