Cleopatra out-takes ...

Elizabeth Taylor and veteran actor Finlay Currie on the set of CLEOPATRA. But Finlay wasn't in CLEOPATRA you say - quite right, his part was surgically removed when they were cutting the 6 hour epic down to a more manageable 4 .... pity Finlay didn't make the cut here, he was in so many other epics, from QUO VADIS? to BEN HUR. 

FILMS IN REVIEW is a fascinating little magazine I missed at the time, its good discovering them now, like that 1988 one with a terrific interview with Lee Remick looking back over her career, and this recent acquisition I found on ebay, dated January 1988 with a good feature on CLEOPATRA, going through the original Mankiewicz screenplay for his proposed six hour version, which would be shown in two parts. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox soon put paid to that and the 4-hour version that exists now is as much as we are going to get. 
I don't think there will be any A STAR IS BORN-type restoration here! 

Other deletions, apart from Finlay, included background material on those other characters like Ruffio, Sosigenes, Apollodorus, Octavian, etc. 

I like this particular scene closing the first half, as Cleo sails away, its perfectly written, acted, and scored with that great Alex North score.

Among the supporting players we also like Richard OSullivan (the little boy in DANGEROUS EXILE) as the petulant young Pharoah, Gregoire Alsan as the scheming Pothinus, and Pamela Brown's all-seeing high priestess, and of course we love the opulent sets and costumes, as discussed before, and that great panning shot over the bay of Alexandria as Caesar arrives ....  There is still a lot to enjoy in CLEOPATRA not least Rex as Caesar and as befits a Mankiewicz film, the dialogue is to savour.

Showpeople: The Burtons and Sophia ...

Not seen this one before: Liz Taylor visiting Richard and co-star Sophia Loren on the set of their THE VOYAGE, Vittorio De Sica's last film, filmed in 1973 and not released until much later ....

Only 3 years earlier I had seen, as mentioned before, The Burtons with director Joseph Losey and veteran film critic Dilys Powell at the CINEMA CITY exhibition at The Roundhouse in London ..... 

Laughter in the Dark, 1969

Or: The Burton film that wasn't .... Tony Richardson's LAUGHTER IN THE DARK seems a very rare movie now, there are only 3 comments on it on IMDB - It had a short London run back in 1969, but I caught it on its one screening on BBC2 here, and it then vanished until I got a copy from my pal Jerry - a rare movie hound, always tracking down esoteric items.

This Tony Richardson film caused some publicity at the time, as it was began with Richard Burton who did a few scenes before being sacked for being drunk and causing problems. His replacement was the equally erratic Nicol Williamson, and its an ideal role for him, (he had just done HAMLET at The Roundhouse in 1968, also filmed by Richardson).

Nicol Williamson, Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Drouot star in Tony Richardson's bold adaptation of the Nabokov novel. Updated to 1969 London from pre-Hitler Germany of the early '30s, it's the story of a successful art dealer (Williamson) who becomes so enamored with a degenerate usherette/grifter (Karina) that he literally destroys his life. He loses his wife, his daughter, his job and his eyesight, and finally his life.

Williamson, in a role meant for and started by Richard Burton, gives a great performance, playing an even more obsessive Humbert Humbert. Drouot (from Agnes Varda's LE BONHEUR)  is excellent as the malevolent artist/gigolo who is Karina's real love. The casting of Karina is a bit odd and her French accent is never accounted for. Nevertheless she successfully conveys pure evil. It is one of the international roles she was doing at the time (as in JUSTINE, Visconti's THE STRANGER, MICHAEL KOHLHAAS etc). Siân Phillips (before she became a grande dame) is Williamson's no-nonsense wife. Cast also includes Peter Bowles, and it captures that late Sixties London high life perfectly. Like the films of Nabokov's LOLITA and KING, QUEEN, KNAVE (John-Moulder Brown label) it is another mordantly funny heartless tale, and maybe one of Richardson's most effective films.
A nice in-joke here is that the cinema where Karina works is the old NFT (National Film Theatre, now the BFI Southbank in London, where I idled away a lot of the Seventies) - as the cinema did not sell refreshments in the audiorium. (It was also used as the cinema in Winner's I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATS'ISNAME). 
As recorded previously, Richardson had a problematic '60s after the enormous Oscar-winning success of TOM JONES in 1963, bankrolling his and Woodfall's following films, as he indulged himself with Jeanne Moreau in MADEMOISELLE and THE SAILOR FROM GIBRALTAR, and the expensive  THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE in 1968, all of which under-performed, putting it mildly, so big things may have been expected of LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, but as Losey found out, the Burtons were losing their box office cachet by then ...

