Wednesday 30 December 2020

The Stone Killer (1973, dir. Michael Winner)

Charles Bronson in The Stone Killer, most likely trying to figure out Gerald Wilson's deliriously convoluted screenplay...

The Stone Killer (1973, dir. Michael Winner)

Another film watched over Christmas, Michael Winner's 1973 film is a rollicking big-budget exploitation picture with Bronson supplying serious star wattage. His Lou Torrey is short on subtleties, but the physicality of his performance is impressive, whether he's crashing his car through market stalls in pursuit of a motorcycle, or scrambling up staircases blasting everyone in sight. Gerald Wilson's screenplay had me tied up in knots from the get-go, and for the most part the film was barely comprehensible, but Winner knows how to deliver the thrills and spills and one can at least enjoy the breakneck outrageousness of it all. In fact the film is genuinely bizarre at times, as if two or three other films were intruding upon it, and afterwards I had to wonder if I did actually see a scene where Bronson visits an Easy Rider-style hippie commune (complete with camel) and did I really spot Angelo Rossitto perched on a hotel reception counter ? It seems I did...

Thursday 24 December 2020

Richard Burton on the joy of a book collection...

Found during a random page selection from the Richard Burton Diaries...

Saturday 4th October 1969

"Yesterday I spent most of the day unwrapping the books. By some lucky guess the bookshelves, measured by guesswork on my part, accommodate the books almost perfectly, leaving half a shelf spare for any additions that Dent-Dutton may dream up. Now comes the task, looked forward to, of putting them in order, either alphabetically or by subject matter. Alphabetically by authors is probably the most practical, though E would prefer them in colours. I protest that they will look like a pretty wall-paper, a decoration reminiscent of those shops in London where one goes in and orders two yards of books without knowing or caring what's inside them. We have mild side-bets as to who has the most volumes under his name. It's probably Dickens but there are a quite a few dark horses like Walter Scott, Gibbon and Grote (History of Greece). Shakespeare is in four volumes so he's out. The tomes are all beautifully bound in velvet green calf, red and blue calf, black and maroon morocco, grey calf. A sensuous delight just to hold and touch. There is a section for children, an encyclopedia, dictionaries of all kinds, history geography art science romances essays and all. The room when finished is going to be a dream and I shall probably spend most of my time there. There is a beautifully rough stone fireplace, log-burning, and the outside door leads directly into the garden. A couple of easy chairs, a small bar, a sofa, a desk and a chair and a couple of rugs thrown about the floor and a painting or two on the walls and you have the best cell ever for a literary man. It's so particularly delightful to have the time and the leisure (and the money) to do it without having to rush off in 10 days to do some ghastly film chore..."

Claire Bloom & Richard Burton in the 1965 film The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Wednesday 23 December 2020

Still watching the skies ?

 "I've been getting messages from outer space, they spiral like a finger in the sky" says the paranoid narrator of Yo La Tengo's song Deeper Into Movies... I've been listening to YLT's 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One this morning, and it's sent me down an unexpected path, looking at vintage UFO photographs. Not exactly a subject I'm terribly interested in (I've never seen an episode of the X Files), but like Ossian Brown's Haunted Air book, which collect old photographs of Halloween celebrations, some of these pictures have a genuinely eerie quality if one can look past the fakery. I wonder has the UFO subculture waned over the years, now that people are photographing and recording the world 24-7 with their phones ? I'm not looking to go down the rabbit hole of UFO Facebook groups and so on - these things become tedious very quickly, but I remember many years ago watching a program on one of Sky's public access channels about a UFO convention and it was weirdly fascinating to see so many nuts gathered in one place. Or perhaps, I misread the situation, and all these people were knowingly indulging in a fantasy. I'm not sure...


Monday 21 December 2020

The Collection

Just over twenty years worth of film collecting in 2,400 lines... I finally completed updating my DVD/BR list for 2020, with the newest entry on the list, Arrow's pedal-to-the-metal turbo-charged BR edition of Crash closing out another excellent year of film collecting. We still haven't got BR editions of The Devils or Renaldo and Clara, but they will come... I'm something of a list junkie and I find keeping an inventory of my titles very beneficial, especially now that my collection is fairly large and sometimes difficult to keep a track of. A few years ago, I started compiling everything I have on an Excel spreadsheet, and it's proven very useful. On more than one occasion, it's saved me from buying a title I already own, such is my faltering memory, and the list also comes in handy for nights where I don't have a film in mind (I usually pick my film early in the day), and a quick stroll thru the list usually inspires something, and much more effective I find, than standing before a riot of spine names. If you want an alternative to logging your titles on a tracker program, and if you have access to Excel or one of the free Excel clones out there, it's something I'd recommend...

Sunday 20 December 2020

Bruce Wightman's Dracula

Bruce Wightman's Dracula

I rediscovered this drawing earlier this morning, found inside my copy of The Dracula Centenary Book (1987). This book was part of a clutch of books that have outlived their usefulness and were being relegated to the top shelf of a wardrobe to make space on my main bookcase. I only spotted the illustration by chance, as I flicked through the book one last time before it being put out of reach. I'm reminded that my annual reading of Stoker's novel (which I've done these past 4 years) and my intention to read it back to back with the Icelandic Powers of Darkness variant never happened this year, like so many things planned at the top of the year. So, it rolls over to 2021, and as soon as I finish the Titanic book, I will pick up Joseph O'Connor's novel Shadowplay which reimagines the relationship between Stoker and Henry Irving. Things to look forward to…

Saturday 19 December 2020

Swastika Girl

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lili Marleen: British quad poster by Tom Chantrell

British quad for Lili Marleen, Fassbinder’s 1981 film, another gorgeous piece of artwork by the great Tom Chantrell. I spotted a very affordable copy of this poster last week on eBay and almost pulled the trigger on it, but ultimately let it slip in a final moment of indecision - I don’t have the wall space to display it, and perhaps the swastika and suspenders are just a little too provocative for something that would be seen by visitors. I popped back onto eBay this evening in the hope that it was still there, but of course it’s gone. Hanna Schygulla looks fabulous here, and I love the 80’s flavor of the illustration, the Warlord-style blasting tanks, and there’s a nice bit of British video history courtesy of the Alpha logo on the bottom left. The film was released on VHS the following year on Alpha’s Intervision label.

Friday 18 December 2020

Barbarella

Barbarella, British Quad poster

Watched and filed away for another 20 years... Some talk of Jane Fonda on FB earlier prompted a revisit of Roger Vadim’s 1968 film, a film I have not seen since the early days of DVD, and perhaps with good reason - apart from the joy of watching Fonda at her loveliest, the film seems a waste of talent: Vadim’s direction is pedestrian, Terry Southern’s script is unfunny, the production design by the same man who designed The Leopard is unattractive, Marcel Marceau’s given nothing interesting to do, and Anita Pallenberg loses her voice to an indifferent dub job. I wonder what a great stylist like Mario Bava or Fellini might have done with the film - an injection of Sayricon weirdness would have helped. Everyone knows Duran Duran lifted their name from the film, but I’m assuming Drew Daniel’s Matmos did likewise...

