The Filth & the Fury

I’ve been catching up with a number of Sky Arts things I had taped before Christmas, and last night I caught the 2018 documentary Anarchy on Thames, which I wrongly assumed was a film about the Sex Pistols’ boat trip down the Thames to promote the God Save the Queen single. So I was a little disappointed to discover that the film was actually about the infamous 1976 Bill Grundy interview, 90 seconds worth of television that has been scrutinized to death over the years. Happily though this brisk 30min retrospective was surprisingly enjoyable, and it was good to hear from a few personnel who were in the Thames control room on that faithful day, cheerfully confirming that Grundy was most definitely not drunk, despite him brazenly saying so on air, but rather was a little juiced up and ready to knock his young interviewees down to size. Good to see Alan Jones interviewed as well, recalling his days hanging around the SEX shop, and there's the irrepressible Don Letts, who's momentarily stunned by Bromley boy Simon Barker wearing a swastika armband - and if that seems astonishing now, it’s worth recalling that the BBC’s cringe-worthy Black and White Minstrel Show was one of the most popular shows of the day. Nice too to see Glen Matlock, looking fabulous for a man of 61, recounting a tale he’s probably told a million times by now and having a chuckle at Steve Jones’ priceless (and seemingly unnoticed) comment about the hefty EMI advance “We fuckin’ spend it didn’t we”.

Following the Grundy documentary was the 30min The Sex Pistols Vs Bill Grundy, the final episode of Sky Arts' enjoyable comedy series Urban Myths which dramatizes famous tall tales and half-truths from popular culture. The centerpiece of the episode was the re-staging of the Today Show and while I could nitpick that director Simon Delaney didn't re-create shot-for-shot the original interview, or that the swastika on Simon Barker's armband is cautiously turned out of view, it's the book-ending sequences - the build-up to the interview and the fallout, that were the most enjoyable parts of the episode. An ominous title card warns "3:00pm - 3 hours to transmission", as Steve Pemberton's Grundy begins that faithful day with a few pints down the local, before sweeping into Thames Television studio and shrugging off, in his customary unflappable style, the challenge of the last minute scheduling of the hitherto unknown punk rock group the Sex Pistols. Following the shambles of the interview, the band are camped out in the green room addressing complaints from an angry unsuspecting public, in their own customary style (“wrap it in a pineapple and shove it up your shitter”), while a brooding Grundy comes to the realization that he has unwittingly been caught on the wrong side of history.

Writer Simon Nye sketches the personnel involved in the broadest of strokes - Pemberton's Grundy is the quintessential old fashioned and lecherous TV presenter (I wonder did his family take offence ?), while Kieran Hodgson plays Malcolm McLaren with a snotty Rimbaudesque swagger. Charlie Wernham and Matt Whitchurch are both fine as the vicious hoodlum Steve Jones, and the sensitive soon to be ex-Pistol Glen Matlock, while William Kettle's Paul Cook seems more like an afterthought. Frankie Fox is a real find though, his Johnny Rotten is played with laser-guided precision, and perfectly captures the frontman's dead-eyed, sneering cynicism. Rounding out The Sex Pistols Vs Bill Grundy is a very funny vox-pop sequence of actors playing disgruntled Today Show viewers airing their grievances, including the famous lorry driver who put his foot through his TV in a rage, which most likely is the biggest myth of the Grundy fiasco.

A Sorcerer by any other name...

Preview picture spread for Sorcerer, from the August 1977 issue of UK film journal Films and Filming... I spotted this earlier whilst leafing thru an issue of Films and Filming and I was surprised to see William Friedkin's film presented to British and Irish audiences under its original title, rather than the international Wages of Fear title. Films and Filming often ran previews well in advance of release dates, and I wonder was it the intention of the UK distributor, at this early stage, to release the film under the Sorcerer title, and reap the benefit of the tenuous link to the The Exorcist ?

I couldn't nail down an exact theatrical release date for the film on this side of the Atlantic, but it seems the film was in UK theatres by February 1978 - enough time perhaps for the UK distributor to rethink its strategy in the face of the dismal Stateside performance of the film. The director himself writing in his 2013 memoir, offered a combination of theories for the film's failure, among them, the ill-advised choice of title which seemed no more profound than the director borrowing it from Miles Davis' 1967 album which he had been listening to at the time. Friedkin himself wanted to call the film Ballbreaker, which might have looked good stenciled on one of the trucks, but studio boss Lew Wasserman flatly refused. Interestingly,  Films and Filming's review of the Wages of Fear eventually appeared in the May 1978 issue and its inclusion almost feels like an afterthought, considering the lag behind the film's roll out across UK and Irish cinemas earlier in the year. The magazine's chief critic Gordon Gow praised the film's moody atmosphere but felt the film was "careful but dull". To further dispel interest in the film, Gow signed off his review with a touch of regret that the Wages of Fear was a clumsy abridgment of the longer Sorcerer and warned this version of the film had been disowned by its director.

