In 1974 Peter Sellers revived his flagging film career by agreeing to resume the role of Inspector Clouseau. The Pink Panther franchise produced a run of successful films up until his death in 1980. It’s an odd coincidence that in the year before his “comeback” Sellers played another Frenchman in possibly the most obscure film he ever appeared in. The Blockhouse is not a starring vehicle for him, but rather an ensemble piece where he plays one of seven men trapped in an underground bunker during World War II. The unusual cast also includes Charles Aznavore, Leon Lissek, Jeremy Kemp and Peter Vaughan. It’s a rare straight role for Peter Sellers.
The Blockhouse is directed by Clive Rees and based on a novel by Jean Paul Clebert, which in turn is supposedly based on real life events. If this is true then it is an extraordinary story. The seven men, all prisoners of war, are trapped underground during the D-Day raids. They find themselves in a German “blockhouse”, an underground shelter with food, drink and – equally importantly – candles to keep them alive for years. And it turns into years. In 1951, so the story goes, two men were rescued from a blockhouse after surviving for seven years, four of them in total darkness.
Thus The Blockhouse is fairly depressing subject matter, although it is compelling viewing due to the excellent performances. Especially Sellers. Despite the megalomaniac he is often portrayed of in biographies, he does not attempt to steal the limelight in this film any way. A truly brilliant performer, who sadly squandered his talent on often substandard material. Peter Vaughan, another actor better known for comedy, is also very impressive as the first to crack under the strain (a piece of trivia: Vaughan also played Sellers’ father in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers). Unfortunately the film quality of The Blockhouse is poor, with the direction uneven. It’s no surprise that Rees did little else. But there are several memorable sequences. Sellers attempting to teach his fellow captives dominoes, an ill-advised bicycle race, and Sellers (again) resolved to his final moments under the earth. This, together with the final scene when the supply of candles comes to an end, is very moving.
It’s strange that The Blockhouse fell into obscurity for so long, and there’s probably a metaphor there somewhere to compare the film with the plight of the seven forgotten men. I’m not aware of it ever being on UK television. Stranger still, it is now available as part of The Peter Sellers Collection on DVD together with Where Does it Hurt? and Orders are Orders, arguably his two other least known films. I would think any Pink Panther fans buying this will be in for a shock.
I was surprised to find that I had never seen Race With the Devil. This 1975 film was chosen as a favourite by the author Sean Hutson in a recent edition of SFX magazine. It stars Peter Fonda and the great Warren Oates and blends a mix of road movie with a dash of Satanism. This isn’t as an accomplished movie as, say, Rosemary’s Baby but is much less mannered and far more enjoyable than Spielberg’s Duel and better than, coming much later down the line, The Hitcher and Tarantino’s Death Proof.
The premise of Race With the Devil is that of a camping holiday gone very wrong. Lacking here is campside singsongs, barbecues and cool beers, replaced instead by deadly car chases, eerie petrol stations, inefficient cops and – oh yes – snakes. Snakes that make, if this is possible, Snakes on a Plane look very ridiculous indeed. There’s lots of shots of screaming women in this film. And very often of screaming men.
Fonda and Oates play two regular guys out caravanning with their wives, Lara Parker and Loretta Swit (from MASH), who run into big trouble. Possibly the one drawback of the film is that it never settles down into a particular genre. In the early scenes we see a lot of Fonda racing around on a motorbike, stopping now and then to remove his helmet and look pretty. Perhaps a throwback to his Easy Rider days, but unnecessary. Also very early in the film Fonda and Oates happen to eavesdrop on a scene of ritual sacrifice. What begins as what could be a sequence from Carry on Camping (‘ere Sid, have a butcher’s through these binoculars and cop this!”) quickly turns into our main quartet of characters running for their lives. Like Duel, this is a film where the nameless and mostly unseen enemy pursues and pursues, relentlessly and terrifyingly. But, despite how it may have been billed over the years, it remains essentially a chase film, with only a glimpse or two of anything supernatural.
