DR. RENAULT'S SECRET (1942)

Director Harry Lachman started his career as an artist, became a film director in England, France and his native America, and then went back to being an artist. This film came right at the end of his career as a director and shows him to be a quite competent director of B-movies. Lachman was a house director at Fox and was used to handling the studio's Charlie Chan series which, along with his biopic THE LOVES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE the previous year, would have made him an obvious choice for this, one of the studios few low-budget horror movies. Based, uncredited, on a story by Gaston Leroux (of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA fame) and owing not a little to H.G.Wells' Island of Dr.Moreau, the films benefits from the presence of horror regular George Zucco as the eponymous mad doctor and an excellent performance by J. Carrol Naish as his secret. Like most B-movies from the bigger studios the film is able to utilise some impressive sets and a supporting cast that includes such reliables as Arthur Shields and Mike Mazurki (both strangely uncredited in prominent roles.) The films, while not offering anything original, at a fast paced 58 minutes, never outstays its welcome and this, combined with all the points above and the excellent photography, make this good fun and a welcome addition to any vintage horror film collection. Rating **

JUDEX (1963)

My first experience of Judex came in the early sixties when a friend and I went to Millbank for a screening of the complete 1916 Louis Feuillade serial which ran for about six hours. It was a great experience and was made even more special by having a live piano accompaniment by cinema pianist Arthur Dulay. Soon after that memorable afternoon George Franju's remake of JUDEX appeared and it has taken me forty-five years to catch up with it. Franju was not very interested in making JUDEX, his ambition was to remake Feuillade's other classic, FANTOMAS.

According to scriptwriter Jacques Champreux, Franju ignored Judex's motivation and preferred to concentrate on the recreation of the period and the evocation of the films of his youth. For today's viewers, the CGI generation, Franju's JUDEX would seem very slow, but it is necessary to remember not only how films were in the Sixties but how they were in the years preceeding. It would be easy to say that JUDEX is character driven but the truth is that there is little or no character development. It is to a degree plot driven but then Franju seems very cavalier about plot detail and the story chugs along on a series of unlikely coincidences. Champreux regards the film as pure expressionism. Feuillade set his story in a realistic France (albeit ignoring World War One that was raging at the time) while Franju has to recreate the past which gives his film a very potent "magical realism" which is potent. There are wonderful touches : nuns suddenly produce hypodermic needles, Judex is a precurser of Bat Man complete with a bat cave headquarters beneath a ruined castle, he wears a cloak and seems to have psychic control over a pack of dogs, Judex's black clade minions scale the outside of a building like insects. Almost as important is the fact that in Franju's film Judex is a conjuror - played by real life stage magician Channing Pollock. The female villain is played by a wonderfully coldhearted and calculating Francine Berge (Bardot was considered for the role but was too expensive), Edith Scob (so memorable in Franju's EYES WITHOUT A FACE) is her victim and Sylvia Koscina is a passing circus acrobat. The Andre Melies on the cast list is the son of the famous French cinema pioneer, Georges Melies. I think it is often instructive to ask oneself "Which film does this film most remind me of ?" Well, in the case of JUDEX, it is Jacques Becker's CASQUE D'OR which has a similar period setting....to my surprise there is a scene in JUDEX where Francine Berge and her boyfriend are dancing in a nightclub. They are doing a odd, jogging, little dance and the scene has (for me) a strange erotic quality...in CASQUE D'OR Serge Reggiani and Simone Signoret perform the same dance. Coincidence ? Rating ****

TOM MILNE

Many people influence our education in movies. It might be somebody who we talk to about films, somebody who we see films with or somebody who recommends films to us. I wrote some time back about the influence of Jim Kitses on my own early film appreciation. Sadly, I learned today that another of the great influences on my film life - critic Tom Milne - passed away three years ago. I can't claim to have known Tom very well but I did meet him on many occasion and was on first name terms with him. Our first meetings were professional and but I think Tom recognised that my love of films went far beyond the business side of things. I was in my late teens when I first met Tom Milne and was already a big fan of his film criticism (he was at the time editing the MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN at the British Film Institute) and was flattered that somebody I saw as a celebrity seemed eager to discuss movies with me whenever we met.

