Dirk as Gabriel

I won't tell you how much I paid for it but once I saw this great 8x10 glossy of Dirk Bogarde as Gabriel in MODESTY BLAISE, I simply had to have it. In all my years of collecting Dirk and Modesty items I had never seen this photo before, and its a good authenticated signature too. 
(he wears a similar black cap in several scenes in the Losey classic).

I have my own Dirk autograph, personalised "to Michael" by Dirk when I met him at the National Film Theatre in 1970 - yikes, 42 years ago! (as per my report at Bogarde label), but here it is again. (the autograph site: clickautographs.com has some other great stuff too, which I must return to...). 

 My friend Martin adds:  "Cheap at the price, I say.  I believe everything is worth what we pay for it, be it tuppence or £200, if it is something we really want and makes us feel good."

I could of course have just copied the image, but at least now I have the original.

Paul Simon: still great after all these years

Two music giants rocked London last week, oh and Madonna was here as well (but I only really like her "Vogue" and RAY OF LIGHT and MUSIC mid-period) .... Bruce Springsteen attracted headlines as his Hyde Park concert had the plug pulled on it as it over-ran, but Paul Simon got rave reviews as per usual. Good to see his GRACELAND out in a new re-mastered edition too, this was played at the concert as well as his great solo hits. I absolutely loved his 1975 album STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, which was perfect for turning 30, every track was a standout and those songs like "My Little Town", "50 ways to leave your lover", "Have a good time" quickly became standards to join the others like "Mother and Child Reunion", "I Do It For Your Love", "Slip Sliding Away", "Something So Right" "Train in the Distance", "The Sound of Silence" etc., and of course we all loved his 1970 opus "Bridge Over Troubled Water" with Art Garfunkel. The infectious African rhythms of GRACELAND are still delighting and it remains a very influential world music album.

Simon for me is probably America's finest male song-writer and singer up there with Joni Mitchell. I can listen to them anytime and their extensive back catalogues. I liked Bob Dylan's mid-'60s stuff and the hippie era JOHN WESLEY HARDING and NASHVILLE SKYLINE and the later BLOOD ON THE TRACKS but thats about it regarding Dylan for me - as I preferred Tims Hardin and Buckley with that amazing elastic voice of his - as per previous post, Music label.  
A memory: 1966 when I am 20 and new in London and living on my own, still to make new friends. Paul Simon's "I Am A Rock" is playing and I identified so much with it, and "Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall". Great that Simon at 70 is still performing and touring. His recent album SO BEAUTIFUL OR SO WHAT is also marvellous and I am getting used to the new songs. Along with Joni his work is as essential to me as say Aretha or Joan Armatrading. One of the several Paul Simon compliations is an essential item then. He reminds us of music's ability to transport us to a land of grace.

Some British R.I.P.s

Simon Ward (1941-2012). It is always saddening to see the demise of someone who was only a few years older than oneself, as I had seen Simon in that landmark 1967 production of Orton's LOOT (left) when I was 21. It is a curious career that despite some good roles never attained the heights, but according to interviews he was happy to be a working actor. He was the lead of course in Attenborough's YOUNG WINSTON in 1972, and other movies included ZULU DAWN and his role as The Duke of Buckingham in Richard Lester's MUSKETEERS films in '73 and '74. He was also in THE TUDORS in 2010. I noticed him drinking in a pub in Marylebone one lunchtime a few years ago when I worked in the area. He was very supportive too when his daughter Sophie came out as lesbian.

Angharad Rees (1948-2012), a popular television actress in the U.K., her best known role being in POLDARK, a very popular series in 1977. Both she and her ex-husband Christopher Cazenove (1943-2010) died far too young, a son of theirs was also killed in a traffic accident in 1999. She later diversified into designing jewellery, and also had a relationship with Alan Bates, before she re-married. 

The English '60s explode into colour ....

How we lived then: I love this image from Schlesinger's A KIND OF LOVING, 1962 - 50 years ago!

One more '60s post, on how that decade began: watching just two channels on a small black and white television with one's family in the lounge, no high definition then! - as in A KIND OF LOVING above, which captures that tedium perfectly. No wonder there was an explosion in music, art, movies, as young people went out a lot to express themselves and make their own entertainment ... cue those new black and white movies for the new generation like BILLY LIAR, THE SERVANT, THE KNACK, GEORGY GIRL, MORGAN ...

