Phantom Lady

Ella Raines and Elisha Cook, Jr. in Phantom Lady (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1944).

I wish I had this on DVD so I could do a screen capture of the scene just before the one pictured above, wherein Ella Raines uses her whole body to encourage Elisha Cook's manic drum solo to its, er, climax. As she tells him, she's "a real hep kitten." This little noir-lite nugget, based on a Cornell Woolrich story (written under the pseudonym William Irish), makes up in inspired moments for what it lacks in consistent intensity. Franchot Tone and Alan Curtis are both kind of duds as the villain and hero respectively, but in a weird way their dudness works.

The Devil Rides Out

Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out (dir. Terence Fisher, 1968).

Fisher does it old school in his third-to-last film, reviving the drawing-room drolleries of his fifties productions. Richard Matheson script from a Dennis Wheatley novel. Christopher Lee as the virtuous Duc de Richleau, a sort of Van Helsing to Satanists. And most strikingly, Charles Gray (Bond villain and Rocky Horror criminologist) as the evil Mocata.

Killer's Kiss

Parallel lives: Jamie Smith and Irene Kane in Killer's Kiss (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1955).

Low-budget city drama with some stunning camerawork (e.g., the famous scene in the mannequin warehouse, and the "Watch Your Step" staircase sequence). The most interesting thing about the story is the brittle relationship between the two leads: being your typically emotionally negligent noir protagonists, they are so not there for each other at a crucial moment; and yet, both are so able to get over it. Kind of a heartening life model, or an anemic one, depending on your standards.

Children of Men

Clive Owen and Danny Huston in Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006).

Slavoj Zizek talks in one of the DVD bonus features about how this film is notable because of the way the main character functions primarily as a filter through which we apprehend the background, the socio-enviro-political details that are the "real" subject of the movie. The truth is, they're not really the background at all--the screen shoves all the topical markers in our face and makes sure we get their relevance at every turn. Nevertheless, Cuarón is a visually thrilling director, and some of those details--the minister's medicated brother and his electronic hand gadgetry, the tricycle-rickshaws in the London streets, the commercials for the suicide pill "Quietus" ("You Decide When"), and some of the least banal use of seventies rock on a soundtrack since Breaking the Waves--go a long way toward rescuing the picture from its more heavy-handed tendencies toward mythic posturing and elegaical jeremiadism.

The Mansion of Madness

The Mansion of Madness (dir. Juan López Moctezuma, 1973).

Moctezuma was a sometime collaborator with Jodorowsky, and it shows. Mansion is a loose adaptation of Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether," but it feels more like a cross between El Topo and a Hammer Film. It's the kind of movie where incongruous funny-sound-effect music pops up without warning, but some of the sets and shots really are striking. There's a primitivist-execution-squad dance number near the end that is one of a kind.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Peter Cushing and Miles Malleson in The Hound of the Baskervilles (dir. Terence Fisher, 1959).

Cushing as Holmes. Perfect. Great scene where Christopher Lee is terrorized by a tarantula--for real, as he explains in the "actor's diary" special feature that comes with the DVD I watched it on. Miles Malleson, a character actor who appears in several Hammer films (including both Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula), is a hoot as usual, here playing an dotty old bishop/entomologist. Malleson was also an accomplished screenwriter: among his credits was the Ludwig Berger/Michael Powell Thief of Baghdad from 1940.

Brides of Dracula

Marie Devereux and Andree Melly in Brides of Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher, 1960).

No Christopher Lee in this one. Just a rather twerpy young vampire baron (that's another thing about Hammer--every other character is a baron!) and some undead ladies in nightgowns. Cushing's Van Helsing is gallant and dashing as usual, and there are some charming comic turns by supporting actors.

These Are the Damned

"Black leather, black leather, crash crash crash...": Oliver Reed and some Teddy Boys in These Are the Damned (dir. Joseph Losey, 1963).