Burtons go Boom!

More Tennessee Williams mayhem, sorry - arthouse classic, or if you want, a Trash Masterpiece .... whatever, its certainly a cult movie now. (see THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS STONE - below).

It must have seemed a good idea at the time for arty culty director Joseph Losey to team up with The Burtons in 1968, after the relative failure of his 1966 Bond spoof MODESTY BLAISE (perhaps MY cult movie...) and then ACCIDENT in '67 - the last of his with frequent players Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker.

BOOM! is now regarded as a camp Trash Classic in some quarters, and maybe it started that era of Burton and Taylor's decline at the box office - after their mid-60s artistic hits WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, after those popular items like THE VIPS. THE SANDPIPER IS a Trash Classic even if Minnelli gave it some surface style and gloss and Taylor looked marvellous, if a little dumpy. They must have thought they were being artistic doing another Tennessee Williams (but "What were they thinking?" - even though they were drinking a lot at the time...) - even if it was a failed play of his "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" which the ageing Tallulah Bankhead had done on stage with Tab Hunter as her younger Angel of Death - that would have been something to see! 

Here are some choice comments from various websites on this fascinating misfire ..... 

As serious art, BOOM! is a bomb. Yet, as a testimony, a very camp testimony, to the lives of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Noel Coward, and Tennessee Williams, it is literally hysterical in its preoccupation with the emptiness of wealth, sex, and luxury.

 It is the incredible Miss Taylor who grounds this late 60's arthouse flop, and manages to transcend it's failing qualities, to make it a screen orgy of bad taste and over the top drama!

Taylor's role (like Vivien Leigh’s MRS STONE) is really that of an aging rich gay man who is trying to hang on to youth and the beauties that money attract. Burton's role is that of the hustler who is all that is left for the old queen to attract. But as with so many Williams works it all must be encrypted and coded so that the America of the late 50's and early 60's could handle his true intentions. 

Taylor plays ageing hedonist Flora “Sissy” Goforth, the much-married, drug-addicted, richest (and it’s been argued, the most irritating) woman in the world. From the windswept high solitude of her all-white villa on the edge of a cliff in Sardinia, the terminally ill Goforth is in denial about her imminent death, distracting herself by dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder, as she coughs up blood, and directing her diva’s wrath at her long-suffering servants in fractured Italian. She is visited by the enigmatic Christopher Flanders (played by Burton), a failed poet turned gigolo notorious on the international jet set as an ambiguous and parasitic Angel of Death who materialises whenever a wealthy woman is about to die. 
Burton is too old for the role that was written for a man in his twenties and Taylor is too young and too healthy looking to be the dying Sissy. As an elite high society gigolo Flanders surely should be a bronzed adonis, someone like Terence Stamp in Pasolini's TEOREMA, also 1968. Clad throughout in a samurai warrior's robe (complete with ceremonal sword) Burton look haggard and faded. It's he who looks like he is dying, instead of Taylor.

In theory BOOM! initially may have seemed promising. Taylor and Burton were show business royalty and the public was still entranced by their glitzy soap opera lifestyle. Taylor had triumphed in earlier film adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays like CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959). Joseph Losey was a hip, art-y director of the moment, critically acclaimed for films like THE SERVANT (1963).

Taylor plays in full-throttle imperious, overripe, scenery-chewing diva mode, and shrieking like a harridan, Her Sissy Goforth is self-parodic, unhinged and drag queeny - maybe that was the only way to play it - no wonder John Waters says Taylor’s appearance and abrasive performance in this film were a beloved source of inspiration for Divine.

BOOM! is incredibly beautiful to look at, weirdly enjoyable and frequently mesmerising in a way only a truly trashy bad movie can be. Losey’s prowling camera and elegantly composed shots ensure it’s never dull to watch - especially when Noel Coward arrives as The Witch of Capri ! and Taylor wears that kabuki outfit with that spectacular head-dress ...

