Three Films Make A Post: Evil has a new vessel…

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023): From time to time, Gary Shore’s and Rebecca Harris’s tourist attraction based horror film gets up to a scene or two of effective, surrealist horror. More often then not, alas, this is one of those movies that confuses “surrealist” with “random”, so there are interminable scenes of the filmmakers just throwing random stuff at characters and audience.

Little of that stuff sticks or lands anywhere interesting, while the film drags through an interminable two hours of non-plot. Good actors like Alice Eve and Joel Fry stand around, do things with little relevance or connection, some dude who doesn’t look like him and isn’t too great of a dancer plays Fred Astaire (did I mention this thing is random?), and little of any actual consequence, impact or meaning happens.

The Red Monks aka I frati rossi (1988): Not really less confused but decidedly more concise is this Italian TV movie (“Presented by Lucio Fulci”) directed by Gianni Martucci. Its tale of sordidness and a bit of murder plays out before an early 40s background it can’t afford to actually portray (again comparable to Queen Mary) but really doesn’t seem to care about anyway. What the film does care about is to put a kind of cheapskate greatest hits of Italian Gothic horror and giallo tropes on screen, mix them up with the help of a surprisingly clever protagonist shift in the final act, and let its audience wallow nostalgically in the TV sleaze.

This will only work for viewers who are really into the beautiful ages of Italian genre cinema and its byways, but for those like us, it is a surprisingly fun little movie.

The Spiral Staircase (1975): This version of the Ethel Lina White thriller drags the somewhat venerable book into the age of the 70s British potboiler thriller. It isn’t exactly art, but Peter Collinson was pretty great at this sort of thing, rushing its protagonist (Jacqueline Bisset) through her private gauntlet of betrayal and mad men with verve and the joyful nastiness of the British thriller of that era.

From time to time, the film teeters on the brink of actual feminism, but whenever it does, Collinson appears to get distracted by needing to do something cheap and schlocky instead. I’m neither damning nor complaining here, for as much as I would have liked the whole affair to just be a little bit more clever than it ends up being, I never could – and certainly still won’t – resist a bit of good schlock. Plus, say what you will about the director, Collinson was pretty great at improbably, schlocky suspense sequences.

In short: The Sell Out (1976)

Former US intelligence operative Sam Lucas (Richard Widmark) has retired to Jerusalem where he lives with another former spy, Deborah (Gayle Hunnicutt). Alas Sam’s peaceful life is going to end soon, for he’ll have to cope with the results of a rather peculiar partnership. Apparently, high level US spy Harry Sickles (Sam Wanamaker) and high level KGB boss General Kasyan (Peter Frye) have made a pact to get rid of troublesome and unloved members of their respective agencies by teaming up for absurdly public assassinations. And if that means blowing up Israeli children in a botched attempt to kill US traitor Gabriel Lee (Oliver Reed), so be it.

However, before he changed sides, Gabriel was Sam’s favourite spy pupil. Or even a bit more – Gabriel likes to call the older man “Papa”, so when he comes to Sam for help, the surprisingly honourable (for a spy) man has a hard time not trying to help, even knowing that it will probably cost him everything. Complicating things is the fact that Deborah was Gabriel’s girlfriend before he defected, and Sickles is clearly an old enemy. Add to this the Israeli security Major Benjamin (Ori Levy), who is really unhappy about the whole dead kid business, and you have quite the clusterfuck.

Which is also the proper word to describe the script (by Murray Smith and Jud Kinberg) of Peter Collinson’s spy action drama The Sell Out. When the basic set-up to your spy movie is less plausible than Blofeld’s latest attempt to shoot 007 into space, but you still seem to want to make a gritty, semi-realistic spy movie with actual human psychology in your characters, you are in trouble. The whole basic plan in which Sickles and Kasyan conspire to murder some of their own agents very loudly and in public makes little sense. Since when have spy agencies have had trouble to get rid of their own people quietly, and with less opportunity to create a major international incident or three? Why assassinate people in the least effective manner possible? Why push dangerous people into a position where they are bound to lash out at you just for basic self defence?

Character psychology doesn’t work much better either. It is clear the film is trying, and it certainly has a fine cast to do it, but no character relation here ever feels plausible or convincing. Everything is either plain stupid, or screeching, overwritten melodrama (particularly Hunnicutt has to go through literal contortions), or just plain pointless. Most acting choices are as inexplicable as the writing, but then what’s an actor to do when given material this incoherent?

Collinson attempts to muddle through whatever it is the script is trying to do, but there’s a lifeless quality to the melodramatic parts of the film, and little flair to the more general spy business. The Sell Out only ever truly comes alive during the action sequences. But a couple of good car chases and shoot-outs can’t save anything here.

