Gorgo (1961)

Salvage divers and professional assholes Joe Ryan (Bill Travers) and Sam Slade (William Sylvester) stumble upon a very large and dangerous giant reptile probably woken up by a volcanic eruption off the coast of an Irish island.

Initially, the boys were going to grab themselves a treasure buried under the sea there but they decide that catching and stealing a member of a giant unknown species of reptiles is much better business; particularly since it always seem to be others who pay with their lives for the mistakes these two make. Despite a small Irish boy knowing better (Vincent Winter), Joe and Sam manage to catch the animal and rent it out to a circus in London. As it usually goes, nobody involved is actually prepared to secure the dangerous monster they are trying to sell to the public – and the Better Business Bureau is asleep at the wheel – so the animal, now dubbed Gorgo, manages various near breakouts.

Gorgo will be the least of London’s problems, though, for it turns out that it is only the junior version of Gorgo, and its quite a bit more gigantic Ma or Pa does go out of its way to get its baby back, however many famous landmarks may have to be crushed on her or his way.

Gorgo is the final film directed by Eugene Lourie, before he returned to exclusively working as art director and production designer. His handful of films showed Lourie to be a director who really knew his way around giant monsters, resulting in films with generally stronger scripts than most other American or British films of the genre had to offer, as well as with more of a visible personal handwriting.

Despite using the old “giant monster as a circus attraction” bit, Gorgo fits nicely into the cycle of Lourie monster movies. Where, after all, can you find a giant monster movie whose protagonists are quite as unpleasant as Joe and Sam are, with a supporting cast of arrogant military, ineffectual scientists, a greedy Irish harbour master and so on and so forth, with only the usual annoying stupid little boy as the voice of moral and reason (the latter when he’s not running towards giant monsters)? Why, it is as if the film were saying something about the ineffectual and shabby nature of humanity when confronted with things that are metaphorically and literally much larger than themselves; Gorgo is somewhat Lovecraftian in this regard. Of course, a slightly less cosmically horrific worldview tries to assert itself at the end, for there is some child-rescue-based redemption coming for Joe and Sam. One can’t help but ask oneself, though, if the inevitable mob of angry people they’re bound to meet after the end of the movie will care much about our protagonists’ personal redemption.

Other attractions here are Lourie’s decision (not for the first time in his small but valuable giant monster movie making career) to emphasize the human loss like hardly anyone else making these films after the first Godzilla and before Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera trilogy did: people are crushed by crumbling buildings, trampled by Gorgo senior, jump desperately out of windows. Lourie was clearly interested in making Gorgo as threatening as possible, with the film’s final scenes of destruction, mostly bathed in red flames, effectively driving the monster home as a natural power humanity has no control of whatsoever, despite a monster suit quite below the Japanese standards as well as the need to use a lot of library and repeat footage during the final half hour of destruction.

Lourie again shows himself as a visual inventive and creative director here, unlike a lot of his low budget colleagues at the time putting visible thought into the staging of scenes, as well as into providing the things the audience was coming to see (giant monsters crushing things) with a degree of thematic resonance. I also applaud the absence of the usual horrible romance, even though I’m not at all happy with the fact that an absence of “romance” in Gorgo’s case also means the complete absence of women from the film outside of the (effective) mass panic scenes. Oh for times when films are allowed to do as much with women as they do with men!

As a whole, though, I find Gorgo nearly as satisfying, and just as interesting as Lourie’s few other directorial efforts, which makes it as fine as Western giant monster movies get.

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In short: Blind Corner (1963)

aka Man in the Dark

Blind composer of horrible popular songs Paul Gregory (William Sylvester) thinks his marriage to former actress Anne (Barbara Shelley) is a bit more healthy than it really is, with Anne tolerating his bouts of cynicism (caused by his blindness) and his low-level alcoholism, and he in turn tolerating her unpleasant interest in money and love for being the social butterfly of the couple.

In truth, Anne has not been loving anything about Paul anymore but his money for quite some time now, and is having an affair with the young, and rather weak-willed, painter Rickie Seldon (Alexander Davion); Paul for his part is not exactly doing much to dissuade his secretary Joan (Elizabeth Shepherd) from her big fat crush on him.

Anne knows quite well that she won't be able to divorce Paul and keep access to his pile of money, so she's trying to convince Rickie to murder her husband, who likes to cavort drunk on their flat's balcony, so that they both can be together and rich - or so she says. Rickie's not too excited about the plan, but once Paul finds out about the affair and Anne puts the painter on the spot telling him he's either going to kill her husband or will never see her again (and, to Rickie's defence, she is played by Barbara Shelley), he comes around to the plan.

Both haven't counted on Paul being blind but far from stupid or helpless, though. There's also an additional nasty surprise waiting for the painter.

