HELLRAISERS: The Three Musketeers

In an embarrassing example of Well Known Film Facts Totally Passing Me By, I had no idea, when I added Richard Lester’s ‘The Three Musketeers’ to the rental list, that its sequel (the cunningly titled ‘Four Musketeers’) actually compromised the second part of Dumas’s novel instead of being the rushed-into-production quick cash-in that I’d assumed it was.

Turns out, too, that both films were shot at the same time – indeed, the cast thought they were just making one (fairly long) film. When producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind released the thing in two halves, to not inconsiderable box office, the main cast united in apposite “all for one, one for all” stylee and brought a court action against the filmmakers.

Watching ‘The Three Musketeers’ over the bank holiday weekend, I had the schizophrenic experience of finding the behind-the-scenes battle more interesting than any of the swordplay on offer (don’t get me wrong: it’s excitingly done and Oliver Reed, to use the vernacular, proper goes for it; there’s just too damn much – it’s swords drawn every five minutes or so and after the fifth or sixth bout a sense of repetition sets in) and yet, as the end credits – with their little teaser for ‘The Four Musketeers’ – rolled, I was cursing that I hadn’t added that title to the rental list while I was at it.

Schizophrenic is a good description of the film overall. Oliver Reed brings real gravitas to the role of Athos, likewise Christopher Lee to the role of Rochefort, yet the presence of comic stalwarts Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, coupled with Frank Finlay’s buffoonish portrayal of Porthos and a general tendency by Lester to play entire sequences as exercises in broad physical comedy, gives the film an air of ‘Carry On D’Artagnan’.

Speaking of D’Artagnan, the casting of Michael York (along with that of Richard Chamberlain as Aramis) turns half of the Musketeers into pretty boys, and while the shirtless York demonstrates a buffed-up muscularity, his screen presence is at odds to Reed’s brooding intensity.

Then again, the cast as a whole is something of a pick ‘n’ mix bag: where else would you find Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welsh, Charlton Heston, Joss Ackland, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Simon Ward, Geraldine Chaplin, ‘Likely Lads’ star Rodney Bewes and (I kid you not!) Sybil Danning rubbing shoulders in the same movie?

Perhaps the unlikeliest candidate emerges as most appealing: Raquel Welsh’s aptitude for deadpan comedy is priceless, her portrayal of Constance de Bonacieux as a coquettish clutz both satirises her sex symbol status and turns what could have been a mere set-dressing role into a scene-stealing success. Roy Kinnear, too, deserves a ‘man of the match’ award for two bits of inspired silliness: his attack on Rochefort with an uprooted sapling, and his twatting of a court guard while dressed as a bear.

The pacing is uneven – because of the high-end frequency of the sword fights, the moment the film pauses to deal with court intrigue or flesh out a character, inertia sets in – and some of the acting is just plain wooden, but for all the tomfoolery George Macdonald Fraser’s script retains a commendable fidelity to the novel and at 103 minutes it’s an entertaining timewaster that doesn’t waste too much of your time. Damned if I haven’t added the follow-up to my rental list.

HELLRAISERS: Look Back in Anger

You can pretty much date the “angry young man” movement in British literature as having its beginnings with John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back in Anger’ in 1956. In fact it was a press officer at the Royal Court Theatre who came up with the phrase as part of the play’s publicity.

The “angry young man” movement in British cinema was coterminous with the kitchen sink drama. These grimly realistic films, often tackling controversial social issues (infidelity, abortion, domestic violence, alcoholism), reached their fullest expression in the 1960s with the likes of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘The L-Shaped Room’, ‘This Sporting Life’, ‘The Family Way’ and ‘Poor Cow’. Two striking examples, however, were made in the late ’50s: Jack Clayton’s ‘Room at the Top’, from the novel by John Braine, and Tony Richardson’s adaptation (having directed the original theatrical production) of ‘Look Back in Anger’.

