The last line of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless could have been the capper to an epic tale of striving and loss, but after almost one hour and 45 minutes of not-quite-there dramaturgy and characters that seem more like symbols and types than actual people, that last line rings utterly false.

Ulmer is a good director — he’s been called “the poet of Poverty Row” — but nothing he’s made since Detour (1945) has really struck a chord with me.

Detour is not only one of my favorite film noirs, but one of my favorite films, period, and would easily make the list of my top 10 favorite films of all time.

I liked both The Strange Woman (1946) and Carnegie Hall (1947), but neither ascended to the pulpy, brilliant heights of Detour. It’s been more than 15 years since I saw Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), but I remember loving it. The wonderful lead performances by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff didn’t hurt, but Ulmer’s direction and surreal set pieces took it to a level that most Universal horror films can’t match. His dreamy horror film Bluebeard (1944), which starred John Carradine, is good too.

My point is that Ulmer is a director capable of great stuff, but Ruthless doesn’t show him in top form. Based on Dayton Stoddart’s 1945 novel Prelude to Night, the film is a series of flashbacks that tell of the merciless rise to power of Horace Woodruff Vendig (Zachary Scott).

The film begins with a glamorous party at Horace Vendig’s palatial seaside manor. He has thrown the party to coincide with his announcement that he is handing over all his wealth and possessions to world peace organizations. Among the guests are Vic Lambdin (Louis Hayward) and his date, Mallory Flagg (Diana Lynn). Vic is Horace’s oldest friend, and his reappearance stirs up old wounds and painful memories.

Horace was an unwanted child. His parents (played by Raymond Burr and Joyce Arling) split up, and both of them were more interested in their own love affairs than in their son. But after Horace saves a girl named Martha Burnside (played as a child by Ann Carter), her parents accepted him as their own child, which allowed him to attend Harvard and make his mark in society. Incidentally, young Horace is played by Robert J. Anderson, who also played James Stewart as a young man in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

In the series of flashbacks that follow Horace’s childhood, Zachary Scott and Louis Hayward play the younger versions of themselves and Diana Lynn, who plays Mallory, also plays the grown-up Martha Burnside. I’m not sure what the point of this dual role was. The two characters aren’t related, and if Mallory’s resemblance to Martha is meant to remind Horace of everything he has lost then not enough comes of it.

Horace’s ruthless business machinations and his seduction of women are inextricable. When he’s used a woman for all the social advancement she’s worth, he throws her aside for his next conquest.

The film’s theme of sex & business is made most literal in the sequence in which Horace takes over the entire financial empire of Buck Mansfield (Sydney Greenstreet) by seducing his wife Christa (Lucille Bremer). With her comes everything. She tells Buck that she couldn’t transfer her affection to Horace without also transferring her loyalty, but the idea that she holds the key to all of Buck’s assets is still pretty far-fetched. She eventually wises up, as all of Horace’s women do, and she screams at him, “From the first moment you weren’t kissing me, you were kissing forty-eight percent!”

On the IMDb page for Ruthless, there are many user reviews that proclaim the film a classic, and nearly the equal of Citizen Kane (1941). I don’t know what movie these people saw, and can only ascribe their enthusiasm for Ruthless to the deep desire that lies in the heart of every cinéaste to champion an unfairly neglected film.

Besides the style of the film, which is passable but nowhere near the technical brilliance of a film like Kane, the lead performance of Zachary Scott is too one-note to ever make the viewer truly hate or love Horace Vendig. (It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the scenes of Horace’s childhood, in which another actor plays him, are the most moving and compelling of the film.)

Scott crafts a character who is by no means likeable, but there’s also nothing particularly interesting or profound about his plutomania, and I could never dredge up the depth of feelings that his friend Vic experiences, making the “tragic” events of the film’s climax more laughable than sad.

Directed by Dorothy Arzner, While dancing at the Palais Royale in Akron, Ohio, Bubbles, a cynical blonde chorine, and Judy O’Brien, an aspiring young ballerina, meet Jimmy, the scion of a wealthy family. Both women are attracted to Jimmy, a tormented young man who is still in love with his estranged wife Elinor. Back in New York, Bubbles finds work in a burlesque club, while Madame Basilova, the girls’ teacher and manager, arranges an audition for Judy with ballet impresario Steve. En route to the audition, Madame Basilova is run over by a car and killed, and Judy, intimidated by the other dancers, flees before she can meet Steve. As she leaves the building, Judy shares an elevator with Steve, who offers her a cab ride, but she is unaware of who he is and rejects his offer.

Lupino had not wanted to become an actress but preferred composing and writing. Lupino branched out into film directing and producing in 1949, becoming one of two women to enter the still male dominated field.

Mary Ann Anderson first met Lupino when she was a Sub-Agent for the Lund Agency. “Ida thought I was “not mean enough” to be an agent and thought of me as “more business oriented.” She hired me has her Personal Assistant and Business Manager. One year later Ida had a California court appoint me as her Conservator due to her 12 year separation from actor Howard Duff and the mishandling of her finances by her Business Manager. I worked for Ida for 12 wonderful years. To me she was the original Auntie Mame, outspoken, directed, a grand story teller and a wonderful friend.”

The four opening chapters by Mary Ann Anderson which include Anderson’s account of her first meetings with Ida Lupino in February 1983 are vivid, humorous and insightful. Lupino has hit hard times but still retains her independent spirit and quirky personality. Beginning with Chapter 5 Lupino begins her personal memoir recalling her early life in England with her father Stanley Lupino and her subsequent Hollywood career where she worked with celebrated leading men including Humphrey Bogart, Basil Rathbone, John Garfield and Steve McQueen. Her marriages to Louis Hayward, Collier Young and Howard Duff are also discussed in some detail.

While her feature films were primarily aimed at female audiences, on television Ida Lupino quickly became known for her skill at directing male dominated westerns, mysteries and detective dramas. Ida Lupino was the first woman to make a name for herself in episodic television and loving it.

“I would rather direct an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents for $1,250.00 than to star in one for $5,000.00. Directing is much easier than acting. The actor deals in false emotions, produced on cue. The director has problems but they are all normal. He doesn’t have to smile into the camera while suffering through with an early morning grouch.”

Ida Lupino guest-starred in two episodes of The Virginian – “A Distant Fury” (1:25) and “We’ve Lost A Train” (3:30) and directed “Dead-Eye Dick” (5:09). She also guest-starred in the second season Alias Smith and Jones episode “What’s In It For Mia?” (2:22). Lupino’s work on The Virginian is covered briefly with references to Dwight Whitney’s 1966 TV Guide article on the set of “Deadeye-Dick.”

Ida Lupino directing David Macklin in The Virginian episode “Dead-Eye Dick” (5:09)

Numerous scarce photographs supplement the text and help make the book entertaining reading for any Ida Lupino fan.

Details of ordering the book can be found at Ida Lupino : Beyond the Camera.

Review copyright Paul Green 2012. All rights reserved.