And then there was the matter of Star Wars. The unveiling of George Lucas's film preceded Friedkin's by a week but it proved a disastrous bit of scheduling - while the queues were snaking around the corners for Star Wars (with some patrons making their second and third visit), Sorcerer was playing to empty theatres. It was enough a signal a sea change in the tastes of film goers who evidently had grown tired of pessimistic character-driven dramas, embracing instead Star War's swashbuckling juvenile fantasia. And yet, four decades on, Sorcerer has been rediscovered by a younger generation who cherish the films made in that halcyon era of American Cinema when art briefly trumped commerce, the film now considered one of the finest films of the decade, and the high-water mark where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

In Cinemas that week...

A supplement to my previous post which mentioned Cork’s beloved Pavilion Cinema which closed in 1989. I found this page torn from the July 8th 1982 issue of the Evening Echo, Cork’s local newspaper, and the cinema listings make for fascinating reading. Chariots of Fire was the major new release of this particular week, playing at the Palace and the Oakwood, one of the smaller regional theaters, while North Sea Hijack, a rather formulaic Roger Moore action adventure film was the Cameo’s newest attraction. The Capitol was showing Cannonball Run, which I suspect was in its final week, the listing relegates it to the Mini - the Capitol’s second, smaller screen, while across the street, the Classic was still packing them in with Stripes. The Lee cinema, known as a second run house was showing the recently released Escape From New York, with support from Escape from Alcatraz, and it’s interesting to note the amount of second run features in theatres that week - The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), Mandingo (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), Dressed To Kill (1980), the Kathleen Quinlan-romance, The Promise (1980, and still unreleased on DVD), and the Alan Ormsby-penned high school comedy drama, My Bodyguard (1980). What’s most fascinating though is the Capitol’s Italian Exploitation double-bill The Last Hunter and Eaten Alive, which probably came as a package from the UK distributor Eagle Films. And while one might expect Antonio Margheriti’s (or rather Anthony M. Dawson’s) The Last Hunter to pass for an American-made Vietnam War film, I was genuinely surprised to discover that Umberto Lenzi’s rather tawdry cannibal film made it to these shores. Worth noting that Margheriti’s film was actually released on VHS in the UK the previous year; as were Escape From Alcatraz and Dressed To Kill, although I think it unlikely that any of those films were widely available on VHS in Cork at this early stage of home video.

Incidentally, the front of the Capitol cinema was well known for its prominent display of the posters of the current roster and coming attractions, and I wonder were the memorable British quads for The Last Hunter and Eaten Alive both on display that week ? Both were illustrated by the great British artist Tom Chantrell, and it’s worth noting that his poster for the Lenzi film differs subtly from the more sadistic image that was used for the Vampix VHS release released in 1983.

 image courtesy of Chantrell Posters

image courtesy of Film On Paper

Post-Script: Whilst researching this post, I stumbled across this wonderful photograph of the Capitol Cinema taken in and around 1979 with Phantasm featured on the marquee, with The Deer Hunter playing at the second, smaller theatre. You can also see the front-of-house posters sitting underneath the Capitol sign. The crowds lining the street are catching a motor rally.

His Master's Voice

Derek Walmsley writes about the beleaguered HMV in his editorial for the February issue of The Wire, and it's jogged a memory of a wonderful two-week break spent in Malta in June 2015. The connection here is the instantly recognizable HMV sign spotted looming over heads of shoppers and tourists on Valletta's St. John Street. The sign belongs to D'Amato's, Malta's oldest record store and one of the very few brick and mortar store music store left on the island. It's astonishing to think that this store has been in business since 1885, the famous HMV sign a leftover from a bygone era when the original proprietor Anthony D'Amato, was the sole dealer of the Gramophone Company's record label His Master's Voice. Meanwhile across the street, the vertical Cinema sign beckons patrons to the small, intimate City Lights cinema which specializes in cult, exploitation and adult cinema - if you were in Valletta this week, you might have caught The Last Walz, and perhaps skipped across the street afterwards to purchase the soundtrack.