The clue’s in the title. And for anyone who missed it, it’s made explicitly clear in the towering fury of Richard Burton’s performance as Jimmy Porter, the mid-twenties university graduate who has turned his back on everything that university and education stand for and ekes out a basic living behind a market stall. At night, he plays trumpet and drinks at jazz clubs.
He lives in a dingy flat with put-upon wife Alison (Mary Ure) and lodger and co-worker at the stall Cliff (Gary Raymond). The flat, with its proximity to a church whose bells toll the faithful to and from worship with metronomic regularity, is a prison. Alison has become the personification of all the upper-middle-class superficiality he has so robustly eschewed. There is no love left in their marriage. Jimmy’s vehemence towards her leaves her fearful. She can’t bring herself to tell him she’s pregnant.

Cliff does his best to keep the peace between Jimmy and Alison, but his affectionate (though entirely platonic) relationship with Alison adds tension. Jimmy is as derogatory in his treatment of Cliff as he is towards Alison; and there’s no doubt that Cliff is second fiddle at the stall, Jimmy leaving him to tend to customers without a break while he hares off to the pub with “Ma” Tanner (Edith Evans). “Ma” Tanner is Jimmy’s erstwhile landlady and, as the maternal appellation suggests, something of a mother figure to him. A decent side to Jimmy emerges while he’s in her company; he accompanies her to a forlorn cemetery, goods trains clanking past in the distance, where she tends to her husband’s grave.

There’s a grimness to every frame of ‘Look Back in Anger’. From the dismal cemetery to the pubs wreathed in cigarette smoke; from the cramped rows of terraced houses to Jimmy and Alison’s equally cramped flat; from the grubby station platform where leave-takings and returnings are played out to the litter-strewn market place where stall inspector Hurst (Donald Pleasance) sneeringly and punctiliously makes his rounds and a coterie of stall holders close ranks against Indian tradesman Kapoor (S.P. Kapoor). Jimmy is a witness to the racially motivated accusations against Kapoor which see Hurst revoke his licence, and urges him to stand up to his accusers. Kapoor replies sadly and pragmatically that there are other towns and prepares to make his departure. “What made you come to this bloody country?” Jimmy asks him. “In India, I was an outcast,” Kapoor replies.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

‘Look Back in Anger’ kicks Englishness in the teeth. It’s easy to see why the clanging churchbells drive Jimmy mad: he has rejected the doctrines they vouchsafe; he knows full well that the racket they make never quite disguises the provincialism, the xenophobia or the smug hypocrisies of which the likes of Alison’s parents are emblematic; never quite drowns out the bleating of mealy-mouthed jobsworths like Hurst. ‘Look Back in Anger’ kicks against church, state, education and ambition (asked what he really wants, Jimmy answers “Everything. Nothing”). It even cocks a snook at the theatrical tradition (notwithstanding the origins of its source material) by having Jimmy and Cliff boisterously interrupt the rehearsals of a parlour room play Alison’s friend Helena (Claire Bloom) is appearing in.

Jimmy’s an unlikeable character for much of the 100-minute running time (he’s probably even more insufferable for the two hours plus of the play), and my sympathies while watching the film are generally more with Alison despite the fact that she does herself no favours by being such a doormat, but I can understand where the anger comes from and what it’s directed towards. Anyone who can’t is either from the upper-middle-classes Jimmy’s so contemptuous of, or they’ve never lived in England.

As a feel-bad film, ‘Look Back in Anger’ is up there with anything Ken Loach has ever put his name to. As a document of working class Britain, it’s a lot more convincing than anything Mike Leigh has ever put his name to. As a showcase for a searing, raging, no-holds-barred, tear-the-screen-up performance, it’s arguably Richard Burton’s finest hour.

Oliver Reed

Oliver Reed would have been 73 today.

Had it not, you know, been for a life of booze, birds and brawling, and all of it done to the extreme.

Here at chez Agitation, where teetotalism is a dirty word and it is unequivocally accepted that brilliance and self-destruction go hand in hand, a celebratory and non-judgemental glass of the old vino is being raised to the memory of one of Britain’s premiere hellraisers.

HELLRAISERS: Villain

Michael Tuchner's 1971 Brit crime outing 'Villain' came with one of the best taglines ever: "Meet Vic Dakin ... then wish you hadn't."

