A Thrilling Development: Nurse Will Make It Better (1975)

“Thriller”, season 4, episode 2

Charley (Linda Liles), the daughter of Edgar Harrow (Cec Linder), an American diplomat in England living in quite the country manor, is a bit of a firecracker. She’s breaking hearts left and right – particularly those hearts her more seriously minded sister Ruth (Andrea Marcovicci) seems invested in – and goes through life with the clear conviction everything in it belongs to the rich and hot like her by rights.

So it’s not much of a surprise that she can’t cope at all when a riding accident she’s at least half responsible for herself leaves her paraplegic. In fact, her behaviour is so extreme, it’s not terribly easy to feel much compassion for her. It is also driving away one nurse after the other.

Until, that is, Bessy Morne (Diana Dors) arrives. Bessy easily – and with a bit of magic – manages to build a rapport with Charley, and, like an evil Mary Poppins, soon starts to exert a rather negative influence on the rest of the household, too, particularly the youngest sister Susy (Tiffany Kinney). And look, if Charley is a good girl, reads the nice big book of witchcraft dear old Bessy is going to provide and agrees to a certain pact, she might even manage to walk again.

Only Ruth and Harrow’s chief of security Carson (Ed Bishop) seem to understand that something very bad is going on, but they won’t really start to do something about it once the body count starts. On the plus side, there’s also an alcoholic priest (Patrick Troughton) in play who might eventually come in useful.

In the coming weeks or months (I’ve never been too great at planning, I have to admit), I am going to dip into episodes of the British 70s TV show Thriller (not to be confused with the US 60s show, of course). Produced and to a large degree written by the great Brian Clemens (of the Steed and colleagues Avengers and so much more fame), this was an anthology show with episodes of about seventy minutes length each, usually with some American actors involved to make it easier to sell the show there, and generally with thriller (what a surprise) and – more irregularly – supernatural horror plots. There’s an obvious debt to Hitchcock style thrillers on display, of course, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised by an influence of the – often great - non-supernatural thrillers made by Hammer which were of course themselves inspired by Hitchcock.

This being a British TV production of its time, the show does tend to some of the visual weaknesses TV production in the country was already starting to lose when this was made, namely the often slightly confusing contrast between 16mm exterior shots and interiors shot on video, which does tend to make even the best set look a bit more flimsy than it should.

However, thanks to usually fun acting and clever and unapologetically pulpy scripts, that sort of thing is rather easily overlooked in the better half or so of the episodes I’ve seen by now.

Nurse Will Make It Better really is a case in point there. This is one of the absolutely supernatural entries in the series, with no improbable last act reveal to make things “realistic”. Instead, this one ends in a scenery chewing duel between Patrick Troughton (in what feels like a bit of dry run to his character in The Omen) and Diana Dors absolutely made-up as evil Mary Poppins (though she is in truth the devil herself, which is pretty awesome). A duel that Dors absolutely wins with a performance that manages to be so camp and silly that it actually becomes creepy again.

Which really is the way the script handles most of its business. Clemens is not at all afraid of using every simple and cheap (that is, affordable on his budget) trick in the books to make his tale of a sexless seduction of the not so innocent interesting and fun, first building the family up in short and deft strokes, and then letting it implode via the obvious fault lines once Bessy gets her claws in.

There are some genuinely creepy scenes here, in particular most everything concerning Bessy’s influence on Susy, a couple of cleverly staged murders, and some neat business where characters see something horrible Bessy hides in a little chest, but the audience can only go by their reactions on what it actually is, making a virtue of the fact the show couldn’t effort many special effects. The acting is very on point, too. Marcovicci makes a very likeable heroine who wins out in the end because she loves a family that gives her a lot of reasons to hate them, and channels this love into practical action, and Liles and Kinney really seem to have fun witching it up.

While the direction – by Shaun O’Riordan, a British TV stalwart – certainly can’t go all giallo or 70s cinematic horror on us thanks to the problems of mostly shooting on video under very constrained budgetary circumstances (the lighting in the show as a whole tends to be rather bland, too), there’s quite a bit of clever blocking and framing to produce tension or demonstrate the lines of influence here.

It’s a fun little film – given its running time and structure, that does seem the proper word rather than episode – giving dear old Bessy her due very nicely.

In short: Danger Route (1967)

Jonas Wilde (Richard Johnson) is working as a killer for one of the British secret services; as it goes with jobs like this, he’s gotten sick and tired of it, particularly since he’s acquired Jocelyn (Carol Lynley) as the kind of girlfriend that makes a man think of retiring. Also, not killing people for money anymore.

However, shortly after his latest job and before he can do anything about his retirement plans, Wilde is called in for an emergency assassination on British soil. The Americans have gotten hold of an Eastern defector, but Wilde’s superiors are convinced the man is in fact a double agent who will do incalculable damage if he’s not “gotten rid of”. The job doesn’t sit quite right with Wilde, particularly when curious things start to happen around the new job. His contact Ravenspur (Maurice Denham) suddenly grows a niece (Barbara Bouchet) who just happens to be in the game too, and Wilde can’t shake the idea the defector isn’t the only one who is to be gotten rid of.

He’s quite right, too, and that’s not even the worst thing Wilde will learn in the next few days. Well, at least he’s tough and unpleasant enough to have a chance for survival.