Starring: Louis Hayward, Joan Bennett and George Sanders

102 min  -  Action 

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In this series, he functions as a private investigator and in the episodes I’ve seen no mention is made of any criminal past. But not exactly as your common, garden variety P.I. I’ve never seen any sort of office in any of the shows. He flies in and out of the country quite frequently, spending more time on the continent and in Mexico than in the States.

But he dresses the part of a P.I. of the era, wearing tench coats and snap brim hats, smoking heavily(four times in the half hour story linked below). He seems to get hit on the head a lot as well and, of course, he’s always ready to help the downtrodden with never a thought of any recompense.

In one episode, THE WEREWOLF STORY, Lanyard is asked by a law firm to check on a client, a very wealthy, slightly dotty, old lady that has bought a castle in The Balkans and intends to live the rest of her days as the queen she imagined as a young girl. He meets her in France where she announces they are leaving for the castle. The Balkan prince, and his daughter, that sold her the castle are there also. A sinister looking pair, they are not happy to see him. He learns why when the old woman shows him a paper she has to sign that says she can never sell the castle and, upon her death, it reverts back to the Prince.

Lanyard smells a rat.

Michael Lanyard is played by Louis (Charles) Hayward, an actor born in South Africa in 1909. Educated in England and the continent, during WWII, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and commanded a photographic unit that filmed the Battle of Tarawa for a documentary that won the 1945 Academy Award for best documentary(short subject). He managed a night club for a period until he displayed some acting skill and playwright Noel Coward became his patron. He starred as Simon Templar in three films in 1938, 1940, and 1953. He also starred in the 1938 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Youtube seems to have only one episode available:

The Las Vegas Story (both DeForest Kelley and Jerry Paris appeared)

A lot of well known actors, maybe not back then, appeared on the show. Barbara Billingsley(Leave It To Beaver), Harry Morgan(Dragnet and M*A*S*H), Ernest Borgnine(McHale’s Navy), Jean Byron(Patty Duke Show), Beverly Garland, Marjorie Lord(The Danny Thomas Show), DeForest Kelley(Star Trek of course), Kenneth Tobey(quite a few of my favorite monster movies from the fifties), and Jerry Paris(Dick Van Dyke show) were some of them.

A final note. Of the thirty-nine episodes, thirty-one were similarly titled as THE something STORY.

For more overlooked goodness, check out Todd Mason\'s SWEET FREEDOM.

Dame Judith Anderson as Emily Brent in “And Then There Were None”

Film review: “And Then There Were None” (1945)

written by Dudley Nichols

directed by René Clair

The first adaptation comes from 1945, Christie’s heyday really, as she found herself moving to a more mature writing style and straying from Hercule Poirot, who had so dominated the ’30s. And Then There Were None isn’t a great film, partly because it’s playing around with a bleakness which was felt all too much in the world in 1945, but it’s definitely an experimental, enjoyable and beautifully photographed one.

Under René Clair‘s direction, the film applies many ’40s tropes – some delightfully quirky music at the comic relief character, Fred Narracott (Harry Thurston), for example, as he cheerfully chomps on a sandwich whilst the others on the boat to Soldier Island get sick – and I can understand that a lot of people these days don’t really have the time for a ’40s black-and-white picture. But for those like myself, who were clearly born in the wrong era, this is lovely and surprisingly modern stuff. Even though this is a studio-bound film, I’ve no doubt it would be better than any similar all-star version released in 2011, quite frankly!

For the most part, the film is quite faithful to the book. All of the characters are quite similar to their counterparts, with the only notable change being that Anthony Marston becomes a foreign Prince (Mischa Auer) although he’s no less decadent or reckless. Auer is a bit of an over-actor (the only wrong note amongst the cast), but he has a great face and he’s the first to die, so who’s complaining? As the servant couple, Richard Haydn and Queenie Leonard are just divine. Haydn was a brilliant comic or dramatic actor, and he finds a very, very delicate balance between the two forms, as the increasingly drunk Rogers. His slow demise after his wife’s death is particularly heartfelt, even though his acting style clearly belongs to another era. And Sir C. Aubrey Smith - a former cricketer, of course – is perfectly cast as General Mandrake; you couldn’t hire someone to play that sort of stiff upper lip character as well as the real deal. The General’s pain and melancholy, as he sits on a rock accepting that death has come, is haunting, because Smith plays it as he should: it’s the all-pervading element of the General’s soul, but he was raised not to show it too easily, so the character avoids becoming a cliche. (The size of the cutlass he was stabbed with – seen only after the fact – makes me feel very uncomfortable, though.)

A couple of the catalysing murders are changed, however, to get around the Hays Code. This foolish document was a way of censoring all movies, to make sure that Hollywood didn’t ruin anyone’s moral sensibilities, and it’s the reason why clever film directors such as Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock would find ways of giving you plenty of euphemisms and sly sexual references, to slide in under it. As a result, Emily Brent’s pregnant maid becomes her no-good nephew who hung himself in a reformatory she placed him in. But Judith Anderson more than sells the change as the uptight Emily. The key to this film, I think, is that the actors – all theatrically trained, of course – know how to sell the dimensions of their characters. We don’t need to know all the details of why the General did what he did, or why Emily is such a religious freak; the actors clearly know them, and these facts pervade their characters.

Roland Young as Blore, June Duprez as Vera, Barry Fitzgerald as Judge Wargrave, Louis Hayward as Lombard and Walter Houston as Dr. Armstrong

I promise I’ll become more challenging in later reviews, but this film gets most everything right. The gradual realisation that the survivors are trapped together with a murder in their midst rings true because of the well-blocked group discussion sequences. By the time characters are forming individual alliances, it’s impossible to tell who’s the killer, but we believe it could be anyone. (There’s an adorable scene where Lombard and Vera discreetly try to figure out the killer’s identity, while Vera distractedly plays an etude on the piano: beautiful stuff.) As Dr. Armstrong, Walter Houston puts his expressive face to such good use, aided by the chiaroscuro of the later scenes once the house is plunged into darkness. Houston reminds me of James Coburn, and he commands every moment he’s on screen, while believably playing “Drunk, but always drunk”. Roland Young gets the least to do, as Blore: a character who rarely stands out, as in the novel. It’s no-one’s fault, really, but Blore is just a dependable English chappy here. He gets some great comedy moments, but is the least defined of all ten “little Indian boys”. Young is crucial to the film’s funniest moment, which riffs on – and goes further than – Love’s Labour’s Lost, with four of the men spying on one another like a Babushka doll, only for the man at the front to walk around a corner and spy on the man at the back, leading to a complete circle!

(Incidentally, I adore the opening credits, which play over a rock as a CGI wave splashes at them to change the name onscreen.)