Thursday 17 December 2020

On A Sea of Glass

Currently reading this detailed and comprehensive 2012 account of the life and death of the Titanic… In contrast to so many other Titanic reports, where the first few days of the voyage are merely a preamble before the disaster, Tad Fitch and his co-authors have furnished the book with so much fascinating detail about ship’s business and its passengers, that one wishes the Atlantic crossing had been longer. This is a Titanic presented with all its imperfections – behind the grand opulence of the first class spaces, there was unfinished dĂ©cor and incomplete fixtures and fittings throughout the ship, and a malfunctioning heating system that had passengers shivering in their beds. There’s a wealth of compelling detail about some of the 2,240 souls on board the ship, from industrial magnates returning from holidays in Europe and Africa, newly weds on their honeymoon, and Irish and European emigrants seeking opportunity and adventure in the New World. There were disgruntled passengers, like the mother and daughter who complained incessantly to the stewards about their genuinely cramped 2nd class accommodation, and there was the poor woman who slipped on a wet staircase on her first day and broke her arm. There were seasick passengers that never made it to the dining hall, and travelers whose nerves could not be calmed by the flat sea and the oft repeated assurances that the ship was “unsinkable”.

On A Sea of Glass: The Life and Loss of the RMS Titanic

At the point in the book where I am, the eve of the disaster, the fate of these people has yet to be determined. One crew member mentioned in the book, and I find myself frequently thinking about him, is one John Coffey, a 23 year old Irish engineer who accompanied the ship from Southampton to Cobh, and there jumped ship for reasons unclear – perhaps he had some premonition of disaster (as did many on board the ship, after Titanic almost collided with another ship as she left Southampton) or perhaps he simply wanted to get home to Cobh and stay there. But what of that extraordinary moment when he first heard about the disaster ? One could scarcely imagine having that much luck…

Thursday 10 December 2020

A dream of Dune

Some Moebius landscapes to get lost in... The new Dune film will be here soon I'm told (in a theatre/living room near you), but I'm not expecting much - the trailer makes it look like one of the recent Star Wars films, and I didn't much like Blade Runner 2049 either. Instead I'll grumpily cling to my utopian dream of Dune as a multi-million dollar, internationally produced, 5-hour animated film based on the design work of Team Jodorowsky: Moebius, Giger and Chris Foss. This will mean I’ll have to sacrifice my dream casting of Donald Trump as the Baron Harkonnen, but God, wouldn't it be great to be excited again by the promise of a huge animated sci-fi fantasy a la Akira back in the day ?

I've been listening to the Dune soundtrack this morning, that strange nexus where Toto, David "Pop the Cow" Lynch (as he's referred to in the dedications on the album), the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and Brian Eno meet. The author of the soundtrack's Wiki entry states Eno composed the Prophecy Theme for the film, but to me it sounds like music that was originally recorded for the Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks album, and later donated to Dune - it could certainly be used in any given moment during For All Mankind. The Wiki entry also says Eno "is rumored to have composed an entire earlier Dune soundtrack" which sounds rather fanciful - at least I've never heard of any such thing elsewhere...

Wednesday 9 December 2020

I Played Misty For Me

I watched Play Misty For Me last night courtesy of Universal’s UK Blu-Ray, and am pleased that this is finally in the collection, reclaimed after too many truncated, indifferent TV screenings over the years. Seeing the film again in better circumstances, made it feel a lot fresher than I might have given it credit for in the past – the film has arguably been displaced within popular film culture by Fatal Attraction, but Misty remains a disarmingly visceral thriller and, notwithstanding the gothic shadings of The Beguiled and High Plains Drifter, the closest Eastwood has come to crafting a contemporary Horror film. I had actually forgotten that Misty was Eastwood’s directorial debut (Don Siegel’s bartender will do that) and the film is an impressive calling card, especially that spectacular helicopter shot that opens the picture. Some judicious editing would have improved the film, the picture is weighed down by an unnecessary amount of footage of Carmel, as if Eastwood was too much in love with Bruce Surtees’ landscape shots to cast them aside - I spotted one shot of waves battering the coastline that has a near imperceptible jump cut, suggesting some kind of 11th hour pruning. I’m tempted to imagine the contrasting locations were a metaphor for the two woman at the centre of the film – Donna Mills reflecting the safe, pastoral wilderness, and Jessica Walter, the tempestuous, relentless Pacific ocean, but perhaps in the end it’s all just pretty window dressing. On the other hand, the on-the-fly footage from the Monterey Jazz Festival, though rather superfluous to the plot is a real treat, and I was pleased to spot the great Joe Zawinul with the Cannonball Adderley band. My Blu-Ray edition is completely barebones (“not even a trailer” as they say!), and in the absence of Tim Lucas’ acclaimed 2020 commentary track on the Kino BR, and the contextual material that was available on previous DVD editions, I turned to Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 Eastwood biography earlier and I’m reminded of what an unpleasant read it is…

Lobby card for Play Misty For Me

Harold Budd (1936 - 2020)

Very sad this morning to hear the news that Harold Budd has passed away. I’m not normally moved by the death of artists and such, but throughout this awful year I frequently turned to Harold Budd’s music to lift the spirits during moments when I carried a heavy heart. His gorgeous, dreamy music, his distinctive piano sound (as recognizable as Coltrane’s brassy tone) gave me considerable comfort when I felt anxious and afraid. So today, I will be listening to his albums and reflecting on his work and thanking him for creating a space to catch a breath to take shelter from the noise.

Tuesday 8 December 2020

What’s Welsh for sinister ?

Friday the 13th came up in conversation last night and John Cale’s wearing of a white hockey mask in the latter half of the 70’s came to mind. I made a note to consult my copy of Cale’s 1999 autobiography What’s Welsh for Zen to find out the origin of the hockey mask, but disappointingly it gets only a cursory mention when Cale describes his idea for wearing costumes on stage to deepen the meaning of his songs. Tim Lucas suggested to me that Cale adopted the hockey mask after it made the front page of one of the American news weeklies, and I’ll go with that. I’m pleased to pick up the book again, not having looked at my copy in years, and I’m reminded of what a striking book it is, with the text laid over and meshing with photos, drawings and distressed image and typographic effects, as eccentric and erratic as Cale’s long discography. Looking for a mention of the damned hockey mask, I find myself drawn back into the book, as my eye scans over fascinating remarks about Eno, Lou Reed and quite candid revelations about his stormy, even harrowing marriage to Cynthia Wells of the GTOs...