Thanks to Lanny for coming down from Portland with the videotape of this, one of his all-time favorites and one of Hammer's most unusual and dramatically ambitious productions. It's one of those movies where you really don't want to say anything about the content because a big part of what makes it so engaging is the way it goes places you don't expect. But the first few minutes, with their intimations of A Clockwork Orange, are enough to let you know that it's going to be a stylish, worthwhile piece of cinema. Viveca Lindfors: "How could you be so cruel?" Oliver Reed: "I enjoyed it very much, milady!"

See also Kevin Killian's review at Amazon.

The Curse of the Werewolf

The beggar at the table of the great: Richard Wordsworth in The Curse of the Werewolf (dir. Terence Fisher, 1961).

It's set in Spain, but everybody says things like "'Ello, then, wot's this 'ere?" The color is magnificent, and the historical sets and costumes are pretty inspired in their gaudy unlikeliness. The whole first twenty minutes or half hour or so are like a separate little movie unto itself, and a very perverse, recherché one at that. A wandering beggar shows up at the wedding feast of a cruel and decadent baron, who makes him dance for table scraps. The baron's bride intercedes, asking the baron to show the beggar mercy, and the baron makes the beggar his bride's "pet"--except that she apparently forgets all about him the next morning, and the beggar languishes for years in the dungeon, long after the baroness dies and the baron himself becomes an even more foul (and syphilitic) old ogre. A beautiful mute girl (why do Hammer films have so many mute girls?) brings the beggar his food every day. The ugly gross old baron makes a pass at the servant girl, and she spurns him, incurring his anger. He has her thrown in the dungeon with the beggar. The beggar, now a subhuman bearded troll, rapes her! She is released, kills the baron, escapes through the woods, and is found by a kindly villager, who takes her back to his place where he and his wife care for her till she delivers a child and dies. The child will grow up to be Oliver Reed, who because he is born on Christmas and is the son of a mute servant girl and a feral beggar rapist, naturally turns into a werewolf sometimes. But all that's almost an anticlimax after that long, weird set-up.

Horror of Dracula

Valerie Gaunt in Horror of Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher, 1958).

The first Christopher Lee Dracula film from Hammer, and one of three that Fisher would direct. A bloody travesty of Stoker's novel, and wildly effective. Lee was born to play Dracula--he is Dracula. Cushing is perfect as Van Helsing too. Everything works here: the pacing, the color, the awkward comic relief. There's not nearly this much energy in the following year's The Mummy, though that one is fun just for its high camp value and its tomb that looks like a slightly dusty Victorian drawing room.

The Mummy

Christopher Lee walks like an Egyptian in The Mummy (dir. Terence Fisher, 1959).

More Eastmancolor fun from Fisher and the Hammer folks. Best thing in this one: the tense encounter between Peter Cushing as a British archeologist and George Pastell as Mehemet Bey, a modern-day worshipper of Karnak, a "third-rate" pagan deity. From one perspective, it's imperialist nostalgia indulging in the fantasy of the dangerous Arab other, and from another, it's a witty indictment of "civilized" western complacency. But the scenes with Lee as an Egyptian high priest are just plain outrageous.

The Shanghai Gesture

Ona Munson and Maria Ouspenskaya in The Shanghai Gesture (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1941).

I wish I could post a screen capture of almost every single shot in this gorgeous, incoherent, screwed-up, delirious film. Victor Mature as Dr. Omar the "Persian Poet"! And the dialogue: "Stop behaving like a disabled flamingo."

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Slicing up eyeballs: Peter Cushing in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (dir. Terence Fisher, 1973).

The final Frankenstein film from Hammer. Cushing's wife had died shortly before it was made, and it's hard not to acknowledge that this lends a particular melancholy to his performance. He's terribly frail and gaunt--so much so that one senses he is near death himself (though he would live another twenty years). The ultra-low budget shows sorely in places: Dave Prowse looks just ridiculous as the monster, like a cross between Bigfoot and a Morlock. There are some fine supporting performances, though, and the whole production has a distinctive, dusty, gothic feel that is different from any of the previous films. The ending is either ineptly flat or chillingly open-ended--I'm not sure which.