Of course, there are two areas in which the film can’t entirely live up to its successors. The first is psychologically: really aside from Emily and the General, we don’t get a lot of evidence that anyone feels guilty (and even those two are quite repressed!). Everyone was lured here because they arguably committed murder, after all! The final night on the island is very tense, with the survivors plotting together even as they suspect one another, but there isn’t the sense that anyone fears their past crimes coming to light. And this is bolstered by the fact that – SPOILER ALERT! - the screenplay follows Christie’s stage adaptation, not the book, in which Vera is innocent and Lombard is actually a friend in disguise, meaning that the two of them conspire to escape, and catch the Judge at his dastardly scheme. As an ending, it makes perfect sense: the original ending is too bleak for a lightly dramatic Christie play, and too challenging as a film. I don’t begrudge them, and I’m not surprised that only the Russian adaptation has dared to change it back. But it does weaken the characters of Vera and Lombard, particularly the latter, who is just a dashing ’40s film hero. As played by Louis Hayward (Noel Coward‘s erstwhile lover), he’s very dashing, and trés droll, but I’m not sure I buy him as a former army man.

Still, lest I sound like I’m negative, Dudley Nichols‘ script is still very faithful to the book, and would be the basis for the two ensuing English-language films.

June Duprez as Vera Claythorne

Vera, at least, is served well by June Duprez, who has also clearly read the book. While her character is deprived of any of the psychological disturbance that made her my favourite Christie character as a child, Duprez creates Vera as a slightly manic, unsettled woman, who could feasibly be the killer. It’s a bravura performance, and she ain’t half bad-looking either. The scene on the beach, with Lombard and Vera at cross-purposes, is cleverly directed and scripted, too. Finally, then, we come to the Judge, played by Barry Fitzgerald, who has a remarkably memorable face. This Judge is a witty Irishman, who chuckles a lot and is generally unhinged. He’s quite a showboat – and indeed I warmed to other film Judges quicker because they seemed less nutty – but it’s a winning performance, to be honest. After all, the Judge must be a bit mad, surely, and I’ve certainly met old men who cackle a lot like this dude.

All in all, And Then There Were None is a success. It looks great (the scene where the survivors debate whilst a storm rages outside is smashing), and from time to time the camera moves just a little unusually, giving us scenes framed in shadow, or point-of-view shots that seek to liven every minute of its running time. The vibrant score, taking the eponymous nursery rhyme as its starting point, is catchy and effective too. Is it the best film of the bunch? Admittedly, no. The later films would be able to glory in post-Hays code censorship relaxation and more psychological exploration, leading to movies with more red herrings, more likely suspects, and more haunting atmospheres. But this was my first film version, and it’s a damn classy effort!

Tomorrow, we look at 1965′s “Ten Little Indians” directed by George Pollock.

A shot rings out. Beautiful stage actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) has just killed her alcoholic, cheating husband Barney Page (Louis Hayward) in self-defense. Distraught, she flees and finds herself in the midst of New Year’s Eve revelers. She wades through the crowd and finds her friend, the troubled poet William Williams (Richard Basehart).

She tells him what happened. “Should I call the police?” she asks.

“Oh heavens no,” he says. “They’d only arrest you for murder. They’ve got such one-track minds.”

Instead, William suggests that she see the influential and wise theatrical agent John Friday (Tom Conway) and ask his advice. On the way, she wishes that she could somehow live the past year all over again, and never go to London, where her husband Barney met the scheming adventuress Paula Costello (Virginia Field). Things would be different for William, too, who is fated to be committed to an insane asylum by a woman named Eloise Shaw (Natalie Schafer).

To Sheila’s surprise, William is no longer standing behind her when she arrives at John Friday’s flat, and she’s suddenly wearing a different evening dress. Furthermore, John insists that it’s only the first day of 1946, not the first day of 1947.

Once Sheila wraps her head around what has happened, she realizes what a rare gift she’s been given, and sets out to make things turn out right this time around.

But she quickly finds that events are conspiring to work themselves out the same way, no matter what she does. She doesn’t need to go to London with Barney to make Paula Costello a part of her life, because Paula knocks on the wrong door when she’s in Greenwich Village in New York, and winds up at Sheila and Barney’s party.

Sheila confides in her friend William, who doesn’t quite believe her cock-eyed story, but is sensitive and open-minded enough to listen to her when she tells him what she thinks will happen. “Barney will fall in love with that woman, William. He’ll go on drinking, become a hopeless alcoholic. He’ll grow to hate me. He’ll try to kill me. I’ve got to escape all that, William.”

Sheila vows that she won’t act in Paula’s play, Say Goodbye, which she did the first time she lived through 1946. She and Barney move to Los Angeles, where he stops drinking and gets back to work on his second play. For awhile, it seems as if Sheila will escape her fate, but then a package arrives. It’s a brilliant new play, Barney declares, but there’s no author’s name on it. “What’s the title?” asks Sheila in horror. “It’s called ‘Say Goodbye,’” Barney responds innocently.

Alfred Werker’s Repeat Performance is very much like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. The narrator, John Ireland, even sounds a little like Rod Serling. It’s a tricky, clever film with hints of metafiction, particularly in the scene in which Sheila says she doesn’t want to play an actress because audiences don’t like actresses as characters.

It’s a wonderful film that stands up to multiple viewings. It doesn’t need to be seen twice to be appreciated, but if you do watch it twice, you’ll catch many bits of dialogue that have a deeper layer of meaning once you know how everything will end.

Walter Bullock’s script, from a novel by William O’Farrell, is intelligent, and does an excellent job of balancing its science-fiction elements with its human drama. The acting is great, too, especially by Louis Hayward, who gives a weird and brilliant performance as Sheila’s unlikable but ultimately tragic husband Barney.

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, 1947) – 5/5

One of the great exemplars of Technicolor cinematography (provided by Jack Cardiff, who also lensed Powell’s equally ravishing follow-up The Red Shoes [1948]) – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A cohort of Anglican nuns, lead by Mother Superior Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), take up residence in a windswept nunnery in the Himalayas (once home to the raja’s harem, hence its now-ironic designation, House of Women), where a combination of the exotic flora and fauna, the rarefied atmosphere and the eccentric customs of the “primitive” locals begins to exert a baleful, regressive influence on the hapless brides of Christ. These irruptions of repressed sexuality place Black Narcissus in a long tradition (or, more precisely, countertradition) in mainstream cinema of less-than-worshipful portraits of the cloistered life, stretching from Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922) to Ken Russell’s The Devils (1970) – not to mention the bounteous bizarrerie of the “Nunsploitation” subgenre that flourished throughout the 1970s.

Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946) – 4/5

Lean’s streamlined, spectral Gothic adaptation of Dickens’ novel brings his strong visual sensibility to bear on ostensibly melodramatic, contrivance-riddled material. Early scenes set among the fog-shrouded churchyards and moors would not have been out of place in a particularly eerie segment of the Ealing portmanteau horror film Dead of Night (1945). And the goings-on at Miss Havisham’s Satis House (irony!) – the taunting, seductive cruelty of the girl Estella (Jean Simmons), the punishing pugilistic masochism of young Herbert Pocket (played as an adult by Alec Guinness) – emanate a perverse sexuality that finds concrete depiction in the cobweb-festooned wedding banquet Miss Havisham has peevishly preserved since the day of her jilting. On the other hand, the rigmarole surrounding Pip’s inheritance (source of the title’s glad tidings), and his manifold efforts to metamorphose into presentable gentility, lack the sharp satirical eye that would have rendered them more significant than mere window-dressing.

