Hell Drivers

“Psst! Wanna see a movie starring Number 6, 007, that stiff-upper-lip lieutenant out of ‘Zulu’, Dr Who, Inspector Clouseau’s boss out of the ‘Pink Panther’ films, “Bootsie” Bisley, George Cowley off ‘The Professionals’, one of the blokes in ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ and the guy with the dirtiest laugh in the ‘Carry On’ films?

“Yeah? You’re interested? Got just the thing for you, guv. The genuine article. Nice little 1957 British B-movie. Black-and-white and sharp as a knife. Pop in the back room and I’ll sort you out with copy. Cash only, like. Where did it come from? Fell off the back of a lorry, didn’t it?”

(Authorities arrive.)

(Trenchcoated, fedora-wearing spiv is carted off.)

(Normal service resumes at The Agitation of the Mind.)

But, to be fair, our newly nicked friend – presumably falling down some stairs at a nearby police station even as I type this article – has a point. Imagine it: a movie starring Patrick McGoohan, Sean Connery, Stanley Baker, William Hartnell, Herbert Lom, Alfie Bass, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum and Sid James.

An all-star cast, right?

Hmmmmm, sort of. An all-pre-star cast might be a better description. Connery was still five years away from his star-making turn in ‘Dr No’, Hartnell was six years away from being the first incarnation of a certain still-active time traveller, McGoohan and McCallum were seven years away from – respectively – ‘Danger Man’ and ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ … and it would be another three years after that before McGoohan, who died two days ago at the age of 80, gave British television its finest hour (or rather its finest 13 hour-long episodes) with ‘The Prisoner’, a satirical, subversive, surreal, genre-defying and truly original masterpiece of the medium.

(Parenthetically, Jackson and James had probably had the most notable careers at that point, both starring in perennial Ealing favourites – ‘Whisky Galore’ and ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ respectively – and James delivering a scene-stealing performance as Knucksie the barman in Powell & Pressburger’s ‘The Small Back Room’.)

Was it serendipity that brought all these soon-to-be-greats together for ‘Hell Drivers’, or did director Cy Endfield have a unique eye for talent? It really doesn’t matter. The point is, ‘Hell Drivers’ is a hard as nails, tough-talking, two-fisted, pedal-to-the-metal B-movie that breaks the mold. B-movies were often referred to as “the little picture”. Not this one. ‘Hell Drivers’ stands tall in post-war British cinema and throws a long and enduring shadow.

Although Stanley Baker is the headliner (he and director Cy Endfield went on to form a production company together to bring ‘Zulu’ to the screen), it’s Patrick McGoohan’s ballsy, menacing performance that defines ‘Hell Drivers’.

The plot, in a nutshell: recently released ex-con Tom Yately (Baker) goes to work for a two-bit trucking company managed by the irascible Cartley (Hartnell) and whose lead driver “Red” Redman (McGoohan) is a truculent bully forever brawling, chewing on a cigarette and downing Guinness at the wheel. Yately is still stewing over a road accident he caused, in which his younger brother Jimmy (McCallum) was injured. Discovering the corruption, swindling and dangerous driving conditions his fellow truckers are coerced into, Yately is compelled to make a stand.

It could almost be a western. And to be honest, the narrative doesn’t matter. It’s Endfield’s commitment to gritty realism that makes ‘Hell Drivers’ a bona fide classic. My father was starting out in the road haulage business in the late fifties and all of his recollections, as well as details he’s pointed out to me whilst watching the film, identify the film as being the real deal, with the (obligatory for the day) exception of the language being considerably toned down.

‘Hell Drivers’ inhabits a milieu of truck stops, digs and haulage yards. There is camaraderie, but also rivalry. The drivers – pulling in long hours and driving recklessly fast to make up their runs – live for booze, birds and brawling. Outside of the films of Sam Peckinpah, it’s one of the most nihilistically accurate portrayals of how men interact. Particularly when that interaction explodes into violence. The inevitable punch-up between Yately and Redman is brutal and intense, anticipating the visceral hand-to-hand of the Bourne films by fifty years.

Everyone wears their role like a threadbare donkey jacket. Endfield directs with the speed and velocity of one of the Dodge trucks. And Patrick McGoohan, a decade before he re-defined what the small screen was capable of, tears up the big screen like a man possessed.

i.m. Patrick McGoohan (19 March 1928 – 13 January 2009)

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.

PERSONAL FAVES: From Russia With Love

The formula the franchise was built upon is virtually evident in the first Bond film, 'Dr No': exotic locations, glamorous women and a megalomaniacal villain with a fully kitted-out secret base.

The third instalment, 'Goldfinger', would truly establish the formula: exotic locations, glamorous women, a megalomaniacal villian with a fully kitted-out secret base and a shedload of funky gadgets.

Essentially then, the four Gs: guns, girls, gadgets and globetrotting. Plus the megalomaniacal villain lurking in his ever more gargantuan secret base (hollowed out volcanoes a speciality).

By the later episodes, it got so that Bond's profession (espionage) was almost an afterthought. Let's face, the man doesn't exactly go undercover; and unless blowing the bad guy's secret base to hell can be classed as clandestine activity, he doesn't do much spying either. The usual sequence of events boils down to: M tells Bond that something dodgy is afoot, normally tipping him off from outset as to who the bad guy is; Q gives Bond some funky gadgets; Bond walks into bad guy's favourite casino/golf club [delete as applicable] and announces himself as "Bond, James Bond" (told you he doesn't do undercover); Bond cleans out bad guy over the card table/roulette table/links [delete as applicable], pissing him right off; Bond dallies with a couple of beauties, at least one of whom is duplicitous; Bond gets caught by the bad guy, who invariably explains in great detail his plans for world domination before either (a) locking Bond in an easily escapable broom cupboard conveniently situated next to the armoury, or (b) suspends him over a pool of sharks/piranha [deleted as applicable], a low-burning night-light under the taut rope; Bond utilizes funky gadgets courtesy of Q branch, effects an escape, foils the bad guy's plans and blows the fully kitted-out secret base to smithereens.

