In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I saw this with my sister and Eloise on a visit just after Halloween. It's a live-action Disney film with only a minor in-story ballet performance, which builds very freely on the original story of The Nutcracker, drawing along the way from other children's portal fantasies like The Wizard of Oz (four realms with a capital city in the middle, Clara saying "I guess I'm not in London any more") Alice in Wonderland and Narnia. Once in the land of the Four Realms, Clara must defeat the villain and save the kingdom - but who is the real villain? Therein lies the twist - and an excellent character for the unexpected villain to play. The whole thing looks absolutely beautiful, from the costumes to the CGI to the Nutcracker-soldier's delicate gold lip-liner, and we had quite a lot of fun afterwards discussing which of Clara's various outfits we liked best.

But Clara is no dress-up doll - she has inherited a passion for mechanics from her mother, quietly encouraged by Drosselmeyer (her godfather and also an engineer), and uses it in the Four Realms to save the day through the laws of physics. Because this is a Disney film, though, the mother herself is already dead when the story begins, and Clara's challenge is to understand her legacy and negotiate a new relationship with her grieving but repressed father in order to find her own sense of identity. Gradually we learn that the mother not only had a gift for engineering but actually used it to create the whole kingdom of the Four Realms by building an engine to bring her toys to life. So, Clara is able to step into her mother's shoes and use this knowledge to set things back to rights in the kingdom, before returning to the real world to restart her relationship with her father.

In the course of all this, though, it was made clear that the father had never known anything about the mother's engineering skills or the rich fantasy world which she had created, which seemed very sad indeed to me but was never really addressed or explored at all. It seemed like we were being shown a world where eccentric men like Drosselmeyer (played by Morgan Freeman being amazing) might recognise women's skills and creativity, but the staid traditional men at the heart of the patriarchy like Clara's father never could, and had to be approached solely on their own terms. Still, I'd rather Eloise got to see films about clever, creative female engineers saving the day but still having to fit the mould their fathers require of them than not at all. She found some aspects of this film quite scary, especially when Clara and her friends went into the abandoned amusement park-themed kingdom of apparent villain Mother Ginger, and had to cuddle up to my sister to be reassured. But it clearly made quite an impression, as she watched another film which made a twist revelation about a character's motivations over Christmas, and offered this as an example of the same device. It's so lovely watching her learning how stories work. :-)

Serial killer movies just ain't my bag, and I only watched this because we were ushered into a premiere screening of it during the Brașov Dracula Congress which I attended in October, without being told what we were going to see. I have seen the original film a million years ago (though not any of the intervening sequels), and as far as I can tell this one was trying to be a clever, modern, self-aware take on it while actually really being not all that different from it at all. It was marketed as being about women fighting back, and indeed Jamie Lee Curtis' character (Laurie Strode) is well-developed and well-acted, while the film ends with her, her daughter and her granddaughter managing to reconcile their differences and defeat Michael Myers after multiple men have died in the attempt. But we're still shown flash-backs into Michael Myers' childhood which include his sister sitting naked in front of her dressing table brushing her hair, before being murdered by him and ending up on the floor as a Sexy Corpse. There are a couple of references to chess-sets early on, presumably to help establish Myers and Strode as deadly opponents, and some stuff about how Myers' prison psychiatrist has become obsessed with him as an object of study to the point of enabling his crimes. But fundamentally, the plot boils down to a lot of people dying, usually shortly after scenes which have portrayed them as stupid or assholes - another big hoary old trope strongly rooted in the original Halloween. I mean, don't get me wrong - I'm well aware that the Gothic vampire and ghost stories I love best are absolutely packed full of tropes as well, often reflecting the same kind of conservative bent. But a few soaring ruins, dark supernatural beings or pagan shenanigans make all the difference for me. If you liked the original Halloween, and / or the wider serial killer genre, you'll probably like this film - but all I really got out of it was a reminder of why I don't.