Like in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER or NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH that weird Williams poetry comes through the bizarre situations. The set must have been expensive too. Taylor and Losey went on the equally bizarre and culty SECRET CEREMONY, also filmed in 1968 in London. This too  was a notorious flop at the time - and this is where I  come in, as I saw Burton and Taylor with Losey and "The Sunday Times" esteemed film critic Dilys Powell discussing the film on stage at the 1970 CINEMA CITY exhibition at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in London. SECRET CEREMONY had been badly received, cut, and sold to television and they were outraged at its treatment. I can still picture Elizabeth, looking great in a patchwork gypsy-style dress and flashing that diamond ring. Burton and Losey seemed hangdog about it all ... 
Our affection for Elizabeth grew in her later years: all those diamonds, perfumes, her AIDS charity work, her varying weight and looks ... for me though her great era was that decade from 1954 (THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, GIANT, RAINTREE COUNTY, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER and, yes, CLEOPATRA) when she and Marilyn were the twin deities of the era, as Sophia and Brigitte came to the fore.

The Burton era though was passing, were the public getting tired of their ritzy lifestyle and antics as they were forced to make more and worse films to maintain their lifestyle? - people were just not going to see them, together or separately, any more - and who could blame them with items like HAMMERSMITH IS OUT, BLUEBEARD, THE DRIVER'S SEAT, ASH WEDNESDAY .... ZEE & CO though was another genuine Trash Classic we will have to re-visit it soon.
Losey had another success, artistic and popular, with THE GO-BETWEEN in 1971 and was then mainly filming in Europe. He directed Burton again in his 1972 THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY, which a lot of people, including me, didn't bother with at the time - despite it also featuring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider - or maybe it did not hang around long enough for us to see it. It was though deadly dull when I finally got the dvd a while back. 

Cleo & Alex revisited

I always enjoy settling down to watch CLEOPATRA again - particularly if recording it from widescreen HD television, so one can zip past an occasional dull bit. Ditto Robert Rossen's 1956 ALEXANDER THE GREAT - a more turgid telling of the Alexander story than Oliver Stone's 2004 dazzling magnum opus which I like a lot - check posts on ALEXANDER at Colin Farrell label.

CLEOPATRA got a bad press at the time and was considered a turkey for a long time, but its a fascinating movie -- the first half at any rate as Rex Harrison is a dynamic Caesar and there are impressive set pieces - that great panning shot over Alexandra as Caesar arrives (Stone must have hommaged this in his ALEXANDER as he also shows us Alexandra where the aged Ptolomy is dictating his memoirs), and all those early scenes with Taylor and Harrison and of course that entry into Rome! 20th Century Fox certainly lavished care and attention and money on the sets and costumes and crowd scenes - all those people were really there. Taylor is impressive with that make-up and all those costume changes (a great wardrobe by Irene Sharaff, like that contrasting blue and red she wears when seeing Caesar's assassination in the flames, with high priestess Pamela Brown) and I love the score by Alex North - my best friend had the soundtrack album so we used to play it a lot. Leon Shamroy's cinematography captures the opulence of the sets.
I like that closing scene to the first half too as Cleo sails away and the music swells up. Her barge entering Tarsus in the second half is a wow too .... but here Burton rants and Taylor gets shrill ("I asked it of Julius Caesar, I DEMAND it of you"..), then the final scenes in the tomb are marvellous. I first saw this on its general release, maybe in '64 or '65, and those close-ups of Taylor on the big screen as the asp bites are someone one remembers .... Legend has it that Mankiewiz was writing the script by night and shooting during the day, after the film relocated to Italy and the famous scandal erupted. The dvd and blu-ray packages are good too, packed with all those features and documentaries including footage of Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd, initially cast, and Joan Collins' screen test as Cleo ...... it would not have been the same. 
CLEOPATRA remains impressive and a lot of fun, without the cachet of  Kubrick's SPARTACUS or Mann's EL CID or FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, or those other great epics of the time like Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or Visconti's THE LEOPARD. 

