Let the Right One In

I’d enjoyed the novel. I’d read review after review laden with superlatives. I’d heard it called the best vampire movie since ‘Near Dark’; an instant modern classic.

I carried such a weight of expectation to the cinema with me, that I virtually needed a forklift truck to carry it. That was over a month ago and initially I was … not disappointed, that’s the wrong word; I was impressed with ‘Let the Right One In’. I admired it for all sorts of reasons that I’ll go into in a couple of paragraphs’ time. It just left me a little cold. And there were a few niggling flaws.

Call me a pedant, but this is the kind of thing that jumps off the and reminds me I’m watching a movie, a fiction, something fake: a car arrives outside a brutally monolithic housing complex and its driver starts carting his belongings inside while someone watches from another apartment; an overhead POV shot shows the car on a snowy street, with nary a tyre track behind it, nor any footprints leading from it.

Okay, you’re right: I’m a pedant.

The other scenes that bother me are a tad harder to dismiss. The whole film – like the novel it’s based on – is built around one of the cardinal rules of the vampire genre: a vampire can only enter premises they have been invited into. Both novel and film demonstrate in icky detail what happens if they just go waltzing in without invitation. ‘Let the Right One In’ – it’s both title and mission statement. Yet on two occasions – Ginia (Ika Nord) turning up at Gösta (Karl-Robert Lindgren)’s house; Eli (Lina Leandersson) arriving in the nick of time to save Oscar (Kåre Hedebrant) in the film’s otherwise brilliantly staged denouement – this crucial device is in one case completely overlooked and in the other never fully explained. I’d lay the blame at the scriptwriter’s door for not reading the book properly, only John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own novel for the screen.

Now, having got all that off my chest, on to what makes Tomas Alfredson’s film so impressive. Firstly, a creaky subplot that only serves to pad out the last third of the book is completely excised, so that the real point of the story is never lost sight of. It’s tempting to describe ‘Let the Right One In’ as a horror story with a heart, but that makes it sound mawkish. The horror is firmly routed in social reality: broken homes, loneliness, bullying, inner rage. The heart is in the friendship (borderline love) between Oscar and Eli. Both need someone. Both are outsiders. Both have a streak of darkness in their personality: Oscar carries a knife and gouges at a tree, imagining he’s striking back at his persecutors; Eli … well, she’s a vampire. It’s a question of blood, innit?

A month down the line and it’s the coldness of the film that lingers. Alfredson films the housing estate like Ingmar Bergman channelling Ken Loach. The exteriors are foreboding; the interiors are drab; the lives that are lived here are tired and worn down. Shots are composed to emphasize claustrophobia: characters are framed in doorways, or tight against walls (mostly notably when Oscar and Eli communicate by tapping out morse code). Even the handful of scenes set in the countryside outside the estate offer little release. Trees press in against each other. The icy expanse of a lake is treacherous rather than scenic.

Much of the narrative occurs at night, Alfredson mostly using just one point of illumination in any one scene, leaving much of the screen dark. I’m not talking about effective use of shadows or the suggestion of things half-seen. ‘Let the Right One In’ creates an aesthetic of solid swathes of darkness. This – and the ferocious intelligence with which it keeps its supernatural elements reigned in and instead draws horror from reality – is the key to the film’s bleak and wintry brilliance.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Godfather Part II

If ‘The Godfather’ can be said, broadly, to be about the old Don acceding to the new Don, then ‘The Godfather Part II’ is a tale of several Dons.

Principally, it documents the ruinous patriarchy of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) following the death of his father (Marlon Brando) and his succession as the Don at the end of the first film in counterpoint with the origin story of the young Vito Corleone (Robert de Niro) and the events that made him the Godfather.

‘The Godfather Part II’ opens with Vito Andolini, a young boy, solemnly following his father’s coffin. Cause of death: an insult to mafia chieftan Don Cicci (Joe Spinell). His mother pleads with Cicci for her son’s life, but he’s adamant: the boy must be killed lest he grow to a man and continue a vendetta. Vito’s elder brother is killed for this selfsame reason.