Inside John Cale's 1999 autobiography What's Welsh for Zen

Inside John Cale's 1999 autobiography What's Welsh for Zen

Monday 7 December 2020

René and Sara

I watched Don Siegel's 1970 picture Two Mules for Sister Sara on Friday night, and it's always nice to see a familiar name among the production credits - in this case look out for René Cardona's second unit director credit, a nice bit of work after Night of the Bloody Apes. When Iver Film Services released Apes on video in the UK in 1983, I think they missed a trick by not including on the sleeve the hype blurb "From the director of Two Mules for Sister Sara". Who knows, it might have saved the film from the DPP's eccentric selection of titles...

from the opening credits of Two Mules for Sister Sara

George Harrison's Electronic Sound

First album of the day, and it's turned my home office (ie. my kitchen table) into the Bell Labs, with the sounds of electronic birdsong, white noise and space-age whooshes drifting in from the living room. I watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet last week, and positioned prominently in the background of several scenes is George Harrison's 3rd album All Things Must Pass. I made a mental note to grab Harrison's album off the shelf, but this morning, in the mood for adventure, I pulled out instead, Harrison's 1969 album Electronic Sound. Putting aside the thorny question of the exact authorship of the pieces on the album, which Beatles writer Kevin Howlett addresses in the liner notes of the excellent 2014 reissue, the music here is utterly fantastic, and in places bridges the gap between the Barron’s alien soundscapes of Forbidden Planet and the free-form atonalities of early Throbbing Gristle. It’s a shame the album still remains unloved and neglected to this day.

Electronic Sound (2014 Zapple CD)

Saturday 5 December 2020

Mank (2020, dir. David Fincher)

I watched Mank on last night and if ever a film should have been dedicated to Pauline Kael, it was this one. For the most part I enjoyed David Fincher’s film, but it fell well short of greatness, and in its own humble way, the 1999 film RKO 128 was a superior take on the making of Citizen Kane. Fincher’s film is well written and acted, but I was less pleased with his decision to shoot the picture in b/w, wishing instead he had homaged John Alonzo’s work on Chinatown rather than Gregg Toland’s on Kane. I visited the Hearst Castle in 2006, and my memory of the property, with its eccentric collection of bric-a-brac, is indelibly bathed in California sunshine, so much so, that when I saw it recreated in monochrome for the film, it felt like a stylistic overdrive. And the cue marks, charming in the first instance, became annoying after the third or fourth appearance - it’s as if David Fincher was treating American Cinema from this era as a sort of quaint museum piece. Also, I didn’t much like how the character of Louis B. Mayer was played, as a sort of diminutive cretin with a particularly sour look on his face, but perhaps I’m thinking too much of Michael Lerner’s studio boss in Barton Fink, who I think personified best the flashy studio-era movie mogul gangster…

Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz

Friday 4 December 2020

Xmas AD: The 2000AD Annual

Christmas presents secured - check. Decorations retrieved from the darkest recesses of the attic - check. 2000AD annuals - CHECK !!! A December tradition I try to keep every year is taking some time to flick thru my remaining 2000ADs annuals - the galaxy’s greatest annual, which was always a huge part of Christmases-past. Reading David Bishop's 2009 book Thrill-Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD, I was dismayed to find out that the annual was a thorn in the side of the 2000AD staff, a hastily assembled rag tag collection of old strip reprints, short stories, wordsearch puzzles and quizzes, reader drawings and in the early annuals, Tomorrow's World style features on space travel, VCRs and home computers. All grist to the mill for this young earthling.

2000AD Annuals from yesteryears

Wednesday 2 December 2020

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971, dir. Dario Argento)

Four Flies on Grey Velvet came up in conversation a few days ago and my failure to say anything about this film prompted me to revisit Argento’s third film last night. My previous screening of the film was in 2009, when the botched MYA DVD first hit the street, so last night’s screening, courtesy of the German Koch Media Blu-Ray was long overdue. Sadly though, my inability to comment on the film was not so much down to my faltering memory, unreliable as it is, but the fact that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is rather dull and unengaging. Not having seen the film in over a decade I couldn’t recall going in who was tormenting Michael Brandon’s character and quite honestly, I gave up guessing about midway through, such was the insipid storyline and the leaden pacing - the suspense sequences in particular seem to take an age to unfold. Four Flies is a sort of oddball film at this point in Argento’s career, and it feels very self-conscious in a few respects. There’s some very show-off subjective camerawork as if Argento was flexing his muscles in an increasingly crowded murder-thriller genre that had found inspiration in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. And there’s some dismal comedy as if the director was deliberately trying to shake off expectations set by his two previous thrillers. The comedy would find greater expression in the sabbatical that was The Five Days of Milan, and if one follows the sequence of films, Four FliesFive Days; Deep Red looks ever more like Argento’s great comeback film. Four Flies is probably a more enjoyable film to discuss than to watch, and there are ideas and elements in the film that would resonate for years to come across Argento’s work, even as far in to the future as Opera, and for that alone, the film remains an essential collector’s item.

US lobby card for Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Tuesday 1 December 2020

Frightmare (1974, dir. Pete Walker)

I watched Pete Walker’s 1974 film last night, ahead of reading about the film in Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic, and thinking about Kim Butcher’s Debbie - British Cinema’s worst JD, M. Emmett Walsh’s line in Blade Runner came to mind: “Talk about beauty and the beast... she’s both”. In a film where all the principle characters are falling inexorably into a black hole, the directionless Debbie at least discovers her true calling in life, albeit to the whirling sound of a black and decker power drill.

The perfectly named Kim Butcher in Pete Walker's masterpiece Frightmare

Revisiting Frightmare after some years, I was surprised by the sheer nihilism of the film, and no doubt Pete Walker and David McGillivray delighted in sending audiences shuffling up the aisle of the cinema in awkward silence at the film's merciless climax. And speaking of awkward silences, seeing the film again remined me of a feature in the Spring '93 issue of UK quarterly fanzine Monstroid, containing a report from the Festival of Fantastic Films, held in Manchester the previous year. The organizers had come up with the brazen idea of reuniting Pete Walker and David McGillivray for a Q&A – brazen because both men had at that time not spoken to each other in 12 years, their partnership ending acrimoniously after Schizo. According to Paul Higson’s account it was a tension-filled night, with both men throwing jibes at one another, and Walker losing his cool at one point over a disputed claim in David McGillivray’s 1992 book Doing Rude Things that Walker’s films lost money. “I never said that” offered McGillivray, to which Walker, finally losing his cool, screamed: “YOU DID!” I wonder did Pete Walker and David McGillivray speak since ?