This is an excellent black and white Universal scary house movie which lady_lugosi1313 lent me on DVD. There is nothing supernatural in it, but it is very Gothic indeed, featuring as it does an ancient and remote Welsh manor-house on a stormy night, inhabited by a crotchety sister and a spiky brother who harbour dread family secrets including an aged father and another criminally-insane brother locked in the attic. Into their world stumble a collection of very modern characters who have lost their way driving through the storm, including a fairly ordinary married middle-class couple, their louche bachelor friend, a self-made northern industrial millionaire and a show-girl. Over the course of the night, drama unfolds and romance blossoms. The cast includes Boris Karloff as a mute butler who turns violent under the influence of drink, while the industrialist is Charles Laughton in fine form and the show-girl is Lilian Bond, who looks so much like wicked_prose that I believe I wrote and told her so when I originally watched it. But the story really works above all because of the brother and sister who are the main inhabitants of the house - Horace Pemm, played by Ernest Thesiger who has a wonderfully beak-like nose for peering down at people over when thrown into high relief by a candle, and Rebecca Pemm, played by Eva Moore who cackles and mutters beautifully and is very insistent about telling both her brother and the lost travellers that "We've no beds! No beds." As a result, they have to spend the night on rather hard-looking sofas in front of the fire - a tough fate in particular for the wife of the middle-class couple, played by Gloria Stuart, who early on changes into a backless silk gown for no better reason than this is a 1930s Hollywood film and someone has mentioned dinner, and thus presumably spends the entire story absolutely freezing to death while the storm rages around the building. She doesn't help this by opening a window in the room she's been sent into to get changed immediately after putting on the dress, even though she was explicitly told not to, leaving her battling with a howling gale and severe reproaches from the sister. Highly recommended for everything except sensible clothing tips.

This one I saw a week ago with the lovely glitzfrau at the Hyde Park Picture House, in all its newly-restored 4K glory. I love Forster, and his work always seems to inspire excellence in screen adaptations, but this one has always meant the most to me I think. I saw it first some time in my early teens - I'm not sure exactly when but I would guess aged about 14 - when it was broadcast on Channel 4, and remember sitting up for hours afterwards on top of a chest of drawers which sat in the bay-window of my bedroom, looking out through an open window over the dark, quiet street while summer rain dripped in the trees and climbing plants outside, and wallowing in the feel of it. By then I'd already had multiple powerful crushes on other girls or teachers at school, but I had never before seen anything at that time which presented queer attraction as openly as this, let alone suggested that it could be good and fulfilling or might turn out well. It seems the film has had a similar sort of impact on many people over the years.

I've watched it at least once since, but not for a long time now I think - a good fifteen years, I'd say. But it's always stayed with me, and coming back to it now I am not at all surprised. It's not just the subject-matter, but how incredibly well-crafted the film itself is in every possible respect. Almost every shot in it is absolutely iconic, not a line of the dialogue is wasted, and although the musical soundtrack is beautiful and well-deployed, it also gets so much out of silence - still, high-angle shots of Cambridge, lingering on characters' pained faces, etc. Above all, though, I was struck by how well-structured the whole thing is. It's inherently a film of two halves because of the way it tells the story of Maurice's two successive relationships - one ultimately unhappy, but also leading the way towards the other, where he finds his fulfilment. Actually, in that respect it reminded me very much of the 1963 Cleopatra, with its Julius Caesar half and its Antony half, though Forster laid down that structure for his book long before that film was dreamt of.

But anyway, what that allows, and what Merchant & Ivory really brought out of the book, is an incredible series of resonances, so that almost every scene throughout the film resonates with and calls forwards or backwards to a fellow in the other half. I mean things like Maurice having his boxing gloves with him from the start in Cambridge, to be followed up by his efforts in the East End boxing club later; Maurice climbing in through the window of Clive's room and then Scudder later doing the same to Maurice; Maurice writing to Clive that he gets no sleep and begging him to answer his letters while he's in Greece and Alec later writing exactly the same to Maurice from his boat-house; Maurice saying in the tutorial at the start, when Risley is arguing that words are the only things which matter, that no, it's deeds which matter, and then at the end coming to tell Durham what he has done and being full of joy at Alec's deed of not getting on the boat to Argentina.