After his mother’s death at Don Cicci’s hands, Vito is smuggled out of the isolated village of Corleone and finds himself on a ship bound for America. At Ellis Island, an officer reads his name tag: “Vito Andolini from Corleone”; the clerk mishears and logs his name as Vito Corleone.

A couple of decades later another Don, this time a corpulent white-suited robber baron called Fanucci (Gaston Moschin), seals Vito’s fate. Already associating with snappily dressed petty criminal Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), Vito makes the jump from small-time to fully-fledged Don-hood when Fanucci tries to put the squeeze on them and Vito, sickened by the way he leeches off his fellow Sicilians, decides to take him out of the game.

Make no mistake about it: Vito Corleone does bad things. He steals, he fences (and not in the swordplay sense of the word either) and he commits murder. He benefits people’s respect – and the little gifts by which they show it – by trading on the reputation gained from dealing with Don Fanucci. And yet there’s honour in the way he conducts business. Whereas Don Fanucci operated to the detriment of the fellow Sicilians in his neighbourhood, Don Corleone operates, by and large, to their betterment.

Soon he’s projecting the appearance of a legitimate businessman, importing olive oil from his native country. A business trip to Sicily takes him back to Corleone and some unfinished business.

Michael Corleone, however, is moving further away from the family business inherited from his father. The Corleone family have moved lock, stock and barrel to Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and sold off the olive oil business preparatory to a move into the entertainment sector, principally casinos. Michael wants a piece of the action owned by ageing shyster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), a man whose incessant talk of retirement and his own mortality, sprinkled with promises that he’s going to turn over his interests to his “friends”, keeps his would-be rivals hanging on for an easy share out instead of becoming embroiled in a messy war for control. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer: Hyman Roth could have coined the saying.

Things quickly go wrong. There’s a traitor in the Corleone’s midst, and an attempt on Michael’s life. A potentially lucrative move into the casinos of Cuba goes tits up when Castro’s revolution topples the old guard and a rich man’s playground suddenly becomes a maelstrom, with mobsters, politicians and playboys alike falling over each other to leave the country. Michael becomes increasingly insular. Paranoia gradually informs his decisions and he spurns the advice of trusted consgilieri Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall). His marriage to Kay (Diane Keaton) disintegrates. Congressional hearings on organised crime single out the Corleones, with the promise of a star witness who will give direct testimony against Michael.

Pacino and de Niro are both – no other way of putting it – fucking awesome. The script, by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, cleverly juxtaposes father and son at roughly similar ages. De Niro reverse-engineers Brando’s characterisation in a pitch-perfect performance, capturing both Vito’s steely resolve and the magnanimity and family-based code of honour that underpins it. Pacino continues the character arc from the first film, drilling down deeper into Michael’s heart of darkness.

With its extended running time (just shy of three and a quarter hours), multiplicity of characters and events, and detailed examination of the dynamics of families, businesses and allegiances, ‘The Godfather Part II’ could easily have degenerated into big screen soap opera. With Coppola at the absolute top of his game – this is one of the very few sequels in the history of cinema to surpass the original – the effect, instead, is more akin to grand opera.

Or to Shakespearean tragedy. The comparison is almost clumsy – the temptation to facile epithets like “‘Hamlet’ with a tommy-gun” or “‘King Lear’ in a fedora” are irresistible – but ‘The Godfather Part II’ deserves comparison to the Bard. Shakespeare’s tragedies are shot through with the understanding that it’s never as simple as good vs bad; that revenge is a muddied, muddled and compromised business from the off; that plotting and betrayal are only part of it, and what William Ernest Henley called “the bludgeonings of chance” are just as instrumental in the shaping of events.

Coppola’s masterpiece, too, is freighted with these understandings; and also with the grimly irony that it’s not the sins of the father that are at the heart of this particular tragedy but the sins of the son.

"You have come of your own free will to the appointed place": another visit to The Wicker Man

If you’re after copy of ‘The Wicker Man’ on DVD, you’ll be most likely to find it in the horror section.

But is it a horror film? The ending’s definitely horrific and the subject matter is paganism and the extremes of religious belief. And yet it’s not a horror film in the way ‘The Omen’ or ‘The Exorcist’ are horror films.