Interestingly, Race With the Devil still works brilliantly despite the fact that it’s central theme is now over familiar. This is possibly because the best themes will continue to be used; much of this film reminded me of the recent (although obviously much less restrained) Wolf Creek. People get chased by bogeymen. This is film lore, we learn it but it still entertains. We know that Fonda and Oates will fail in convincing the police that they are being followed by Satanists. We know that every single petrol station they visit will have a telephone that doesn’t work and a particularly creepy attendant. We know that it is absurb how they are persecuted so easily (but this is nevertheless still convincing). We suspect (and hope) that this film will end rather bleakly. So essentially Race With the Devil is manipulative of its audience, setting up a ridiculous yet highly enjoyable premise.
I suspect this movie works so well because it is so rooted in the 70s. In the pre-cellphone age a scene shows Parker and Swit visiting a library to research devil worshipping (they end up stealing two reference books). Isolation was so easier to portray 35 years ago. The sheer size and emptiness of America adds to their hopeless plight, an inhospitable and alien landscape where you don’t really have to travel as far as the hillbillies of Deliverence to find trouble.
If I had to find one word to describe Race With the Devil I would describe it as a hoot. By this I mean a film that’s simply very enjoyable but one that won’t stand up to too much scrutiny like, again, Rosemary’s Baby. The scene with the two rattlesnakes inside the caravan is superb. Oates, as always, is a very watchable actor. The director, Jack Starrett, also does a good job in adding to the drive-in exploitation canon that he excelled in. The movie is fast and energetic. What raises it high in the horror genre is its ending; sudden, nasty, shocking and brilliant.
In the early 70s Hammer Films attempted to expand their horizons, deciding that the usual formula of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee Frankenstein and Dracula vehicles was becoming somewhat tired. One of the solutions was to produce features set in the present day and to introduce younger stars. In 1972 the double bill of Fear in the Night and Straight on Till Morning was released. The latter film starred Rita Tushingham and newcomer Shane Briant, who despite going on to star in several Hammer features is now sadly little remembered. The move to replace Cushing and Lee mostly failed, with Hammer becoming increasingly directionless. The studio lost their appeal as the 70s trudged on, with Straight on Till Morning being one of only a few artistic triumphs.
Along with Ralph Bates, Shane Briant was groomed as Hammer’s new leading man at the time, and although leading rather well in Captain Cronos – Vampire Hunter he is possibly most effective in Straight on Till Morning. Here he plays a rather deranged young man (Peter) who is slowly revealed as a very dangerous killer. Both Briant and Tushingham are excellent in this film.
Brenda (Tushingham) is a northern girl who tells her mother she is pregnant (although she isn’t) and leaves Liverpool for London intent on finding a partner to father a child. An odd decision, but she’s an odd character and let’s be frank here; this is a weird film. Brenda decides to engineer an encounter with Peter by the impulsive means of stealing his dog one evening and then returning it to him the next day. It works. The two embark on a rather offbeat relationship, based partly on some kind of homage to Peter and Wendy in Peter Pan, although this is never explored thoroughly.
Peter Collinson (The Italian Job) directs his only film for Hammer, and the approach comes across at times as an attempt to emulate the Roeg/Cammell partnership of Performance in the film’s erratic and jarring editing technique. Attempts at being art cinema largely fail, although Collinson proves himself as the most versatile of directors. Along with Fear in the Night, Straight on Till Morning was first considered as a tv movie and it does pre-empt the later Hammer House of Horror series for ITV which also effectively used a modern setting for its small screen chillers.
Striaght on Till Morning also reminds of both the films of Pete Walker and of Alfred Hitchcock’s London set Frenzy. But unlike Walker (and even the 1972 Hitchcock) Collinson doesn’t rely on the permissiveness of 70s cinema to sneak in an extra does of sex and violence. Straight on Till Morning plays by the rulebook of suggestion – there is next to no blood spilt on camera although this still results in one of the most shocking films of that decade. This is partly due to the excellent acting and the dark ending, which is one of the tensest on camera.
James Bolam and Tom Bell appear in supporting roles, but their presence is so slight it seems their careers were at a low ebb at the time. It’s Briant and Tushingham’s film. Indeed, Hammer appear to be deliberately avoiding the inclusion of the recognisable supporting cast that usually kept their features bouyant. But never mind, the leads are enough to keep this one afloat. Rita Tushingham is a performer I’ve always felt uncomfortable with but in this film she is superb, almost parodying her ugly duckling persona of the previous decade. I last saw her in the Joe Meek biopic Telstar. Shane Briant still works consistently, although its tricky to name anything notable he’s done in recent years. Peter Collinson didn’t really direct anything more of worth and died in 1980. Straight on Till Morning is glaringly 70s British cinema, and the disturbingly frank shock factor of this film has undoubtedly kept it from television showings and let it sink into undeserved obscurity. A pity.