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2008) – 3.5/5

Maddin’s self-professed “docu-fantasia” employs his usual silent-cinema-obsessed aesthetic (tableaux vivant, intertitles, rear projection and freeform whimsy) in the service of a quasi-exposé – probing into the seedy underside of his hometown, covering ground similar to kindred spirit David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), albeit in Maddin’s own inimitable fashion. Many of these sequences can best be summarized as a prolonged lamentation on the architectural devastation wrought by civic leaders under the auspices of modernization (read: economic opportunism). More intriguing are the (assuredly apocryphal) tales that Maddin clearly relishes concerning protoplasmic psychic phenomena, séances attended by eminent citizens and brothel madams alike, the occult labyrinth of unacknowledged byways and alleys that intersect the official cityscape, and a particularly hilarious Maddin family psychodrama, in which the director’s sister strikes and kills a deer with her car, only to have their mother “interpret” the sexual shenanigans underlying this ludicrous cover story. (Maddin concedes that this “hermeneutics of suspicion” was likely well-founded.)

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Charlotte Zwerin, 1988) – 4/5

Zwerin’s documentary is conventionally structured (talking head/archival footage/talking head), yet remains compelling; in fact, it’s priceless if for nothing else than the vintage late-60s footage of Monk onstage and off: The maverick bebop composer/performer comes across as some kind of space alien (shades of Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie), largely bewildered by the throng and crush of adoring fans and the asinine questions fobbed off on him by uncomprehending journalists. (“Are the piano’s 88 keys too many for you? Or not enough?”) Unfortunately, the performance footage only contains snippets from the roster of Monk classics, but what’s there is as stellar as expected.

Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942) – 4/5

Riveting, ruthless home-front film, based on a Graham Greene story, dabbles in alternate history: Though filmed at the height of the Blitz, Day begins with an introductory scene set after the war, the roving camera moving down a dusty thoroughfare, entering a rural hamlet and coming to rest in front of a churchyard memorial inscribed with columns of German names; a flashback then returns us to a summer afternoon in 1942, as the drowsy village of Bramley End finds itself unexpectedly billeting a brace of English soldiers who turn out to be “Jerries” (German paratroopers, to be precise) in disguise. Even worse, the local squire reveals himself as a treacherous fifth columnist. Even more tough-minded and unrelentingly brutal than Cavalcanti’s outstanding postwar noir, They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), Day takes the time to establish and explore its quaintly bucolic setting, then spends its second half blasting it to Kingdom Come. Cavalcanti stages the unexpectedly explicit violence unflinchingly – in one memorable sequence, the Germans lob a grenade into a roomful of children; without a moment’s hesitation, a matron grabs it up and barely has time to shut the door behind her, sheltering the youths from the blast, before it detonates. Of course, the propaganda value of the moment is obvious, but the terseness and thrift with which the scene is accomplished counteracts any sense of overt manipulation, rendering it exemplary of the film as a whole.

House by the River (Fritz Lang, 1950) – 4/5

Considered “minor” Lang and largely dismissed, even by the director himself, this Gothic-tinged melodrama/noir nevertheless brims over with trademark Langian preoccupations (guilt’s ambivalent nature, the mass media’s (here, book publishing’s) influence on society, sexual compulsion and destructiveness) and indulges in more overtly Expressionistic imagery than many of his American films. In fact, the first fifteen minutes or thereabouts of House by the River ranks with Lang’s finest work: Freed from the (restrictive) presence of his wife Marjorie (in a nod to Lang’s earlier Woman in the Window [1945]), aspiring novelist Stephen Byrne (wonderful, weasel-like Louis Hayward) fails to seduce and then strangles his live-in maid Emily; when his brother John turns up immediately afterwards, Stephen guilt-trips him into helping cover up the crime. The uncanny, dreamlike riverine imagery reminds one of Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955). Shots of water spiraling down a bathtub drain, in close proximity to a sexualized murder, herald Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). But the rhythms, and recurring instances of doubling, are all Lang’s own: both Emily and Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) enter the frame in identical fashion, a silhouette against garish wallpaper, their nightgown-clad legs descending a staircase (the Byrne house’s appearance and layout is also decidedly prescient of Psycho); the clumps of floating weeds Stephen spots as he frantically searches the river for Emily’s ineffectually submerged corpse echo her spreading blonde hair once he discovers it. Finally, it’s worth noting that, far from being plagued by guilt for the (at least partially accidental) murder, Stephen seems to thrive on and exploit the attention he gains as a result, going so far as to base his next novel on it, since, after all, a writer should write what he knows.

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008) – 3.5/5

Bearing more than a passing thematic resemblance – in its handling of urban anomie – to Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll (2009), Kurosawa’s latest moves even further away from the J-horror trappings that established his reputation with Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001), while maintaining those films’ penetrating philosophical inquest into the dissociative weirdness underlying contemporary Japanese society (in this instance the breakdown of the nuclear family), laced with the social satire and off-kilter antics that have characterized his recent films. When patriarch Ryuhei get laid off from his white-collar job, he decides to withhold the news from his wife Megumi and sons Takashi and Kenji, perpetuating the illusion of employment in order to preserve his authority. Sonata’s first half follows along as Ryuhei runs the gauntlet of humiliation, whether it’s spending hours waiting on a virtually endless queue at the unemployment bureau, or learning the ropes of functional redundancy from a high school chum who’s also jobless (building to a hilarious dinner sequence where Ryuhei’s friend takes a fraudulent phone call – he sets his phone to automatically ring five times an hour – then leverages a fictitious gaffe to berate Ryuhei and earn brownie points with his wife). Eventually, the other three quarters of the family are allowed to develop their own subplots, with varying degrees of interest – Megumi’s run-in with a home invader (Kurorsawa regular Koji Yakusho) feels tacked on, Takashi’s decision to join the American army is clearly a swipe at Japan’s hypocritical support of American militarism, while Kenji’s musical aspirations shade into rebellion against teacher and father alike – building to a (too convenient) dark-night-of-the-soul that forces each character to grapple with their inner demons. Making up for this dramaturgical fumble in a luminous coda, Sonata concludes with the family reuniting for Kenji’s piano recital, a note-perfect performance of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” rendered with Kurosawa’s trademark precision framing and lighting.