It’s not a thriller either, not really … although there are elements of that genre. It’s not a mystery or crime film, even though the main character is a police officer investigating a disappearance.

If Zavvi or HMV had curio sections, or oddity sections, that’s where ‘The Wicker Man’ would end up. The fact that the only genre you could legitimately assign it to is the musical (there are at least five carefully choreographed musical numbers, all of them pertinent to the narrative) just makes it the more curious, the more odd.

Devout Christian Sgt Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) – a man so pious he’s saving himself for the marriage bed – receives a letter summoning him to the remote island of Summerisle where a young girl, Rowan Morrison, has gone missing. How remote? Howie needs a small flying boat to get there! He goes alone (bad move) and rubs the locals up the wrong way from the word go (bad move part two).

Not that Howie and the islanders were ever going to hit it off, though. Not when the younger contingent fornicate publicly while there elders lasciviously serenade Willow (Britt Ekland), the landlord’s sultry daughter at The Green Man. Not when the local chemist has jars of foreskins and foetuses on his counter. Not when schoolteacher Miss Rose (Diane Cilento) discusses phallic symbolism with a class of girls in their early teens, or one of her colleagues leads a group of similarly aged boys in a sexually suggestive song and dance around the maypole. Not when he witnesses a fertility rite in progress whilst making his way to Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee)’s ancestral seat to voice his suspicions that Rowan is not just missing but murdered.

Lord Summerisle: I’m confident your suspicions are wrong, Sergeant. We don’t commit murder here. We're a deeply religious people.
Sgt Howie: Religious? With ruined churches, no ministers, no priests and children dancing naked.
Lord Summerisle: They do love their divinity lessons.
Sgt Howie: But they a-are naked.
Lord Summerisle: Naturally. It’s much too dangerous to jump through fire with their clothes on.
Sgt Howie: What religion can they possibly be learning jumping over bonfires?
Lord Summerisle: Parthenogenesis.
Sgt Howie: What?
Lord Summerisle: Literally, as Miss Rose would doubtless say in her assiduous way, reproduction without sexual union.
Sgt Howie: What is all this? I mean, you’ve got fake biology, fake religion! Sir, have these children never heard of Jesus?
Lord Summerisle: Himself the son of a virgin impregnated, I believe, by a ghost.

On the off-chance you haven’t seen ‘The Wicker Man’ and the picture I used on yesterday’s post didn’t give it away, here’s a

SPOILER ALERT

The clash between Howie’s belief system (staunch, pious, puritanical Christianity) and Summerisle’s (paganism, fertility, sacrifice … you know, when necessary) is the life blood of the film. It’s what gives ‘The Wicker Man’ its structure, its tension, its symbolism and its power.

His values and moral rectitude are challenged by the islanders’ sexual liberalism, culminating in his ‘tempting’ by Willow (the darkly erotic tensions that have informed the proceedings thus far get kicked up a notch with Ekland’s renowned dance sequence); casual acts of blasphemy and heathenism fuel his slow-burning sense of outrage; obstructions to his investigation only strengthen his determination to find Rowan.

And of course it’s all, as Summerisle blandly informs him, a game. With Howie as the pawn. The sacrificial pawn. “Animals are fine,” Summerisle opines, “but their acceptability is limited. A little child is even better. But not nearly as effective as the right kind of adult.” In other words, a virgin. (Remember that line in ‘Scream’ – “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex … Big no-no. Sex equals death”? Scratch that!)

It’s when the islanders advance on Howie and bind him and drag him up the hill to the eponymous effigy that ‘The Wicker Man’ makes the leap from compelling and well-made if somewhat offbeat movie to completely unforgettable cinematic experience. The roles played in the May Day pageant are made devastatingly clear. Howie has played the fool and been king for a day – “and who but a fool would do that?” He will, he is told, undergo death and rebirth. Not his rebirth, though; that of Summerisle’s crops. “As a Christian, I hope for resurrection,” Howie retorts, “and even if you kill me now, it is I who will live again and not your damned apples.” Summerisle reminds him that it’s a rare privilege for a man of his religious values to be granted a martyr’s death. Indeed, when Howie is stripped, anointed and dressed, prior to his sacrifice, in a white robe (arms held out at shoulder height in a crucifixion pose), the ritual is almost Christian in its iconography.

