Hot Enough for June

Nore - in Godalming, Surrey - was the last and most extravagant of the country houses Dirk Bogarde owned in England before he upped sticks for France and settled in a Provence farmhouse. Set in ten acres, it was more of an estate, with two cottages and a studio in addition to the house itself, which boasted ten bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Bogarde and his manager/partner Tony Forwood paid £40,000 for it. That was in 1962. When it went on the market in 2004, the asking price was £2.5million.

Imagine the upkeep! It's no coincidence, as John Coldstream points out in his magnificent biography of Bogarde, that he began "accepting parts purely for the money". Even then, he wasn't enamoured about appearing in 'Hot Enough for June', Ralph Thomas's adaptation of Lionel Davidson's novel 'The Night of Wenceslas'. It was only when Tom Courtenay was in the frame for Nicholas Whistler, the hapless linguist who becomes a spy without even knowing it, that Forwood, as Coldstream recounts in the biography "said to Dirk in front of the producer and director: 'I'm not sure, Dirk, that you can afford to turn this down. Everyone knew that 'afford' was meant in the literal sense."

It wouldn't be the last time Bogarde gritted his teeth and made a film he had no interest in - nor the last time he'd do it to fund the upkeep on a house. In the 70s, he again returned to the espionage genre (with 'The Serpent' and 'Permission to Kill') and sunk the paycheques into Clermont, his property in France. I've not seen either of these, although both have eclectic casts and sound like they might be highly entertaining films. I have seen 'Hot Enough for June', though, and while it's not the abject mess that many critics would have you believe neither is it (unfortunately) a camp, spoofy underrated gem ripe for rediscovery.


That it never really gels is because it isn't camp or spoofy enough.

The plot in a nutshell: aspiring writer Nicholas Whistler (Bogarde) is happily signing on at the Labour Exchange when he's given an interview, ostensibly for a trainee management position. Picked for an overseas assignment due to his fluency in Czech, he has no idea that his new boss, Cunliffe (Robert Morley) is actually a big wheel in MI5, or that he's an unknowing courier, there to collect a formula and carry it back to London. Arriving in Prague, he is assigned a chauffeur: the glamorous Vlasta (Sylva Koscina). He has just as little idea that Vlasta's father, Simoneva (Leo McKern) is a ranking member of the Secret Police and Cunliffe's opposite number. Simoneva wants Whistler for his contact and the formula. Vlasta just plain wants him. Hilarious shenanigans ensue.

Or should have ensued. The opening scene, even before Whistler is recruited, sets the scene for the film 'Hot Enough for June' could have been. In a non-descript office, spymaster Roger Allsop (John le Mesurier) returns to the quartermaster a plethora of gadgets, ruing the untimely demise of the agent to whom they'd been issued. A cut to an index card reading "007 - deceased" provides the punchline. Although the number is never mentioned, it's clear Whistler has been recruited as 008. Only without anyone actually bothering to tell him.

At this point (ie. three minutes in), Ralph Thomas and scripter Lukas Heller - best known perhaps as co-writer, with Nunnally Johnson, of 'The Dirty Dozen' - could have gone one of two ways: absurdist humour played dead straight (a la 'Dr Strangelove'), or out-and-out camp spoofery. Sadly, 'Hot Enough for June' is neither one thing nor the other, and such pleasure as it does offer are incidental ones. Such as Morley and McKern chewing up the scenery, the latter bringing a brusque physicality and a droll wit to his characterisation of Simoneva.

There are wry touches - although much more humour could have been milked from them - in a smattering of scenes which point up the differences between Whistler and his better-known predecessor: when Whistler dons a tux it's not to make a dashing entrance into an opulent casino but to impersonate a head waiter as he makes his escape through a restaurant (he tarries long enough to serve up a Hungarian goulash with dumplings; when Whistler needs a mode of transport to get away from his pursuers it's not an Aston Martin DB5 with modifications but a stolen push bike.

