The Wolfman

In a guest article written last Halloween, my friend Paul Rowe compared the golden age of the Universal horror movies with the current trend for remakes and wondered:

“Why, at a time when even the most low-budget shoot has production values that the movie-brats of the seventies could have only dreamed of, does every director shoot horror movies as fucking action comedies!?!?”

He continued:

“I had my hopes briefly raised when I learned that the upcoming remake of ‘The Wolf Man’ was to be set in Victorian England (predating the contemporary set 1941 version) and would remain faithful to much of George Waggner’s original. Benicio Del Toro as Larry Talbot? I licked my lips. I’ve since learned the director is Joe Johnston. Joe-‘Jurassic Park 3’-‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’-Johnston. ‘The Wolf Man’ as family-friendly actioner anyone? Er … no; no thanks. Even with Andrew Kevin Walker, who came over all gothic for ‘Se7en’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’, having contributed the screenplay, things don’t bode well.”

Which pretty much summed up my thoughts on the prospect. ‘The Wolfman’ had been announced in 2006 with Benicio del Toro executive producing and starring as Larry (now Lawrence) Talbot. As Paul noted, the script was by Andrew Kevin Walker and promised to augment the original with new characters and different character dynamics. Mark Romanek, who had earned good notices with his second feature film ‘One Hour Photo’ (and drawn an unforgettably sinister performance out of Robin Williams) was confirmed as director in February 2007. Less than a year later, it was announced he had left the project, with the old chestnut of “creative differences” cited.

The future of ‘The Wolfman’ remained indeterminate. Brett Ratner was considered as a replacement. Brett Ratner, a bargain basement Michael Bay who doesn’t even have the common courtesy to be Michael Bay. I am still offering prayers of gratitude to a God I don’t believe in that this excremental turn of events never came to pass. Other possible included Frank Darabont, James Mangold and Martin Campbell. As it turned out, Joe Johnston got the job.

This more than anything counts for my trepidation over ‘The Wolfman’, and explains the brickbats it has received critically. The thought of a re-imagining of George Waggner’s atmospheric and quietly subversive classic with the director of ‘The Mist’ at the helm – or, to an only slightly lesser degree, the director of ‘Walk the Line’ or the director of ‘Casino Royale’ – presented a “what if?” so potent that surely un film de Joe Johnston could never live up to it.

Then I read Francisco’s review on The Film Connoisseur (which I am still convinced was the first review of the film to surface on the blogosphere): it was unreservedly enthusiastically. Francisco even divined the rationale over the choice of Johnston as director:

“To me Johnston is the go to guy for making a Hollywood film that plays by the rules, plays it safe. No artsy fartsy risky business here. He is the kind of director who will direct a film, tell the story, and follow the rules set by the studio. He is not what I would call a trouble maker of a director. This guy plays ball with the studio execs and makes the movie they want to see. And for ‘The Wolfman’, which is a film Universal Studios obviously cares much about, Joe Johnston was a good choice.”

So me and Paul went along, with low expectations but a piqued curiosity. When I say low expectations, I mean that Paul had no expectations and all I was taking to the table was the prospect of Emily Blunt looking quite fetching in period garb.

When it was over and we emerged blinking into the light of Showcase Cinema’s car park (then spent an embarrassed quarter of an hour walking up and down after we realized we’d lost the car), there was nothing for it to vocalize a vaguely admission: we’d enjoyed it. We’d enjoyed it a hell of a lot.

In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that ‘The Wolfman’ is possibly the best Universal horror movie remake since Coppola’s garish and overblown but still hugely entertaining take on Dracula (and come, when you’ve got a young Monica Belucci as one of the brides of Dracula giving off a vibe that there might be more than just a blood sucking on the cards, what’s not to like?).

Okay, I’m in damning-with-faint-praise territory here, since the rest of the Universal remakes – Branagh’s bloodless, ball-less and boltless take ‘Frankenstein’ and the tripartite of cinematic evil done by Stephen Sommers in the form of the ‘Mummy’ movies and the stultifyingly bad ‘Van Helsing’ – represent a low tide mark in quality control that will forever remain unchallenged so long as Tommy Wiseau never decides remake ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ in a kid’s paddling pool with the leftover special effects from ‘Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid’.

‘The Wolfman’ rises above the other Universal remakes because, unlike Branagh’s ‘Frankenstein’, it offers a fun, rip-roaring, entertaining hour and three quarters at the flicks; but at the same time (unlike Sommers’ crimes against celluloid) it never tips over into histrionic stupidity freighted with increasingly desperate spasms of CGI.