Howie warns Summerisle that another failed crop might result in his sacrifice. “The crops will not fail,” comes the defiant response. The debate – the battle, as it were, of beliefs – continues even when Howie’s been secured in the wicker man and the kindling around its base lit. As Lord Summerisle leads his people in a full-throated rendition of ‘Summer is i-cumen in’, Howie gives it some 23rd Psalm, his voice carrying over theirs. He calls down a curse upon them. He beseeches his God to receive his soul.

The closing shot shows the wicker man consumed by flames, a raging fire against a yet more fiery sunset. There’s an almost blood-like quality to the image that’s wholly appropriate for a film about the conflict between two men of equal but divergent religious fervour – one orthodox, one rooted in supposedly less enlightened times – and the fine line between faith and madness evident in both of them.

SPOILERS END

PERSONAL FAVES: The Wicker Man

I started The Agitation of the Mind to celebrate great movies, not to carp about mediocre ones. To indulge my passion in the art form, not to slate it. I wasn’t interested in playground-level name-calling over films I didn’t like.

Which was all very noble and high-minded. But it hasn’t stopped me, over the year and a half I’ve been running this site, from vituperatively drubbing the likes of ‘The Happening’ and ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and having a high old time doing it.

So, before I get on with the business at hand – a two-parter* on Robin Hardy’s cult oddity ‘The Wicker Man’ in honour of Christopher Lee’s 87th birthday – there’s something I need to get off my chest and I’m going to be very immature about it.

Neil laBute’s 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage is a great big pile of poo. So nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!

Right. Back to business.

Christopher Lee was riding high on his popularity as Dracula in a seemingly endless parade of Hammer films when he came across David Pinner’s novel ‘Ritual’ and recognised its potential. Anthony Shaffer was also riding high: the film version of his Tony award-winning play ‘Sleuth’, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, had garnered great acclaim, and he’d been engaged to script Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, ‘Frenzy’.

Shaffer’s adaptation retained little of Pinner’s narrative, instead fashioning an enigmatic mystery rich in symbolism and enigmatic mise-en-scene based around a conflict between belief systems (Christianity and paganism). Robin Hardy landed directorial duties and probably had no idea how maligned, misappropriated, controversial and – finally – revered his film would become.

Produced through the ailing British Lion, the company had just been acquired by John Bentley. Faced with union concern that he was going to asset-strip the company, Bentley rushed ‘The Wicker Man’ into production. The May Day setting, crucial to the film’s aesthetic and imagery, called for a springtime shoot; instead, Hardy and his cast and crew found themselves shooting in October. Fake blossom was glued to trees and the dancers called upon to perform au naturel and al fresco in the fertility rite scene braved the late autumn chills.

An eclectic cast was assembled: alongside Christopher Lee and fellow Hammer alumnus Ingrid Pitt were Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland and, after David Hemmings and Michael York passed, the lead role of Sgt Neil Howie went to Edward Woodward, best known then for his role in the TV series ‘Callan’.

An opening credit thanks “The Lord Summerisle [Lee’s character in ‘The Wicker Man’] and the people of his island off the west coast of Scotland for this privileged insight into their religious practices”. However, in his magnificently titled autobiography ‘Lord of Misrule’, Lee recalls “we went to Ayrshire, Kirkcudbrightshire, Newton Stewart, the Logan Botanical Gardens and Culzean Castle … and with these and other sites on the Scottish mainland, we stitched together a totally plausible island”.

If Lee refers to the fictitious island as being “stitched together”, then Hardy’s original 100-minute cut of the film was summarily unstitched, reduced by 15 minutes and the remnants re-cobbled together with little regard for continuity. During shooting, British Lion had passed from Bentley to EMI and was now being run by Michael Deeley, who deemed ‘The Wicker Man’ one of the worst things he’d seen and enforced the cuts which brought the running time down to B-movie length; it was eventually released on a double bill with Nic Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’.