Vic Dakin (Richard Burton) is a vicious East End gangster with an appetite for rough trade and an almost unhealthy attachment to his mother. I'm guessing that Tuchner, Burton and scripters Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais were crossed off Ronnie Kray's Christmas card list soon after the film came out.

Burton, coming off bland historical epic 'Anne of the Thousand Days' and indifferent war movie 'Raid on Rommel', tears into the part, turning what could have been a hackneyed, one-note role into a symphony of hair-trigger menace and snarling contempt. When his nemesis Inspector Matthews (Nigel Davenport) announces he has witnesses against him, the caustic response is, "If I looked at one of them, they'd piss in their pants. Because I'm Vic Dakin!" Clement and la Frenais bring the same quick-fire patter to 'Villain' that they did to their sitcom scripts. Greeting Matthews as "Sergeant", the copper reminds Dakin of his promotion. "Come through, has it?" Dakin sneers, adding (without missing a beat), "That's nice. Bit more on your widow's pension."

It's tempting to describe their screenplay as a forerunner of their work on Roger Donaldson's 'The Bank Job'. Both follow the three-act structure of job gets planned; job is executed but with unforeseen consequences; various parties try to screw each other over in the aftermath. Both feature an effortless interweaving of subplots. Both depict peers of realm compromised by their extra-matiral shenanigans and in the pockets of underworld figures as a result. But whereas 'The Bank Job', notwithstanding its occasional moments of brutality, is essentially playful in its construction and knowingly ironic in its evocation of hard-edged 70s thrillers, 'Villain' is a hard-edged 70s thriller and what bit of humour Clement and la Frenais bring to the table is cynical, acidic and sparingly doled out.

The plot kicks off with Dakin getting some inside information from a disaffected wages clerk (James Cossins): a payroll, three heavies, ordinary car (the firm's awaiting delivery of an armoured van), £70k easy. Dakin's mind is more on his former squeeze Wolfe (Ian McShane), a bisexual hustler who's introduced pimping out his Home Counties girlfriend Venetia (Fiona Lewis) to sleazy but well-connected politican Gerald Draycott (Donald Sinden). Dakin's crew have their doubts - robbery's not their usual game - and to complicate matters the job would take place in someone else's "manor". Still, 70 grand is 70 grand (this is 1971, remember) and Dakin sets out get fellow mobster Frank Fletcher (T.P. McKenna)'s permission to operate on his turf.

Fletcher's hesitant, though. The job's risky. Then a strike is announced which affects the payroll transportation dates, and it's make your mind up time for all involved: hit the payroll the next day or not at all. Fletcher comes onboard, along with his right-hand-man Edgar Lowis (Joss Ackland).

What happens next is one of the best botched robberies scenes in crime cinema. The guards handling the payroll twig to Dakin's box-them-in-and-force-them-off-the-road tactics. A frenetic barrage of squealing tyres, twisted metal and down 'n' dirty hand-to-hand ensues (in fact, with its punchy editing, realistic violence and backdrops of industrial wastelands, 'Villain' presupposes the in-your-face aestheic of 'The Sweeney' by four years). The money is booby-trapped. Steel spikes erupt from one of the cases, injuring Lowis. A gas canister spews choking orange fumes from another. Fletcher takes a pasting.

Miraculously, however, they escape the scene. Dakin, knowing the heat will be coming down on him (Matthews has spent the first half of the film harrassing him, seemingly on general principle), leaves what remains of the money with Lowis. This is where things start going wrong for him. In short order Lowis is nicked and Matthews arrests Dakin in front of his dear old mum.

Cue Wolfe, now back in the fold and putting up with the beatings that constitute Dakin's understanding of foreplay, and the dirt he has on Draycott. Alibis a-go-go and Dakin's back on the street, pissed off and wanting the money. But Matthews is just as determined to put him behind bars ...