What ‘The Wolfman’ does have to offer is a script that cleaves closely enough to the original to preserve good memories, yet opens out to embrace enough of its own little quirks (the inclusion of Inspector Abberline – here played by Hugo Weaving – of Jack the Ripper fame is an offbeat yet strangely intriguing conceit) to prevent it from being just a slavish copy but with more souped up effects.

The casting is a tad hit and miss. Del Toro turns in a peculiarly muted performance. Anthony Hopkins chews the scenery like a good ’un, evidently having more fun on a movie set here than he has in a good few years. Anthony Sher doesn’t just chew the scenery in his small but zealously attacked role as a physician – he swallows it down and then has the horizon for dessert! Art Malik brings a touch of gravitas to a nothing role. Weaving plays Abberline like some antecedent of Inspector Regan in ‘The Sweeney’; you wonder why he never managed to get the Ripper down the cells and beat a confession out of him. Emily Blunt is underused as Gwen Conliffe (here the fiancé of Lawrence’s murdered sibling, not just a flibbertigibbet Talbot picks up at the local antiques shop) during the first two thirds of the film. She provides its emotional charge in the final frames, though.

Johnston conjures up some atmospheric visuals, giving fans of the original (or of the classic Universal monster movies in general) everything they could want in turns of swirling ground-mists, dark tranches of woodland, gypsy camps and fearful villagers, but with the eviscerations ramped up to satisfy the requirements of the modern gorehound. He also throws in an unequivocally not-in-the-original asylum sequence that explodes into a fragmented, hallucinatory sequence of images that suggest the ghost of Donald Cammell had been summoned in an after-hours editing room séance. It’s a scene that’s grand guignol, Gothic and grotesque purely for the sake of it – and it’s the best scene in the movie!

The real star of the show, however, is Rick Baker’s visual effects, and ‘The Wolfman’ homages his work on ‘An American Werewolf in London’ with the casting of one of the darts players from that film as well as taking Talbot (in his lycanthropic incarnation) on a little detour rampage through London, vaulting rooftops, crashing through chimneys and thudding into omnibuses. It’s not subtle, it lacks the dark melancholy subtext of the original, and it probably won’t be half as much fun to watch second time around – I think that much of my enthusiasm comes from expecting ‘The Wolfman’ to be freakin’ awful and deriving a genuine delight in being proved wrong – but damned if it wasn’t the best fun I’d had in the cinema in six months (and yes, that includes ‘Avatar’) … or at least until I saw ‘Ponyo’ a couple of days later. But that’s another review.

Wolfie vs. Wolfie

Over the last couple of decades, the great Universal monster-protagonists have been subjected to big-budget, high-profile and generally disappointing remakes: Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1992) was entertaining but overblown, Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (1994) was anaemic – and doesn’t the pompous shoehorning of the author’s name into the title tell you something? – and Stephen Sommers’ ‘The Mummy’ (1999) and ‘The Mummy Returns’ (2001) were just plain execrable.

Sommers then went on to make ‘Van Helsing’ (2004). It is better that we do not speak of ‘Van Helsing’.

Now ‘The Wolf Man’ gets the treatment, with Joe Johnston calling the shots, Andrew Kevin Walker co-scripting and a quality cast headed up by Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt.

I had my doubts, but an enthusiastic review by Francisco at The Film Connoisseur has heightened my anticipation and I’m looking forward to taking in a screening of the film next week.

In the meantime, my guest review of George Waggner’s 1941 original is online at The Death Rattle.

And while I’m on the subject, has anyone noticed the similarity between the soon-to-be-iconic image of Emily Blunt on the remake’s poster art and Kelly Reilly in ‘Eden Lake’?

Could it be that werewolves are the new chavs?

When Eight Bells Toll

In the late '20s to mid '30s, huge amounts of "quota quickies" were pumped out to satisfy the terms of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, which stipulated that a certain percentage of all films shown at British cinemas had to be British productions.

I'm convinced a similar piece of legislation was in force between the early '60s and the late '70s, requiring that a certain percentage of all films produced were Alistair Maclean adaptations. Some were big-budget, big box-office affairs such as 'Where Eagles Dare' (already covered on these pages as part of the personal faves project) and the inexplicably popular 'Guns of Navarone'; others, like 'Puppet on a Chain' and 'Caravan to Vaccares', were interchangeable Euro productions that deserve the "quota quickie" comparison.