In short: The Italian Job (1969)

Freshly out of prison, small time-ish yet highly aspirational criminal mastermind Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) inherits a plan for stealing a whole lot of gold in Turin from a friend murdered by the Mafia. It’s a bit of a crazy undertaking, but Charlie manages to talk hilariously posh underworld king (you can take that literally) Mr Bridger (Noël Coward – yes, that Noël Coward) into financing the somewhat crazy plan. So it’s off to Italy with a bunch of people mostly without personality to outfox the police as well as the mafia and get rich.

Even in 1969, films about cars that go really fast had a bit of a problem with filling the parts that were not about car chases. Peter Collinson’s film decides to go around that particular problem by being a car chase caper movie, which is a decent enough idea at its core. Alas, in this concrete case, the non car-chase parts – aka two thirds of the movie – are just not a terribly good caper movie.

For one, the quality of the jokes – even if you forget contemporary sensibilities and pretend it is still 1969 – is highly variable, tending to the unfunny, and for every actually funny bit like Caine’s bone-tired facial expression after he has bedded the half a dozen or so prostitutes his girlfriend gifts him as a “coming out present” (I did mention we need to forget our contemporary sensibilities, right?), there are two that fall down flat with an audible “thud”. Though I’m sure Benny Hill’s (sigh) pervy Professor with a weight fetish would have been hilarious once, in the music hall. The film also has the tendency to drag jokes that are funny for the first two or three times out way too often, and at first genuinely funny business like Mr Bridger’s royal poshness is getting just a bit tedious through the power of repetition, though Coward seems to amuse himself just fine.

As a caper movie, the film suffers under a particularly slow middle act, with planning and experimentation that never feel like anything but a way for the film to fill out the running time. Adding to the plight of this tedious part of the film is the inexplicable decision to surround Caine – who is cool even when he’s silly, fortunately – with a large amount of helpers who have no discernible character traits that could make things more interesting whatsoever, so apart from Caine, Mr Bridger, the self-explanatory Camp Freddie (Tony Beckley) and the unfortunate pervy prof, there are a dozen or so completely interchangeable guys around, doing little but take up screen space.

On the plus side, once the heist finally, after a long long long long time, starts, it’s actually pretty damn fun, with some ingenious moments and direction by Collinson that finally gets the tone of light but actual excitement the first two acts were crying out for right.


That’s car chase movies for ya.

Ten Little Indians (1974)

aka And Then There Were None

Under various pretexts, the mysterious U.N. Owen invites a group of people (Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Adolfo Celi, Herbert Lom, Gert Fröbe, Maria Rohm, Charles Aznavour, Stéphane Audran, Alberto de Mendoza and Richard Attenborough) into an unused hotel smack dab in the Iranian desert next to some picturesque ruins.

On their first evening, a tape message by the voice of God, or Orson Welles, accuses everyone in the house of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Usually, that would be quite enough to stop every party, but this one takes until Charles Aznavour sings a song with an invisible band to get antsy; or the sudden nervousness might be on account of his death by poisoning shortly afterwards.

Now, our protagonists find themselves trapped in the Hotel, for the desert seem rather unconquerable, and there are neither cars nor telephones around. Soon, more people die based on a free very interpretation of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, and people become increasingly paranoid, convinced the killer must be one amongst their ten.

Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians seems to be a book that brings out the best in the people adapting it, perhaps because it lacks a single annoying detective and replaces her or him with a perfect opportunity for a bunch of actors to emote, chew scenery, or something of that kind.

Dubious yet sometimes lucky British producer Harry Alan Towers loved the material so much, he made three adaptations of it, about one every fifteen years. Okay, I suspect he needed to keep making them to keep a license alive, but given that two out of these three films are actually rather good, that’s not the worst that could have happened. As far as I understand, this second Towers version uses much of the dialogue from his first version, but it still retains a character very much of its own thanks to its acting ensemble, its locations, and Peter Collinson’s direction.

Collinson, a man with mediocre as well as quite great films on his CV, clearly saw the opportunities the locations Towers acquired gave him to build a rather macabre mood. His camera finds the inherent threat in the hotel’s interiors where spacious oriental kitsch meets occidental colour-blindness, he uses spectacular staircases for playing games of the audience watching someone watching someone else while he himself is being watched without needing more camera involvement than decidedly clever placement, etc, and so forth.

The film’s visual style seems highly influenced by the giallo, the camera generally being positioned in the more peculiar and telling ways available with no conversation – and this is a very conversation heavy peace – not enhanced by direction that seeks to express the mood inside a room via its own movement and positioning even before the actors do anything at all. Like many a giallo director, Collinson succeeds in leapfrogging an audience’s scepticism towards a faintly – or very – ridiculous plot by creating a mood that suggests dreamscapes and the workings of the subconscious, making it very easy to read the resulting films in a manner where what a film’s plot has to say becomes secondary to what its mood tells us about its characters and the meaning of the world surrounding them.