It’s a testament to the atmosphere of creeping dread that suffuses every frame of ‘The Wicker Man’, as well as to the performances and Hardy’s off-kilter direction (the film has the feel of a waking dream; or, in its final stages, nightmare) that even in its ravaged 84-minute incarnation, it’s still one hell of a movie. I first saw it in this version on TV in my mid-teens and it wormed into my subconscious and twenty years later I still find it unnerving and intriguing and compelling.

Robin Hardy subsequently attempted to recover the excised footage and reassemble his original cut. The film canisters, however, were missing, popularly thought to have been amongst a consignment of obsolete stock used as landfill during construction of the M4 motorway. Which could have been the end of the story, except for a print of ‘The Wicker Man’ that had been sent, pre-Michael Deeley’s interference, to Roger Corman who was considering releasing it to the drive-in circuit.

Although there was a limited cinema re-release in 1979 (six years after the ignominious original release), it wasn’t until the 2001 DVD restoration produced by Canal+, who had, by this time, acquired the rights, that Hardy’s complete version of ‘The Wicker Man’ gained any degree of widespread distribution.

The restoration is crucial in terms of pacing, characterisation and establishing Lord Summerisle and his subjects’ paganism in stark contrast to Howie’s devout Christianity. We follow Howie’s increasingly frustrated investigation over two nights on the island (the Deeley-savaged version compresses the entire narrative across one night, making for a cluttered second half where exposition and continuity are sacrificed and Howie lurches from one set-piece to the next); more of the islanders are seen to play a part in the proceedings; and Howie’s character arc from piety to outrage to martyrdom is more effectively – and poignantly – achieved.

Interestingly, Robin Hardy – whose only directing credits since ‘The Wicker Man’ have been ‘The Fantasist’ (in 1986) and some episodes of ‘E Street’ – is currently trying to secure financing for the intriguingly titled ‘Cowboys for Christ’, described as the projected second part of a ‘Wicker Man’ trilogy and slated to reunite the director with Christopher Lee.


SOURCES
‘Lord of Misrule’ by Christopher Lee (Orion, 2003)
‘The Wicker Man’: Wikipedia article
‘The Wicker Man’ website

*The behind-the-scenes stuff today, followed by an appreciation of the film itself tomorrow.

Sir Ian McKellen

Happy 70th birthday to an authentic acting legend: Sir Ian McKellen. Already an accomplished and justly celebrated performer in the theatre before he achieved success on the big screen, Sir Ian has excelled in everything from Michael Mann’s underrated slab of Nazi gothic ‘The Keep’ to Bill Condon’s ‘Gods and Monsters’, in which his portrayal of director James Whale pretty much fits the description “unforgettable”.

Of his appearances as, respectively, Magneto and Gandalf in the insanely popular ‘X-Men’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogies … well, the enduring appeal of the films and the man himself speaks volumes.

And you’ve got to love someone who, at the absolute height of his cinematic popularity, fulfilled a long-held ambition by appearing in ‘Coronation Street’. But why be surprised? This is, after all, the man who single-handedly made ‘The Da Vinci Code’ – a whopping pile of fetid bum-dung whenever Sir Ian’s not onscreen – somehow watchable.

There’s a lot of reasons to admire Sir Ian McKellen, a lot of reasons why I’m raising a large glass to him tonight. One of those reasons is his support of LGBT rights. Sir Ian is co-founder of Stonewall and a patron of, amongst others, Pride London and The Lesbian and Gay Foundation. He has spoken of tearing out homophobic passages from Gideon Bibles while staying in hotel rooms and caused the plug to be pulled on a TV interview in Singapore when he asked if the host could recommend a local gay bar.

All good stuff, but it’s the political aspect to his activism that stirs the blood. When he came out in 1988, he was vocal in his opposition of Section 28 (a controversial legislation then being considered by the Conservation government that stipulated local councils should “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”; in short, a law that would have hamstrung gay rights and consciousness-raising about gay rights). At a meeting with MP Michael Howard, the politician not only refused to change his stance on Section 28 but had the temerity to ask Sir Ian to sign an autograph … which he did, annotating it “Fuck off, I’m gay.”

Respect!

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.