Then you've got the mid-tier stuff. 'Fear is the Key' has a plank-like Barry Newman in the lead role, but boasts good turns from John Vernon, Ben Kingsley, Ray McAnally and a gorgeous Suzy Kendall, and a terrific, poundingly edited car chase. 'Breakheart Pass' is a weird conflation of Agatha Christie mystery and wild west iconography which, thanks to Lucien Ballard's sumptuous cinematography, has the look of a Michael Cimino film. Or there's 'Force 10 from Navarone', which I personally prefer to its overlong and self-important predecessor. While no-one's idea of great cinema, 'Force 10 from ~' is less talky and more action-packed than 'Guns of ~', with shoot-outs, knife fights and a blow-the-dam/destroy-the-bridge finale that manages to rise above some obvious model work.

'When Eight Bells Toll' slots into this mid-tier. Etienne Perier's direction is largely pedestrian, much of the action indifferently staged, the romantic subplot shoehorned in and devoid of any frisson, and the story twisted into overplotted WTF-ism the way only Alistair Maclean could.

Basically: naval operative Philip Calvert (Anthony Hopkins) and intelligence bod Hunslett (Corin Redgrave) are despatched by spymaster Uncle Arthur (Robert Morley) to Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, to investigate a spate of hijackings which have targetted ships carrying gold (can't you just tell this is a Maclean plot?). Posing as marine biologists, their ship is immediate boarded by "customs officials". Calvert makes them as bad guys straightaway. Later, a couple of locals hand out a beating intended to warn him off. It doesn't work. Uncle Albert, concerned that Calvert's a maverick and contemptuous of his superiors, sends a couple of crack commando types to sneak aboard a ship he's earmarked as the hijackers' next target. When they turn up dead, Calvert wonders if there's any connection to the recent appearance of a flashy yacht belonging to a Greek shipping tycoon (look, I said this was a Maclean adaptation, okay? what were you expecting? subtlety? characterisations that didn't rely on stereotyping?). Unsurprisingly, there is.

It all gets needlessly complicated, with a kidnapping subplot thrown in alongside Calvert's attraction to duplicitous femme fatale Charlotte (Nathalie Delon), whose motives couldn't be more obvious if she had "I'm secretly in league with the bad guys" tattooed on her forehead.

Then Uncle Arthur turns up and the maverick undercover agent and his port-sipping old-school-tie boss are forced to work together.

I guess the intention was that Calvert and Uncle Arthur would provide a sparky comedic double act, but by this time - roughly the mid-way point - Perier has established a fairly dour atmosphere, making brooding use of the rugged Scottish landscape and the dark rolling waves of the North Atlantic, while the action is devoid of heroics or Hollywood veneer (although I stand by my earlier comment about indifferent staging: a fist fight is lackadaisically choreographed, a helicopter crash shoddily effected) and the resulting shift in tone is as out of place as Walter Stott's magnificently over-the-top score.

Striving for the immediacy of Monty Norman's James Bond theme and the urgency of David Shire's 'Taking of Pelham One Two Three' soundtrack, it swerves between them and emerges as a souped-up big band swing-fest. And it kicks in, without any variation or modulation, every time anything remotely actionful happens. A helicopter takes off - BAM! the music erupts. A speedboat zips across the harbour - POW! it's that OTT theme again. It's barmy, intrusive and incongruous - it's genius! The cast is solid. Notwithstanding the ill-judged Calvert/Uncle Albert buddy movie concept, Hopkins and Morley are on fine form. 'When Eight Bells Toll' was only Hopkins' fourth or fifth movie and his first leading role, and he makes mundanity memorable, delivering servicable dialogue as if it were laced with meaning. Lower down the credits, Maurice Roeves as a seat-of-the-pants helicopter pilot, Del Henney as a gun-toting heavy and Jack Hawkins (dubbed by Charles Grey) as the shipping magnate are all value for money.

There's also a brilliantly cold-hearted scene where Calvert, cold-cocking an antagonist, wraps a chain around the man's legs and drops him overboard; a human anchor! Plenty of films would have chickened out and had him dragged back up, still alive, to be handed over to the authorities. 'When Eight Bells Toll' doesn't. The dude gets chucked overboard and stays overboard; he's a goner. Calvert, like Smith in 'Where Eagles Dare', is a typical Alistair Maclean do-or-die man-of-action protagonist. But because the average Maclean hero is utterly predictable doesn't mean he can't be a bit of a bastard.

A Bridge Too Far

It's easy to see how Richard Attenborough's 'A Bridge Too Far', based on Cornelius Ryan's exhaustive account of Arnhem debacle Operation Market-Garden, was intended as a corrective to the big-budget, all-star-cast jingoist war epics so popular in the 60s and 70s.