Tom loved all types of movies from the horror films of James Whale to the chamber pieces of Carl Dreyer. His enthusiasm for the whole film medium was infectious. It was after watching VAMPYR and knowing that Tom had been a consultant on the Masters of Cinema series and a particular fan of Dreyer that I decided to find out what he was doing these days. Almost immeadiatley I found a tribute page to him. Tom was a lovely man and I wish I'd known him better than I did, but I feel lucky to have known him at all. Some of his colleagues have posted tributes and memories of the man that are both moving and amusing and give a good picture of Tom's wide ranging tastes, please take some time to read some of them at : http://www.mastersofcinema.org/tommilne.htm

YOIDORI TENSHI/Drunken Angel (1948)

In the post war slums of Tokyo a young gangster (Toshiro Mifune) visits an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet removed from his hand. The doctor also diagnoses tuberculosis and the gangster reacts violently and leaves. The doctor goes to see the gangster and tries to persuade him to get an X-Ray but again the meeting ends in an assault on the doctor. This is the basic premise for Kurosawa's film and as this brief outline suggests it is mainly a two-hander for the two great Japanese actors. The vivid depiction of the slums (we are in the world of IKIRU here) with children drinking from lakes of rotting water where the city's waste has been tipped and disease and crime running rampant is the perfect setting for this tale of redemption. From Western eyes conditioned by Hollywood cliche viewers tend to expect that the main focus of this tale is Mifune's young gangster and we are, perhaps, deliberately led down that path by Kurosawa. The doctor is living with the girlfriend of a gang leader who is due to be released from jail. Will Mifune protect them ? Well the action takes all the expected turns but the motivations and results are not at all what we would expect. Mifune's character is a selfish son-of-a-bitch who can see no further than his own reputation and there is no softening of his personality. In Hollywood he would have discovered gratitude and humility and gone out in a redeeming blaze of glory but for Kurosawa the man is a waste of human potential and his end is ineffectual, squalid and motivated not by any noble sacrifice but by pride. Kurosawa compares him to a young school girl who suffers from the same disease and who listens to the doctor. While Kurosawa never hits us over the head with the "message" the characters would seem to me to stand for the attitudes of post-war Japan, with Mifune as the old self destructive ways and the schoolgirl (who we only see twice) as the way forward. The polluted slum is post-Hiroshima Japan. On the more personal level the redemption that we first expect to be Mifune's is actually that of the doctor - Kurosawa tells us this in the title. The final seen has a feeling of optimism that reminded me strongly of Sjoberg's TORMENT. Rating ****

Curiously, I watched this on the same day as I viewed WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU in which a man is pursued along a beach by a strange ghostly figure. In DRUNKEN ANGEL, Mifune dreams that he finds his own coffin on a beach and is pursued along the beach by his own corpse. I think they call it synchronicity!

WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU (1968)

It was soon after WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU was shown as part of the late lamented OMNIBUS BBC series that I was talking to a friend in Parkway in Camden Town, London, when Jonathan Miller walked buy. "Dr.Miller!" I said akmost without thinking. Miller stopped and came back. I complimented him on his film and said I hoped that he would do more. He was very gracious and friendly and said he was glad that my friend and I had enjoyed the film. Of course, Miller went on to do all sorts of things on television and notably in Opera and never returned to the works of M. R.James. A shame because he shares much of James academic background. Seeing the film again (this is my third viewing) I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. There is much to admire, of course, the atmosphere of the seaside hotel, the lone windswept beaches, the wonderful performance by Michael Horden (whose recordings of James stories are to be sought out) but my memory has been playing tricks. The first and second viewings seem to me to have been much scarier and the the two sequences involving the strange pursuing figure and the haunted bed seem to have been much longer and far more disturbing. Memory obviously plays tricks and familiarity lessens the effect. Rating ***

MOVIE SNAPSHOTS No3

Dislocation, dislocation, dislocation!