A lot of this is there already in Forster, as I established during a hasty skim through the book after I got home, but not all of it. It's very clear that every line, every shot, every moment in the film was incredibly carefully thought through with the eyes of fine craftsmen so that it would convey the maximum amount of meaning - like the water dripping though the ceiling of Clive Durham's house to reflect the rotten sham of his marriage, or the final scene of him carefully and purposefully closing and bolting his windows to the memory of Maurice. Yet it never feels hokey or Oh So Symbolic - there is enough room for the characters to breathe and to be three-dimensional to prevent that.

One interesting choice is that the film is very deliberately and specifically set in the run-up to the First World War through repeated on-screen captions which date each stage in the development of the story so that it finishes some time in 1913. My skim through the novel suggests this did not originate there (though glitzfrau, who somehow read the whole thing that evening, may know better than me). The novel was originally written during 1913 to '14, but it doesn't include any explicit internal dating, and could take place any time in the late Victorian or early Edwardian periods. In fact it's tempting to read the scenes in King's as based on Forster's own undergraduate years - that is 1897 to 1901, when the Provost there was one M. R. James, then at the height of his own Platonic friendship with James McBryde.

Going back to the film, repeatedly reminding the viewer that war is approaching perhaps casts a pall over the happy ending, since it implies that whatever Maurice and Alec may have built will be shattered to pieces in the trenches within a year. (In the book, by contrast, they simply fade into a sort of unseen fantasy-Arcadia.) But I suppose it is an inevitable element of how we now look back to that period, and especially its upper classes. Merchant and Ivory put enough casual snobbery and misogyny into the mouths of both Maurice and Clive to mean it is a world which has to fall.

Meanwhile, the image of Maurice and Clive raptly imbibing Monty's ghost stories isn't the only enticing inter-text to be had from watching the film now. Merchant and Ivory clearly knew what they were about when they casually dropped Helena Bonham-Carter into the audience at the cricket match, for all the world as though Lucy Honeychurch had called by from A Room with a View. But they could not have anticipated that the scenes of Hugh Grant lurking at the back of the court-room while the verdict is read out at Risley's trial would now look quite so much like a young Jeremy Thorpe seeing a vision of his future - right down to the hat he is using to try to hide his face. They did know what they were doing when they cast him, though, as well as everyone else in the film. Very, very well done, Merchant and Ivory. Thank you profoundly for everything you put into this film.

Seen a couple of weeks ago with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House. I don't think it needs a hugely long review from me, because it is obviously a very famous and much-analysed film which I really doubt I'll have anything very original to say about. But a few points which particularly struck me:

1. It's in colour! I was honestly quite surprised by this, because I'd just assumed that all Hitchcock films were inherently in black and white, even though I've seen (for example) Rope and The Birds, which aren't, and I had seen stills of this sequence as well:


I guess I just assumed the stills were colourised? Anyway, my real point is how incredibly well the colour is used throughout the film to convey character through signature palettes, create a sense of fear or unease, make sure we notice connections etc. Pretty impressive, if sometimes maybe slightly overdone in the way that many film-makers overdid colour once they had it available to play with.

2. It has two major moments of revelation: one when the audience is shown that Judy Barton doesn't just resemble Madeleine Elster, but had been impersonating her, and one when the nun stands up at the end and says "I heard voices" (I'm deliberately keeping that one a bit vague to avoid spoilers - but you will know what I mean if you've seen it). Learning the nature of Judy and Gavin Elster's conspiracy at least explained how Jimmy Stewart's character had got away with being the Worst Trail Ever in the first part of the film. Of course Madeleine had never 'spotted' him, despite his habit of pulling up very blatantly only a few yards behind her car or staring at her openly in museums, once we understand that she was stringing him along the whole time. As for the final twist with the nun - what a head-fuck! It seems obvious to me that Scottie must jump after Judy just after the credits roll, as there is no way he is psychologically going to survive losing her that way twice. It is only his destiny, really, given the entire theme of the film, to finally surrender himself to that vertigo after all.

3. Jimmy Stewart really is exceptionally good in it, especially when he is in shock after 'Madeleine's' death. His badly-dyed hair is quite distracting, though, and his character is not at all endearing - especially his dismissive treatment of Midge. It is very noticeable that she simply disappears from the film once her plot value (mainly as a sounding-board for Scottie) expires.