ALEXANDER THE GREAT, 1956, is another movie I remember fondly, first seeing it as a kid at a Sunday matinee, some great images linger: Danielle Darrieux as Alexander's mother Olympias on the battlements as the troops depart, and that great moment with the dying Darius (Harry Andrews) abandoned after the battle. A blond Burton does his best, and again there is a good cast including Claire Bloom, Peter Cushing, Andrews and Stanley Baker. Here are a cache of lobby cards:  

From that era, we also like Robert Wise's HELEN OF TROY, Fleischer's THE VIKINGS , Cecil's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, LeRoy's QUO VADIS and of course Wyler's BEN HUR, and I will add in SOLOMON AND SHEBA too ! Then there' those Steve Reeves movies ..... 

Who's afraid of ....

Just one priceless moment from WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? - Elizabeth doing Bette's "What A Dump" - from BEYOND THE FOREST of course! 

Love is not the sweetest thing !

A trio of mesmerising star turn impersonations:  Derek Jacobi as painter Francis Bacon; Michael Douglas as Liberace; Helena Bonham-Carter almost as Elizabeth Taylor .....

I had been putting off seeing LOVE IS THE DEVIL and BEHIND THE CANDELABRA for some time, as I felt one may be too grim, and the other too camp - but they make up an astonishing double bill with a similar story arc: naive young man gets taken up by older artist who turns out to be a monster who tosses him aside when he has tired of him ... both stories capture facets of British and American gay life in the '60s and '70s and into the '80s perfectly .

In the 1960s, British painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) surprises a burglar and invites him to share his bed. The burglar, a working class man named George Dyer, 30 years Bacon's junior, accepts. Bacon finds Dyer's amorality and innocence attractive, introducing him to his Soho pals. In their sex life, Dyer dominates, Bacon is the masochist. Dyer's bouts with depression, his drinking and pill popping, and his satanic nightmares strain the relationship, as does his pain with Bacon's casual infidelities. Bacon paints, talks with wit, and, as Dyer spins out of control, begins to find him tiresome. Could Bacon care less?

or as I said, on IMDB the other week: 

LOVE IS THE DEVIL, 1998. More artistic temperament in spades in this study of the painter Francis Bacon, and the man in his life, George Dyer, a small time crook. Again the casting is the thing: Derek Jacobi is uncanny as Bacon – as mesmerising as he was in I CLAUDIUS, while a pre-Bond Daniel Craig seems just right as the working class man out of his depth with Bacon’s Soho drinking pals who include Tilda Swinton - young David Hockney is depicted here too. John Maybury’s film  - I see it as a filmic version of Munch's "the Scream" - though cannot depict any of Bacon’s art but the film suggests their nightmare quality. The destructive relationship between painter and muse is caught as Dyer falls into alcoholism and pill popping, before his suicide. Grim is the word, at least Frear’s film on Joe Orton, another gay maverick artist, PRICK UP YOUR EARS had a lot of humour among the increasingly grim dramatics. 

John Maybury's film astonishes on many levels, capturing the selfish artist and the untidy (putting it mildly) studio, and all that drinking at the Colony and other drinking clubs. Jacobi is astonishing, whether cleaning his teeth with Vim detergent, putting shoe polish in his hair and applying mascara and powder before he heads off for an afternoon on the razzle, as Dyer sinks deeper into misery and booze and pills - Craig, as he was in LAYER CAKE and THE MOTHER and ENDURING LOVE is as solid as he was as Bond, James Bond.

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA, 2013: Before Elvis, before Elton John, Madonna and Lady Gaga, there was Liberace, pianist and flamboyant star of stage and television. Scott Thorson, a young bisexual man raised in foster homes, is introduced to Liberace and quickly finds himself in a sexual and romantic relationship with the legendary pianist. Swaddled in wealth and excess, Scott and Liberace have a sx-year  affair, one that eventually Scott begins to find suffocating. Kept away from the outside world by the flashily effeminate yet deeply closeted Liberace, and submitting to extreme makeovers and even plastic surgery at the behest of his lover, Scott eventually rebels. When Liberace finds himself a new lover, Scott is tossed on the street. He then seeks legal redress for what he feels he has lost. But throughout, the bond between the young man and the star never completely tears ...