'Villain' is a solid 70s crime movie: the script is pacy, Tuchner's direction taut and clear-sighted (it was his first film; sadly, everything he made subsequently was by-the-numbers), and the entire cast - including Colin Welland, Tony Selby and Del Henney relishing decently-written secondary roles - fire on all cylinders. Cinematographer Christopher Challis, a million miles away from the romantic musings of Powell & Pressburger (he shot seven of their films), colours 'Villain' grim. His vision of post-swinging-Sixties London is a masterclass in unloveliness: vast acreages of concrete, abandoned factories, soulless arterial roads and flyovers, broken-down lean-to's under railway arches. The poet Shelley wrote "Hell is a city much like London". Pace Challis. His London spawned Vic Dakin, and if that isn't proof I don't know what is.

HELLRAISERS: The Stunt Man

Fast forward from Peter O’Toole playing a tyrannical Nazi general in an over-the-top war movie in 1967 to Peter O’Toole playing a tyrannical director making an over-the-top war movie in 1978*. And whaddaya know, it’s the director who’s the most dangerous character. Our boy allegedly based his portrayal of messaniac helmer Eli Cross on David Lean.

I’m saying nothing.

The perks of retrospect permit the observation that Eli Cross sounds quite similar to Eli Roth.

Again, I’m saying nothing.

Besides, Cross is shooting a war film not an exercise in torture porn. Or is he? Everything is about the shot; about provoking the audience. “I know a man who made an anti-war movie,” Cross reminisces, “a good one. When it was shown in his home town, army enlistment went up six hundred percent.” Cross wants his movie to be subversive, and to that end views newly hired stunt man Cameron (Steve Railsback) as more or less expendable. What’s a mere human life compared to getting the shot?

Cross’s fixation on getting the shot is demonstrated when a camera quits shooting with 22 seconds of still-usable film in the camera. When he dares to be flippant and ask what Cross could possibly have captured in 22 seconds, the director rounds on him: “In 22 seconds, I could break your fucking spine. In 22 seconds, I could pinch your head off like a fucking insect and spin it all over the fucking pavement. In 22 seconds, I could put 22 bullets inside your ridiculous gut. What I seem unable to do in 22 seconds is to keep you from ruining my film.”

So with Cross monstrously egomaniacal and the stunts he demands crazy if not suicidal, why on earth does Cameron go along with them? Ah, thereby hangs the dynamic of Richard Rush’s film.

Cameron is a Vietnam vet with a hazy past. He’s on the lam. In the opening scene, he avoids arrest by a couple of hick cops who could have wandered in from ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ and duffs up a would-be hard nut who tries to prevent his escape. Hitchhiking out of town, he’s crossing a bridge when he thumbs a lift from a man driving an old Duesenberg made up to look like a German staff car; the driver responds by kicking him out of the car and then almost running him down. Cameron heaves a lump of iron after him and walks angrily away. Next thing he knows the car has gone off the bridge and a helicopter has appeared out of nowhere, Cross borne down out of the skies in Leni Riefenstahl-ish magnificence.

Cameron has found himself, inadvertently, in the middle of one of the key shots in Cross’s movie. Moreover, he’s just killed the stunt man who was about to engineer said moment. Cross, quickly intuiting that Cameron has something to hide, makes Cameron an offer: he’ll keep the cops off Cameron’s back and in return Cameron will take the stunt man’s place. Reluctantly Cameron agrees to it, and Cross begins by having the on-set hairdresser give him a do that emphasises his resemblance to the dear departed.

A warped and satirical battle of wills ensues. Cameron engages with his new career head-on, earning the approbation of the crew and the affections of leading lady Nina (Barbara Hershey), while Cross manipulates him at every twist and turn until Cameron becomes convinced that Cross wants him to take the dead man’s place in every single respect including the all-important bit about not being alive anymore.

And this is where, for all its flaws, ‘The Stunt Man’ resoundingly succeeds. (And there are flaws: I was going to use the phrase “gaps in the logic of the film”, but “gaps” suggests restricted pockets of space you’d be hard pushed to squeeze through. The gaps I’m talking about are huge, wide-open, drive-a-fleet-of-trucks-through-without-touching-the-sides affairs. Also, it’s overlong; the humour doesn’t always gel; and Railsback’s performance is plank-like.) But where ‘The Stunt Man’ works is in its blurring of the lines between reality and make-believe, between authorial conception and directorial vision, between perception and paranoia.