I'll probably want to watch it again some time, knowing everything that the audience knows by the end. I suspect it is a better watch that way. But for now, that's it - I'm done.

Oops, I've let a bit of a film review back-log accrue again... Let's see what I can do about that this afternoon.

I saw this one with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House. I found it OK, with some good performances, period settings and nice camerawork conveying an appropriately Gothic atmosphere where relevant (as in the Villa Diodati) but without undermining the basic realism of the film. Unfortunately, though, it plays pretty fast and loose with the actual facts of Mary's life - which was part of my complaint about The Happy Prince and Oscar Wilde (LJ / DW). Overall, it didn't irritate me anything like as much as The Happy Prince, because Mary simply wasn't a smug, entitled arse in the way that Oscar Wilde was, and nor was the film quite so intent on portraying her life as a tragic work of art. But it definitely did want to suggest that absolutely everything which happened to her before the publication of Frankenstein was all systematically and almost divinely destined to culminate in the production of that book, which didn't actually leave much space for her agency as a human author rather than a passive cork, tossed on the waves of life.

Here are just a few examples of the departures from reality which I noticed, based on the pre-holiday reading I did for our DracSoc trip to Geneva in 2016, and the exhibitions we saw while we were there (LJ / DW):

Film	Reality
Mary meets Percy Shelley while staying with the Baxter family in Scotland, after she has been sent away there by her stepmother.	Mary literally missed meeting Shelley for the first time because of this stay, as he came to London while she was away after securing the patronage of her father, William Godwin. They met only after she had returned, during his regular visits to the family home.
Neither Mary nor any of the Godwin household initially know that Percy has a wife and child, and Mary finds this out to her shock when they turn up outside her father's bookshop to ask where he is.	All of them already knew all about the wife and child well before Mary became involved with Percy, because he had brought them to the Godwin family home to introduce them to everyone (though Harriet did turn up demanding for Mary and Percy to be kept apart once the relationship had begun).
Mary and Claire first set eyes on Byron at a theatrical demonstration of Galvinism, complete with experiments on frogs' legs.	It was actually at a lecture on Milton delivered by Coleridge. Mary's knowledge of Galvinism came later, through conversations at the Villa Diodati.
Percy's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg sexually assaults Mary in their home, in a move which comes as a complete surprise and (obviously) a shock to her.	Percy had suggested to Mary in advance that she and Hogg should sleep together, and although she hated the idea at first, they corresponded about it. In those letters Mary seems interested but wary, but nothing ever came of it in the end.
Byron invites Percy and Mary to stay in his villa in Geneva and welcomes them as soon as they arrive.	Claire conceives of the whole notion of tracking him down there and persuades the others to follow. They arrive two weeks before Byron and spend the intervening time in a hotel, waiting for him to turn up.
Mary writes the bulk of Frankenstein in run-down rented rooms in London.	She wrote most of it while travelling onwards through Switzerland and into Italy after the Geneva stay.

Many more things are omitted, such as Mary and Claire's other siblings, Shelley bursting into the Godwin family home to propose a suicide pact with Mary as a way of escaping Harriet, and an earlier elopement to the continent by Mary and Percy (taking Claire with them). I am less concerned about omissions, which are necessary to convey a story coherently in the length of the film, but the distortions of reality here actively worked against one of the central claims of the film. On the one hand, it kept trying to show us how her life fed into her work, but on the other it wasn't even presenting her real life, but another fictionalised life which did not in fact lead up to the novel we know.

I could appreciate and give credit for some of what the production team were trying to do in the course of this, such as showing clearly how difficult it was for a woman to be taken seriously as an author in the early 19th century, as well as the brutal and disastrous consequences of the patriarchy generally and Byron and Shelley's notions of free love particularly for women with no access to contraception. But I felt that some other narrative decisions made for serious missed opportunities, and that applied particularly to the real complexities, drama and evident intellectual calibre of her relationship with Shelley, all of which were largely thrown away in favour of a pretty conventional troubled romance story.

In short, I'm glad I saw this (because I was always going to want to) and it's certainly better than The Happy Prince, but it could still have been an awful lot better than it was.