Most of us know Amicus as purveyors of horror anthology pictures, but of course the company did work in other genres too, like the mid-level realist spy movie Danger Route. The film is neither as kooky as your typical Eurospy movie or James Bond film nor as complex and dark as Le Carré style espionage films but moves on that middle ground where the spy work is relatively down to Earth yet not quite enough so to be believable as naturalistic.

On a philosophical level, the film prefers a somewhat tired bitterness and a very general feeling of disgust, a disgust that is in large part shared by its hero, who is disgusted by the things he does for a living (and once for Queen and Country), disgusted by how good he is at them, clearly disgusted too at the way he uses people like Diana Dors’s (fittingly sadly played) lonely alcoholic housekeeper, and certainly disgusted by the duplicity of everyone around him. Johnson expresses this disgust with deeply tired look and the facial expression of a man who really can’t smile at himself in the mirror anymore. The way Johnson plays him, it’s quite clear that Wilde expects the betrayals he is going to suffer during the course of the movie as the logical consequence of all the betrayals he has committed – and continues to commit - himself. In what feels like a twist of bitter irony, the only times Wilde really seems to be without doubts is when he commits the violent acts he has begun to abhor.

Seth Holt (a director with a bit of spy experience via the TV show Danger Man) films this bitter little piece without any grand gestures, concentrating on the performances of his lead and a bunch of fine supporting actors, giving everything the appropriate leanness as well as providing moments of effectively unpleasant violence that turn Danger Route into something of a lost gem of the espionage genre.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,spies,seth holt,richard johnson,carol lynley,barbara bouchet,gordon jackson,diana dors

Craze (1974)

London antiques dealer Neal Mottram (Jack Palance) is in financial trouble, with creditors and the IRS breathing down his neck.

Neal also just happens to be the leader of a small cult that worships the idol of a demon named Chuku (or something of that sort) he keeps in his cellar. Neal's situation begins to improve when he has an altercation with a former member of his coven and accidentally pushes her onto the (not very spiky looking) trident the idol carries. Neal - not the sanest of men - decides to interpret the woman's death as a blood sacrifice, rolls up the dead body in a carpet and throws it in the Thames.

A bit later, Neal suddenly finds a secret drawer full of gold coins that should take care of his most dire financial troubles. Clearly, it's Chuku's reward for the sacrifice!

With this sure sign of godly intervention in hand, it does not take long until Neal loses it completely and decides to sacrifice more women to satisfy Chuku. Neal's live-in "associate" Ronnie (Martin Potter), a young man whom the antiques dealer took in from the street where he was working as a (gay) prostitute, soon enough cops to what his boss is doing, but a weird mixture of loyalty and what one assumes - though the film does never actually show it - must be at least a part-time physical relationship between the men, possibly something more romantic, keeps him in line while Neal continues killing.

The police (with a short appearance by Trevor Howard and a young David Warbeck) are soon on Neal's case.Yet even though the antiques dealer acts as suspiciously as humanly possible, the cops can't prove anything. That may have something to do with the fact that the leader of the investigation, Sergeant Wall (Michael Jayston), seem more used to letting his fists speak than to the actual investigation of crimes. Still, Neal's luck (or Chuku's blessing) can't hold out forever.

Craze is a minor film in the body of work of the great Freddie Francis (here working for producer and writer Herman Cohen) that is quite below much of the director's best work in quality, but that functions perfectly well as a time capsule of early 70s London as seen through the eyes of the elderly.

Consequently, the film is full of everything you expect from the first half of the 70s: blinding fashion (and blinding wallpapers), random occult nonsense that tries to give itself an "exotic" sheen, cops who may have once heard of civil rights, awkward sex scenes (they do after all include Jack Palance as an irresistible ladies' man, though his character seems to assume that's Chuku's - big scriptwriter in the cellar that he is - blessing too and so on. These pleasures/eyesores all come together into a thick miasma of the mood of the film's time.

As a time capsule, Craze is highly entertaining, and really pretty brilliant; as a horror film, it's okay when one has a tolerance for middling genre pieces whose strengths don't have much to do with them being horror films. Francis was incapable to shoot a bad looking movie, as he again and again demonstrates through his lovely eye for visual detail here, yet the director was well capable of making a film that just doesn't do much of interest when it comes to its actual storyline. The plot meanders a bit too much, the murders tend to the absurd, yet are never absurd enough to get Craze into the zone of irreality, and most of the interesting thematic avenues are never really explored. There's a bit of subtext in the movie that could lead to one interpreting Palance's murders as his attempt to deny his attraction to Ronnie, but honestly, that's stretching interpretational freedom in the manner of Mister Fantastic.

So what's left when one tries to watch Craze as a horror film are scenes of Jack Palance mugging, Jack Palance killing women, some very brightly coloured blood, and Jack Palance's bare chest. That would leave the film barely watchable in a "point and laugh" sort of way, but for me, there's something utterly irresistible about a film so desperately trying to be part of its time, and to be pop. I do doubt Francis or Cohen actually understood contemporary pop culture in the least, but that's part of the fun of the whole affair.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,horror,reviews,freddie francis,jack palance,martin potter,diana dors,suzy kendall