I'm feeling terribly nostalgic about HMV this week. Closer to home, my nearest HMV opened in Cork city in 1990, moving into the Pavilion Cinema building which closed its doors in August 1989, after 68 years of film exhibition. The first film shown at the Pavillion was D.W Griffith's 1919 6-reeler The Greatest Question, while the very last picture show was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Pav, as it was known to Corkonians was the last of the city's palatial picture houses and I have very fond memories of the auditorium's beautiful ornate wooden panel ceiling, and the grand staircase which was decorated with the posters of the day. Happily, when the building became a music emporium, the film connection was maintained as HMV became my first port of call for my burgeoning VHS collection. In fact it was less his His Master's Voice than His Master's Video, in the early years of the shop, whatever cash I had was sent upstairs to the first floor, to the VHS section where I bought my first copies of some of the most pivotal films of my life -  Blue Velvet, the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Devils, Suspiria, 2001 and the first widescreen VHS edition of Apocalypse Now in 1992, to name but a few. At the same time I was scouring the videoshops of their old dusty pre-certs, but what set HMV further apart from the other VHS hunting grounds, was the availability of foreign and independent Cinema, the shop stocked a fine selection of esoteric titles from some of the more outre labels of the day - Artificial Eye (Andrei Rublev, Blue, Farewell My Concubine) Tartan (Man Bites Dog, Hard Boiled and the original b/w Night of the Living Dead), Connoisseur/BFI (The Falls, Solaris, Stalker) and Electric Pictures (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Mean Streets, Pierrot Le Fou). I still have a few of those HMV-bought tapes to this day.

I shouldn't over egg the nostalgia too much. As a music store I had little use for HMV in those early years. Back in the early 90's, even a modest size town like Cork could support 5 or 6 record stores at any one time, and most of my cash was spent at the small but legendary Comet Records, which kept me supplied with Death Metal on vinyl. I don't recall HMV stocking the likes of Obituary and Bolt Thrower, and vinyl at the time was dying a death before its spectacular resuscitation a decade later. I seem to remember getting excited one Saturday afternoon to find Ministry's 1986 album Twitch sitting on the rack, an album that had no earthly business in HMV, but such discoveries were few and far between. And unlike Comet, no one hung out in HMV which to me is an essential characteristic of a great record store. HMV was expensive too, and it always seemed to be a choice between a video or a CD, and in most cases, the video won out. I remember well the hell of indecision of weighing up the cost of The White Album, which was grossly overpriced - £27 Irish pounds to be exact, expensive in old money, but a veritable box set in today's money. However a vicious young hoodlum I befriended, regularly shoplifted-on-demand from HMV and did eventually secure me a copy of the White Album for a fiver. I never did find out how he snuck the fat-boy case past the scanners on the double doors - an agent in the field should never be made reveal his methods, but I hear a tin-foiled lined pocket was enough to bypass the security.

And yet, I miss HMV when it was HMV. Since 2006 the building has been occupied by the home-grown Golden Discs, another record shop and a truly wretched one at that. Its film section has none of the reach that HMV once had, comparatively speaking, and prices are even more inflated - a fresh vinyl copy of the 1967 Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits will cost you 3 times the price of the humble CD edition. Incredibly Golden Discs has been operating for almost 6 decades now, and has seen a slew of Cork record stores rise and fall around it. At this point I think Golden Discs would survive a nuclear catastrophe which probably makes it more a cockroach than a record store. Meanwhile, the future of HMV hangs in the balance yet again, and it's my sincere hope that a solution will be reached that will save jobs at the 125 stores across the United Kingdom and allow the HMV name to live on.

The Drummer

"I am nothing more than a drummer and rallier"

Adolf Hitler, interviewed in 1922

"We’re not fucking Nazis. We’re from Salford"
Peter Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division

I mentioned in my previous post Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler, and something struck me in an early chapter of the book, when Kershaw's writes about Hitler's burgeoning skill at inflaming the Munich beer halls with nationalist fervor. Hitler considered the role of the drummer a vocation, he became the agitator who understood how to shake the masses from their acquiescence to the Versailles Treaty. The image of the drummer is a powerful one and two representations immediately sprang to mind from the page - David Bennent's little drummer boy from The Tin Drum, and the sleeve of Joy Division's 1978 debut release An Ideal For Living, which features a drawing of a drumming Hitler Youth. The Joy Division EP is in fact loaded with Nazi references throughout. The type used for the band name leans heavily towards Germanic styles, and inside the fold of the sleeve is the famous 1943 picture of the frightened Warsaw Ghetto Boy discovered by the SS in a hide-out just before the ghetto was liquidated. The Nazi references carry over to the music too: the very name of the recently rechristened Joy Division was taken from Yehiel Feiner's disturbing 1955 Holocaust memoir House of Dolls, while a short passage from the book is spoken on the track No Love Lost. Furthermore, the first words spoken on the EP, the oblique count-off 3-5-0-1-2-5 Go! which opens the track Warsaw was a reference Rudolf Hess's prisoner of war number.

Obviously the four members of Joy Division were not drummers for fascist ideology but I was curious to know Peter Hook's reflections on the matter in his 2012 memoir Unknown Pleasures. 