Bogarde bumbles through the (deliberately) half-arsed action scenes like a good sport, maintaining an air of perplexion throughout. The man was no stranger to light comedy at this stage in his career, as his almost unholy popularity as Simon Sparrow in the 'Doctor' films attests. He even invests his scenes with Sylva Koscina with a bit of sparkle.

But, ah Sylva Koscina! If there is any reason to watch 'Hot Enough for June', it's Sylva Koscina. Playing Vlasta as an ice-maiden one moment and a purring, coquettish kitten the next - and with a twinkle in her eye that lets you know the whole thing's one big joke - she sways and shimmies through the film with a knockout 60s hairdo, an hourglass figure and a disarming amount of likeability.

Never really achieving the Hollywood cross-over success of Sophia Loren, Koscina propped up any number of forgotten thrillers and sex comedies in the '60s and '70s. Coincidentally, her motivation for accepting roles was not dissimilar to Bogarde's: most of the money went into her well-appointed villa in Rome's affluent Marino district.

Campbell's Kingdom

Ah, the great and prolific actor/director relationships: John Wayne and John Ford, Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Dirk Bogarde and Basil Dearden Joseph Losey Ralph Thomas.

Bollocks!

It pains me to discuss the Bogarde/Thomas relationship (nine films together compared to the five he made with Losey and the four with Dearden) since Thomas was a journeyman director and did little to tap into either the brooding sensuality or the tortured intensity of Bogarde as an actor. Nevertheless, it was the likes of the 'Doctor' films ('~ in the House', '~at Sea', '~ at Large', '~in Distress'*) which made him a matinee idol. His dreamy turns in 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'The Wind Cannot Read' went over big with his legions of fans, as well. 'Hot Enough for June' - considered elsewhere in this year's Dirk-fest - didn't quite recapture the mainstream magic, while their final collaboration, 'The High Bright Sun', is largely forgotten.

Which leaves 'Campbell's Kingdom' - certainly my favourite of a frankly not-that-remarkable canon. Adapted from Hammond Innes's bestseller, it opens with Bruce Campbell** (Bogarde) turning up at ramshackle Canadian mining town Come Lucky having inherited his late grandfather's land, a tract the old man was convinced was rich in oil. Old man Campbell's undoing was an unscrupulous partner who defrauded their backers, amscrayed with the money and left Campbell to take the fall ... and do some time. Bruce, recently given six months to live following (it transpires) something of a misdiagnosis, decides Campbell's Kingdom is a nice isolated spot to end his days.

He hasn't reckoned with crooked contractor Owen Morgan (Stanley Baker) who is cutting corners and using cheap materials in the building of a dam which will eventually flood Campbell's land. Prevented from even visiting the Kingdom (the only way to the high ground it occupies is a clanking industrial hoist which Morgan owns and controls), Bruce bristles at Morgan's assertion that the land is worth nothing and is suspicious of the geologist's report Morgan produces which indicates there was no oil. Refusing to sell Morgan the land, Bruce makes contact with the geologist, Bladon (Michael Craig), and discovers that Morgan falsified the report.

Never mind that he's pale, weary and at death's door, Bruce gets a new lease of life fending off Morgan's overtures (which graduate from fiscal imperatives to acts of sabotage) and determining to prove that his grandfather was right about oil under the Kingdom. To this end, he engages the services of roughneck driller MacDonald (a spendidly miscast but loving-every-minute James Robertson Justice) who in turn employs world-weary trucker Tim (an equally miscast Sid James) to head a convoy hauling his equipment from Calgary to the Kingdom. A five hour drive with the little matter of roadblocks and Morgan's hoist at the end of it.

What follows is the centrepiece of Thomas's proficient thriller: a contrived but decently executed quarter of an hour's worth of hairpin bends, vertiginous drops, rock falls and dynamited bridges as Campbell, Boyden and MacDonald strive to outwit Morgan and has vicious crew and get the convoy up to the Kingdom. Scenes of truck wheels spinning and failing to gain traction as chasms yawn beneath them homage Clouzot's 'Wages of Fear' (released three years earlier), while the mechanics of the hoist and its tense ascent of the unforgiving mountainside predate 'Where Eagles Dare' by more than a decade.