The Legacy (Richard Marquand, 1979) – 3/5

Well-constructed, if unexceptional, chiller from the future director of the thrillers Eye of the Needle (1981) and Jagged Edge (1985). An American couple (Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott) traveling in England on business are aided after a car accident by an eccentric millionaire who offers to put them up in his palatial country manor; as it turns out, it’s all part of a vast Satanic conspiracy involving a group of six rival inheritors to their host’s power and influence. This supernatural rendition of Ten Little Indians is no new shakes, straddling the line as it does between the Gothic-influenced Hammer horror tradition (indicated via veteran Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster’s contributions to the script) and the more graphic, kill-centric films of the ascendant slasher cycle (reflected in several overt references to the giallo films of Bava and Argento), yet Marquand manages to puff some new life into things with a smattering of attention-grabbing flourishes, most notably his penchant for overhead and high-angle shots. Meticulous baroque set design and decoration render support as well. Serious points, however, must be deducted for a strident late-70s-jangly soundtrack, beginning with the ineffably awful opening-credits ditty “Another Side of Me,” as performed by Kiki Dee (most noteworthy for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” her hit duet with Elton John).

A fable of pure ambition, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless tracks the success of Horace Woodruff Vendig (Zachary Scott) as he claws his way to millionairehood; the movie is obviously influenced, in theme and frequently in style, by Citizen Kane, although it also seems to be an answer to the ideas of people like Ayn Rand in its portrait of self-interest and the toll such a philosophy takes (The Fountainhead was published five years before Ruthless came out, and was a hit, and Rand was peddling her ideas in magazines and such). Vendig’s big mansion in the opening sequence evokes Xanadu, but its interiors have the strange airiness of a fascist political rally, especially in Ulmer’s architecturally-minded visual treatment.

Vendig, an old man, is announcing his great financial giveaway for the cause of peace; extensive flashbacks will reveal his true nature. Boyhood friend Vic Lambdin (Louis Hayward) is on hand to provide a skeptical response to Vendig’s generosity, and also to rub his friend’s nose in the fact that he has taken up with a younger woman who freakishly resembles the woman they both loved in their youth. Both roles are played by Diana Lynn, a curious choice for the role but a welcome actress at any time.

The female roles are interesting and well-acted: Martha Vickers plays a socialite who takes up Vendig in college (he’s now known as Woody, the better to capitalize on a vaguely respected family name of his past and add a bit of Ivy League Jazz Age sass); when he finishes using up her connections and family influence, there’s Lucille Bremer, as the wife of a corporate monster (Sydney Greenstreet, very human here). When Vendig struggles to best the Greenstreet character in a bit of capitalist chess-playing, he goes after the wife for romance and insider information, exploiting her position in his customary manner.

People describe Ruthless as a low-budget Kane, but it also looks influenced by The Magnificent Ambersons, especially in the early sequences of old houses and faded family names. Vendig the youth is played by Bob Anderson, the kid who played George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, the George that has his sore ear slapped by Mr. Gower. The lad goes to visit his father, who now lives in a saloon/whorehouse with a large aquarium; dear old Dad is played by Raymond Burr in Gay 90s garb and mustache, a huge man who gets pushed around by his slatternly girlfriend. With various visions of what people become, Vendig can be somewhat forgiven for his super-achiever attitude.

Ruthless is missing something, even in its more complete running time. It has no “Rosebud,” for one thing, and wide-eyed Zachary Scott, such a fine cad, looks a little more overwhelmed than overwhelming here. Maybe that works, in a funny way, for the film: Vendig is carried along in the current of a corrupt system and gets destroyed, just like all the little people.

It is one of a small collection of films that exist in a very narrow sub-subgenre: movies about writers (or “being a writer”) that are ostensibly about something else. This subgenre includes Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, which pretends to be about alcoholism, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which pretends to be about madness. These are films about men who desperately want to be writing, but are doing a horrible job of it, and, like many writers, invent elaborate methods of avoiding their work. Someday I will write a grand piece about this subgenre, but, you see, I am putting it off just now.

House by the River, the setting of which is apparantly Southern and the setting of which is apparently Victorian – such details seem beside the point here – begins with writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward, perfectly cast) sitting on the back lawn of his large house, which looks out at the unnamed river. He is trying to write. He has had some sort of success before, but is receiving yet another rejection letter as we meet him. The busybody battle-ax who lives next door asks him about his writing efforts and failures, which is always the last thing a writer wants to be fucking asked about. It’s dusk, apparently, although most of the movie seems to exist in a dim-lit funk anyway; the scene looks amazing, like a visualization of depression.

In the river, a dead cow, or water buffalo or something, floats by. The battle-ax reminds us that the location’s proximity to the mouth of the river makes tidal effects pronounced, and this carcass, like other garbage the river has taken on, will pass back and forth for a period of days. What a marvelous image for Fritz Lang’s cinema, which is so often marked with guilty consciences (often with good reason) or other stains that can’t be forgotten. (1950: Jean Renoir was making The River, a beautiful film with the river as central image of the never-ending, non-judgmental flow of life; Lang’s river pushes filth back and forth.)

Yes, it might be a little obvious, but this is a stark film. Stephen and the battle-ax note the comeliness of his housemaid (Dorothy Patrick – Lang had wanted to cast a black actress), who announces she is taking a bath in an upstairs room; a few minutes later, as he approaches the house, he hears the bath water running down the drainpipe outside. Lang gives the pipe its own shot, as it gurgles. Stephen smiles, the pervert. There follows a murder, and Stephen’s lame (I mean literally, he has a bad leg) brother (Lee Bowman) getting implicated in the coverup, and Stephen’s wife (Jane Wyatt) becoming disillusioned by her husband’s oddly jubilant response to the disappearance of their maid.

Of course he’s jubilant: the case has brought him some public attention, and he gets to do a book signing. Plus, he can write again, as he prepares a new manuscript that will be based on the murder. This horrible person is a great match for Louis Hayward, whose face has the same crumbling seediness of the house, and whose voice is surely the secret of his ability to snow people. (He really looks like Orson Welles, and is just as shrewd as Welles about the voice-seduction.)

Lang’s visualization of the river is shivery, and there’s one horrifying scene where Stephen is whacking at the canvas sack in the water, trying to gaff it with a pole; he finally makes contact with it and tears the sack, whereupon the corpse’s long blond hair comes floating out, waving there in the river. Elsewhere, Lang relentlessly returns to a shot down a hallway or path, creating a funnel through which the characters are channelled. No escape, but then you knew that.

Born in 1889, Williams was a prolific novelist who is probably best known today for the same reason he was famous in 1946; he wrote the novel Leave Her to Heaven in 1944, which was made into a hit film in 1945 starring Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent, a calculating sociopath with twisted ideas about love.

The Strange Woman was a natural choice to be made into a film following the success of Leave Her to Heaven. Both stories are psychosexual portraits of women with Electra complexes who use their allure to ensnare men and who don’t allow conventional morality to keep them from their goals; even taboos like murder mean nothing to them.

Unlike Leave Her to Heaven, The Strange Woman is a period piece. The film begins in Bangor, Maine, in 1824. Young Jenny Hager (Jo Ann Marlowe) is being raised by a single father (Dennis Hoey) whose only love in life seems to be drink. After Mr. Hager receives stern words from prosperous shop keeper and importer Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart) when he once again begs a jug of liquor off of him, the scene switches to a river bank, where young Jenny is tormenting Mr. Poster’s son Ephraim (Christopher Severn), a sickly boy who can’t swim. She pushes him into the river and holds his head under with her bare foot, but when Judge Henry Saladine (Alan Napier) arrives in a carriage, she says, “Poor, poor Ephraim,” and jumps in. She drags him to shore and blames his predicament on the boys she was with.

The judge is disgusted with Mr. Hager for stumbling through life drunk and failing to care for his daughter, but once Jenny and her father are alone, it’s clear that she loves him unconditionally. “Before long we’ll have everything,” she says. “Just as soon as I grow up we’ll have everything we want, because I’m going to be beautiful.” Mr. Hager tosses his empty jug into the river, and when the ripples clear, child actress Marlowe’s reflection has become that of the beautiful Hedy Lamarr.

Jenny may be all grown up, but clearly only a few years have passed. All the adults are played by the same actors, and things are much the same in Bangor. Her father is still a hopeless drunk and Mr. Poster is still the wealthiest, most powerful man in town. Bangor appears to be a little rowdier, however, with more commerce coming through the docks, and more drunken sailors stumbling around. Jenny and her friend Lena (June Storey) hang around the waterfront, attracting the attention of sailors. Lena tells Jenny that, with her looks, she could get the youngest and best-looking men around, but Jenny replies that she’s only interested in snagging the richest.

When her father confronts her, she flaunts her sexuality, bragging that she can make any man want her, and he beats her viciously. The whipping he gives her, while they stand face to face, is a little ambiguous, and more than a little sexual.

She runs away to Mr. Poster’s house, and shows him the stripes on her back, throwing her hair forward and dropping the back of her dress, as if she’s posing for a racy portrait, and his face registers both shock and lust.

It’s not long before Jenny marries Mr. Poster. It’s clear that he is a replacement for her father. Her physical longing, at least for the moment, is focused on her old friend — and new son-in-law — Ephraim, who has been sent away to school. She writes Ephraim a letter telling him how lucky he is to have a “nice young mother” and that she will “demand obedience and love.” She writes that if he refuses her, “I will punish you by not kissing you good night” and ends her letter with the line “…come home and see what a fine parent I can be. I do think families should be close, don’t you? Your loving mother, Jenny.”

Ephraim (now played by Louis Hayward) returns home, and he and Jenny slowly but surely fall for each other.

As the film poster above rather obviously shows, Jenny has two faces. For instance, when she and Ephraim sit on the banks of the river together, her recollection of pushing him into the river when he was a boy is flawed. She tells him that those rotten boys did it to him, and she tried to save him. Is she lying? Does she know she is lying? Does he know? Does he go along with it because he loves her, or does he truly believe her?

Jenny’s dual nature mirrors the nature of Bangor itself. On the one hand it is a prosperous New England town with an active churchgoing population of well-to-do people (like Mr. Poster and his young wife), but on the other hand it is a seedy little port city full of drunken sailors and “grog shops and low houses” (a.k.a. pubs and brothels). Jenny uses her husband’s money from his shipping and lumber businesses to improve the town, shaming him publicly into contributing large sums to the church. In private, however, she is carrying on with Ephraim, and even encourages him to arrange an “accident” for his father so they can be married.

Ephraim won’t be the last man in Jenny’s trail of conquest, either. As soon as she lays her eyes on John Evered (George Sanders), the tall, strapping foreman of Mr. Poster’s lumber business, it’s clear that the weak-willed Ephraim doesn’t stand a chance.

The Strange Woman is a well-made film with fine performances all around (with perhaps the exception of Gene Lockhart, who as Mr. Poster exhibits some of the most over-the-top reaction shots I’ve seen since watching Grayson Hall on Dark Shadows). Its narrative is sprawling, and clearly adapted from a novel, but the filmmakers keep everything moving along nicely.

Director Ulmer was a talented craftsman who toiled away in Poverty Row for most of his career, producing a few masterpieces, a few awful pictures, and plenty of films in between. The Strange Woman represents the rare film on his résumé with a decent budget and a reasonable shooting schedule. He was lent out by P.R.C. (Producer’s Releasing Corporation) at Lamarr’s insistence (apparently they were friends back in their native Austria-Hungary). He was paid $250 a week for the job. P.R.C. studio boss Leon Fromkess, on the other hand, received roughly $2,500 from United Artists. While he may have gotten the short end of the stick financially, the deal gave Ulmer a chance to work with a professional cinematographer (Lucien Andriot), a major star or two, a well-written script based on a hot property, and major studio distribution.

In And Then There Were None, eight people are invited to an island off the coast of Devon by a Mr. and Mrs. “U.N. Owen.” (Get it?) When the guests arrive, they are informed that Mr. Owen is away, and that the guests will be attended to by servants Thomas and Ethel Rogers, bringing the cast of characters up to ten.

Even 70 years ago, the N-word was a more sensitive topic in America than it was in England. Presumably because of this, the novel was published in the U.S. as And Then There Were None in 1940, the name of the island was changed from “Nigger Island” to “Indian Island,” and the song that provides the structure of the story was changed from the original, which had been a standard of blackface minstrel shows since 1869, to “Ten Little Indians”:

Ten little Indian boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.
Nine little Indian boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight.
Eight little Indian boys travelling in Devon; One said he’d stay there and then there were seven.
Seven little Indian boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six.
Six little Indian boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.
Five little Indian boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four.
Four little Indian boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.
Three little Indian boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two.
Two Little Indian boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one.
One little Indian boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.

Each guest finds a framed copy of this gruesome little poem in his or her room, and is informed over dinner, via a phonograph record, that everyone on the island has gotten away with murder in one way or other, and that all are going to pay. Then the fun begins, as the characters are dispatched in the manner of the rhyme. The first guest drinks cyanide at dinner (choking), the second has an overdose of sleeping pills (oversleeping), the third declares that no one will leave the island and soon after is bludgeoned (one said he’d stay there), and so on.

The novel is a case of truth in advertising. At the end, all the characters are dead. The film is somewhat lighter, and allows a couple of them to escape unharmed. It follows Christie’s own 1943 stage adaptation of her novel, which softened the grim denouement. Given what’s come before, however, the happy ending feels like a bit of a cheat, and modern viewers might find themselves rolling their eyes at the finale.

And Then There Were None is still a great little mystery picture, though, and its cast of veteran character actors play their parts to the hilt. The film occasionally borders on farce, but never in a bad way. I especially enjoyed Walter Huston’s performance as the quietly maniacal Dr. Armstrong, but Louis Hayward as the cat-like Lombard and Barry Fitzgerald as the phlegmatic Judge Quinncannon are both memorable, as well.

Q: How did you get into acting?

A: I think as far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an actor. I was always dressing up and playing Let’s Pretend, and putting on Mother’s hat and so on, I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that. I didn’t know how to go about it, I was writing all these letters and no-one would answer at all, so I went to dea Dad and asked if he could help me get to Hollywood. And he said Yes, my boy, and he produced a ticket for me but it was only one way. And I’ve wondered since if he felt that I would make enough to get back on my own, or if he felt that I wouldn’t get back at all.