Julie Christie's Liz in BILLY LIAR comes down to London where she would soon be a DARLING (left, with the boys), leaving Billy behind up north - while Rita Tushingham's journey from A TASTE OF HONEY to SMASHING TIME via A PLACE TO GO, THE LEATHER BOYS, THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES and THE KNACK showed the '60s girl moving from grim reality to fantasy and slapstick in day-glo colours, as well as getting involved in jewellery capers with Marcello Mastroianni (DIAMONDS FOR BREAKFAST) and going to India with Michael York in THE GURU.

Michael and Rita in THE GURU.

By the mid-60s there was that explosion into colour with The Beatles in HELP!, popular movies like Clive Donner's NOTHING BUT THE BEST and WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? which we liked so much: Romy! Capucine! Paula! Peter! I had the soundtrack album by Burt Bacharach; the cult classic MODESTY BLAISE and then Antonioni gave us a different view of London in BLOW-UP - as we joined the new generation having fun in HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH and SMASHING TIME.... then we were ready for psychedelia and MIDNIGHT COWBOY and the rest as 1970 began... Donen's ARABESQUE (Sophia, Peck labels) was also a perfect mid-'60s caper with a plot that makes no sense now - a message in a microdot which would be delivered electronically now, but Loren dressed by Balmain has a lot of fun and Alan Badel is the best suave Arab villain with a shoe fetish ever.  I remember friends and I going off to the Odeon, Kensington for the first day of Visconti's THE DAMNED, one of the movies one had to see that year 1969.

The Beatles in colour - the HELP! songs are like the first pop videos

The zany climax of WHATS NEW PUSSYCAT?, so very mid-'60s

1940s British favourites

One more look at British movies - those 1940s classics I have discovered (being a child of the '50s) and cherished over the years ... BLACK NARCISSUS may even overtake BLOW-UP as my favourite film of all time, and I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING is one I have to see regularly too (just to spend time with Wendy Hiller, Pamela Brown, Roger Livesey, Nancy Price), and one can look at Lean's GREAT EXPECTATIONS any time and still be amazed by that amazing black and white photography ....and I simply love THIS HAPPY BREED, and the amazing sets for Michael Powell's A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and THE RED SHOES. Lean's 1948 THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS has been a recent discovery too, a stunning melodrama the equal of BRIEF ENCOUNTER. More on these at labels below ...

Wendy Hiller and that great Scottish castle interior

That British '40s certainly belonged to Powell & Pressburger, David Lean, Carol Reed - and also those Ealing films like SARABAND FOR DEAD LOVERS, WHISKEY GALORE, KIND HEARTS & CORONETS, IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY, as well as those early '40s war efforts like 2,000 WOMEN and of course IN WHICH WE SERVE. BLITHE SPIRIT is still magical too, and of course the Gainsboroughs and those Anna Neagle films - even now one gets a delirious thrill from super tosh like MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS or CARAVAN - the heyday of Stewart Granger and James Mason, as well as Ann Todd, Celia Johnson, Flora Robson and that enchanting young Joan Greenwood, among others.  All nicely complementing the American noirs and musicals of the period and all those vehicles for Davis, Crawford, Stanwyck, Hepburn - with or without Tracy. 

Bickering relations in THIS HAPPY BREED

James Mason - ODD MAN OUT

That marvellous beach (Barra in Scotland) in WHISKEY GALORE

 Soon: More People We Like: Peter Finch, Alan Bates, David Warner, Flora Robson.

Those British comedies ....

An affectionate look at some of those late '50s/early '60s British comedies we liked - its the performers that matter here, those comedians and character players who made even the dullest movie watchable. So we dedicate this to the great Joan Sims and Hattie and Kenneth and Charles and Richard Wattis and ...

PLEASE TURN OVER, 1959 - An early CARRY ON in all but name, by the regular team Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas, with regulars Leslie Philips,  Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey (guesting as a jeweller). This is set in smart suburbia where martinet father Ted Ray and ditzy wife Jean Kent (her driving lesson with Lionel Jeffries is a hoot) preside - their daughter Julia Lockwood (Margaret's daughter) writes a raunchy best-seller and the locals recognize that she has written about them and soon chaos erupts throughout this small English town with predictable results. Its good fun, with Joan Sims as the maid and others like Colin Gordon, Joan Hickson and Dilys Laye providing the laughs. A pleasant afternoon time-waster.