This and a couple of other set-pieces (a night attack on the Kingdom and the inevitable climax as the jerry-built dam bursts) tick the right boxes; Baker is rugged, menacing and properly hissable as the villain; the Rockies provide a dramatic backdrop (even if Ernest Steward's cinematography does tend to come on a bit like a tourist brochure); and at a tight 100 minutes it never outstays its welcome.

On the flipside, the presence of half of Thomas's usual stable of Rank Organisation bit-players is somewhat offputting - you know you're in Canada because of the mountains but it all seems a bit East End, dahnit? - and Bogarde resolutely fails to gel with Barbara Murray in the shoehorned-in romantic subplot. The ending's a bit of a cop-out, as well, but to be fair it's replicated more or less faithfully from the source material (the only false note in Innes's otherwise pacy and atmospheric novel). Thomas's worst sins, though, are his blithe rejection of the standard editing room modus operandi of actually having shots that match. I don't think I've ever seen more screamingly blatant day-for-night shots than in 'Campbell's Kingdom'. Day-for-night? More like bright-blue-sky-for-pitch-black. The high bright sun, indeed.

*The latter a belated, almost cameo-like, return to the role.

**No relation to the prominently-chinned actor.

Appointment in London

Glancing back at 2007's inaugural Dirk-fest, I see that in a somewhat tossed-off review I rubbished 'The Spanish Gardener' as "a nothing film".

Which it is. I make no retraction of that statement.

Where I have sinned in that long-ago article is my dismissal of Philip Leacock as "a journeyman director ... his only other film of note is the WWII melodrama 'Appointment in London'."

Reapproaching 'Appointment in London' for this year's Dirk-fest, I realise I may have been hasty in that description. I remembered 'Appointment in London' as melodramatic because of the romantic rivalry between brash American pilot Mac Baker (William Sylvester) and driven British Wing Commander Tim Mason (Bogarde) over Eve Canyon (Dinah Sheridan), a widowed naval intelligence officer. I remembered it as melodramatic for its red-herring "careless talk costs lives" subplot.

But there's more to 'Appointment in London'; more than its thuddingly clunky title suggests. Let's get that title out of the way before we go any further. The film is set mostly on a Bomber Command airbase (presumably in Lincolnshire: it's very flat) and the title refers to the invitation to Buckingham Palace received by Pilot Officer Pete Greeno (Bryan Forbes) - nicknamed "the Brat" for his casual, daring-do attitude - to collect the DSO and bar.

Quite the Mr Popular is Greeno. Only Mason isn't too happy about his habit of making post-mission phone calls - in code. Not wanting to believe that Greeno might be a turncoat, Mason browbeats the truth out of him: the calls are to "a girl", to let her know he's safe. Mason tears him off a strip, then dismisses him. On Greeno's next bombing run, before he can keep his appointment in London, his plane crash lands on his return and he's killed outright.

It's against the sobering effect that Greeno's death has on the airbase that Mason's obsession with completing yet another and another mission is contrasted. He's notched up 87 as the film opens and both his superior and the Medical Officer are urging him to quit. 30 missions was the standard for a tour of duty on Bomber Command, with airmen lucky if they survived a third of that number. Mason's total - and his determination to push it up to 90 - comes across as borderline suicidal.

His last few death-baiting flights play out against his burgeoning relationship with Eve, their romance further counterpointed by the arrival at the base - looking for closure - of Greeno's mystery "girl": actually his very homely wife Pamela (Anne Leon). It's with mixed feelings, then, that Mason undertakes that fateful 90th mission. A nasty accident before the plane has even left the ground suggests that the flight might be jinxed ...

Easy to see why I'd recalled 'Appointment in London' as a melodrama. It has all the elements. But Leacock clearly isn't interested in them. They're only there as an excuse for a plot. Leacock's agenda is the minutiae of life in Bomber Command: the men, the planes, the equipment, the cameraderie, the drawn out periods of waiting between bombing runs and the proximity of violent and fiery death during them. What he isn't interested in, despite the cheesier aspects of the script, are gung-ho heroics, tub-thumping jingoism or the target for Mason's 90th mission being a secret base of our-best-chance-to-shorten-the-war importance.