I am – obviously – very fond of that approach to filmmaking, perhaps even to a fault, but I think this particular Christie novel just calls for it. This is, after all, a film about members of the upperclass and the bourgeoisie having to show and confront the truths behind their masks and the lies they tell themselves to get to sleep at night. Why, two of the more working class characters might even be called innocent, which would probably be more telling in a class-political sense if the other two weren’t just as murderous the bourgeois.

These characters are brought to life in various ways between subtlety, thespian grandstanding, and good old scenery-chewing with most of the involved well able and willing to use all three approaches, depending on what any given scene calls for. It’s all rather lovely to watch, particularly in scenes like the surreal confrontation between Lom and Attenborough with two packs of matches and a billiard table as a prop.

This all adds up to a very fine movie, even if the ending eschews to embrace the darkness of the novel and goes for a rather more normal happy end that only fits the tone of what came before vaguely. Despite the problem of the ending, Ten Little Indians is another exception to my usual “Ugh, Agatha Christie” rule.

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The Man Called Noon (1973)

aka Un hombre llamado Noon

A man (Richard Crenna) is nearly assassinated while making what looks like preparations for a classic western showdown. He barely manages to escape with his life and – after a somewhat nightmarish chase – finds himself sharing a hobo-style train ride with the surprisingly friendly outlaw Rimes (Stephen Boyd). The man does need all the help he can get, it seems, for a grazing shot to the head has left him without memory; he only remembers that his name is Jonas, and that someone named Janish was involved in the attack on him, but apart from that he has no idea what’s going on with him whatsoever.

Rimes takes Jonas with him to the ranch of Fan Davidge (Rosanna Schiaffino), which just happens to be a place a certain Janish has turned into a safe house for his bandit gang - without Fan’s consent. Janish isn’t on the ranch right now, but various dangerous developments suggest that Jonas is actually a gunman called Noon. At the very least, he has very practical experience with meting out brutal violence, and is certainly a ruthless man.

Both traits will come in handy once various people start trying to kill Noon while he’s trying to solve the mystery of his own identity; a gold treasure is involved too.

Peter Collinson’s British-Italian-Spanish co-production (of course shot in Spain) The Man Called Noon is quite an interesting film. An adaptation of a Louis L’Amour novel, the film stands with one foot in the realm of the psychological western as made in the United States during the 50s, with the other – particular when it comes to its depiction of violence - in the world of the Spaghetti western. Collinson made quite a few fine genre films that often seem to straddle eras and sub-genres the way Noon does, never quite reaching the heights that give one posthumous cult status as a director, but generally turning out films at least worth watching.

Noon certainly is, despite being marred by a slightly overcooked finale that contains more melodramatic posturing than the rest of the film together. Outside of the finale, the film is tight, yet often growing unreal and dream-like. Particular some of the scenes of violence are filmed with stylistic methods you can often see connected with dream sequences, suggesting its action taking place in Noon’s (to leave it at that name) mind as much as in the outside world.

Even outside the action scenes, Collins tends to position his camera at peculiar angles, shooting very traditional western scenes in uncommon ways that turn the often seen into something a bit stranger. I suspect it’s an attempt to let the audience share some of Noon’s confusion, the befuddlement of someone who still knows the rituals of his job and genre by instinct, but doesn’t know what they’re actually meant for. From time to time, Collinson overdoes this a bit and things threaten to feel a bit silly, but the largest part of the film expresses a peculiar mood of alienation very much its own, with Noon stumbling through a fun house mirror world quite like a noir protagonist who isn’t at all sure anymore if he’ll want to find the truth about himself. Although, it has to be said, Noon lets its main character off quite lightly in the end.

Richard Crenna does a good job on the acting side, believably embodying Noon’s state of confusion and basic decency as well as the coldness and ruthlessness he only still remembers as reflexes. Crenna’s performance even suggests another dimension the script doesn’t really seem to be interested in: that forgetting parts of what he was is exactly what enables Noon to change and possibly find a future, his loss of memory helping him regain some buried part of his humanity (while killing a lot of people, of course).

As a fan of European genre cinema of the era, I’m also happy with the rest of the film’s cast, the well-known faces of Farley Granger, Rosanna Schiaffino, Aldo Sambrell and last but not least Patty Shepard, who gives a pretty unhinged performance as capital-e evil Peg Cullane. Why, Shepard’s so evil, she even owns an adorable black cowboy outfit she wears when she’s out doing evil!

And if that doesn’t sound like a recommendation, I don’t know what does.

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