“If God could do the tricks that we can do he’d be a happy man,” Cross declares, delighting in the integration of rampant egomania and huckster-like chicanery that epitomises his personality. It’s a key line. ‘The Stunt Man’ is a house of cards, a hall of mirrors, a tissue of lies and a web of deceit. And so it should be. It’s about Hollywood.



* ‘The Stunt Man’ requires its audience to think, therefore the studio got cold feet, shelved it, and it was 1980 before the film saw the light of day.

HELLRAISERS: The Night of the Generals

An all-star production of the over-produced, over-publicized, over-long archetypally ’60s variety, ‘The Night of the Generals’ blends murder mystery, conspiracy thriller and war movie tropes into a heady cocktail of WTF. We’re talking two and a half hours of hopelessly confused narrative digressions and howlingly incongruous scenes.

Occupied Poland, 1942: Major Grau (Omar Sharif) attends the scene after a prostitute is murdered in a dingy tenement building. Dressed in an ankle length greatcoat and black boots, he questions a witness who is hesitant about co-operating. And with good reason. “He was an officer,” the witness mumbles fearfully. Grau asks how he knows. “He was wearing trousers like yours.” Trousers, that is with a red stripe. The kind of natty apparel you don’t get to strut around in till they make you a general.

Like me reiterate at this point that Grau is dressed throughout this scene in a long greatcoat and high boots. His trousers are obscured. The man could be wearing a freakin’ kilt! Also, he’s played by Omar Sharif, whose swarthy Egyptian looks, while toned down with a dusting of white powder, remain more swarthy and ethnic than you’d credit anyone with in a military hierarchy based on Aryan purity.

The incongruities continue. The Polish hooker is revealed as a German agent, only for this tantalising subplot to disappear. A Corporal who’s a talented pianist complains at having to play Chopin when Wagner is his composer of choice. (Aside from the orchestral piece ‘Siegfried-Idyll’, Wagner’s entire output was opera or lieder; he wrote no piano music.)

Then there’s the lurching flash forwards to the mid-Sixties as Interpol agent Inspector Morand (Philippe Noiret) – a man whose connection to the events of the war isn’t established until halfway through the film – plods around tracking down the surviving protagonists and asking them blandly procedural questions in a manner that makes ‘Midsomer Murders’ look like James Ellroy on crack.

Oh yeah, and no sooner has the mise-en-scene returned the audience to Poland in 1942 than it’s suddenly Paris in 1944 and everyone’s been transferred and have co-incidentally met up again. Or maybe it’s not such a co-incidence, since ‘The Night of the Generals’ takes another lurch at this point and the 20th July plot (you know, the old bomb-in-a-briefcase under the table, let’s kill der Führer routine) is in full swing and all but one of the potential murderers are involved in the conspiracy.

But wait, you protest. The 20th July plot took place back in Germany. What’s all this malarkey about the conspirators being in Paris? Well, they’re waiting for word that the craply-moustachioed one is toast, whereupon they can establish a new government and curtail the war and … oh, what the hell? The point is, the conspirators have to keep the non-conspirator out of the way for a couple of days, and some fucking genius involved in the production of this Euro-pudding decided that huge amounts of tension and suspense could be wrung from one of the major characters being driven around Paris interminably and having a Stendhal Syndrome kind of turn when he goes to view some allegedly decadent art (you know, the kind that features naked women). This character being a hardcore Hitlerite and having a tendency to viciousness, could he be the murderer?

There is absolutely no mystery to ‘The Night of the Generals’. No suspense. It is by turns ludicrous, clichéd, overacted and pedestrian in its direction. It boasts a powerhouse cast – Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray (two Blofelds in the same movie! playing Nazis!), Christopher Plummer, Coral Browne, Philippe Noiret, John Gregson and Nigel Stock – all of whom are miscast, underused or saddled with appalling dialogue: Noiret’s is exposition-heavy and, although at ease in English-language productions elsewhere in his filmography, he seems distinctly unconfident here; and pity Pleasance, desperately trying to breathe life into a clunker of a line like “am I to assume that if Stage 1 meets with resistance we will go to Stage 2 and possibly Stage 3” (I can only quote Paula’s monumentally derisive comment: “Wow, so there isn’t a Stage 1a, 1b or 1z, then?”)