I’d always understood that it was sunny California, and I arrived at the terminal in an absolute downpour. And I had on a tweed suit, being frightfully British of course and whacking great bags, and I walked from downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood, it was a question of economy, and I arrived there at the YMCA and in a very well-rehearased speech I said ‘I have just arrived from England to get into films, I have an Ingersol watch, very cheap but very reliable, worth $16, would you please accept it as security until I’ve got into films to pay?’

It’s extraordinary, very lucky, that I should arrive in Hollywood when James Whale was directing a film with Louis Hayward (‘The Man in the Iron Mask’), Louis Hayward played twins, a good brother and a bad brother, and James Whale wanted an actor who could play opposite Louis on these screens, but knowing this actor would never be seen, it was split screen, and whoever played opposite him would end up on the cutting room floor. And I was allowed to go and see the rushes, and I saw myself giving appalling performances, but I was gradually able to tone it down to a filmic level.

Q: You were as much a movie fan as a movie actor when you were in Hollywood, weren’t you?

A: Oh, still am. Yes, it was simply wonderful to not only meet these legendary people who’d just been shadows on the silver screen to me, sitting in the 1,9′s when I could afford it. Ida Lupino was doing a picture with Humphrey Bogart, and it was up on location in the big Bear Mountains, ‘High Sierra’, and Louis Hayward and I went up to stay with Ida, and Bogart was simply wonderful. Very unsure of himself, not at all the tough characters he played, which goes for all actors, we’re all bags of nerves. And he demonstrated, because I asked him to, his quick draw and firing. He was absolutely marvellous, he’d take a quarter, toss it up in the air and nine times out of ten before it hit the ground he’d have knocked it for six. It was absolutely marvellous.

Q: Thanks to Louis Hayward, who provided you with a generous cheque, you got as far as New York, where you performed your first war effort.

A: Yes, not very successful, dear boy. I was walking down the street and I saw a hospital saying ‘Give blood for Britain’, and I thought that was all I had to give. I went in, gave a pint, walked out and fell flat on the pavement. I was hauled back inside and given two pints! All English actors were given medicals and I was pretty low, I think, having knocked myself around playing rugger many years ago, and I was told to stand by. They don’t need cannon fodder yet, I was told by the medical officer.

I got up as far as Canada, to the YMCA, said ‘I’m broke’, as usual, but they just happened to be short and let me do night shifts. I always seemed to be arriving as they were short of something. But I got a job in the art department of a film in Montreal. They were doing the special effects for a film with Eric Porter called ‘The 49th Parallel’, and they wanted twelve swastikas. So I took them home to do them, and I stuck them on little pins to dry, and was later met by two Canadian mounted police, and they were there to arrest me.

Q: And that was how you met your wife?

A: I’d been up to the ENSA office, and as I came down there was this dear lady, it was just as though we’d met again. We hadn’t, we’d never met before, but it was as though we had, quite remarkable. We sat together immediately and ran through the lines (for ‘Private Lives’), and she knew it backwards, so we soon got through that and started to talk of other things, and we just knew immediately that the rest of life in this world and the next, we would be together. It’s not a question of even falling in love, it was meeting up with your soul, it that doesn’t sound too high falluting. I do owe everything to Helen, I was greatly blessed.

Q: You admit in your book that you married for money.

A: (laughs) Yes, Helen had, I think, ten pounds and I had fifteen.

Q: One of the plays, A.E. Matthews was in the cast.

A: (laughs) Yes, Matty was famous for, what was it, longevity. Apart from being a wonderful comic actor. And he professed to reading the obituary column in the newspaper every morning to see if he was still alive. And Matty had this thing of having a rest between the matinee and the evening performance, and the Call Boy tapped on the door for the half hour, because in those days you got a half hour call, and he didn’t get any reply so he opened the door and saw Matty lying there prone, so he rushed to the Stage Manager and said ‘Mr. Smith, Mr. Matthews is dead!’, and when they later discovered he wasn’t, Matty called the perpetrator to his quarters and said ‘You must never do that in future, it causes dismay, what you must do in future is you go to someone in authority and say very quiety and calmly I think Mr. Matthews is dead’.

Q: How did you get into television?

A: What had happened was my dear, dear wife had been absolutely wonderful, I hadn’t worked for years, we had no money, we just had each other, which is wonderful. She said ‘I’m going to write to all the directors and producers at the BBC and say that you’re free’. I said ‘Darling, no-one’s heard of me except you, Mum and Dad’, she said ‘Don’t be silly’. I thought it was be awful, I was very unhappy about it, but the very next day I got many replies, and one especially from Harold Clayton offering me the leading part in ‘Cornelius’. Helen gently explained, ‘What happens, Peter dear, is that you have everything against you as an actor apart from photogenic looks and talent. You’re nervous as a race horse, you don’t like people watching you when you work’ and several other things, and we’ve got to put all this together. I forget how many plays I did at the BBC, but more than half of them were already established successes from the theatre. I think you’d have to be a very bad actor not to come over fairly well in many of those parts.

Q: It must be ’1984′, a very controversial TV play, that’s best remembered.

A: We had the scene where the villains of the piece, the people run by Big Brother, anyone they thought was a rebel, they’d find his achilles heel and use it. And Winston Smith, the greatest hero in all fiction, they found out that his fear was rats, and they confronted him with them to make him do what they wanted. So two rats had to be got hold of by the BBC Props department. I don’t know if they still exist today, but two rat catchers were contacted, and one of them went to the sewers to obtain two, and they were plonked onto the set in a cage, looking very pathetic and shivering, with lovely arc lamps warming them, and people kept coming by and dropping cheese in, and they were loving it, they were thinking ‘This is the life’. Their part was to leap at my throat, snarling with teeth like Dracula, and by the time we came to do this scene they were fast asleep, having a marvellous time.

Fortunately, this was just a rehearsal, so the call was put out to the sewer man, but he wasn’t available, so they had to nip down to the nearest pet shop and get a couple of fawn-coloured tame ones, which had to be painted grey by the make-up department. And a great notice was put up, ‘These animals are not to be fed under any circumstances’, so as they day went on they were getting hungrier and hungrier and angrier and angrier. Now this was coming up to transmission night, the Sunday night, and we kicked off at about half past seven, and by this time they were ravenous, they were howling, these rats, tame rats, howling for their grub, to such an extent that they had to be removed to another studio. I was given a monitor, and a bit of cheese was dangled, they leapt up, I was given a cue and I had to scream.

Sunday nights were reserved for drama, and there was a live repeat on the following Thursday. Not tapes, but some other form of reproduction had been introduced to television, and I don’t mean this in any way against technicians, whom I have the greatest regard for, but the BBC moguls felt that it would be more fair to the technicians if they recorded the second performance. To me, it lost the edge, the second performance, because it builds up to such a… There were questions asked in the house as to whether the repeat should be allowed the following Thursday.