Saturday 28 November 2020

Elephant Video

When it comes to the halcyon era of British home video, few collectors will have a kind word for Elephant Video, who's roster of 19 or so titles included a clutch of Italian Exploitation classics – City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, The Last Hunter and uh… Umberto Lenzi's Eaten Alive, albeit issued in very watered down editions, almost completely devoid of splatter. I myself have been very scornful of Elephant in the past, for back in the early 90's when I first discovered Italian Horror, my introduction to Lucio Fulci's films was courtesy of Elephant and it was disappointing to find out all the good stuff was missing. Elephant was indicative of the seemingly fly-by-night VHS labels that were rehabilitating for the post-certificate era, some of the more contentious titles previously caught in the DPP dragnet; Elephant’s sleeve artwork was poorly rendered on lightweight paper and the cassettes were cheap plastic things that rattled to death in the VCR when rewound. I mention Elephant because they feature in, unlikely as it seems, the Winter 1989 issue of Sight & Sound which I was reading earlier. The article about the cleaning up of the British Video Industry (“Codes of Practice”) quotes Elephant boss Barry Jacobs speaking about the difficulties of distributing his product. Elephant were notorious for pre-cutting their submissions to the BBFC to guarantee a smooth and cost-effect passage through the offices at Soho square, but what I wasn’t aware of was how much pressure was brought to bear by the Video Packaging and Review Committee. In the case of Elephant, Barry Jacobs was informed by the BBFC that the Board would not consider reviewing Elephant titles until the sleeves were passed by the VPRC. House by the Cemetery was one of the biggest Elephant casualties, losing some 4mins of footage, but as well as that, the knife being wielded on their sleeve was no longer bloody as per the pre-cert Vampix VHS edition (at least they were able to retain Alan Jones' notes from the Vampix sleeve). The second half of the 80's were hard times it seems for small indie labels and while I’m not trying to defend a hard-done-by Elephant Video, the S&S article offers a more nuanced perspective than I previously considered…

Suitable for display: Elephant Video sleeve for House By the Cemetery

Wednesday 17 June 2020

Christ Stopped at Eboli....on VHS

Very pleased to hear Criterion are adding Francesco Rosi's 1979 masterpiece to the Collection in September. I'm hoping for a simultaneous UK release but either way, I'll be adding this to my own collection even if it means getting the more expensive US import - some things are worth the extra cash. It's been at least twenty years since I last saw Christ Stopped at Eboli and I retain very warm, impressionistic memories of the film - the dusty, impossibly remote town where the film is set, the strange and fascinating customs and superstitions of the townsfolk, and a career-best performance from Gian Maria Volonte. If Christ did stop at Eboli, I stopped at VHS - the 1992 Artificial Eye VHS edition that is, which contained the long 3½ hr version of the film spread over two tapes. In 2006, UK label Infinity Arthouse put out the film on DVD but it was a huge disappointment, containing a 145min abridged version of the film, but worse still, the DVD transfer was extremely poor, the image riddled with ghosting instances and darker interior scenes that were rendered near unwatchable. So the forthcoming Criterion Blu-Ray is a genuine cause for excitement. With the release some months away, this gives me time enough to finally read the Carlo Levi memoir the film is based on, and perhaps revisit Arrow's Taviani Brothers collection.

All this talk has me feeling nostalgic for my old Artificial Eye set and for this post, I dug it out from among the few VHS tapes I still own. I've always been fond of the Artificial Eye aesthetic - the uniformity of design, the clean organization of titles and text, the judicious use of stills and the instantly recognizable gray sleeve which gave an air of austerity and gravitas that I felt was entirely appropriate for titles like L'Atalante, Andrei Rublev, Les Enfants Du Paradis, i.e. serious world cinema. Looking at the Christ Stopped at Eboli sleeve now and seeing Derek Malcolm's name, I'm reminded of how much star wattage critics like Malcolm (The Guardian), Philip French (The Observer), and Geoff Andrew (Time Out) had back in the 90's...

Artificial Eye's 1992 doublepack VHS edition of Christ Stopped At Eboli

Tuesday 16 June 2020

The Kill Bill Diary

It could have been so different, as David Carradine reminds us in the second entry of his 2004 memoir The Kill Bill Diary. It's March 2002 and for the past year Warren Beatty has been courted by Quentin Tarantino to the play the part of Bill. The 65 year old Beatty however has grown increasingly weary of the amount of time and effort the part requires, and when Tarantino suggests Beatty play Bill "like David Carradine", a fed up Beatty shoots back with "Why don't you offer it to David ?" Two weeks later Carradine along with his fellow Deadly Viper Squad of actors are in the thick of a grueling month-long, pre-shoot training regime learning martial arts and wire work under the tutelage of Yuen Wu Ping. And Carradine is enjoying every moment of it. 

Written in a breezy, unpretentious style, The Kill Bill Diary is an interesting, sometimes fascinating account of David Carradine’s unlikely late career bump up to the A-list movie-making league after two decades worth of straight to video crap. Carradine’s reputation rests mostly on his 70's work, having made films for Martin Scorsese, Roger Corman, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Walter Hill and lest we forget Ingmar Bergman, plus he created a television icon as Caine, the wandering Shaolin monk in Kung Fu. But as the 80’s wore on Carradine’s increasingly erratic lifestyle reduced him to the status of jobbing actor taking fast pay checks for exploitation quickies. Carradine’s book doesn't rake over the ashes of the years spent languishing in the margins; he’s more content to spin a yarn about making Bound for Glory or The Long Riders, but what emerges most strongly from the diaries is Carradine's joy at finally landing the big fish (and director) he has been waiting for his entire career. 

David Carradine in a scene deleted from Kill Bill Vol. 2

Those looking for a detailed look at the making of Kill Bill will be disappointed. Carradine has little interest in recording the nuts and bolts of film-making and perhaps to bolster that aspect of the book, he lazily borrows two set reports written by Harry Knowles. The focus instead is on Carradine's interactions with his fellow actors (he's especially generous in his praise for Uma Thurman and Michael Madsen) and his collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, here displaying a Wellesian level of energy and enthusiasm on set, inventing dialogue and scenes moments before they are shot. One peripheral but noteworthy character in the book is Rob Moses, whom Carradine describes as his "personal trainer and guitar buddy". Their twenty-year friendship was one of the more important relationships in Carradine's life and the actor had come to rely on him, so much so that he endeavored to get Moses attached to the production and served as Carradine's driver to and from locations. I had to wonder if Tarantino took some inspiration from this when writing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Carradine steers clear of gossip and controversy for the most part, but there are a few grumbles of complaint along the way. Carradine is candid about his perilous finances (a string of ex wives and a taste for the good life will do that) and moans that his fee for the film was strictly scale (as was the rest of the cast) and the lengthy shoot resulted in him turning down several film offers and lucrative work on the convention circuit signing autographs (I presume the diary was Carradine's idea to squeeze a little extra revenue out of the film). Carradine records his irritation with Miramax for reprimanding the actor for various faux pas made during the film's promotional campaign - most seriously, when Carradine prematurely announced to a journalist that the original film would be split in two. Incidentally, Harvey Weinstein makes a few cameo appearances in the book, and is an intimating presence. Carradine refers to him at him at one point as a "master of the universe", (a seemingly complimentary but perhaps a knowingly ambiguous description), and admits "Harvey's not someone you want to be mad at you". Elsewhere Carradine writes: "Harvey showed up with a young actress in whom he is showing an interest" which prompts a shudder.

As I came to the end of The Kill Bill Diary, I felt a touch of sadness that Carradine never benefited from his change of fortune. As Carradine closes out his work on the film, with a whirlwind of globe-trotting promotion, Carradine is optimistic that better roles in bigger films were to come following his acclaimed performance in Kill Bill Vol. 2. But despite the prestige of appearing as the titular character in a Quentin Tarantino film, Carradine never did escape the low-budget film circuit where he continued to work until he was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room in 2009 in what is best described as strange circumstances.


In preparation for reading the book, I watched Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2 back to back, and it was interesting to revisit them in one single sitting. In fact this was my first time seeing the films together, strange considering I've owned the Japanese DVDs since 2004. Probably I was holding off for a release of the long rumored Whole Bloody Affair edition which has had a few select theatrical screenings but has yet to emerge on home video. But now that I’ve seen both films together, I have to wonder though how they ever knitted together in the first place, considering how distinctive both films are from each other - Vol 1, the fast, flashy, psychedelic blood feast, and Vol 2. the languid, introspective character study. 

I suspect Quentin Tarantino had originally envisioned Kill Bill as a big take-the-day-off-work roadshow event a 4-hour magnum opus deserves, but eventually conceded that the epic length was too demanding for theatrical audiences. And to retain as much of his director's cut as possible, he was forced to split the film into two easily digestible halves. I now think that this was the best thing for the film, not because it breaks up the excessive run time, but because the story (assuming it follows the structure of Vol.1 and 2), no longer peaks much too early with the House of Blue Leaves massacre. I wonder had the original 4-hour version come out in 2003 would audiences have criticized the film for the quite drastic shift in tone from the stylish pyrotechnics of the first half to the comparatively quiet and reflective second half ? We'll never know. Almost 20-years later, it's impossible to think of Quentin Tarantino's fourth film as anything but his fourth and fifth and even if the Whole Bloody Affair does eventually get a home video or streamed release, it will surely be seen as a novelty item much like The Godfather Saga...

Monday 8 June 2020

A Fistful of Yojimbo

The current Covid-lockdown has given me opportunity to program films I would not ordinarily have time to see, and recently I enjoyed a double-bill of Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars. The plan was originally to follow up Yojimbo with the sequel Sanjuro, but the chance to revisit Leone's film in close succession was too good to pass up.1 Not having seen both films in many years, I had assumed Leone’s film lifted just the bare outline of the story (Ă¡ la The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai) but the borrowing was more substantial than I had remembered, with plot points, characters, even shots from Yojimbo reappearing in Leone's film with only a few minor tweaks. In fact much of the delight of watching both films together is how frequently they interlock, and credit is due to Leone and his writing partners for transposing a story set in feudal Japan to 19th century Mexico, and swapping a swordsman for a gunslinger with relative ease. There's an irresistible symmetry at work here between Kurosawa and Leone's film. Yojimbo filters the classic iconography of the American Western (the ramshackle frontier town, the mysterious stranger) through a Japanese mythology, whereby Leone absorbs this gene-splicing and returns it back to the Western. I like to imagine Leone bent over a moviola in Rome, running Kurosawa's film backwards and forwards, studying the text in detail, and if there's some truth to that, perhaps one can say that for the Italian Western (that is to say the spaghetti western), Yojimbo is the archetype of the archetype. 

Watching A Fistful of Dollars again, I was struck by the ghostly elements of the film - the desolate, lonely town, the eerie business in the graveyard; and while dried up desert towns and cemeteries full of fallen loved ones yearning for vengeance were a common setting in American Westerns, in A Fistful of Dollars, these elements assume an almost Gothic Horror atmosphere. I'm tempted to look at the Italian fantasy films of the period, when a certain Gothic flavor that was developing with films like I Vampiri, Black Sunday, and Hercules in the Haunted World, but I need only to glance back to Yojimbo and see a similar sense of phantasmagoria at work. If one was working through Kurosawa's filmography in strict chronological order, Yojimbo might feel just a little slight after Hidden Fortress and The Bad Sleep Well, and it probably is - the film is mostly confined to 2 or 3 sparse interior and exterior locations, but this limited, confined use of space lends the film a claustrophobic intensity.

To push the idea further, the town in Yojimbo feels just that little bit odd - apart from the warring gangsters, it appears that most ordinary folk have fled or remain shut up in doors, and the town feels less like an earthly plain and more like what the Japanese call Meido, a gloomy, shadowy afterlife where souls await promotion to Heaven or get flushed down to Hell. When Sanjuro wanders into the town, the rival clans are locked in an infernal stalemate where neither side has the upper hand. Even Sanjuro inadvertently finds himself stuck in this limbo perhaps for his roguish deeds, and is redeemed when he frees the captive wife of the local farmer and unites her with the family. For his uncharacteristic good work, Sanjuro escapes certain death after he is mashed to a pulp and is smuggled out of the town in a coffin to recuperate at a cemetery.

Yojimbo's eerie setting must have reverberated with Leone, because the town in A Fistful of Dollars are also strangely empty, apart from the inn-keeper, the ever busy coffin maker, and the family trapped within the Rojo-Baxter feud. Leone also re-stages the rescue of the imprisoned woman, and gives it an unmistakable religious bent. When the Stranger warns the family to get out of town, it reminds one of the angel from Matthew's New Testament warning Joseph and Mary to take Jesus to Egypt to avoid execution by Herod. The little boy whom the Stranger reunites with his mother, in case anyone missed the symbolism is named JesĂºs. Later when the Stranger is almost beaten to death, he duly escapes in a coffin, but in a slight departure from Yojimbo, the Stranger takes refuge in a mine (which is an underworld of sorts!). The cemetery location is in fact used earlier in the film, when the Stranger props up two dead soldiers against a tombstone, a ghoulish part of the Stranger's plan to further weaken the warring the families. If the Bodyguard and the Stranger emerge from their ordeals stronger and wilier, Leone playfully lends his man pseudo-supernatural powers in the climax of A Fistful of Dollars, when the Stranger emerges from a cloud of dust and appears impervious to Gian Maria VolontĂ©'s bullets, much to his astonishment, before the Stranger reveals a bullet-proof metal vest. 

Yojimbo

A Fistful of Dollars

Yojimbo
A Fistful of Dollars
It's perhaps not a stretch to say that Yojimbo is a better film than A Fistful of Dollars. Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, indeed Toshiro Mifune and Clint Eastwood, were at very different junctures of their careers at the time they made their respective films. Kurosawa had a string of masterpieces under his belt when he made Yojimbo, while Leone was still a few years away from making his. Yojimbo is better plotted, better shot and better acted, but the irony of course is that it's Leone's film that has made the greater mark on Cinema. Where Yojimbo is elegant, with its luminous, noirish black and white photography and beautiful, dexterous swordplay, A Fistful of Dollars fizzes with a youthful energy and an unashamed vulgarity (as does most of Leone's films it must be said), and from the gaudy, comic book style credit sequence to the brash, sudden outbursts of explicit messy violence, it feels like a stick of dynamite tossed at the traditional American Western. A Fistful of Dollars was pivotal is resuscitating the ailing Western whose conventions were beginning to fall behind the times. Indeed, with one kick of the saloon door, it changed the face of the western all'italiana forever and spawned thousands of imitators and variations for years to come.

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Notes
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1. Had I copy of the film on DVD, I might have watched Walter Hill's 1996 film (and authorized Yojimbo remake) Last Man Standing. In fact I've not actually seen Hill's film so I made no mention of it in the post.

Wednesday 3 June 2020

Until the End of the World artwork

I wanted to include this as part of yesterday's musing on the British Thief poster, but it proved too awkward a fit, so it gets its own post today. Presenting the original artwork for the 1992 UK Entertainment In Video VHS edition of Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders' globe-trotting science fiction adventure.... I speculated yesterday that Thief's lukewarm performance in the US might have been due to the artwork designed for the US one-sheet poster, which gives the impression the film is more a science fiction thriller than a tough urban crime film, and as I was putting the post together, the artwork for EIV's VHS edition of Until the End of the World came to mind. I remember renting this tape out in 1992 and being disappointed the film didn't deliver on the promise of the beautiful nebulous airbrush painted sleeve which has a Cyberpunk/William Gibson feel to it, quite unlike the actual film. I'm thinking back now to those formative film watching years, and Until the End of the World was most likely my first Wim Wenders, and what an inauspicious introduction it was: EIV's tape contained the vastly cut down 151min version of the film, and no wonder I thought the film a confusing and alienating experience. In the subsequent years I discovered much greater riches with Wim Wenders' German films, plus his two finest films, Paris Texas and Wings of Desire, and with those under my belt, I was intrigued enough to revisit Until the End of the World in 2005, when Studio Canal put out the complete 287min cut (4 continents, 4 DVDs). Over the years my fondness for the film has grown considerably, and I now consider it one of the more interesting and rewarding films of the 90's.

Until the End of the World - British VHS artwork

Tuesday 2 June 2020

Thief Poster

British quad for Thief... I'm only posting this to stave off the temptation to buy this gorgeous poster which I spotted on ebay earlier. I'm thinking about where it could go in the house but I’ve pretty much used up all the wall space my wife will allow me. It's a beautiful piece of design, and as far as I know this artwork is exclusive to the British release, capturing well the gaudy, neon look of those painted wet streets. The film's poor performance in the US no doubt prompted United Artists to devise a different marketing strategy for the film's international release, and the decision to go with a more conventional crime film concept was understandable. As much as I love the film's US one-sheet poster - a transparent rendering of James Cann's face against a furnace of white-hot sparks, it does suggest a futuristic, hi-tech science fiction thriller rather than a tough, no-nonsense crime film. The Violent Streets re-title doesn’t have the modernist cool of the original title, but this film was made in Chicago, and reportedly filmed in some very rough neighborhoods, so the re-title feels well earned. To cover all bets, the British poster modified the original tagline: "Tonight, his take home pay is $410,000...tax free", adding “He’s a thief”, but it doesn't quite work as well as reading it on the American poster. Michael Mann's film arrived at the beginning of the 80's, and reflecting on the tagline with its focus on aggressive, deregulated money-making, it feels very zeitgeisty. Not quite the kind of laissez-faire economics Reagan promoted but nonetheless one imagines the profit potential of the thief's line of work appealed to the burgeoning yuppie class and the obsession with fast money.

Thief: British Quad poster (Re-titled: Violent Streets)

My only quibble about the British poster is the awkward promo insert for Tangerine Dream's soundtrack, which I presume was due to the confusion of the album retaining the original film title and the US one-sheet artwork. In fact the first UK pressing of the soundtrack came with a hype sticker which advised: "The soundtrack of the film re-titled Violent Streets" lest there be any doubt of the connection. I'm listening to the soundtrack now as I put this post together and it's easily the group's best soundtrack work, much more so than Sorcerer I think - the opening section of the film scored to the track Diamond Diary is arguably their finest moment on film. I mentioned earlier that the US poster may have misled people into thinking the film was some kind of dystopian science fiction but the look of the film coupled with Tangerine Dream's score does lend the impression that the film is taking place not quite in the present, but perhaps a few years in the future. Certainly, the three-dimensional look of the nocturnal city, the street and signage lighting reflected in the wet alleyways and roads, creates a striking layered density that anticipates the look of Blade Runner's 21st century Los Angeles...

Friday 22 May 2020

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death Of Al Adamson

For a brief moment as I watched David Gregory’s superb 2019 documentary, I dreamily contemplated ordering Severin’s 14-disc Al Adamson set, despite swearing a few years ago I would never see another Adamson film after the death march that was a late-night TV screening of Psycho-A-Go-Go. But the moment passed, and I'll put that little slippage down to the sheer pleasure of hearing veteran movie folk (most of them well into their 70’s and 80’s) recount war stories from the halcyon days of American exploitation cinema. Al Adamson wasn’t the worst of the schlockmakers, in fact some of his better made films are actually quite... watchable - his 1969 outlaw motorcycle film Satan’s Sadists in particular is a minor classic of the late-60's biker pic craze. Adamson is best remembered nowadays for his horror films but as a journeyman film maker he dabbled in westerns, crime films, science fiction, blaxploitation, even a family film (the very skewed family film Carnival Magic). If Adamson had a genuine talent it was his ability to make films dirt cheap, often financed with loose change and it remained a source of pride for Adamson that he made entertaining and profitable films at a fraction of the spend of the major studios. With the decline of the drive-in market in the early 80's (the natural home for Adamson's films), the director for the most part retired from movie making and branched into real estate, virtually disappearing from view until he made headlines in 1995 with the shocking discovery of his body, bludgeoned to death by a handyman he employed, and concealed for weeks under a freshly laid tiled floor at his remote home in Southern California.


Dramatic stuff indeed, and director David Gregory to his credit has made a film that finds the right balance of light and shadow. Told in a chronological order, the first hour or so is dedicated to Adamson’s film-making career and assembles all the major surviving members of Adamson’s repertory of cast and crew (and sometimes there was little to differentiate both), as well as the affable director himself culled from an archive interview he gave before his untimely death. The tales from the trenches of low-budget film-making are often hilarious. We hear about Adamson's penchant for casting washed-up actors who came cheap but not without their eccentricities. Lon Chaney Jr, performed in a fog of alcoholism, while actor J. Carrol Naish was in poor health was by the time he appeared in Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 1971. The twice Oscar nominated actor was incapable of remembering his dialogue and when huge cue cards were provided for the semi-blind actor, his line readings were accompanied by distracting loud clicks from his unruly dentures !

Producer and close friend Sam Sherman, himself a great chronicler of Adamson’s films on several laserdisc and DVD commentaries, explains how Adamson’s films were often re-shot, re-edited, (re-colored!) and fashioned into completely different films from what they originally started out as. For what was one of Adamson and Sherman's most infamous cut n' paste jobs, the 1965 film crime thriller Echo of Terror was overhauled and re-released as Psycho-A-Go-Go, then in 1969 it mutated into the science fiction film The Fiend with the Electronic Brain, before being reworked again and re-packaged as a horror film called Blood of Ghastly Horror. Elsewhere, colleagues recall with some affection, Adamson's notorious thriftiness which often meant his cast and crews went unpaid. Vilmos Zsigmond who shot 3 films for Adamson before graduating to McCabe & Mrs. Miller for Robert Altman, recalls how the director paid him for a day's directing work with the proceeds of a newspaper delivery job which Zsigmond found endearing enough to continue working for him. Actor and stuntman John "Bud" Cardos fondly explains how he often appeared as two different characters in Adamson’s films, as in the scrappy 1970 western Five Bloody Graves, where he is actually killed by himself ! The documentary also draws on dark connections with the Spahn ranch (Satan’s Sadists and some pick-up shots for 1969's The Female Bunch were filmed at the ranch when it was home to the Manson family) and in the early 90's Adamson appeared to make a return to film-making only to get tangled up in quite a bizarre UFO conspiracy which those close to the director, Sam Sherman included, seem very reluctant to discuss on camera (!)