There’s something unsettling about London on film in the 1970s. Streets appear a little too empty. What traffic there is flows freely, with cars slowing down to park easily so their drivers can reveal what’s concealed inside the boot. Police come across as particularly inept, and allow teenage gangs to run riot on their motorcycles. Teenagers in general tend to fall into two general camps in 70s horrors; the easy victims or the out and out nasties. It’s a bleak and creepy 70s landscape.
Creepier still if it’s a Pete Walker film. Frightmare was directed by Walker in 1974 and follows his similarly gruesome offering from the same year House of Whipcord. Like the earlier film, Frightmare leads the viewer down an increasingly dark and narrowing path, where no-one is saved and the viewer is left particularly aghast. Or all the 70s horror films, it is one of the most shocking.
Frightmare begins in the 1950s, where a lone figure (Andrew Sachs) is murdered at a run down funfair. Jumping to the present day, Edmund and Dorothy Yates (Rupert Davies and House of Whipcord‘s Sheila Keith) are released from a mental institution. Apparently they are now cured of their irritating cannibal tendencies. So we can all rest peacefully. No, hang on a minute, this is a Pete Walker film…
If you’ve dared to watch the trailer, the film provides reassuringly melodramatic music to its horror, and as well as the London setting Walker uses a desolate but far from comfy farmhouse, where open fires provide easy access to red hot pokers. The nastiness of Frightmare will be no surprise for anyone familiar with Walker’s work. The director kept British cinema alive in the 1970s, although perhaps alive is the wrong word to use for a series of films generally dealing with some degree of bloodbath. Walker directed a series of successful films before retiring in the early 1980s. Rumour has it that he became a property developer. As well as horror films, Walker knocked out a series of mild sex comedies, the most well known probably being Tiffany Jones in 1973. He almost directed a movie starring The Sex Pistols, possibly more interesting than Julien Temple’s limp Great Rock and Roll Swindle. But we’ll never know. Walker’s final film was a brilliant swansong. The House of Long Shadows brought together Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, John Carradine and Christopher Lee.
Pete Walker creates an absurd world that is really beyond criticism, and his recent appearance at the BFI easily proves this. An amiable and eloquent gentleman, he comes across as something of an English Roger Corman. An exceedingly nice man who just happened to make horror films, there’s little point in digging too deeply into the meaning behind the flicks. The films, if you like this sort of thing, are just fun, and Walker is happy to admit that he stopped directing at a relatively early age simply because he’d run his course as a filmmaker. And, more to the point, how could you possibly top The House of the Long Shadows?
Walker’s cinema remains elusive and obscure, making him the truest cult filmmaker. His movies rarery, perhaps never, appear on television and are difficult to track down on DVD. So sadly many of his feature have escaped my attention, such as this intriguing looking film with the bizarre casting of the singer Jack Jones and the future Mrs Connolly Pamela Stephenson:
The Comeback looks fantastic, but I’ll have to make do with the trailer for now – that familiar deep voice telling me
Perhaps he is going mad. Or perhaps there is someone there…
After two decades I’ve finally done it. One of the most obscure movies ever made has finally dropped into my hands. In 1970 Amicus films made The Mind of Mr Soames starring Terence Stamp. Some background: Amicus are best remembered for their series of portmanteau horror films in the 60s and 70s. Stamp is best known for playing wide eyed innocence combined with a forgivable cockney charm, most movingly in Billy Budd (1962), chillingly in The Collector (1965) and, much later, with a lot of humour and gravitas in The Hit (1984). The Mind of Mr Soames brings together the very 70s contemporary look of the Amicus fantasy film with Stamp at his childlike best.
Stamp plays John Soames, a 30 year old man waking from a lifelong coma. He rises from his marathon sleep as essentially a baby in a man’s body, and it’s the duty of a stiffly military type (played by Nigel Davenport) to apply a programme of education to bring Mr Soames up to speed. It’s not easy, and anyone having ever dealt with babies and toddlers will quickly concur that a grown man throwing a tantrum might not be one of life’s pleasures. And where a film featuring an actor faking the mannerisms of a baby could go horribly wrong, it’s a credit to Stamp that he manages to pull it off so well with great wit and a dash of menace. And incidentally, this is the last of the modest run of films that featured the youthful Stamp; when he re-emerged in 1978 as General Zod in the Superman films he really had grown up.