I may have missed it, but I don't think Leacock really bothers identifying what the target for said mission is. The point is, the pilots and master bombers and radio operators and tailgunners took the same risks, chanced their lives in what were colloquially known as "flying coffins", and often limped back home riddled with anti-aircraft fire or an engine gone and it didn't matter if they'd been sent out to destroy a factory, a munitions dump or a railway yard (never mind something as dramatic as, say, a heavy water plant) - it was in a night's work.

I'm no plane buff but the few comments 'Appointment in London' garners on IMDb are from guys who seem to know there stuff and the consensus of opinion is that Leacock employs the right planes and the right technical details in accurate locations and situations. Disregard the Mason/Baker/Eve triangle and some talky longueurs, and 'Appointment in London' proves a thoughtful, detailed and quietly engrossing film.

Darling

Promiscuity. Infidelity. Celebrity. Degeneracy. Sex 'n' snobbery. Orgies. Abortion. Kleptomania.

By rights, 'Darling' ought to be a full-throttle, rip-snorting (or coke-snorting) lurid delight, a guilty pleasure of the highest order. In the hands of Russ Meyer it could have been a trashy soft-core romp a la 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls'. With Richard Lester at the helm, it might have been the bona fide document from the Swinging Sixties that actual director John Schlesinger so obviously wanted it to be.

'Darling' starts with Diana Scott (Julie Christie) recounting her life story to an interviewer. There she is as a little girl on a school outing. There she is as a little girl in the school play. There she is aged twenty and all grown up with it, sashaying through the great metropolis when up comes a production assistant on a current affairs show presented by Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde). She contributes a few casual lines to an interview on social attitudes and the generation gap and next thing you know Diana and Robert are merrily swanning around together.


Trouble is, he's married. So's she. Oooooh, controversial. Robert comes off as the heel for leaving his wife and children (a shot of him, suitcase in each hand, trudging sheepishly away from the house pulls back through the living room window to reveal he's left an envelope on the mantlepiece addressed to the luckless Mrs Gold), while Diana does an effective character assassination on her ex in just a couple of lines of voiceover (he's a "nice boy" apparently, and "playing at" being married). I may have missed it, but I don't think the poor chap even gets the dubious courtesy of an envelope on the mantlepiece.

Diana and Robert set up home together, but Robert does inconsiderate things like typing up the scripts for his TV show and treating Diana sensitively, so she does what any self-respecting vacuous amoral chic chick would do: she hooks up with filthy rich advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey)* who has no class but looks good when he takes his shirt off and has a flash apartment and a Mercedes sports car. Because these are the things that count.

Sorry, was I being facetious?

Outwardly 'Darling' is a serious, multi-layered film that deconstructs the archetypes of the Sixties as determinedly as the aforementioned Richard Lester celebrated them. Not the least of its achievements is suggesting that Diana's outwardly respectable and starchly middle class parents are the people who schooled her in the elegantly empty small talk and studied self-confidence that greases the wheels as she makes her way up in so-called society.

Schlesinger's satire finds its outlet in the panoply of supporting characters: the sleazy MP (a pre-'Porridge' Brian Wilde) who drools over Diana, the dissipated photographer who captures an image that wins her the first of many lucrative modelling and advertising contracts, the fast-buck producers who cast her in a B-movie potboiler, and Miles's bohemian friends in Paris who think nothing of making out in front of each other and playing truth or dare. Ooooooh, even more controversial. (This, incidentally, is the most awful moment in the film: Schlesinger trying to be all arty and European and stylishly debauched but concocting, instead, a scene so flatly unerotic and unintentionally hilarious it makes your average Robin Askwith tits 'n' milkmen flick look like 'Citizen Kane'.)