For all intents and purposes, it takes its cue from the likes of 'The Longest Day' - epic running time (just shy of three hours); huge, intricately-orchestrated set-pieces; famous faces all over the shop (Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, James Caan, Sir Laurence Olivier ... the list would be longer than the article itself if I listed everyone); an almost inappropriately stirring score by John Addison. In fact, it differs in only one crucial way.

It's about a fuck-up.

An Allied fuck-up.

This aspect of 'A Bridge Too Far' was never going to be its most popular attribute. And yet, when it was released, the almost inevitable storm of controversy that greeted it centred almost solely around Dirk Bogarde.

Here's Christian Browning, son of General Sir Frederick Browning (the real-life character Bogarde played) on his performance: "... poncing around with white gloves. Those gloves! Dirk played Anacleto in 'The Singer Not the Song' more or less the way he played Dad." (Quoted in John Coldstream's biography.) Here's co-star Edward Fox (quoted in same): "He was impersonating Freddie Browning completely wrongly. It was as if he set out to play him as a poofy waiter."

(The very idea of Edward Fox, whose okay-chaps-what-ho performance isn't far short of parody, criticising a Bogarde characterisation as 'poofy' is hilariously ludicrous.)

So why all the Dirk bashing?

The answer goes back to one of the two reasons Bogarde accepted the role (three if you count the fact that Attenborough, by dint of a holiday home in Provence, was more or less Bogarde's neighbour): (i) a $100,000 salary, and (ii) Bogarde was first billed and his character has 'the Line'.

Discarding the former (okay, $100K is decent chunk now and was a fuckload back in 1977, but it was still peanuts compared to what the American cast members earned), Bogarde's ego was certainly stroked by the latter. Because so many big stars were cast, billing was alphabetical: therefore, before Caan, Caine and Connery, let alone the likes of Elliott Gould or Ryan O'Neal, Dirk Bogarde stands as top-billed actor.

Then there's the Line. Again, a note of explanation: Browning was under considerable pressure from High Command (specifically Montgomery) to deliver an against-the-odds success with Operation Market-Garden. Concerned over the logistics, dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning famously averred that they'd be going "a bridge too far". It's worth bearing in mind that he said this before the operation.

William Goldman's script - in all other respects a clear-sighted adaptation of Ryan's book - indulges in a jarring anachronism. Because Goldman opted to omit the critical meeting between Montgomery and Browning, Browning is essentially cast as the villain of the piece: monomanicially pushing the mission through despite everyone else's misgivings, fixated in true death-or-glory stylee that Market-Garden is infallible. Worse, in order to retain the line that gives both book and film their title, he has Browning foppishly muse, after the operation goes disastrously wrong, "Well, as you know, I've always thought that we tried to go a bridge too far". Which basically makes Browning sound like a pompous dick, blithely stating the obvious after the fact.

The script, however, is the writer's business; in this case an American scribe's take on a British snafu. That a British director happily filmed it is a matter for discussion elsewhere.

As regards Bogarde's involvement .... call me biased (I'm a fan, after all), but wasn't he merely doing what all actors do - reading the lines and taking direction?

And his performance? He plays Browning as aloof, slightly disconnected (attributes I'd imagine are necessary for a high-ranking officer in wartime, who makes decisions, and by extension gambles with lives, coolly and dispassionately). In a film where so many of the other stars just be themselves (Connery is Connery, Caine is Caine) or ham it up (Hackman as a Polish officer) or phone in wooden performances (O'Neal) or play on their established persona (Maximilian Schell and Hardy Kruger reprise their rent-a-Kraut roles from any number of previous outings), Bogarde's performance is definitely not the worst. Far from it. In fact, perhaps only Anthony Hopkins emerges from the whole production as giving a rounded, subtle, memorable performance.

'A Bridge Too Far' has some stunningly brilliant scenes and a fair smattering of shruggingly ordinary ones. Attenborough's direction is often geared to spectacle when human drama needs to be at the fore (I'd love Peckinpah to have made this film, to have given it the sense of waste, loss, brutality, desperation and hard-won, shell-shocked humanity that permeates every frame of 'Cross of Iron'). Peckinpah had been a Marine. Dirk Bogarde, too, had a military background. He served in World War II. His evocative poem 'Steel Cathedrals' is still frequently anthologised in collections of war poetry.

I wonder how many other actors in 'A Bridge Too Far' had also worn the uniform for real, not just as a costume.