The ever-reliable Robert Vaughn also stars as an American surgeon, initially called in to revive Soames but who then stays on to criticise Davenport’s archaic teaching methodology. Bearded and experimenting with 70s cashmere, it could be argued that Vaughn is attempting to shrug off his Man From Uncle image. Whatever his success rate, he’s still reliably good. His character argues that Soames should be allowed to play and be given a break from the strict regime of mathematics and vocabulary (and I suppose they were still using the term the three rs in 1970; and there were no league tables at the time although Davenport would surely be in favour of them). Vaughn showers Soames with exciting toys and secretly allows him free reign of the institution gardens, infuriating Davenport and inadvertently leading to the patient’s escape. This, I suppose, is what we have been waiting for.
Stamp’s flight inevitibly causes consternation for the folks he runs into on the outside. First he upsets a playground game of football and then a lunchtime drinking session in a smoky pub. People appear disturbed by Mr Soames’ peculiar garb, although this may not appear odd to the modern audience as he is wearing a now obvious hoodie. Times really do change, and the final scenes of the film begin to reveal its age. On the run, Soames boards a train full of quaint compartments, where he accidentally menaces a young girl to hysteria. Odder still, as I’ve been led to believe that Stamp was considered quite a catch in his prime and many a young lady would have jumped at the chance of some railway intimacy.
Joking aside, The Mind of Mr Soames does offer a lot of serious food for thought although many of its themes have a tendency to pop in, say hello but then not proceed to go anywhere. For example, it’s suggested that the Vaughn character has an alcohol problem, possibly related to his own family issues, but this isn’t properly followed up. Similarly, Big Brother rears its ugly head several decades too soon as a camera crew roll up to film every second of Soames’ development. Possibly seeming too far fetched for a fantasy film, the idea of filming a subject’s every waking moment must have been dismissed as spoiling an otherwise intelligent film as it isn’t fully pursued.
But so, after two decades of searching I was not disappointed by The Mind of Mr Soames. It’s an understated film that begs more than one viewing. It’s certainly deeper than the usual Amicus fare. The director is Alan Cooke, who sadly became a hack director for tv, and is based on a novel by the science fiction writer Charles Eric Maine. The guitarist John Williams supplies an odd yet effective soundtrack. Donal Donnelly is effective in a supporting role, and a keen eye might also spot Tony Caunter (Roy Evens in Eastenders) as a disgruntled teacher and Joe Gladwin (Wally in Last of the Summer Wine) as a friendly driver. Vaughn is very good, Davenport perfect for his role but Stamp, as ever when cast wisely, is outstanding. There’s a forgivable quality about his unsullied presence that is particularly effective here.
The Mind of Mr Soames is a sadly ignored and underrated film. Although in some ways its obscurity is a blessing, as there is the danger that the still interesting theme might be picked up by the Hollywood remake brigade. I can see Jim Carrey really going for it, and possibly Daniel Day Lewis if he got to it earlier in his career. If it happens, and whoever takes the lead, I’d like to see Terence Stamp reappear in a remake in the Nigel Davenport role. Why not? Michael Caine has been allowed to indulge in the remakes of some of his classics so why not Stamp? Although, like Amicus films and the early 1970s, the childlike charm of cinema is a thing of the past.
The Blockhouse is directed by Clive Rees and based on a novel by Jean Paul Clebert, which in turn is supposedly based on real life events. If this is true then it is an extraordinary story. The seven men, all prisoners of war, are trapped underground during the D-Day raids. They find themselves in a German “blockhouse”, an underground shelter with food, drink and – equally importantly – candles to keep them alive for years. And it turns into years. In 1951, so the story goes, two men were rescued from a blockhouse after surviving for seven years, four of them in total darkness.
The premise of Race With the Devil is that of a camping holiday gone very wrong. Lacking here is campside singsongs, barbecues and cool beers, replaced instead by deadly car chases, eerie petrol stations, inefficient cops and – oh yes – snakes. Snakes that make, if this is possible, Snakes on a Plane look very ridiculous indeed. There’s lots of shots of screaming women in this film. And very often of screaming men.