Schlesinger draws parallels between these various stratas of society. When Diana meets the MP it's at a fundraiser whose rich patrons are doing their bit for the poor (particularly the minorities). Schlesinger cuts from a fat white woman stuffing herself to three black youths done up in period garb as serving boys watching her resentfully. Later, when Diana meets the Paris set, their liberal credentials are established by the inclusion of a sexually active black man as one of their own.

The fashions, the cars and the yappy John Dankworth score root 'Darling' firmly in the Sixties (albeit a view of the Sixties filtered through the consciousness of a director critical of the rapidly changing social mores). So, embarrassingly, do the unreconstructed values. For all that the fundraiser scene makes a point about prejudice, hypocrisy and condescension, the overall treatment of foreign characters (British Africans and Italians come off the worst) is as dubious as the treatment of gays (stereotypical) and the treatment of women. Schlesinger and scripter Frederic Raphael's portrayal of Diana is borderline misogynistic. With a less appealing, less charismatic and less meltingly beautiful actress than Julie Christie - and without Dirk Bogarde lending real acting chops to the first third of the film - 'Darling' would have been scuppered.

Fortunately, though, Christie is iconic. She turns an underwritten cypher into a sometimes confused, sometimes provocative and ultimately tragic heroine. The final scenes, where the loneliness and the desperation close in, are compelling. It's her film in the final analysis, but Bogarde's in the first third. As the cerebral, sardonic, slightly rumpled Robert - a man who ruefully walks out on his family only to find his new life isn't what he wanted - Bogarde brings depth and gravitas to the proceedings. His is a slow-burn performance - he mostly underplays, giving Christie the limelight - culminating in his discovery of Diana's affair with Miles and their verbal showdown as they leave a private viewing at a swanky art gallery. Diana makes to hail a cab, but Robert stops her.

Robert: We're not taking a taxi.
Diana: Why not?
Robert: I don't take whores in taxis.
Diana: What do you mean?
Robert: That's what you are, isn't it? A little whore. Isn't it? You've been back from Paris two days already. If you don't want me to find out what you're doing, don't leave your ticket and passport lying about all over the place.
Diana: Robert, I knew you'd get the wrong end of the stick ...
Robert: Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in the bed at the same time. You're a whore, baby, just a whore. And I don't take whores in taxis.

By nature of its attack on superficiality, 'Darling' inhabits a shallow milieu. Correspondingly, as the film progresses and Diana moves towards what is simultaneously her apotheosis in social climbing and the final stage of her objectification by the male gaze, characters become little more than set-dressing; emotions drain to hollowness and a facade of bored civility prevails. In depicting the stagnant, 'Darling' stagnates. The break-up between Diana and Robert is the high point of the film, their argument played out as, still in evening dress, they take the escalators down into an Underground station, the other punters nondescript, shabby and vaguely embarrassed by these two elegant individuals letting rip at each other, Diana's accent slipping as she yawps at him like a fishwife. It's the first, and only, time that the social masks drop and something raw, passionate and all-too-human is revealed.

*He makes his money by selling products and his name's Brand. I'll bet they were up all night thinking of that one! (By the same token Gold is belatedly identified as the only man who was worth anything to Diana, so he's called Gold. Diana is an attention seeking blonde whose sole talent is saturating the media with her own image, and who ends up a princess by dint of a loveless marriage, so she's called --- ... oops, better not go there.)

King & Country

'King & Country' - the very title just the first of several bitter pills the viewer is forced to swallow - was the third of Dirk Bogarde's five collaborations with Joseph Losey. For me, it's second only to 'The Servant'. Powerful, unflinching and bludgeoningly grim, it's no surprise it did sod all at the box office. Forty-five years on, its impact is undiminished. This is partly because of Losey's low-key and brutally realistic portrayal of trench warfare, and partly because of a cluster of great performances. It says something that this is one of the rare titles on the Bogarde filmography that he doesn't steal from his co-stars, wittily and elegantly, every time he's onscreen.