MAKE MINE MINK - This is a delightful 1960 comic caper with a sterling cast headed by Athene Seyler, Hattie Jacques and Elspeth Duxbury as 3 old dears in a mansion flat who discover they can steal fur coats which can be sold to fund Athene's charity. Young Billie Whitelaw is their maid, she is an ex-con herself but is dating policeman Jack Hedley. Terry Thomas is another companion of theirs so cue much hilarity as our foursome plot their robberies. Irene Handl is sheer delight as Madame Spolinski, owner of a fur shop they are targeting. Kennth Williams pops in as well.

As the blurb says: Zany collection of misfits led by aging military man (Terry-Thomas) go on a spree of robbing mink coats. An unlikely trio of women (Athene Seyler, Hattie Jacques, and Elspeth Duxbury) find new reasons to live ... until their housekeeper (Billie Whitelaw), an ex-con is suspected of the robberies. Again, it captures that cusp of the '60s time period perfectly and shows what good writing and a quality cast can do for a basic premise, as directed by Robert Asher. 

ALIVE AND KICKING - a more '50s offering, this 1958 comedy needs to be better known. Another trio of old dears: redoubtable Sybil Thorndike, Kathleen Harrison and Estelle Winwood are to be split up at their old folks home and decide to run away. They end up in a boat heading to the west of Ireland where they land on one of the islands where they find perfect cottages they can take over.
These belong to returning American Stanley Holloway but he is soon out of the picture as the old gals take over the local industry of knitting Ara sweaters and soon have a booming local industry going. We have to add in the compulsory Richard Harris among the locals as well as Marjorie Rhodes, Joyce Carey and singer Brendon O'Dowda. Directed by Cyril Frankel - there are no reviews on this at IMDB and they insist it is a 1964 title, but it is definitely 1958 when I saw it as a kid.

UPSTAIRS AND DOWNSTAIRS - another delighted 1959 comedy from the Rank Organisation, directed by Ralph Thomas, in colour and with a very colorful cast! On marrying the boss's daughter, Richard takes his father-in-law's advice to hire a live-in domestic. He soon finds good help is hard to come by. Run-ins follow with dipsomaniacs, bank robbers, a Welsh lass who takes one look at London and runs, and an Italian charmer who turns the place into a bawdy house. Then when Ingrid arrives from Sweden things actually start to get complicated. This is one I enjoyed as a kid, as we watch Michael Craig and Anne Heywood as the newly-weds with James Robertson Justice bluff as ever as father-in-law.

Party girl Claudia + sailors

Joan Hickson is of course a delight as the tipsy cook, Joan Sims is Welsh Blodwyn who has never left Wales; those continental girls Mylene Demongeot and that new Italian girl Claudia Cardinale sparkle (five years later Craig would be supporting her in Visconti's SANDRA - a favourite of mine, Claudia, Craig labels) - Sid James is the local cop, Reginald Beckwith, Daniel Massey, Margalo Gilmore are fun and Joseph Tomelty and Nora Nicholson play the aged bank robbers using the kitchen to tunnel through to the bank next door .... laughs all round then.

THE NAKED TRUTH - a brilliant 1957 comedy utilising Peter Sellers in several roles, he was in the ascendant then. Dastardly Dennis Price is blackmailing several celebrities over secrets in their past which he will publish in his scandal magazine unless they pay up, so they decide to club together to kill him after their individual attempts fail - resulting in high comedy, as directed by Mario Zampi. We have crime writer Peggy Mount and her timid daughter Joan Sims, tv presenter Sellers, glamour girl Shirley Eaton and Terry Thomas is not as respectable as he lets on .... This one cemented Sellers' reputation for various roles as he and Terry Thomas became the major farceurs of the era - both starring in the classic  I'M ALRIGHT JACK and CARLTON BROWN OF THE F.O.

TOO MANY CROOKS - Another great 1959 Terry Thomas comedy also by Mario Zampi (the 3 here, MAKE MINE MINK, NAKED TRUTH and this are a good boxset). George Cole's hapless gang set out to kidnap cad Terry Thomas's daughter but end up with his wife Brenda De Banzie instead. Terry though does not play along and does not want her back, so Brenda takes control of the useless gang to exact her own revenge on her scheming husband. Sounds familiar? It must be the same plot used for that Bette Midler comedy RUTHLESS PEOPLE ...  it is an ideal role for the great Brenda De Banzie, Thomas is his usual caddish self and the crooks include Sid James, Bernard Bresslaw, Joe Melia. Add in John le Mesurier, Sydney Tafler and Nicholas Parsons for added humour. It is just as funny now as it was 50 years ago, as indeed all these are.