Another terrific HBO movie (see THE NORMAL HEART, gay interest label) this Liberace movie is played for laughs as well as dramatics as ageing predatory older man ensnares rather naive young man. Scott (as depicted by Matt Damon) does not seem quite on the make, but is soon revelling in the glitz and glamour of the Liberace lifestyle. It is a shock to see Lee without his wig, as he and Scott get more involved, with Scott too having plastic surgery to look more like Lee, who talks of adopting him. 

Both actors turn in mesmerising performances, plus I did not recognise Dan Ackroyd or Scott Bakula (who delivers the zinger line to Scott: "Right now you are Judy at the Sid Luft obsese era"), while Debbie Reynolds was initially unrecognisable as Lee's mother, and Rob Lowe is the hilarious plastic surgeon. The tackier side of American showbiz is nicely depicted too. It is everything that Soderbergh's MAGIC MIKE should have been (see Mike label) ... while Damon has maybe his best role since THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY and Douglas is truly extraordindary as the great faker and master showman. Left: Soderbergh with Douglas. Liberace's 1955 film SINCERELY YOURS is reviewed at Liberace label. Also, its hardly unfair to depict Liberace like this, after all he had the nerve to sue - and win! - that British paper for casting aspersions on his masculinity! Douglas and Reynolds knew Liberace and his mother, so I imagine their portrayals are spot on. 

More camp showbiz excess is provided by BURTON AND TAYLOR, the BBC's 2013 biopic on the 1983 final teaming of the Great Lovers, who were selling themselves to the public, on stage in a doomed revival of Coward's PRIVATE LIVES. It was a last throw of the dice for Taylor to get Burton back into her orbit, even though he was poised to marry again. Helena (aided by great make-up, wigs, and those purple and lilac outfits) captures the capricious great star, forever late for rehearsals and seemingly not taking it seriously, to the annoyance of Burton and their director, but she delivers when she has to. She is also never far from the drinks trolley .... 

as Burton tries to avoid the booze and do the work. Bonham-Carter is fine as Taylor, but Dominic West suggests nothing of Burton's looks or voice to me, but does radiate a powerful presence, as he becomes horrified at the circus their play has become as the public come to see The Burtons ...

I saw The Burtons up close in 1970 at that Cinema City exhibition in London, as I have detailed previously - Taylor label - where they were with director Joseph Losey and critic Dilys Powell (left) as they were annoyed their SECRET CEREMONY film was a flop and being re-edited and sold to television. Eliizabeth looked marvellous in a gypsy type dress as she flashed that diamond, while Burton was in ranting mood in a safari suit!  The BBC film direted by Richard Laxton, captures a lot of their charisma and is jolly good fun. 

'70s British gangster movies

London is such an expensive (practically unaffordable), flash metropolis now that its a real delight to re-visit that seedy city of the 1970s - which I remember from my 20s then - with its cheap rooms and jobs where spivs and various grubby lowlifes ruled - from Burton's gangster in VILLAIN - made the same year 1971 as Caine's GET CARTER, to essential thrillers like THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. Here we look at VILLAIN, THE SQUEEZE, SITTING TARGET, HENNESSY, PERFECT FRIDAY, and a Trash 70s classic THE LEGACY - giving employment to a lot of our favoutires and stuffed with all those British character actors earning a crust here.   These are all as good as our '70s Brit favourites like Steiger and Lee Remick in the IRA drama HENNESSY or that amiable John Wayne western set in 70s London: BRANNIGAN. The seedy early 70s London is also caught in ALL COPPERS ARE - a recent discovery - all at London/Trash labels - along with GOOBYE GEMINI and cult trash classic DORIAN GRAY. 