Having now seen all the Hammer Frankensteins with Cushing (though not Jimmy Sangster's The Horror of Frankenstein, a 1970 prequel starring Ralph Bates that is currently unavailable on Netflix), I'm especially interested in one narrative element: the odd discontinuity of the series. The second film takes up exactly where the first left off, but from then on, the backstory gets erratic and almost contradictory. In addition, Cushing's personality is subtly different from movie to movie. At times, his evil amounts to mere self-absorption and a certain callousness, and at other times he's practically Hannibal Lecter. It's not a smooth progression, either; he wavers in and out. The cumulative character that emerges as a result is a moral patchwork. What's most frightening about Baron Frankenstein is that you can imagine yourself being drawn into his confidence over long stretches of time, like his various assistants who appear and disappear without explanation, but if some of his actions appear occasionally to reflect a complex sensibility that borders on humanity, these revelations do not resolve themselves into any sort of psychological or emotional growth. You're essentially starting over with each new movie, and what you saw last time is little indication of what you'll get this time. This instability of character is probably more the result of Hammer's (and Fisher's) erratic aesthetic integrity as it is of any deliberate artistry on anyone's part. And yet this very shoddiness of conception is part of what makes it psychologically compelling. Cushing's portrayal of Frankenstein is a fifteen-year-plus, time-lapse study in moral chaos. He is Nietzsche's superman satirically rendered as a chronic failure who doesn't learn from his mistakes. Shelley's original modern-day Prometheus looks too deeply into the abyss and is tragically humbled; Cushing's doctor likes what he sees and keeps looking, even though it continually brings disaster upon him and everyone around him.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Holding out the key: Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (dir. Terence Fisher, 1969).

Destroyed? Isn't that a bit harsh? Maybe not. Frankenstein takes his sociopathic malevolence to new levels in this, the fifth installment in the Hammer series. Among his crimes this time around: murder, robbery, blackmail, and rape. A strange tableau of relentless cruelty. It's hard to say what, if any, identification or sympathy Frankenstein is capable of inspiring, and yet, there's something fascinating about his continually botched pursuit of scientific enlightenment via mutilation and mayhem. The first time we see Frankenstein in the film, he is wearing a grotesque rubber mask. The immediate assumption that springs to mind is that we are seeing one of his experiment/victims, and when the mask comes off, it's a neat sleight of hand--Frankenstein is the monster, which, as I've said before, is Fisher's conceit throughout the series. But Fisher doesn't seem entirely sure how to pitch this idea. Cushing's charisma and urbanity seems somewhat at odds not only with the brutality of his character, but with his comically debased picaresque aspects. Or maybe this dissonance is the thing that makes these otherwise fairly stilted sado-dramas come close at times to brilliance.

Frankenstein Created Woman

Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Created Woman (dir. Terence Fisher, 1967).

The fourth of the Hammer Frankenstein films with Peter Cushing, and the third directed by Fisher. This one has more nonsensicalities and outrageous anachronisms than all the previous ones put together, but it's also a lot of fun. When Baron Frankenstein transplants the soul of his executed assistant into the disfigured and crippled body of the assistant's girlfriend's body (she's committed suicide because of her boyfriend's death), he not only performs world-class plastic surgery to make her beautiful and completely sound of limb, but he apparently decides she would look better as a blonde (with a built-in Carnaby Street sixties hairstyle).

Night Creatures

Peter Cushing in Night Creatures (dir. Peter Graham Scott, 1962).

Another Hammer film starring Cushing: it's on the same disk as The Evil of Frankenstein, as part of the Hammer Horror series. UK title: Captain Clegg. Not really a horror film; more of a semi-swashbuckling (in a gloomy way) graveyard pirate yarn. Pleasantly moldy historical fantasy.

Lanny Quarles offers the best description of the Hammer aesthetic I can imagine: "For me Hammer is all about the color saturation and the horsefacedness of it all. Velvet long tooth cardboard gothness."

The Evil of Frankenstein

Kiwi Kingston (or possibly a dummy wearing his costume and makeup) and Peter Cushing in The Evil of Frankenstein (dir. Freddie Francis, 1964).