I covered another favourite HOW TO MURDER A RICH UNCLE from 1957 at Comedy, Nigel Patrick labels, featuring Athene Seyler again, Katie Johnson and Wendy Hiller.  What a great period it was for comedies from those Ealings like THE LADYKILLERS onwards... there's Sellers again in multiple roles in THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, and of course those first CARRY ONs: TEACHER, NURSE, SERGEANT etc;
and that other favourite of mine the perfectly '50s AN ALLIGATOR NAMED DAISY (comedy, Diana Dors  labels) with Diana Dors and Margaret Rutherford, as well as those early ST TRINIANS with the likes of Alistair Sim, Beryl Reid, Joyce Grenfell and the others, not to mention Dirk's DOCTORs: IN THE HOUSE, AT SEA, AT LARGE etc with Kay Kendall, Kenneth More, Brigitte Bardot, Brenda De Banzie and all the regular farceurs. These were very '50s creations - DOCTOR IN DISTRESS in 1963 did not work at all, it was that new swinging era and the Doctors were suddenly very dated. The '60s CARRY ON's began well with CLEO, COWBOY, CRUISING, SCREAMING, SPYING but too degenerated into tat by the '70s.  

Some other British '60s dramas ...

Having done that post on HOLLYWOOD UK below, on those important British '60s movies and their makers and that BBC series on them in 1993, how about some of the more mundane British dramas from that fascinating early '60s period: the kind of movie that played at the local Odeon or ABC for a week and then vanished for ever, until a tv screening or a rare dvd turned up decades later .... here's a few choice ones, delirious Trash Classics now, with that peculiarly British morality:

BITTER HARVEST, 1963 - my new favourite trash classic, thanks again to Colin. This actually anticipates DARLING by 2 years but whereas Schlesinger's film as wittily scripted by Frederic Raphael scooped all the awards and acclaim, this is a plodding movie-making by numbers version of a similar tawdry tale and in tawdry colour, as penned by solid Ted Willis (FLAME IN THE STREETS, WOMAN IN A DRESSING GOWN etc) and helmed by Peter Graham Scott. It is the sad moralising tale of Jennie Jones (Janet Munro) from a boring Welsh village who dreams of the high life in London. Influenced by the models she sees in magazine ads, she dreams of a life full of glamour, excitement, beautiful clothes etc - she does not yet realise that being a 'model' then had a seedy meaning....

A familiar parade of British regulars turn up here: May Hallatt (the Ayah in BLACK NARCISSUS) as the old aunt poor Jennie has to go and live with, Norman Bird and Vanda Godsell running that pub 'The King and Queen' - I think I know it from a few years ago, in Cleveland Street?, it still looks the same) where nice decent barman John Stride works - he takes Jennie in and falls for her when she wakes up in London - after that first fatal glass of champagne - looking out at the back of Paddington Station, after being seduced by cad Terence Alexander; Thora Hird (unbilled for some reason) is the grasping landlady, and Alan Badel (right) - (so good in ARABESQUE where he gets to play with Sophia Loren), third billed here but with very little to do - is the urbane fashion overlord who takes one look at Jennie and sets her up with all those furs and dresses and that mews cottage (away from that world of grubby bedsits by the railway tracks) which we see her wrecking at the start, before her drug overdose ..... all this would be understandable if Jennie looked like Anita Ekberg, rather than the more homely Munro - perhaps there was a shortage of party girls in London ? Munro was a brilliant actress but looks in her late 20s here while Jennie was surely an impressiouable teenager ...

 This was 1963 after all, when the Profumo Affair was headline news and call-girls were seen to be doing very well for themselves.  I have consulted my "Films & Filming" review from December '63: "There used to be a species of old-time melodrama in which heroes were ruined by strong drink, and boozed themselves into a pauper's grave. BITTER HARVEST brings this formula alarmingly up to date with dire warnings of what happens to girls who watch the television commercials ... The surprising thing is that anyone, in this day and age, could have hoped to make something like this work in terms other than the comic ... Janet Munro is wildly, and sometimes hilariously, miscast ..." - my sentiments exactly. A chunk of the story seems missing though, we see her flashback to how it all began but not what caused her to overdose ...