After the name change, of course, the Nazi shit hit the fan. Changing our name to Joy Division, calling the EP An Ideal for Living and having a picture of a Hitler Youth banging a drum on the front of it – well, looking at it now, I can see the problem. I mean, An Ideal for Living? It even sounds Nazi.

But there was nothing more to it than a bunch of lads – Barney and Ian in particular – who were a bit obsessed with the war. Everybody was back then. We’d grown up with bomb craters behind our houses. It was the time of the big epic war films like A Bridge Too Far, and of Warlord and Commando comics.

Looking back on the preceding years there was most definitely something in the air: The World At War, the landmark 1973 series introduced the spectre of the Nazis to a new generation, while films like The Damned, Cabaret, The Night Porter, Salon Kitty consciously or not, fetishized Nazi uniforms and symbols. In 1973 Brian Eno and Robert Fripp collaborated on the experimental album (No Pussyfooting) and called one of the side-long compositions on the album, Swastika Girls. That same year, glam rock band The Sweet appeared on the Christmas day Top of the Pops performing their sole, solitary hit Block Buster! with bass player Steve Priest camping up as an effeminate Adolf Hitler and brandishing a swastika armband, an example of that curious English phenomenon of the Comedy Nazi. In 1976 Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood began putting together their punk uniform which featured the swastika, here intended to cause as much offense as possible to the older generation. In December of that year Bromley Contingent member Simon Barker appeared alongside the Sex Pistols, on the Today Show wearing the swastika armband. It was in this milieu that the design of An Ideal For Living emerged. Peter Hook recalls:

It was about being shocking, not about ideology. We didn’t have a political bone in our bodies – none of us did, not even Ian. Arty stuff was what he liked, not political. Yes, we were naive and stupid and probably trying too hard to get up the noses of the older generation, but we weren’t Nazis. Never have been and never will be.

But for all their naivete, the Nazi connections would prove, to borrow from a later Ian Curtis lyric, a weight on their shoulders. Sounds' review of the EP on the 24th June, opened with the line Another Fascism for Fun and Profit Mob, while Hook admits in his book that the band lost out on signing with the Fast Product label, an early home to the nascent post-punk scene. It was therefore a relief to the band when Rob Gretton took over management duties in the second half of 1978 and re-issued the EP with an improved sounding pressing and perhaps more importantly, a new sleeve which featured a forest of scaffolding, a striking shot which I think is superior to the drummer sleeve. 

The image of the Hitler Youth drummer remains a loaded symbol and perhaps it was inevitable that Death In June (whose early sound was very much influenced by Joy Division) put out an album in 2006 entitled The Phoenix Has Risen, featuring on the cover, a shot of Douglas Pearce in the guise of the drummer, forging yet another unsavory connection with fascist ideology. But, luckily for me, the thorny subject of Death In June is a post for another day...

Triumph of the Will

Yesterday evening I completed reading Ian Kershaw’s monumental 2008 single-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, and it came as some relief to finally reach the bitter end - the closing years of the book, with the German people and Europe plunged into unimaginable misery and destruction, were particularly harrowing to read. The level of detail in Kershaw’s book is incredible, even in this abridged version of what originally came as a massive two-volume set, but I was a little disappointed that Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will passed by with a mere sentence or two. Instead I turned to my Synapse DVD of Riefenstahl’s film, augmented by an authoritative commentary track by Dr. Anthony R. Santoro, who too often commits the cardinal sin of commentators by describing the events taking place on screen. Still, it’s probably the best way to watch Triumph of the Will, Dr. Santoro's voice is a far more pleasant alternative to listening to the interminable speeches of Hitler's cabinet.

I must admit I’ve had a thorny relationship with the film over the years. As a piece of Cinema, I find it impressively crafted, even visually striking - the sweeping aerial views of the beautiful city of Nuremberg, the wide angle shots of patterns of massed formations (which surely rival the record-breaking amount of extras seen in Gandi), and in particular, the night-time sequences which Riefenstahl stages with back-lighting and smoke, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen. Indeed there are those who claim that George Lucas took inspiration from the film for the design of the victory celebration seen in the finale of Star Wars. The film is darkly fascinating too - in the sequence where Hitler offers a smile and a kind word to some farmers - a moment they surely cherished in the years ahead, I had to wonder what happened to those people as the war entered its final terrible days when their benevolent Führer effectively condemned them to death alongside Germany’s imminent destruction. But for all that, I can’t help but feel that the film has become little more than pornography for neo-Nazis and white supremacists, so much so that I’ve never included the Synapse DVD on my film list. To make some sense of it all, I hope to round out this encounter with Triumph of the Will with the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl…