Author: kevinsturton

Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire- Underrated

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The great English director Alan Clarke (1935-90) was best known for his unflinching portraits of working-class life. Films like Scum (1979), Made in Britain (1982) and the Andrea Dunbar scripted Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) were firmly in the social realist tradition. So Clarke directing a musical about a snooker match between a cowboy and a vampire was something of a departure.


Billy ‘the Kid’ (Phil Daniels) is a 20-year old rising star on the snooker circuit whose unconventional ways rile the snooker establishment. His manager T.O. aka ‘The One’ (Bruce Payne) is in debt to a gangster (Don Henderson) who demands a showdown match between Billy and the reigning world champion Maxwell Randall (Alun Armstrong), ‘the Green Baize Vampire.’ Randall represents the old guard and demands a 17 frame match with the loser never playing snooker again.


Back in the 80’s snooker was hugely popular in the United Kingdom. Players like Steve Davis, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins and Dennis Taylor were household names. The most striking player at the time was Ray Riordon, a tall, dark figure with a passing resemblance to ‘Dracula’ star Bela Lugosi. Clarke and his writer Trevor Preston based the Green Baize Vampire on Riordan and the brash youngster ‘the Kid’ on the young Jimmy White.


The showdown takes up the final half hour of the film. Clarke keeps things interesting by having Daniels and Armstrong performing their own shots so he can keep the actors in the frame and use sweeping camera angles. There is an expressionist feel to the sets. Everything takes place at night and we never see daylight. Though it seems Randall is just playing at being a vampire there are a couple of moments that suggest he may very well be a creature of the night.


Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire sits uneasily alongside Clarke’s social realist work and is often avoided when critics discuss his work, but there is still a political element with Maxwell representing the establishment and Billy the underclass. Daniels is perfectly cast as the cocky youngster, while Armstrong is an amusing mixture of Northerner and the supernatural. Composer George Fenton ( The Company of Wolves ) acted as the musical arranger for the film. Bruce Payne has a terrific singing voice and gets the best number, ‘I’m The One.’


Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire is unique. It is fair to say there will probably never be another film combining Westerns, vampires, and snooker. Sadly it came out shortly after another British musical, the ruinous Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple 1986) and despite the popularity of snooker Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire never found the audience it deserved.

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Colin Clark seems to be the only person who benefited from the awful movie The Prince and the Showgirl (1957, Laurence Olivier) getting two factually dubious memoirs ‘The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me’ and ‘My Week with Marilyn’ out of the whole farrago. There might well be an interesting story behind this culture clash between two American icons and the British theatrical establishment but Colin Clark has bugger all to do with it. Norman Mailer thought it was comic, the British fancy folk with their curious rituals against two Americans who were self-made and despite their success both painfully shy and out of place. 

For the Millers are tied in class knots. English accents, Olivier’s in particular, have to certainly remind them that she is a girl from a semi-slum street and he is a boy from Brooklyn.

Norman Mailer, Marilyn 

Franz Kafka on Film

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The movies were a regular pursuit for the writer Franz Kafka and his friends. Kafka died before the advent of sound, but lived long enough to see the best of the Silent Era. Willy Haas recounted (1) in the magazine he edited ‘The Literary World’ how he saw Kafka crying at footage of Berlin, his dream city; the place he longed to escape to. Kafka understood the power of the image, how it can haunt the viewer; the loss that can be involved in capturing in a place, or a person on film forever. “Dearest pictures are beautiful, pictures are something we can’t do without, but they are a torture too,’ (2) Kafka writes in his unfinished novel ‘Amerika.’

Kafka’s stories are cinematic; the images Kafka creates in the mind stay with you. Though the word Kafkaesque is often used to describe unyeilding beauracracy, and the powerlessness of the individual against the state Kafka’s stories deal mostly with maladjusted, fragile men, who seem to bring misfortune upon themselves despite their attempts to fit into the world around them. Kafka is also a great comic writer, his work can be tragic, but it is never without humour. A number of films have been adapted from his work, while others have used the author’s own life as inspiration.

The Trial (Orson Welles 1962)



As well as adapting ‘The Trial,’ Welles manages to find room for Kafka’s short story ‘At the Door of the Law.’ Welles opens the film by narrating this allegory about a man trying to gain access to the law, but being made to wait for a lifetime without ever knowing why. This addition suits The Trial perfectly. Josef K (Anthony Perkins) finds himself accused of an unnamed crime and tries to seek justice. Welles thought Josef K was guilty for being complicit in an unjust regime, but makes his Josef K more resistant to his fate than Kafka’s. Welles understands Kafka’s vein of black comedy though and brings a Noirish feel to The Trial.

The Insurance Man (Richard Eyre 1986)



One of two plays written by Alan Bennet about Kafka, the other being ‘Kafka’s Dick.’ Franz (Robert Hines), a young factory worker tries to ascertain whether he is entitled to compensation after blue patches appear on his skin. As he is sent from one part of a large building to another, he encounters various other claimants, in his search for the elusive Doctor Kafka (Daniel Day-Lewis). Darkly funny, with a brief world-weary show-stealing turn from Geoffrey Palmer, “people will be wanting compensation for being born next,” The Insurance Man is arguably the best Kafka film to date.

Kafka (Steven Soderbergh 1991)



Palme D’Or winner Steven Soderbergh crashed and burned with his second movie. Torn apart by US critics it eventually appeared on video in 1994. Jeremy Irons makes for a charming, diffident Kafka. Though Soderbergh and his screenwriter Lem Dobbs present a version of what author James Hawes (4) refers to as the ‘Kafka myth,’ it entertainingly combines Kafka’s life with elements of his own fiction. 

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life (Peter Capaldi 1993)



Inspired by Capaldi’s wife mistakenly referring to the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) as Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, this Oscar-winning short sees Kafka (Richard E Grant) afflicted with writer’s block on Christmas Eve. Kafka struggles to find a theme for his short story ‘Metamorphosis’ but his work is continually interrupted by Christmas well-wishers. Cleverly riffing on Capra’s movie and Kafka’s writing the production design by John Beard is beautiful and lends a Brother’s Grimm element to the film.

The Castle (Michael Haneke 1997)




Austrian doom-meister Michael Haneke made this version of Kafka’s unfinished novel for television. The late Ulrich Muhe is the landscape surveyor forever waiting for an invite to the castle. As gloomy as you would expect from Haneke it is also quite funny, and one of the director’s best films. Characteristically spare and focusing on beauracracy and the misuse of authority, key themes in both Haneke and Kafka’s work.

Metamorphosis (Valeri Fokin 2002)



Though Kafka’s work is almost synonymous with the absurd bureaucracy of the Communist regime, he is not well known in Russia. No surprises there, as the Communists banned his work. Russian director Valeri Fokin puts together a fine production of ‘Metamorphosis’ yet it has one glaring flaw. Neil Jordan once wrote (5) about the difficulty of adapting ‘Metamorphosis.’ How do you show the protagonist Gregor Samsa was once human? Fokin tries to solve this by having the actor Yevgeni Mironov pretend to be an insect, but this does not work. Gregor must become something other, a physical transformation needs to take place for the story to work properly.

1. Haas, Willy ‘The Literary World’
2. Kafka, Franz ‘Amerika’
3. Interview with Huw Weldon, BBC 1962
4. Hawes, James ‘Excavating Kafka,’ Quercus, 2008
5. Jordan, Neil ‘The Crying Game – An Original Screenplay,” Vintage Random House 1993, pvii,

They Drive

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Ryan O’Neal as ‘The Driver’ in Walter Hill’s movie The Driver (1978)

Clive Owen as ‘The Driver’ in The Hire: Follow (2001, Wong Kar-Wai)

Dwayne Johnson as ‘Driver’ in the underrated Faster (2010 George Tillman Jr)

Ryan Gosling as ‘Driver’ in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011).

Mel Gibson as ‘The Driver’ in the forthcoming Get the Gringo (2012, Adrian Grunberg). 

Midnight in Paris (2011, Woody Allen) – Programme Notes

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‘Things are sweetest when they’re lost’
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned


Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s most financially successful film to date and picked up an Oscar for Best Screenplay last Sunday. Not bad for a director who was considered a busted flush in the United States and had to seek out funding in Europe. Allen has made four films in London and one in Spain since 2005, but his writing style felt incongruous outside of his regular New York surroundings. Paris has been in so many movies the city comes with its own set of clichés giving a writer of Allen’s abilities plenty of material to play around with. Allen pays homage to the City of Light in a beautiful extended opening sequence and this confidence extends to the rest of the film which is funny and charming and handled with a lightness of touch not seen in his work since The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). 
Like the earlier film Midnight in Paris has an element of the fantastical. Gil (Owen Wilson) feels alienated from his fellow American travellers. His fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her rich right-wing parents have little interest in the city beyond its material comforts. Worse still is Paul (Michael Sheen) an academic in town to deliver a speech at the Sorbonne, whose interest in culture has more to do with showing what impeccable taste he has than enjoying it. Gil wanders away from them one night and gets lost. 
As the clock strikes midnight he accepts a lift from a group of revellers dressed in an antiquated car and finds himself amongst another group of expatriates, the ‘Lost Generation’ of writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the 1920’s. F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill) are taking their first steps towards drink-fuelled oblivion, Cole Porter (Yves Heck) provides the musical accompaniment, while Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) muses on what it means to be a man; “have you ever shot a charging lion?” Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) is as you would expect a bit strange. 
It’s all terrific fun and the film’s message; live for the moment, don’t get distracted by thinking things were better once upon a time, suggest Allen has no interest in recapturing his own glory days but would rather move forward and try to create something new. 

‘Dellamorte Dellamore’ – DVD Review

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Francesco Dellamorte has an unusual problem in the cemetery he watches over in the small town of Buffalora; the dead have a tendency to rise again within seven days of their original demise. Dellamorte has no interest in finding out why they are coming back. Indeed, he is baffled by why anybody would want to come back. Dellamorte is a misfit. Nobody really listens to him. The little old lady who visits the cemetery every day calls him Engineer, even though as he keeps explaining he is not one. The mayor is politely inattentive, praising Dellamorte’s work, while paying no attention to what he has to say. A group of young locals mock him for his rumoured impotence, although Dellamorte later admits he started those rumours so people would leave him alone. He has only two friends, Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) his assistant, who can only communicate by grunting, and Franco (Anton Alexander), a clerk at the post office in the village.
Reclusive, while also longing to escape from Buffalora, Dellamorte’s closed-in world is thrown into crisis when he is drawn towards a beautiful young widow (Anna Falchi). She has no interest in Dellamorte until he shows her the Cemetery’s Ossuary and it arouses her. Unfortunately their tryst is interrupted by her dead husband, whose bite seemingly causes her death. Yet Falchi returns to in various guises later on in the film as Dellamorte becomes increasingly disturbed. 
Unusually for a horror-comedy with gore and sick humour, Dellamorte Dellamore takes loss and grieving quite seriously. Sure, there’s exploding heads and killer dialogue and Rupert Everett bludgeoning a zombie-nun’s head in with a blunt object, but there is a mournful aspect to the film. Everybody has lost or loses someone. Dellamorte Dellamore operates on the same level as a fairytale, or a dream, in which strange happenings are possible, but they have a deeper psychological meaning that is open to interpretation. Death appears to Dellamorte, taking form out of burning rubbish on a bonfire and asks Dellamorte to leave the dead alone. Given that the ‘Dylan Dog’ comic books take place in a world where reality and the supernatural exist side-by-side it is entirely feasible that Death does visit Dellamorte. Maybe however Dellamorte is just losing his mind. 
.Michele Soavi has a gift for creating stunning visuals (Terry Gilliam used him on The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Brother’s Grimm) and the film’s beauty is complemented by a truly warped sense of humour. Dellamorte Dellamore is based on a novel by Tiziano Sclavi and features a character who appeared briefly in the author’s ‘Dylan Dog’ comics. Dellamorte bears a startling resemblance to Dylan Dog and is essentially an alter-ego for the Nightmare Detective. Sclavi based Dylan Dog’s appearance on Rupert Everett so the big fella is perfectly cast here. A gifted comedy actor Everett makes the most of the dialogue and has a sadness to him which renders the absurdist elements of the film more believable. It is a great performance, one of the best you’ll see in a horror film and it’s a shame the film has never found a wider audience though maybe this will change with this new DVD release. Sadly even Everett undersells it, the only mention of Dellamorte Dellamore in his autobiography ‘Red Carpets and other Banana Skins,’ is a small photograph.
Watch the English language track rather than the Italian version. Genre films in Italy have traditionally used American or British stars to attract funding and shoot scenes in English. Everett’s deadpan delivery is preferable to hearing him being dubbed into Italian.The Americanised version of Dylan Dog (2011, Kevin Munroe) appears on DVD and Blu-ray later this month and while it is nowhere near as bad as expected, it is no match for Dellamorte Dellamore. 
Special Features
Part of the fun of Shameless releases is going through the trailers for there other releases. Highlights include Who Saw Her Die? (1972, Umberto Lenzi), a giallo starring former 007 George Lazenby, the haunting reworking of Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ The Designated Victim (1971, Maurizio Lucidi) with Tomas Milian, and Dario Argento’s underrated Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971). 
There’s also an Italian trailer which emphasises the Dylan Dog connection and a photo gallery. The commentary with Soavi and screenwriter Gianni Romoli is interesting and gives an insight into their approach to the material. Soavi says the film is about a man who can’t face reality, who refuses to grow up, who “doesn’t want to leave his garden, his enchanted world.” Film journalist and author Alan Jones has also provided writing on the film’s production and photographs for an accompanying booklet. 

‘Sleeping Beauty’ – DVD Review

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“Such a sleep works wonders.”

By turns haunting, baffling, risible, voyeuristic, perverse, tender, and funny, novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut is a strange one. It may take its title from a fairytale but this Sleeping Beauty owes more to Walerian Borowczyk than the Brothers Grimm. The film may well be a critique of modern young women and their willingness to submit to the desires of men; or a parody of the service industry taking the absurdities inherent in fine dining and raising them to a whole new level.  It may even be a dream for at one point sleeping beauty closes her eyes and the screen goes black. 
                                   
Lucy (Emily Browning) is a pretty student who pays for her studies in a variety of ways.  She submits to medical experimentation, works as a waitress in a café, photocopies documents as an office drone, and occasionally prostitutes herself in nightclubs to guys who can’t believe their luck.  Despite earning money she never pays the rent in her shared accommodation.  Lucy is ambivalent, just drifting along, sleepwalking through life.  There is a tender friendship with a withdrawn literary type (Ewan Leslie) who appears to be drinking himself to death but no other emotional bonds.
She answers a personal ad for a waitress with silver service experience placed by Clara (Rachael Blake), a fixer for wealthy clients and arranger of unusual requests. Lucy’s uniform is pink lingerie. She starts serving at weird dinner parties for older men, and one noticeably masculine looking female, at which the guests eat ludicrously prepared dishes overseen by a maître d who looks like a topless version of an extra from a Robert Palmer video. Clara persuades Lucy to become her sleeping beauty, to lie drugged in a bed for melancholy old men to peruse at their leisure though she remains unaware of what is happening to her. 
There is a disturbing sequence when one of these men becomes aggressive, burning her with a cigar, yet even though she is sleeping she seems the stronger of the two.  He is impotent, ugly, and unlovable.  Aware of it too no doubt and perhaps this fuels his rage. Yet Julia Leigh is by no means unsympathetic to the vagaries of age.  One man delivers a startling monologue about his weariness with life.  What makes this moment more immediate is Leigh’s decision to cut from a reverse shot by having the actor directly face the camera as he begins to speak.  Though in terms of the narrative he is talking to Clara, Leigh breaks the Fourth Wall bringing the viewer into the story, another voyeur here to observe but never touch the heroine.
Sleeping Beauty is made up of static takes, the camera rarely moving, just watching and observing.  The acting is non-realistic and underplayed and the ethereal Emily Browning is outstanding.  The effect is unsettling and often this deadpan approach is quite funny. Though it may be inscrutable Sleeping Beauty is all the better for this ambiguity. Leigh has already written the screenplay for another movie, The Hunter (2011, Daniel Nettheim) based on her own novel, but it will be interesting to see what she chooses to direct next.


Extras


Cast & Crew Interviews are fairly short but in Leigh’s case revealing as she discusses her approach to the film and how she wants the audience to be a “tender witness.” Apart from that there are only trailers; one for Sleeping Beauty, the disturbing serial killer movie Snowtown (2011, Justin Kurzel), and a TV mini-series called The Slap starring Melissa George and Alex Dimitriades.

The Black Pirate (1926, Albert Parker) – Screening Programme Notes

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In this classic swashbuckler a young sailor (Douglas Fairbanks) is the only survivor of an attack by pirates. Seeking revenge for the death of his father the sailor joins the pirate band responsible and tries to destroy them from within. Proving his worth by single-handedly capturing a ship in a daring feat of bravado the sailor eventually becomes known as the Black Pirate. Matters are complicated however when the pirates capture a beautiful princess (Billie Dove) and the Black Pirate must put himself at risk to keep her safe from harm.

Jane Gardner – Pianist

Jane has accompanied screenings of silent movies in London at the Barbican Centre and the National Film Theatre. This is her second appearance at The Station after accompanying a screening of The General (1926, Buster Keaton) in January.

Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939)

There’s a great story about Douglas Fairbanks which emphasises the playfulness and remarkable agility of this legendary Hollywood star. While filming Robin Hood (1922, Allan Dwan) the producers forbade Fairbanks from performing an elaborate stunt. The sequence involved Robin riding towards a castle, then holding on to the drawbridge as it is raised, jumping on to a chain and climbing 50 feet up the front of the set. A stuntman was hired and seemingly performed the stunt with aplomb. Until it dawned on the production crew the stunt man was standing next to them watching the show. The figure waving to them from above was the real Doug Fairbanks.

Physically graceful with a gift for comedy Fairbanks quickly became a popular star in Hollywood. An early highlight is the short comedy The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916, Christy Cabanne, John Emerson) a Sherlock Holmes spoof with Fairbanks as a detective who uses cocaine for inspiration and solves a crime involving an inflatable beach toy.

In 1919 Fairbanks, his lover Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffiths, and Charlie Chaplin formed the studio United Artists to give themselves more artistic independence. Fairbanks took a huge risk by producing the swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro (1921, Fred Niblo). Nobody had tried anything like this before. In case it failed Fairbanks made a backup film, an ingenious slapstick comedy called The Nut (Theodore Reed 21) about an eccentric inventor.

Zorro was a huge success and turned Fairbanks into the most bankable star around. Fairbanks continued in this vein playing D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers (21) with Niblo again directing. There quickly followed Robin Hood (22, Dwan), The Thief of Baghdad (24, Raoul Walsh), Don Q: Son of Zorro (25, Donald Crisp), The Black Pirate, and D’Artagnan again in The Iron Mask (29, Dwan).

Aware of cinema’s growing cultural importance. Fairbanks helped create the USCLA’S film programme. An innovator onscreen and off he was one of the first to experiment with sound though the technology wasn’t quite ready for The Iron Mask.  Fairbanks first Talkie saw him delivering iambic pentameter in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (30, Sam Taylor). His career eventually tailed off and after his marriage to Pickford broke up Fairbanks moved to England. There was one last hurrah in The Private Life of Don Juan (34, Alexander Korda) with Fairbanks as the great lover realising his swashbuckling days are coming to an end.

Chungking Express (1994, Wong Kar-Wai) – Classic

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“At our closest point, we were just .01cm apart. 55 hours later I was in love with this woman.”

Wong-Kar Wai’s Chungking Express proved to be his breakthrough movie internationally. Kar-Wai’s previous film, the elliptical Days of Being Wild (1991) won him acclaim, but was a box-office failure. Chungking Express contains certain genre elements; a femme fatale, a cop, a drug dealer, but Kar-Wai is more concerned with romantic longing.

Filmed in and around the Chungking Mansions, a huge residential building in Hong Kong that also contains bars and fast food joints and serves as a meeting point for the city’s ethnic minorities, Chungking Express tells two stories, both about cops and their love lives. Cop No 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) becomes infatuated with a mysterious blonde haired woman (Brigitte Lin) he nearly bumps into when chasing a criminal. Cop No 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) begins a flirtation with an eccentric fast food worker (Faye Wong).

Wong Kar-Wai made Chungking Express while taking time out from his martial arts epic Ashes of Time (1994), a troubled production which went over budget. Chungking Express is the antithesis of the expensive and elaborate Ashes of Time. Together with his cinematographer Christopher Doyle Kar-Wai shot Chungking Express fast and on location. This seemingly improvised style of filmmaking recalls the French New Wave. Doyle makes extraordinary use of artificial lighting in the cramped interiors of the Chungking Mansions.

Wong Kar-Wai gives a sense of time moving on, with shots of clocks changing throughout the film, and occasionally speeding up the film so passers by move rapidly past his protagonists suggesting they are out of step with everybody else. The first segment sees Cop No 223 ruminating in voiceover about the break-up of his relationship, loneliness, and the possibility of finding love while he is still young. The first story is noticeably shorter than the second, which makes sense given Kar-Wai intended Chungking Express to be a three part movie.Kar-Wai would eventually film this final storyline as the full-length feature Fallen Angels the following year.

As entertaining as the first story is it pales in comparison to the second as Faye (Wong) falls for Cop No 663. Bizarrely, her attraction leads her to break into his flat at every opportunity and to become increasingly hard to get. The boyish figured, wide-eyed Wong is astonishing. It may be that Kar-Wai felt he might as well shelve the third part and concentrate on Wong and her will they/won’t they/what is she doing? jousting with Tony Leung’s bewildered beat cop.

Funny, affecting, and rapturous, Chungking Express is the perfect starting point for those unfamiliar with Wong Kar-Wai’s work. Despite being about urban loneliness and heartbreak the film is directed with a lightness of touch that offsets the melancholy. It aches with the possibility that something magical might just be waiting around the corner.