Jennie wrecks her luxury Mayfair apartment

We finish ironically as Stride with the devoted girl who loved him all along (while poor selfish Jennie used him), dodging the ambulance carrying her lifeless body away ...  as they walk along that London river, and Acker Bilk's mournful theme plays - a moralising tale indeed. The young John Stride (below) impresses here, he had a good career on stage and television in the '60s and '70s (I saw him in DESIGN FOR LIVING with Vanessa Regrave in 1973, theatre label).

Janet was another British show-business tragedy, dead at 38 by either alcohol or a heart problem. She had been signed to Walt Disney before Hayley Mills, for movies like DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE with young Sean Connery, THIRD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN, and the popular SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON; as well as fluff like TOMMY THE TOREADOR with Tommy Steele (thankfully thats never revived these days...), and then she had more adult roles in THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE and LIFE FOR RUTH in '62 but by then the new girls like Susannah York and Samantha Eggar were on the rise; she also a small part in SEBASTIAN (with Dirk and Susannah) in 1968, before dying in 1972. 

THE BEAUTY JUNGLE - one of the first films I saw here in 1964 and its never cropped up since, but I remember it well. Janette Scott (actress daughter of Thora Hird, she was Cassandra in HELEN OF TROY, 1955) is another small town girl who gets a make-over, turns blonde and enters the beauty parade business. This was billed as an expose of the beauty competitions of the time so lots more sleazy tawdry revelations as Janette sees the reality behind the phoney glamour. Ian Hendry (Janet Munro's husband) is lead here and Edmund Purdom more or less plays himself as an ageing movie star judging the beauties. Another British actress of the time Anne Heywood was actually a beauty queen - wonder why she didn't get or want the role .... its all efficiently directed by Val Guest, and the regulars crop up: Norman Bird, Sid James, the great Kay Walsh, David Weston, Jerry Desmonde. Let's have a look at the synopsis:

Purdom still works his charm

On a seaside holiday, pretty Bristol typist Shirley meets Dan Mackenzie from her local paper. He persuades her that she has what it takes in the world of beauty contests, and so it proves. Ditching her predictable fiance and having to leave home, Shirley moves to London to continuing success. Increasingly smitten by her, Dan reckons he should be more than just her manager, but this is not at all the way Shirley sees things.

THE WORLD TEN TIMES OVER, 1963, must be very obscure now, there is only one review on it at IMDB. It is about two 'nightclub hostesses'  working in Soho, London. Billa (Sylvia Syms) has to deal with her father who is coming down from the North to visit her  (Norman Hartnell, just before DR WHO) who does not want to face up to what she does for a living, and the other Ginnie - A KIND OF LOVING's June Ritchie - is seeing a married businessman (Edward Judd); Billa may be more than fond of Ginnie ... stalwart Sylvia impresses again here.

The poster has Ritchie in bra, panties and stockings and suspenders and Syms hanging around street corners in her leather coat and boots, but there's not a great deal of titillation here. This though was X-certificate stuff back then. This rather downbeat drama, as directed by Wolf Rilla, is lifted by extensive location shooting. For those who want to see 1963 London it's a treat. Particularly good is the scene where Hartnell walks through Soho amid the flashing neon lights advertising the sexy delights on show. Another early '60s London time capsule then.

Others of the era include Diane Cilento as another nightclub hostess (they were popular then...) with Steptoe Harry J Corbett in RATTLE OF A SIMPLE MAN in '64, Kenneth More with Billie Whitelaw as THE COMEDY MAN, another downbeat drama in '64; and Ian Hendry again in LIVE NOW, PAY LATER.

I have been unable to track down Michael Winner's  WEST 11 or TWO LEFT FEET both '63 though - that's an early Michael Crawford one also with David Hemmings. Winner's THE SYSTEM is one I like, not a London film though but set in seaside Weymouth, it captures that period perfectly with Oliver Reed, Jane Merrow, Barbara Ferris and pre-BLOW-UP David Hemmings ....  I have already covered A PLACE TO GO and THE LEATHER BOYS and UP THE JUNCTION at London label.  

Next: some late '50s-early '60s British comedies, cue up: PLEASE TURN OVER, MAKE MINE MINK, ALIVE AND KICKING, THE NAKED TRUTH, TOO MANY CROOKS ... all those Peter Sellers, Terry Thomas comedies, and then those '40s British classics - and then on to Pedro Almodovar - I promise.