When I picked my 10 favourites recently I said how difficult it was to pick a favourite film by the great Akira Kurosawa. I quite surprised my self when I picked AKAHIGE/Red Beard(1965) as one of my two favourites from the great man. RED BEARD was a huge hit in Japan and rightly hailed as a masterpiece but fared less well in Europe and America where critics (except for the real Kurosawa afficinados) thought that the plot was a bit "soapy" - well if it is then Kurosawa transcends the material as surely as critic's darling (and I mean no disrespect to him) Douglas Sirk ever did. RED BEARD is a long film but for me is totally gripping from beginning to end.

It is in turn, moving, exciting and, in one memorable scene, scarey as hell. The plot tells of a young doctor in 18th Century Japan who goes to work at a public clinic run by an unconventional doctor (think HOUSE and you're still miles off target) with a reputation for being awkward. The film has many outstanding moments that I could have picked as my movie snapshot including the memorable scene where Toshiro Mifune as the doctor is threatened by a gang of pimps and he proceeds to dislocate their limbs in a fight scene as exciting as any sword fight that Kurosawa ever filmed. But my choice is of a scene very early in the film when the young intern is first taken to meet Mifune. He has heard of his reputation and is very nervous. Another intern takes him to Mifune's office and slides to one side the partition. Unexpectedly, because of the build up, Mifune is kneeling with his back to the door. The two younger men kneel in the Japanese manner and the introduction is made. Mifune still does not turn. The moment is held, maybe for only a few seconds but we, like the newcomer feel it is an eternity. Suddenly Mifune turns and stares at the younger me and again Kurosawa holds the moment for full effect. And what an effect it is! Immeadiatley we, the viewer, become that young doctor facing the scrutiny of our fearsome new boss. This small sequence is a wonderful example of both Kurosawa's power as a director - the suspenseful buildup, the seeming anti-climax and then the climax that draws the audience into the scene - knowing just how long to hold each shot - and of Mifune's fantastic presence as an actor. In that glaring look we know everything we need to know about the character at this point in the film. He has authority, is unconventional, is a bit scarey but is so charismatic that we are drawn to him and want to know more. Brilliant. Luckily the very moment is captured in a still.

VAMPYR, DER TRAUM DES ALLAN GRAY/Vampyr, The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray (1932)

This restoration of Car Dreyer's classic 1932 film is the best and most complete version of the film I have ever seen. The restoration is based on the German version of the film and the inter titles are in that language (although, of course, translation sub-titles are provided). Made in France by Danish director Carl Dreyer the film is based on Irish writer Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's book In a Glass Darkly and it is usually accepted that it is a loose adaption of the story Carmilla, although there is little in the plot besides a vampire that resembles anything in that tale. The film is really unlike anything else in the history of horror movies, although if you are familiar with classic horror films a viewing will convince you just how influential Dreyer's imagery has been. The plot is fairly simple (although perhaps not at first viewing) - Julian West, a traveller versed in the occult, stays at an inn where an old man asks his help in protecting his family from a vampire. The vampire is an old lady who is assisted by the town doctor (who looks remarkably - and I'm sure not accidentally - like Jack McGowran in Polanski's FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS). It is in the telling that VAMPYR is so remarkable and truly unsettling.

The hero, Allan Gray (who in some versions is called David Gray) finds himself in a dream-like world where the ordinary becomes weird (ie. the old man entering the bedroom) and the weird becomes almost matter-of-fact : shadows detach themselves, shadows appear where there is no one to cast them, a grave digger is filling an empty grave. Although shot with sound this is very much in the tradition of the silent film - it is a film where the modern viewer must make a mental adjustment before watching. The Eureka release has some nice extras - including two commentaries, the best by critic Tony Rayns and an irritating one by Guillermo del Toro who obviously loves the film but repeats himself to often. There is an informative booklet, a visual essay on the film's visual influence, a documentary on Carl Dreyer, two scenes cut by the German censor and more. Absolutely one for the collection. Rating *****