VILLAIN,1971. Vic Dakin, a sadistic gang leader and a mother-obsessed homosexual modeled on real-life gangster Ronnie Kray, is worried about potential stool pigeons that may bring down his criminal empire. Vic, who enjoys playing at rough trade with his sidekick Wolfe, plans a payroll robbery and directs the blackmailing of Members of Parliament with a taste for unorthodox sex. Scotland Yard Police Inspector Matthews, playing Javert to Vic's Jean Valjean, is moving in on him and the gang. Gang-member Edgar is hospitalized for an ulcer, and Inspector Matthews might be able to make him sing. Will Edgar spill the beans to the coppers before Vic can silence him?
Richard Burton seems to be having a lot of fun here, Cathleen Nesbitt again plays his doting old mother (as in 1969's terrible STAIRCASE) whom he takes on day trips to Brighton, and there is a great gallery of supporting faces. Burton's boytoy Ian McShane also gets it on with '60s dolly bird Fiona Lewis (topless again) - though unlike the same year's SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY there are no intimate scenes between the men, Vic usually punches Wolfe, maybe thats their foreplay (below) .... Nigel Davenport and Colin Welland (a PC Plod type) are the cops closing in, Donald Sinden is ideal as the corrupt Member of Parliament, Joss Ackland and T.P. McKenna flesh out Vic's associates, as do James Cossins, Tony Welby and Del Henney - the rapist from that year's STRAW DOGS).  

VILLAIN holds its own in the violence stakes, the payroll robbery is botched and things start to go wrong for our beleagured Villain. Its a prime contender for a great 70s crime drama.  Michael Tuchner directs from a script by comedy writers Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais who later gave us their own more comic Swinging London thriller OTLEY in 1968 with Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider and another gallery of supporting players, including yes Fiona Lewis again.  

SITTING TARGET, 1972, by contrast is nasty and brutal with no redeeming features - Oliver Reed is in his element as he snarls and seethes through this brute force crime thriller, ably directed by Douglas Hickox (ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE, THEATRE OF BLOOD). Olly is uber-thug Harry Lomart who easily breaks out of prison with his sidekick Birdy (Ian McShane again)  and they go on the run, Olly though wants to track down and kill his faithless wife (Jill St John) who has told him she wants a divorce and is pregnant by another man. 

This is all grimly realistic with authentic South London locations - those tower blocks around Battersea and Victoria (as in ALL COPPERS ARE) though St John is hilariously miscast here as the Battersea housewife, with June Brown (Dot Cotton from EASTENDERS) as her next-door neighbour. This is a role that cries out for Carol White or Billie Whitelaw who would be ideal here dishing up greasy breakfasts with a cigarette dangling from their lips. The violence and the shootups continue in this cold, drab London until the climax and the wife's secret lover is revealed .... Edward Woodward, Frank Finlay, Freddie Jones are able support.

THE SQUEEZE from 1977, long unseen here, is however the real deal. I like this one a lot, and it will be due for a rewatch. Tough and brutal yes, but stylish too as a great cast go head to head, as directed by Michael Apted (TRIPLE ECHO, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER and still directing now). This is back to 70s London with a vengance, that city of cheap clothes and cheap cars, and grubby rooming houses. Stacey Keach is terrific as Jim Naboth, the shambolic shambling alcoholic ex-cop whom we first see drunk falling down the escalator of the underground - he is as memorable as he was in Huston's FAT CITY. His sidekick who looks after him is, oddly, comedian Freddie Starr, playing it straight here.

A vicious gang kidnaps a woman and her daughter (plus dog) to extort money from her rich husband. He and her down on his luck ex-husband who's an ex cop, decide to try to deal with the kidnappers themselves.
The kidnap scene is nicely handled in the park. The seedy underworld is nicely served up by Stephen Boyd as a frightening mobster - this was Boyd's last main role, he died that year aged 45 and again when playing nasty (as in BEN HUR or GENGHIS KHAN) he ramps it up to the max. 

The main hood is oily David Hemmings, in a good late role too. Edward Fox for once is lively and the kidnapped wife is Carol White, that ill-fated one of the new British girls of the 60s who went from being a child actress (CARRY ON TEACHER) to hits like CATHY COME HOME, UP THE JUNCTION, POOR COW, a foray to Hollywood and dying aged 48 in 1991. The most difficult scene here is where the bored kidnappers force her to strip for their amusement, to a Stylistics song and we see the character's desperation and humiliation, and perhaps the actress's too, it is all brutally unerotic. Keach too is stripped and humiliated by Boyd and his henchman and has to return home stark naked, not even left his grubby underwear. 