This is one of Hammer's non-horror films, shown recently on the excellent TalkingPicsTV channel. It's a crime drama, and for Hammer was clearly a B-feature: you can tell because it is in black and white, despite them having moved definitively into colour for their horror pictures several years earlier, and according to Wikipedia the total budget for it was £37,000 (contrast £81,000 for Dracula three years earlier). It's an absolute cracker, though, with well-scripted characters masterfully acted by Peter Cushing, André Morell and the like, and a beautifully-paced plot which keeps you guessing right up to the end. I sort of watched it with lady_lugosi1313, although not quite in the usual way of being present in the same room together. She was in her house and I was in mine, but as we both knew the other was watching it we exchanged texts as we went along, marvelling at the wondrous talents of Mr Cushing and the twists and turns of the plot.

Because of those twists and turns, I'm going to put the rest of this review under a cut, just in case there is anyone out there who might wish to watch it unspoiled. I do heartily recommend doing so if you have the opportunity. But if you've already seen it or don't care about spoilers and do want to know what it's like, ( click on... )

All in all, a thoroughly good evening's watch, and a strong reminder that there are still many Hammer gems awaiting me, both within the horror genre and without.

Recently, lady_lugosi1313 acquired this Universal Mummy movies box-set, so we have been working our way through it.


We saw the first one, The Mummy (1932) a couple of years ago, and really loved it (reviews here: LJ / DW), but two years is still recent enough that we didn't feel ready to re-watch it yet, so instead we plunged straight into the sequels. The first four of these were churned out in pretty rapid fashion during the early 1940s, and at times it's obvious that they were money-spinners produced as cheaply as possible. Certainly, none of them quite come up to the impressively fresh and intelligent standard of the original. They basically all have the same plot (mummy, brought to life by the latest in a long line of human devotees, murders a couple of secondary characters before carrying off a girl and then being destroyed) and they are rife with racist and colonialist cliches which the first film at least attempted to engage intelligently with (white archaeologists with a scientific understanding of the past vs. cowardly, superstitious and criminal 'natives', as they are literally called). But around that there is a lot of interest to the series, including some of the camerawork, the individual character portrayals and simply the opportunity to watch the genre evolving and its possibilities being explored and extended. They are certainly of interest to the Hammer fan, since it was really the four sequels, rather than the original film, that they used as the basis for their own The Mummy (1959), including the character names and the concepts of a mummy buried alive for trying to revive a dead princess, being reawakened himself by a modern-day disciple, being transferred out of Egypt to a western country and encountering the modern reincarnation of the princess there. More on all of this in the individual reviews below...

( 14. The Mummy's Hand (1940), dir. Christy Cabanne )

[We watched She Done Him Wrong at the Cottage between these two (LJ / DW), hence the jump from 14 to 16.]

( 16. The Mummy's Tomb (1942), dir. Harold Young )

( 17. The Mummy's Ghost (1944), dir. Reginald Le Borg )

( 18. The Mummy's Curse (1944), dir. Leslie Goodwins )

There is one more Universal mummy movie from this (broad) era, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). lady_lugosi1313, who has seen it before, says it's terrible and she doesn't want to do so again, and I entirely believe her. However, I've always been a completist, so she's let me borrow the box-set in order to watch that one on my own. I will indeed before long, but I've already watched two other completely unrelated films since, so I will close this review here and put that one up separately when I get to it.

Taped off TalkingPicsTV a million years ago and watched last weekend for light entertainment. This was the first serious attempt by a production company other than Hammer to capitalise on the success they had had with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). Indeed, they hired Jimmy Sangster, who had written both, to do the script, which makes it of interest straight away, and that's before you factor in Barbara Shelley, who had also already been in a couple of Hammer films and is just wonderful anyway.