Q: In the 1950′s, you were acknowleged as the uncrowned king of British television, you were called Mr. Television in the press. How did you film career get re-started?

A: I was awfully lucky, as a leading man, to get into films when I did, because it was a time when film people weren’t keen on anyone to do with television, because television was keeping people away from cinemas, really for the first time in its history. Except for one company, which was Hammer, who felt that if someone was well-liked on television, if they could get him on screen, they might bring a few more people back to cinema. Having seen the original ‘Frankenstein’, with James Whale directing, a pretty jolly good film, I thought this would be a wonderful film to make. I had my agent call them up, because they’d tried to get me before and I’d never been free.

They did it within the budget and on schedule, and America couldn’t believe that such a quality film could be made within that time and for that amount of money. It just took off, went all over the world, particularly America, where they were bonkers about it. Japan loved it, adored it. So that, really, put the seal on my international fame. Within the first week, it had paid for itself. Hammer went absolutely raving mad, poured the money back, spent £70,000 on making ‘Dracula’.

Q: You’ve played Professor Van Helsing five times now, on screen. What is it that you like about the character?

A: Basically it’s what the fans like, which is the triumph of good over evil, which I think in this day and age is so important, that although Dracula keeps popping up, and so does the Devil – you’ve only got to add a ‘d’ to evil, take an ‘o’ from good and you’ve got God and the Devil, the two greatest antagonists the world has ever known. In the books, he’s written as a little man who almost literally speaks double Dutch, and when I was cast I said ‘Oughtn’t we to get a double Dutcher’, and Tony Hines said ‘No, I think we should play him as you’, so it became almost one of my parts. I never saw the picture where Olivier played Van Helsing, but I think he played him much closer to how Bram Stoker wrote him.

He kept whipping out so many crucifixes from so many pockets, practically from his ears, that he was like a salesman. And right at the very end, the denoument of the picture, he takes out a crucifix and forces Dracula into a ray of sunlight. I thought ‘Let’s do something more than that’, because I came from the Errol Flynn days when you always had a fight, a leap from a balcony… so I said ‘I know we can’t build a balcony now, but we’ve got this marvellous long refectory table, and there’s this curtain window, now what if I jumped up on this, ran along it, did a flying dive, catch the curtain, the sunlight hits old Drac, I jump back onto the table, grab the candlesticks, jump down and make a cross?’. These films were mocked and scorned upon at the time, now they’re held in great reverance in the British Film Institute as masterpieces of their time. It’s an odd old game. I really felt I had made it, which is a wonderful feeling.

Q: You also played Sherlock Holmes…

A: Sherlock Holmes, Robinson Crusoe, Billy Bunter and Mr. Pickwick are said by the pundits to be literary figures who’ll last for all time, which is wonderful. To have played Sherlock Holmes, I think you’re extremely lucky if you have those drawn features as drawn by Sidney Paget in the wonderful Strand magazines, that helps a great deal, I think. Many clever, awfully good actors have played the part and don’t look like him, but I think it’s a plus if you happen to have that sort of physog. Very difficult part to play, of course, becuase he goes up and down like a yo-yo, and you’ve got to be awfully careful when you’re playing a part like that, that it doesn’t become annoying to the audience and a bit clever-clever, you know?

Watson’s no fool, and I think it’s a great mistake if Watson’s ever played as a fool because (a) Holmes would never put up with him, and Holmes had this incredible mind and all his observations were based upon the simplest things.

Q: You’ve been very lucky with your Watsons.

A: Well, yes, when you think – Andre Morell, Nigel Stock, Sir John Mills, well you can’t go much better, can you? It’s this lovely relationship between these two men, this brilliant Doctor, with two or three wives so he must have had something going for him, as well as being a clever medic and a great chum to Holmes, and every generation breeds a new generation of lovers of the character. But the only thing is that Holmes is very fond of pipes, and if you ever see me on the screen smoking one of those things and looking as though I’m enjoying it – it’s not lit, you see, it’s a dummy, something to suck – it’s really very good acting, because I find it desperately nauseating, I have to keep a glass of milk under the chair otherwise I might disgrace myself all over the set.

Q: What was the ‘Star Wars’ experience like for you?

A: (laughs) Oh, you’re naughty. You’ve been reading things about me. (indicates his feet) Berman and Nathan have looked after me for years and years and years, and they’ve never let me down once, except of this occasion. I was dressed rather like an Edwardian chauffeur, as Grand Moff Tarkin, and a pair of riding boots, tight fitting. Incidentally, I’ve often wondered what a Grand Moff is. Sounds like something that came out of a clothes closet. Anyway, they hadn’t got time to have my boots made for me, which is often the case because I have very big foot. So there I was on the first day, stomping around, and it was agony. So on the second day I said to George Lucas, ‘George, I’m not asking for close-ups, but do you think you could shoot me from the waist up?’, and he said ‘Why?’ and I explained the reasons and he said ‘Oh, alright’ and he gave me a pair of carpet slippers, so for the rest of the film I stomped around as old Grand Moff Tarkin, looking extremely cross, in carpet slippers.

Q: What, then, do you think is the attraction of the horror movie?

A: I query your use of the adjective ‘horror’, because horror to me is films like ‘The Godfather’, or about the way, because they depict things that actually happened, which facts of history and all the appalling aftermath. Whereas most of the stuff we do is fantasy, and I think that’s a much better title. I think (a) it’s escapism, (b) it’s fantasy, and strangely enough, here’s another point which I think interests audiences in the picture I make, it’s the power of good over evil.

This film was a sequel to 1935′s Captain Blood, which starred Errol Flynn. It was, in fact, based on a book, The Return of Captain Blood,  that was another book in the Captain Blood series.  Again, Captain Blood, now retired from piracy and serving as a physician on Jamaica, finds himself having to resume piracy to clear his name.  This adds nothing to the story and is largely a rehash of the earlier film.  In the one area where we have some interesting ideas — Captain Blood is opposed to slavery and is helping some runaway slaves make a break for freedom at the film’s beginning.  Though this is not the crime he is charged with, it was a crime for a British citizen living in Jamaica at the time.  When he is cleared of the piracy charges at the end of the film, his complete complicity in the freeing of slaves is conveniently forgotten.  His nemesis, a British lord getting rich from slavery, is killed, but the governor of the island, who was quite happy with the profits from slavery, is still the governor. 

Louis Hayward does a good job at being Errol Flynn here, and has the right mix of culture and swagger to pull the role off.  The movie as a whole, though, lacks brio and seems like people are just going through the motions (as so often happens in sequels). 

One strange note:  we get a brief synopsis of the earlier story in flashback, and the filmmakers chose to use footage from the 1935 film.  Problem is, this film is in color, and that in black and white, and in group shots, Captain Blood is clearly Errol Flynn and not Louis Hayward.  They shot some B & W closeups of Hayward to blur this reuse of film from the earlier title, but I felt it only called attention to it. 

I’d avoid this pirate adventure if I were you.