The sleaze seems piled up here as the drama unfolds and of course all goes wrong. THE SQUEEZE remains an eye-popping revenge thriller capturing 70s London perfectly (gritty locations, a cigarette smoke-fugged London Underground, dismal pubs and Soho 'massage parlours', and a pre-gentrified Battersea and Clapham - expensive areas now) with a dynamic cast, with several of our favourites here.

HENNESSEY, 1975. A fascinating view now. This thriller was barely seen back in the ‘70s and not at all here since, dealing as it does with the IRA and 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland. I imagine it was too close for comfort then, and the preposterous plot about blowing up the Houses of Parliament during The Queen’s State Opening ceremony, would hardly have been met with approval. This American-International title though keeps one engrossed, they certainly cast it well, from the opening riot in Belfast – scenes we were familiar with at the time, hardly “entertainment” though. 

The story – by actor Richard Johnson, playing a hard-boiled detective here – features Niall Hennessy, whom Rod Steiger plays in regular scenery-chomping mode, like where he sees his wife and daughter (young Patsy Kensit) killed accidentally in that riot as he falls on his knees in the street and howls like an animal. His revenge involves blowing up The Royal Family and the Houses of Parliament, as the IRA, led by diehard Eric Porter, begin to realise and have to follow him to London to stop him, as the consequences if he succeeds would be unimaginable. 

Enter Lee Remick in a thankless role as the Irish widow of a friend, who puts him up without realising what he is up to. Trevor Howard enjoys himself as the chief of Scotland Yard, and others involved include Peter Egan, Margery Mason. Don Sharp’s direction keeps it tight and engrossing as we watch Steiger preparing for his mission, as he impersonates a Member of Parliament. The State Opening is from an actual documentary cleverly intercut with the film, which almost convinces one it is the real thing. It is odd seeing a younger Royal Family here and real political figures like Ted Heath and Mrs Thatcher. It is all quite fascinating now and amusing too, apart from seeing Remick wasted in a thankless role - she and Steiger were a lot more fun in NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY in 1968..

PERFECT FRIDAY in 1970 seems tame and genteel by comparison, one of (Sir) Peter Hall's cinema forays at the time. A bank robbery caper, it captures the flavour of the era - particularly as Ursula Andress and Stanley Baker get out of their clothes. He is the timid deputy under manager of the bank where Lady Britt Dorset and her aristocrat husband David Warner require loans to prop up their lifestyle. Our deputy bank manager though has a plot of it his own and needs the impoverished toffs to carry it out, so who is going to doublec-cross who? Baker, Warner and Andress are all highly watchable - in our out of clothes - and it is an amusing forgettable trifle but pales in comparison with those brutal thrillers that came along later in the Seventies .... amusing now too to see that pre-"computer says no" world of banking with real managers who know their clients! 

and now for a 70s Trash classic: THE LEGACY. This schlock horror film from 1978 has it all - Katharine Ross (sort of reprising her STEPFORD WIVES role) and her real-lifre husband Sam Elliott as the Americans in England and being forced to stay at a spooky country pile, stuffed with odd characters: Margaret Tyzack as that creepy nurse, The Who's Roger Daltry as a rock star, Charles Gray and John Standing, Lee Montague, Hildegarde Neil and more .... what power is keeping them there?
SPOILERS AHEAD: (It turns out they are the descendents of a 17th century witch who was burnt at the stake and who are gathered at an English country house in the hope of receiving part of the family legacy, but why is Katharine included? We wonder until she sees that portrait of the witch from centuries before and she realises she is the chosen one... Then all those nasty deaths - one consumed by flames, another chokes on a chicken bone, a mirror shatters and the fragments impale another, and theres that fatal tumble down the stairs ... to say any more would be too much ! 

Sam too takes a naked walk to the shower where the water suddenly gets too hot to handle and he has to break the glass to get out, more blood ... This kind of thing (from a Jimmy Sangster story) was lapped up by audiences back in the 70s, usually as part of double bills, dabbling with the supernatural, or in this case a version of Agatha Christie and who gets killed next? 
(Pop star Fabian too choked to death in that 1965 version of Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS, a camp favouirite of ours, so Roger should have known where his part was going ...). Ross's unique glamour and all that hair are agan well used here, if only the material had been better, still its quite entertaining of its type. Still, I dare say they had a lot of fun making it. Directed by Richard Marquand.