Briefly, and with SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE, 'King & Country' concerns the trial and execution (told you it was a spoiler fest!) of Private Hamp (Tom Courtenay), charged with desertion after he leaves his post and goes walking away from the British lines. He was, he explains, trying to walk home. Assigned to defend him, educated officer Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde) finds himself unexpectedly moved by the working class, simple-minded Hamp.

Convinced that Hamp - a volunteer (on account of his wife and mother pressuring him) who has been in the trenches a soul-destroying three years - acted while the balance of his mind was disturbed, and with sympathetic testimony from Hamp's superior Lieutenant Webb (Barry Foster), Hargreaves makes his case. But he's up against by-the-book prosecutor Captain Midgley (James Villiers) and a Colonel (Peter Copley) who's already made his mind up about Hamp. To make matters worse, Captain O'Sullivan (Leo McKern), the orderly Hargreaves hopes will corraborate the medical evidence, refuses to play ball, scorning the suggestion of nervous breakdown or mental illness and asserting that Hamp was basically yellow.

Bogarde's verbal duel with McKern in this scene is intense. Bogarde - at the height of his fame in the early 60s - was wilfully casting off the matinee idol image and engaging with progressively more challenging material. Gone the dashing heroism of 'Ill Met by Moonlight' and 'They Who Dare'; in its place a harried, world-weary characterisation that points the way towards the controversial roles of his later career - a shift already heralded by his slithery turn as Barrett in 'The Servant', made a year before 'King & Country'. McKern is also on top form, Foster does easily the best work of his career, and Courtenay disappears into his character so completely it's as if he were a chameleon.

'King & Country' opens with a series of extended close-ups of a war memorial - a huge, joyless sculpture of a soldier lying lifelessly on a plinth - and ends with an archive photo of a dead horse adrift in the shell-scarred mud of no-man's-land. Losey incorporates other archive photos at pertinent moments. When Hamp speaks of trying to walk home, Losey cuts to a picture of a featureless terraced house that could be on any street in any working class town anywhere in England, a woman sweeping up outside. The image is anonymous to the point of bland. Then the poster on the wall leaps out at you: 'WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY GO!', a reminder like a slap in the face of the spousal and matriarchal motivation behind Hamp's enlistment.

Losey's black-and-white camerawork conjures life in the trenches as a symphony of mud. The incessant crump of shells - sometimes way off in the distance, sometimes dangerously close - is a constant. The rain is ceaseless. Shattered emplacements, fetid puddles and the agony of waiting. 'King & Country' is a war film without scenes of battle. The Germans are never shown. They don't need to be. The trenches themselves, the conditions in which men are forced to live (and die) - these are the enemy. What men become when war comes to define them, what they are reduced to by the stubbornness and arrogance of their leaders - these are the enemy. There are no Germans in 'King & Country'. They're not needed. The British are bastards enough.

Hamp's fellow tommies stage a mock trial with a rat standing in for him. Cruel? Definitely, but nothing compared to their behaviour on the eve of Hamp's date with the firing squad. They crowd into his cell, ply him with rotgut. Thoroughly drunk, he is barely aware of what is happening as they blindfold him and enact a mock execution. The whole thing degenerates into a grotesque approximation of blind-man's-bluff, Hamp - finally snapping - blundering around arms akimbo, yelling "Where are you, you bastards?" just as the padre enters. It's a horrible scene to watch and as damning an indictment of man's inhumanity to man and the pointlessness of war as anything in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' or 'Paths of Glory'.

Passing judgement on Hamp, the Colonel dictates his report for onward transmission to his superiors. He omits everything Hargreaves introduced into evidence, adding "Don't make any mention of mental illness. They don't need to know about that kind of thing at HQ." When Hamp is taken out to be shot, it is under the watchful gaze of O'Sullivan; his executioners are the men who made a mockery of his last night alive, and Webb is forced to give the order to fire. When the fusilade fails to kill him outright, it is left to Hargreaves to adminster the coup de grace.

Told you there were spoilers. Told you it was grim.

Introducing the Third Annual Dirk-Fest

I started this blog in November 2007. Less than a month after my inaugural post, two events coincided: I found myself laid up ill and my wife (then my girlfriend) took pity on me and bought me the 'Screen Icons' Dirk Bogarde box set to cheer me up. I was off work a week and watched all seven of the DVDs in the set in short order - and blogged about them just as rapidly.