The third installment in the Hammer Frankenstein series is the only one that Terence Fisher didn't direct. Cinematographer Freddie Francis does a pretty good job of carrying on his style, right down to the cleavage fetish (when I think about it, that was probably more of a general Hammer thing than a Fisher thing per se). The monster in this one is terribly dull and lumpish: his head looks like a shoebox coated in papier-mâché. Cushing, as usual, is the reason to watch, although he doesn't really live up to the evil of the title: in fact, compared to his murderous demeanor in the first two films, here he's an affable, misunderstood guy. Katy Wild plays a sweet-natured deaf-mute village girl whose face, for some reason, is as pasty and seasick-looking as the creature's. Honestly, beyond some attractive matte paintings and such, there's not much to recommend this, but now I'm committed to finishing out the series.

Four Sided Triangle

"An empty mind ... and a new beginning": Barbara Payton in Four Sided Triangle (dir. Terence Fisher, 1953).

Along with Stolen Face, this early Hammer film is one of Fisher's signs of predisposition toward the Frankenstein story. Two boys (Bill and Robin) and a girl (Lena) grow up together. Bill and Robin both love Lena, but Lena only loves Robin, and she marries him. Bill and Robin just happen to have invented a machine that can reproduce matter (poetically named "The Reproducer" by Bill, though Robin helpfully points out that it might just as easily be called a "Duplicator"), so unbeknownst to Robin, Bill uses it to make a copy of Lena (with her willing cooperation, and the assistance of his very responsible adoptive father, who's a doctor and decides the risks are not that severe). Since the new Lena (now named "Helen") is an exact duplicate, however, she still loves Robin. What to do? Wipe her brain free of all memories, of course, so they can start from scratch. Guess how good an idea that turns out to be. There's a Lacanian allegory of something in all this. Probably the Hollywood star and genre system as filtered through the low-budget British knockoff industry. Or dumb blonde jokes. Maybe both.

The Revenge of Frankenstein

Peter Cushing and Francis Matthews in The Revenge of Frankenstein (dir. Terence Fisher, 1958).

The second movie in the series makes it click for me: Fisher not only thinks the real monster is Baron Frankenstein; he thinks this makes him the most interesting character. The creature functions in Revenge, as in Curse, only as a symptom. In order to stress the point, this creature (Michael Gwynn) even starts out as handsome, in a gangly English way at least, and when he does turn ugly, it's with a minimum of makeup. The small killing rampage he goes on serves mainly to emphasize Frankenstein's sociopathically callous irresponsibility for creating him. Although he is more sympathetic than Christoper Lee's zombie boogeyman in Curse, he's still a far cry from Shelley's original philosopher creature or Boris Karloff's tragic idiot. Frankenstein, on the other hand, is a suave, determined fiend. By the end of the film, Cushing has fully refined his trademark aura of ironic Nietzschean anti-villainy.

The Curse of Frankenstein

Peter Cushing in The Curse of Frankenstein (dir. Terence Fisher, 1957).

The first in Hammer's Frankenstein series. After seeing some of Fisher's early crime films, with their distinctive, not unappealing, British drawing-room dullness, I have a whole new perspective on his and writer Jimmy Sangster's Shelley adaptation (Sangster, by the way, was assistant director on all the Hammer noirs I've seen so far). What makes Fisher interesting, in an anthropological case-study kind of way, is the same thing that makes him minor: he has no idea how to handle the sensationalistic material he is drawn to. Or he has an idea that flickers to life from time to time, but it is always damped by his obsessive urge to present scenes of basically polite--albeit sometimes homicidal--people engaging in long, repeated bouts of mildly heated disagreement. This is only offset in Curse by Christopher Lee's lurid creature makeup: he looks like he has moldy birthday cake all over his face. That and Fisher's ongoing professional interest in cleavage, which he indulges in this case with both Helen Court as Elizabeth and Valerie Gaunt as the maid Justine. Somehow Fisher's lack of natural feeling for the conventions of the crime and horror genres translates into a queasily repressive formalism that results in a distinctive style after all. And as I write this, it occurs to me ... couldn't the same thing be said, on a much larger scale, about Hitchcock?