Lance Comfort's Blind Corner is - despite two horrid musical numbers that make quite clear why Beatlemania was good and necessary - a pretty swell little melodramatic thriller.

Comfort's direction isn't much to talk about. Blind Corner more a case of a director not getting in the way of his actors than of one putting his own mark on the proceedings, but that does of course imply that Comfort - veteran of British B-movies that he was - was quite capable of realizing the quality of his cast and giving them room to do their thing without him trying to get in their way.

For it is the quality of the cast and the script that makes Blind Corner worth watching. All of the principals are just really excellent at fleshing out the small complexities the script by James Kelley allows them. Sylvester's projection of a combination of ill-served romanticism (which is paralleled in Davion's also rather problematic - seeing as it leads him into an affair with a married woman and a murder plan - romanticism), bitterness and self-loathing is a thing to behold, while also making it more understandable why Anne might not want to live with him any longer (without excusing murder, obviously). Shelley (who is one of the great actresses of British genre films, of course) for her part makes for a fantastic femme fatale, carrying herself with the right mixture of allure and cruelty, yet also showing why life with Paul has - at least in part - made her how she is, in a performance that's more complex than you'd expect in your run of the mill low budgeted thriller melodrama.

Blind Corner is a fine example of the British low budget thriller, and comes highly recommended, even to the fools who don't adore Barbara Shelley.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,thriller,melodrama,lance comfort,william sylvester,barbara shelley

The Hand of Night (1968)

aka Beast of Morocco

After the death of his wife and children in a car accident that left him unscathed, architect Paul Carver (William Sylvester) has fallen into a deep depression. Carver now sees himself as someone "standing between life and death, light and darkness" and craves death, but doesn't seem ready to take the obvious step.

Instead, he travels to Morocco to distract himself. A rather mean-spirited destiny has other ideas for him, though. A dream of a Moroccan crypt, very Western coffins, a "bearded Arab" and Gunther (Edward Underdown), a German archaeologist sitting next to him on the plane into the country, is the first prophetic warning for the American that he will soon enough encounter actual darkness.

Once arrived in Morocco, Carver learns that the friend (colleague?) he was planning to stay with has suddenly died. For Carver, that's as good a reason for a drinking spree as any, but he still has a certain craving to be saved from himself, it seems, and decides to take an invitation of Gunther's to come visit him that very same night.

At Gunther's house, where a party is held, Paul meets Marisa (Aliza Gur), a mysterious beauty who likes disappearing at will, discussions about the nature of light and darkness and being a vampire. Paul is fascinated by the woman, even obsessed, just as if the part of him that craves death and the dark side of life had just waited for her to appear. From the moment of their meeting, Paul is stumbling between Marisa's world and ours. The situation is further complicated by Chantal (Diane Clare), Gunther's non-biological daughter who'd very much like to save Paul from himself.

The Hand of Night is one of those films that have some generally interesting ideas and some atmospheric scenes, but have to fight with the indifference of their execution. Somewhere inside Hand, there's a fantastic film about depression, a death wish and how to escape it, and a peculiar interpretation of the vampire myth, but neither writer Bruce Stewart nor director Frederic Goode seem to know how to make that film and instead like to hide the actually interesting elements behind melodramatic dialogue and drab direction.

Goode often even manages to waste the mood-enhancing powers of the actual Moroccan landscape this was filmed in, as if he were actively trying to let Morocco look as quotidian to the British eye as possible; the film's more effective scenes seem to exist despite Goode's efforts and not because of them, for sometimes, the dream-like strangeness of the desert is too strong for him to make boring, like the call of Marisa's "darkness" is for Paul. It is, as a matter of fact, quite ironic.

Where - after a cheap yet impressive dream sequence right at the film's beginning - director Goode is just not very good (sorry), writer Stewart isn't able to get a grip on a fantastic basic set-up. The film's beginning is an up and down of (sometimes clever) pseudo-philosophical discussions, symbolic psychology of the workable sort, dialogue written as if it were 1938 and not 1968 (and, by the way, spoken by actors acting like it's 1938 by using a cartload of bad fake accents, too), and a few choice moments where the "darkness" the characters talk so much about actually shows in subtle ways. That's nearly enough to satisfy me in a film so clearly trying to be profound instead of just going for the easiest thrills, however, in its final half hour The Hand of Night wastes all this potential on a particularly long-winded and boring finale, turning out like a Hammer Dracula movie made by people who have heard about drama, but don't know how to execute a dramatic finale.

It's a bit of a shame, really, for it's not every cheap little horror movie that shows as much ambition and willingness to build its own strange little mythology as The Hand does. As it stands, this is a film I find impossibly to actually recommend to anyone not highly interested in off-beat independent horror films, yet too interesting to rue having watched it.

 

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