Bogarde has long been my favourite actor. He had a waspish sense of the sardonic about him coupled with a sometimes camp sometimes brooding tendency to engage with the dark side of his characters, kind of like Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward crossed with Jack Nicholson or Harvey Keitel. His eight volumes of autobiography are like old friends to me, books I've returned to time after time, often revisiting a specific passage or turn of phrase (Bogarde on an American limo driver who deposits him with a patently insincere have a nice day: "I nearly thanked him"), even though it's been demonstrated by his biographer John Coldstream that wholesale swathes of poetic licence were woven into the fabric of his memoirs.

Speaking of Coldstream, his biography of Bogarde is one of the best examples of its kind, up there with Kevin Brownlow's book on David Lean or David Weddle's account of Sam Peckinpah's turbulent life and career. It was 'Ever, Dirk', edited by Coldstream from reams of Bogarde's correspondence that prompted The Second Annual Dirk-Fest in late 2008.

The films covered so far have been:

The First Annual Dirk-Fest (2nd - 12th December 2007)
The Blue Lamp
Hunted
The Sleeping Tiger
The Spanish Gardener
Victim
The Servant
Accident

The Second Annual Dirk-Fest (25th September - 26th October 2008)
The Night Porter
The Singer Not the Song
A Bridge Too Far
Death in Venice
These Foolish Things
Ill Met By Moonlight
The Damned

Welcome, then, to The Third Annual Dirk-Fest. We've got three very different war films, a despatch from the Swinging Sixties, an oddity that pretty much stands as Bogarde's only sci-fi movie (or social horror, depending on how you want to look at it), a spy spoof and an example of the clean-cut heart-throb type product that made Bogarde a matinee idol in his younger years.

Coming attractions / Sam, Dirk, Andrei and the Class of 1984

The Peckinpah poll closed earlier today with ‘Straw Dogs’ just beating ‘The Wild Bunch’ into first place with 14 votes (24%), while Pike Bishop and the Bunch take 13 votes (22%) and happily mow down an army of Mexican revolutionaries while they're at it.

The big surprise was ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ in third place with 13%. For a long time, I was convinced I was in a minority for loving this movie: most people I talked to had never heard of it, others just plain didn’t like it. I remember a screening at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema as part of their now-defunct "Shots in the Dark" festival, where half of the audience responded enthusiastically to Peckinpah’s dark-to-the-point-of-nihilistic humour while the other half sat there in stony silence.

In joint fourth place, ‘Ride the High Country’, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ garnered 5 votes (8%) apiece. Out where the iron crosses grow, there were 3 votes (5%) for Bloody Sam's only war movie. ‘The Getaway’ made off with 2 votes (3%), while the elegiac ‘Junior Bonner’ and the less-than-elegiac ‘The Killer Elite’ and ‘The Osterman Weekend’ scraped 1 vote (1%) each.

There was no love at all for ‘The Deadly Companions’, ‘Major Dundee’ or ‘Convoy’.

And for a while I was quite impressed that the computer had worked out the percentages for me ... until I realised that the whole thing only adds up to 94%. I'm going to assume the missing 6% is in honour of his acclaimed TV movie ‘Noon Wine’ and move swiftly on.

The Peckinpah tribute gets underway on 1st December with the whole month dedicated to the maverick maestro here on The Agitation of the Mind. Feel free to join in. Swipe one of these banners, share your thoughts on all things Peckinpah and let’s mark the 25th anniversary of his passing on 28th December in fine style.

In the meantime - and celebrating a personality about as different to Sam Peckinpah as you can get - October kicks off with the Third Annual Dirk-Fest. Mid month, the Tarkovsky retrospective considers two very different works by the chuckle-free Russian director, while Sergio Leone takes centre stage on 26th October when I’ll be writing about ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ as part of This Distracted Globe’s "Class of 1984" blog-a-thon.