Despite the 'Vampire' of the title, the film is more Frankenstein than Dracula. The chief villain, Dr. Callistratus, runs a lunatic asylum and conducts experiments relating to blood types and the artificial preservation of life on patients strapped to beds in a dungeon room beneath a laboratory with tubes full of bubbling coloured liquids. We eventually learn that local people accused him of being a 'vampire' because of his blood experiments and staked him through the heart, but he survived thanks to some kind of culture which he had introduced into his own body (it got very hand-wavey here). Although his hunch-backed servant, Carl, bribed a drunken doctor to resurrect him by performing a heart transplant, the culture has left him with an incurable condition in which his own blood is destroying itself - so he needs constant blood transfusions to survive. In other words, we're more or less at the exact mid-point between the lightly pseudo-scientific vampirism of Hammer's Dracula and the fantastical science of their Frankenstein. Callistratus himself looks more like a corpulent Lugosi than either Lee or any Frankenstein I can think of, though, and indeed the hunch-backed Carl too reflects an ongoing debt to the Universal movies of the '30s and '40s.

It's not exactly a brilliant film, but it's better than the very low expectations I had for it. Most of the performances are competent, if sometimes a bit hammy, there is a modicum of reflection on corrupt justice and the ethics of medical science, and there's a nice sense of tension and peril building up to the climax. Certainly, Barbara Shelley does her job well as a rather nervous young woman who is nevertheless determined to rescue her fiancé from injustice even if that means facing danger herself, and some of her frocks were absolutely fabulous. It's a pity that Talking Pictures' rather shonky print meant I couldn't see them as well as I would have liked to, but then again the same shonkiness probably helped to hide a lot of sins in the cheap sets department. Nonetheless, I did notice that the people who made this ('Artistes Alliance' / Tempean Films) clearly had quite a lot more studio space available than Hammer, as some shots really made a point of showing off large interior spaces.

On the very much down side, Shelley's character is subjected to an icky attempted rape by a corrupt official - a motif which seems to have been thrown into films of this genre and period all too often for the sake of cheap titillation with no real plot value. Other offenders are Captain Clegg, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and Blood on Satan's Claw - and that's just off the top of my head. The one that I'll allow is Witchfinder General, where I think it does serve a purpose in conveying the general brutality of the circumstances, and in making Richard's commitment to marrying and protecting Sarah afterwards a more potent reflection of his love for her.

Meanwhile, I was fascinated to note that Callistratus' servant Carl develops an affection for Shelley's character (Madeleine) which motivates him to prevent her rape and then help her and her fiancé (John) escape the prison, all because he has earlier seen her image in a locket taken from John by the guards. This reminded me straight away of Klove helping Sarah and Simon in Scars of Dracula because he has similarly seen her picture long before, and in turn made me wonder where the trope actually originates - here? Or in another common source? It sort of relates to Dracula being taken with Lucy's image and then tracking her down to claim him for his own in Hammer's film of the same year, which of course gives us a link through Jimmy Sangster as the script writer - but a villain deciding he will have a girl he's seen in a picture isn't quite the same as a servant rebelling against his master to save a girl he's seen in a picture, and it's the latter I'm really interested in. If anyone knows more about where the trope originates, let me know! Certainly, it would be truly sad if by the time of Scars Hammer had sunk so low as to have ripped this motif off directly from this, a second-rate rip-off of their own films...

I saw this a couple of weeks ago with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House. I don't think it needs a detailed review from me, as anyone who wants to see it has already done so and knows what they think of it, and there's loads of detailed comment and analysis all over the web which I don't feel I have anything particularly unique to add to.

So, just a note really to say that I really enjoyed it. The main character reminded me quite a lot of my sister, who is almost exactly the same age as her, had similar hair and wore the same pentacle on a black cord around her neck, had very similar friends and dramas around them at the same age, and had a strained but ultimately loving relationship with our mother. I particularly enjoyed lady_lugosi1313's hearty chuckles during the scenes in which Lady Bird rebelled against Catholic authority - e.g. lying on her back with her friend Julie eating communion wafers while talking about masturbating in the bath. And I thought the most powerful scene in it was when Lady Bird's mother delivered her to the airport to fly to college in New York, used parking charges as an excuse not to stay and say a proper goodbye, and then the camera stayed on her face as she drove away in the car, gradually changing from steely aloofness to powerful emotion, and making the decision to loop round and go back, only to find by the time she had done so that it was too late and Lady Bird had gone.