With the final years of Adamson’s life, the documentary shifts gears and turns a darker shade. Adamson spent the early 90's caring for his terminally ill wife and muse, Regina Carrol and was heartbroken by her premature death. Tragedy would continue to dog Adamson as the decade wore on when Fred Fulford entered Adamson's life. Friends and family recall the increasingly sinister behavior of Fulford whom Adamson hired as a live-in handyman and there are disturbing accounts of trust being abused and financial exploitation. It's a terribly sad coda to Adamson's life, with old friends seemingly gone, and it was only through the interventions of Adamson's brother and his housemaid that police took an interest in Adamson's sudden disappearance. When the police finally recovered Adamson's remains (seen in a quite astonishing and grisly VHS recording of the actual excavation), the moment is genuinely upsetting. When news of his death first emerged, some of the more unsavory elements of the press relished the irony of a horror movie director dying in most horrific circumstances ("This story reads like a plot of a bad horror film" one news report led with). Thankfully though what lingers in the mind after watching David Gregory's moving film is not Al Adamson's gruesome demise but his joie de vivre for making films, a director who delighted in entertaining audiences with cost-effective, unpretentious movies, and a man who was loved and adored by friends, colleagues and fans alike.

Thursday 14 May 2020

Kraftwerk Catalogue Plus

Since the news broke last week of Florien Schneider's passing, I've been revisiting my Kraftwerk collection, that is, the Catalogue albums, plus the three pre-Autobahn albums that HĂ¼tter and Schneider have long declined to re-issue. My CD album editions pre-date the 2009 remasters (which I've heard mixed reports about), but the discs sound absolutely fine and far better than my old LPs which were prone to skips and increasingly distracting surface noise. Kraftwerk made their albums sound so beautifully refined and luxurious, that any extraneous noise becomes a distraction. I long held the image of Kraftwerk recording their music in pristine white lab coats in an ultra clean laboratory. Needless to say it was quite a jolt when I finally saw pictures of the group at Kling Klang, dressed smart casual and the studio brimming with electronic and traditional instruments fed by a writhing mass of cables snaking across the floor.

My Kraftwerk Catalogue


In addition to the Catalogue albums, there is of course Kraftwerk 1, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf and Florian. I think it was HĂ¼tter who brutally dismissed these early albums as "rubbish", which is ludicrous of course - all three are essential documents of German electronica and are strongly recommended to adventurous ears. A cursory listen to these albums (which in the absence of official releases are easily available to stream and download at least), might suggest this noisier, more experimental side of Kraftwerk doesn't sit well with the electronic purity and the precision beats and rhythms of the Catalogue albums. Certainly, there are parts of the first two albums in particular, that seem anathema to HĂ¼tter and Schneider's later methodology, with sections of music that sound like they strayed from one of Kluster's proto-Industrial improvisations. One might even hear a guitar plucked Derek Bailey-style here and there. Atem off Kraftwerk 2, is an electronically treated recording of someone breathing, and I presume it was this kind of sonic weirdness that prompted Steve Stapleton to place Kraftwerk on the Nurse With Would List. But with a closer listen to these albums, you can get a sense of the near future - the train-like rhythms of Ruckzuck, and the robot chit-chat heard on Vom Himmel Hoch, both from Kraftwerk 1, the gorgeous melody on the trance-like Tanzmusik on Ralf and Florian, anticipate the music Kraftwerk became famous for. What's most pleasing about listening to these three early albums again after wading through the Catalogue is the sense of the group evolving towards the more familiar Kraftwerk. It was as if HĂ¼tter and Schneider had to pass through that experimental phase of the first two albums, before arriving at the warmth of Ralf and Florian and onward to Autobahn...

Monday 11 May 2020

Nine Types of Industrial Alienation

Monica Vitti and Richard Harris in the poisoned Red Desert...

Monica Vitti and Richard Harris in Red Desert

My Criterion DVD of L'Eclisse was still sitting alongside my DVD player today (some weeks after an impromptu screening) and before returning it to the shelf, I stole some time to watch the hour-long 2001 RAI produced documentary Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema, which offers a decent overview of his career. What made the documentary worth watching was the remarkable footage from the Red Desert shoot showing assistants spraying grasses and bushes with an industrial paint. I long thought that oft repeated line, attributed to Jonathan Rosenbaum, that Antonioni had "entire fields painted" for the film was apocryphal, but at last here’s the proof. The revelation was enough to prompt a screening of Red Desert and it's always a pleasure to revisit my favourite Antonioni film. Even now, after numerous screenings over the years, I still find it a strange and contradictory picture. Antonioni emphasizes the poisoned grasses and lakes with their unnatural colors and textures (which must have stirred the environmental consciousness of some of his Italian audiences), but Antonioni himself favored innovation and development, and found more vibrancy in the industrial architecture of Ravenna (where the film was shot) than in the region's natural beauty. Indeed I still remain uncertain whether Antonioni is actually sympathetic to Monica Vitti's anxiety-racked Giuliana, and I get the sense that Antonioni is shrugging his shoulders at Giuliana's plight, as if to say change, progress and adapt or be damned. A key line in the film, and perhaps a clue to Antonioni's philosophy comes right at the end, when Giuliana tells her son, that the birds have learned to avoid the plumes of sulfuric smoke in order to survive.

If Red Desert is my favourite Antonioni film, it's certainly Monica Vitti's best Antonioni film. The lost and alienated Giuliana feels a more more substantial character than the aloof, ephemeral women she played in L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and even with the hindrance of post-sync line-readings, her performance achieves a genuine pathos. On this screening of the film, I couldn't help but judge Richard Harris' character Corrado harshly. He's one of the very few people in the film who empathizes with Giuliana's sense of alienation but ultimately he's only briefly passing through Giuliana's life and he knows it. His solution to his own sense of alienation is to keep on the moving, and in the end all he can only offer her before he departs for the southern hemisphere is some meaningless sex which only deepens Giuliana's predicament. The film ends as it begins, with Giuliana left to wander that haunted space between her inner and outer landscapes, the film offering no solution to her problems, only a dream or perhaps a memory to cling to, of a young girl in a beautiful rocky cove, far away from the toxic red desert...