All, I should say, except Peter O’Toole. He takes hygiene-obsessed General Tanz (ostensibly the most one-note character in the whole piece) and imbues him with the insouciance of T.E. Lawrence (or at least the version of Lawrence essayed by O’Toole in David Lean’s epic), the provocative and oddly threatening dandyism of Dirk Bogarde in ‘The Singer Not the Song’, and an icily ironic remove that pre-supposes Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.

Armed with cap, boots, swagger stick, leather gloves and a piercing thousand-yard stare, O’Toole stalks through the film, disdaining Anatole Litvak’s somnolent direction, rolling the deficiencies of the script around in his mouth before spitting them out, and making mediocre material memorable simply by treating it, imperiously, with the contempt it deserves.

HELLRAISERS: Plenty of O'Toole

Deciding on the Hellraisers project – rave about one film a month, alternating between the careers of Messrs Burton, Harris, O’Toole and Reed – I logged into my LoveFilm account and enthusiastically updated my list with the highlights of these gentlemen’s back catalogue. I arranged the list so that I’d get a fair selection for each actor that would give me plenty of material for the next few months.

Many of my choices, however, were flagged with “short wait”, “long wait” or “very long wait”, which I am convinced is a euphemism for “there is a copy of this on DVD, honest, but we largely suspect it’s being used as a beer mat by an oil-rig worker based off the coast of Shetland, but the moment we get it back we’ll send to you, honest we will”.

The first two hellraiser titles to hit my doormat were ‘The Night of the Generals’ and ‘The Stunt Man’. And so it is that the project kicks off, over the next two evenings, with a Peter O’Toole double bill.

Hellraisers

There are some film books that effortlessly pin down an era in cinema history, such as Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’. There are some that chronicle in car-crash detail the disastrous consequences of a misconceived, miscast, all round flop – Julie Salamon’s ‘The Devil’s Candy’. There are some autobiographies that are so staggeringly egomaniacal (Michael Powell’s ‘A Life in Movies’) or so elegantly persuasive (any of Dirk Bogarde’s memoirs) that the truth hardly matters. There are diaries that reveal the day-to-day frustrations of even the greatest directors (Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Time Within Time’). There are biographies that so effectively get under the skin of their subject (Kevin Brownlow’s book on David Lean; John Coldstream’s on Bogarde) that they remain unforgettable.

Then there’s a book like Robert Sellers’s ‘Hellraisers: the Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed’, which is an unapologetic way-hey-the-lads celebration of the collective boozing, brawling and bad behaviour (womanizing needs to be added but I can’t think of a synonym beginning with “B” which will preserve the alliteration) of four of the most devil-may-care talents ever to grace the silver screen.

Because believe it or not, between the bars and the arrests and the brawls with paparazzi and the on-off romances (mentioning no names, Mr Burton) these boys actually made the odd film or two.

In fact, between them, they clocked up some of the most visceral, intense, challenging, dynamic and kick-ass performances in cinema: think of Burton losing it on the pulpit in the opening scene of ‘The Night of the Iguana’, Harris looking like he’s about to ask the fucking camera outside in just about every frame of ‘This Sporting Life’, O’Toole casually announcing “we have taken Aqaba” in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Reed getting stuck into a little nude wrestling with Alan Bates in ‘Women in Love’. And that’s just for starters …

From next month I’ll be running an ongoing series on The Agitation of the Mind, celebrating the bad boys of British cinema. There will be booze. There will be blood. There will be some fucking great movies. It all kicks off first week in May but until then the bar is open at The Agitation of the Liver, so raise your glasses to these gentlemen, drink to their hellraising and rue the fact that we live in a world where Zac Efron headlines movies, launches a thousand merchandising products and doesn’t even have the common decency to trash a restaurant, shag for England (oh all right then, America) and wake up in a holding cell wondering what time the pubs open.