'From Russia with Love' - the second and for my money the best of the Bonds - does things a bit differently.

There's no secret base. There's no megalomaniac seeking world domination; here we have a triumvirate of villains - the Machiavellian Blofeld, the spitefully cunning Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) and the brutally efficient 'Red' Grant (Robert Shaw) - and their plan is twofold: the theft of a Russian decoder, and the disgrace and demise of Bond. In order to achieve the former, they manipulate Bond into acquiring it for them.

And how does one go about manipulating an agent of 007's calibre? Piece of cake - dangle a pretty girl in front of him. Step forward Tatiana Romanova (Daniella Bianchi); a beauty queen in real life, but not the typical Bond girl to be sure. She's just as much a victim of manipulation as Bond. Tatiana is pretty much the innocent victim in all of this, and Bianchi, though limited as an actress, certainly imbues the the character with a human element.

Thanks to all the intrigue, the intricacy of the plotting and the delightful idea that Bond - every inch the uber-mensch in all his other outings - is basically being fucked with from start to finish, 'From Russia with Love' feels like a proper espionage thriller. It has the cynical brilliance of a le Carre novel. Double-dealings abound. Betrayal lurks at every turn. Director Terence Young keeps the tension racked, most notably in the cat 'n' mouse Orient Express sequence, climaxing in a vicious bout of hand-to-hand combat between Bond and Grant (the means by which Grant gives himself away - ordering red wine with fish - remains a classic bit of Ian Fleming snobbery) - a powerhouse scene, jarringly shot and edited. The seeds of Bourne-style visceral action cinema are present here.

The Grant/Bond fight is only one of a number of striking set-pieces: the theft of the decoder and the attack on the gypsy camp are standouts. Likewise, the extended finale - Bond's duel with a helicopter ("I'd say one their aircraft was missing" - surely the only Bond one-liner to reference a Powell & Pressburger film), followed by a speedboat chase - generate tension and excitement without recourse to blowing up a fully kitted-out secret base. And let's not forget that nasty little coda featuring Rosa Klebb and the kind of footwear you can't get at Clarke's.

'From Russia with Love' is probably the only film in the series where you could have a protagonist other than Bond - you could slide George Smiley or Bernard Samson or one of Graham Greene's world-weary and morally compromised anti-heroes into the lead role - and it wouldn't harm the film at all, wouldn't detract from its status as a first rate 60s spy thriller. It's the most un-Bond of the Bond movies ... and, paradoxically, that's what makes it the best.

There's a Bond-fest going on over at my other blog, Guilty Pleasures; the first five Connery outings are under consideration in the first entry.

ST VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL: Marnie

There's really only two variants on the Hollywood love story:

i) Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back again.

ii) Boy meets girl. Boy encounters obstacle in winning girl's affections. Boy overcomes obstacle.

In both cases, the "happily ever after" ending is contractually obligatory.

Now let's consider 'Marnie'. For 'boy' read 'ruthless businessman'; for 'girl' read 'psychologically disturbed kleptomaniac'. Here goes:

Boy - Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) - meets girl - Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren). Boy employs girl. Girl tries to rip off the contents of boy's safe. Boy catches girl in the act. Boy coerces girl into marrying him. Girl gets all frigid on the honeymoon. Boy rapes girl.

Yes, you read that right.

There's more: the catch-all description 'boy works out why girl is psychologically disturbed' pretty much sums up the last half of the film. But the key scene is Rutland's response to Marnie's frigidity, a repressed experience in childhood leaving her repulsed by any sexual advance. Rutland tries to understand her 'condition' but she is contemptuous and insists they sleep apart. "If you don't want to go to bed, please get out," she says, attempting to hustle him out of the boudoir. "But I do want to go to bed, Marnie," he replies, "I very much want to go to bed." And so saying tears her nightgown from her shoulders. It's all very Hollywood, all close ups of silk pooling around her feet, hardly an inch of flesh on display, and Rutland is immediately contrite, draping his dressing gown around her. He sits her down on the edge of the bed, but straightaway starts getting tactile again.

Then he forces himself on her, eyes burning with carnal lust as his face fills the screen.

Adapted from Winston Graham's novel by Jay Presson Allen, it was originally Evan Hunter, fresh off 'The Birds', whom Hitch approached to write the screenplay. Hunter considered the rape scene unnecessary and petitioned Hitchcock to excise it. Hitch was adamant and had Hunter removed from the project. As Hunter recalled in his memoir 'Me and Hitch':

Many years later when I told Jay Presson Allen how much [Hitchcock's] description of that scene had bothered me, she said, "You just got bothered by the scene that was his reason for making the movie."

Dark and twisted? You'd better believe it. 'Marnie' makes 'Vertigo' look like a light romantic comedy. Boasting a good performance from Connery and a poor one from Hedren, 'Marnie' is curiously devoid of any of the bravura set-pieces that typify Hitchcock's directorial signature. It's an oddity in the filmography. It's a blip in a decade-long run of classics.

It's a Valentine's Day movie for unrepentant cynics.