Thursday 7 May 2020

Florian Schneider (1947-2020)

Florian Schneider has passed away. The founder member of Kraftwerk died on April 30th but in suitably enigmatic style, the news of his passing is just filtering out, almost a week later. I can't help but feel a little sad that I didn't get to see Schneider in the flesh while he was with Kraftwerk - he had left the group a decade (or more perhaps) before I saw them in concert in 2018 (where I stood only a few feet away from where Ralf HĂ¼tter was stationed). Reflecting on Schneider's death this morning, I'm still not sure what he did in the group. There was of course Florian's distinctive flute playing which gave those early pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk albums a tremendous color and mood, but for a breakdown in the division of labor at Kling Klang, I shall have to consult David Buckley's excellent 2012 book Kraftwerk: Publikation. As the 70's wore on, Kraftwerk became less a four-man group and more a single collective. The last time the members displayed any kind of visual identity on their albums was in the elegant group photo from Trans-Europe Express. The following year the Man-Machine artwork presented the four members styled and dressed as clones, while subsequent albums would display the group as robots. It was an image that no doubt suited Schneider. While Ralf HĂ¼tter lent a human voice to the group with his dispassionate vocal style, Florian preferred to cloak his voice with vocoders and other devices. On the rare occasions when he offered an interview he was tight-lipped and gave little away (and not without some humor it must be said). And yet it must have pleased him when David Bowie, returning the name check on Trans-Europe Express' title track, named the "Heroes" semi-instrumental V-2 Schneider in his honour.


Before he departed the group, Florian could claim he was Kraftwerk's longest serving member, and he steered the group through at least two organisational crises - early on in the group's history, when his partner Ralf HĂ¼tter took leave for university, and later in 1982 when HĂ¼tter was seriously injured in a cycling accident that left his continuing participation in the group in doubt. When Florian left the group in 2008 or so, it seemed like Kraftwerk has powered down for good, but the group continued on with retrospective tours and the 3D Catalogue concerts. When I saw Kraftwerk in 2018, it seemed more like a multi-media event than a traditional live show. Ralf HĂ¼tter duly sang his vocals but the music I suspect was pre-recorded. In a sense, this kind of automation has future-proofed Kraftwerk from the rigors of psychical deterioration and death. Perhaps, there will a time, after Ralf HĂ¼tter has ceased activity that a highly sophisticated Kraftwerk machine will tour and perform across the world thus fulfilling Ralf and Florian's dream of Kraftwerk robots performing on stage in their place while they worked on music in DĂ¼sseldorf. 

Tuesday 10 March 2020

Dream No Evil (1970, dir. John Hayes)

I managed to steal some time last night to watch a film, and went straight to the second volume of Arrow’s excellent American Horror Project series. Dream No Evil, made in 1970 wound up exactly where I hoped it would by the time it finished: as a smart, offbeat regional Horror-tinged drama whose ambition frequently out runs its modest budget. I’m reluctant to loosen any spoilers, but this one takes place within the fractured delirium of a schizophrenic mind, and it’s as if writer-director John Hayes wanted to explore what domestic life might be like inside the Bates mansion: in this case, a young woman conjures up an idyllic childhood she never had with a loving father she never knew and murders anyone who threatens to come between them. 

Dream No Evil is not a full throttle Horror film, but manages to generate a weird enough atmosphere, and there are enjoyable tonal shifts throughout (which might have had more charge had the expository voiceover been dropped). Had you wandered into the film late, you might think you had stumbled upon a wholesome family western, as if the film’s big casting coup, Edmond O’Brien had stepped clean-shaven from The Wild Bunch which he appeared in the previous year. The rest of the cast are certainly capable (Michael Pataki is particularly good as a preacher without chewing the part up) and director Hayes steals some fine moments in the film thanks to some imaginative desert locations and there’s a particular striking shot of sun down on a faith revival that could have strayed from a classic rock documentary. Recommended.

Brooke Mills in Dream No Evil

Thursday 27 February 2020

Sensation

I'm currently enjoying a Who obsession, and last night I treated myself to a screening of Tommy, which I hadn't seen in a few years. With previous viewings I tended to concentrate on the fast-flowing current of Ken Russell's astonishing visuals and set-pieces, but for last night's viewing, my focus was on Roger Daltrey and the incredible physicality of his performance. I'm hard pressed to name another rockstar-frontman who lends himself so completely, even fearlessly to an acting role (Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth would be another), and certainly Ken Russell puts him thru his paces. But a tremendous film, and had I the time last night, I might have segued right into Peter Watkins' 1967 film Privilege, but it's certainly in mind for another day. Incidentally, as the credits were rolling I spotted the credit "Sculptor Christopher Hobbs" whose production design work I know from Derek Jarman films, but it was a nice Russell-Jarman connection...

Thursday 20 February 2020

The 'orrible 'Ooo !

I'm currently reading Mark Blake's brilliant 2014 book Pretend You're In A War: The Who and the Sixties. In fact I just started it just last night, but it's such a compelling read, I quickly polished off the first 100 pages before the lights-out, bringing the story up to 1963 (before Keith joins the band the following year and completes the puzzle). The Who had a certain undercurrent of aggression, even violence in their music, their huge egos and open hostility towards one another resulted in shows performed at ear-splitting volumes and more famously, there was ritualistic destruction of their stage equipment (and the occasional hotel suite). Blake writes vividly about the London performing scene, and it surprised me how violent the early years of the 60's were. The reports of Mods and Rockers warring en mass have long since been debunked, but both subcultures amped up by cheap speed brought trouble to Who shows. Roger Daltrey himself, to borrow a line, "knew a few performers in his time" (Townsend remembered one local hood who hid out at Daltrey's home as an "awful, awful man") and at one point in the book, Daltrey had to talk down an associate who turned up a show with a shotgun intent on shooting someone he had a beef with. The kids it seems were not always alright...

[Update] I'm further along the book today and when I last left it, Michelangelo Antonioni accompanied by Monica Vitti saw the group perform in London, where Antonioni was prepping Blow-Up. Antonioni was said to have been intimated by the group, their volume and that the band played on seemingly indifferent to a huge brawl that broke out amongst the crowd. Antonioni was looking for a hip group to appear in Blow-Up, and was persuaded to go with The Yardbirds instead, who went on to smash a guitar in the film Townsend style...

The Who photographed in 1965: Pete Townsend, John Entwhistle, Roger Daltry and Keith Moon

Saturday 15 February 2020

Zaireeka ????

How does it work ?

I was reaching for a Flying Saucer Attack CD this morning and scrounging around the F section of my album collection, I found myself looking curiously at my copy of The Flaming Lips' 1997 album Zaireeka. This has always been something of a dust-gatherer in my record collection - the album designed to be heard via four simultaneously-playing CDs was never possible back in the day and the album was quickly consigned to the shelf forever. But rediscovering the album again and having a couple of hours to myself at home I pressed my CD player, one of my DVD players and an old kitchen radio into action. 3 out of 4 discs was the best I could do on the day so having carefully set them all up, I let loose this wacky Flaming Lips experiment. I think I lasted all of two tracks, the whole thing sounding very much like 3 unrelated CDs playing at the same time. I had to admire Wayne Coyne's powers of persuasion for convincing Warners to put this out - this was a couple of years before the group found unlikely critical and commercial success with The Soft Bulletin, and I wonder too did anyone actually play the album as designed back in the day when DVD players weren't readily available as CD players. I imagine there's a Warners storage facility somewhere with a section of racking consisting of nothing but unsold copies of Zaireeka...