The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

The 1960s and 1970s represented a golden age of wartime action adventure movies. The Eagle Has Landed, a British production, was unique in having a World War 2 setting with Germans as heroes.

In real life German paratroopers carried out a daring and successful operation to rescue Mussolini after he had been deposed. The premise of the movie, based on a novel by Jack Higgins, is that this operation gives Hitler the bright idea of ordering an even more daring mission - to kidnap Winston Churchill. Admiral Canaris (Anthony Quayle), the head of the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service), is instructed to carry out a feasibility study. Canaris thinks it’s the most stupid idea he’s ever heard but orders are orders, and in any case he’s confident that Hitler will forget all about his brainwave in a week or so.

Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall) is given the job of preparing the feasibility study. And then it seems that fate has taken a hand. The Germans just happen to have an agent in a tiny seaside town named Studley Constable in Norfolk, and the town just happens to be a few miles from the country house at which Churchill is going to be staying in the very near future. And the town just happens to be ideally situated on a quiet stretch of coastline. The clincher is that Radl just happens to have come across the perfect man to carry out such a mission. Colonel Kurt Steiner (Michael Caine) is a brilliant and recklessly bold paratroop commander who speaks faultless English without a trace of an accent. The Germans would need to have a man on the ground first and here again fate has put the ideal candidate at Radl’s disposal in the person of Liam Devlin (Donald Sutherland), an IRA terrorist currently lecturing at a German university. Much to Radl’s amazement he finds himself coming to the conclusion that the operation has a real chance of success.

There is one minor problem. Colonel Steiner is currently under sentence of death for trying to free a Jewish girl from under the noses of the SS. But when SS chief Heinrich Himmler (Donald Pleasence) presents Colonel Radl with a written authorisation from Hitler allowing him a free hand in carrying out the operation that minor obstacle is removed.

Colonel Steiner and his men agree to carry out the mission on one condition (a condition that will have fateful consequences) - they will wear Free Polish uniforms but they will wear their German uniforms underneath. They are prepared to die, but they are not prepared to accept the shame of being shot as spies.

Liam Devlin successfully makes contact with the German agent in the Norfolk village, but things quickly start to get complicated for him. The last thing he had expected was to fall in love in the middle of the operation but that’s what happens when he meets Molly (Jenny Agutter). 

Steiner and his men parachute in and everything is going smoothly. Then fate (yes, fate again) steps in. One of his men rescues a young village girl from drowning but in the process of doing so his German uniform is revealed. Nonetheless Steiner presses on.

Fate is also about to take a hand in the career of Colonel Pitts (Larry Hagman). Pitts is in command of a US Ranger detachment stationed near Studley Constable. He’s about to be shipped back home and will thus lose his one chance of seeing combat. When he learns of the presence of Steiner’s men in the village he sees his chance. Rather than contact the War Office he decides that he will be the hero of the hour and gain all the glory of foiling the German plan. Sadly Colonel Pitts’ military skills fall ludicrously short of his ambitions. Pitts’ rash decision does provide the opportunity for the movie to launch into some full-scale action sequences. The war has come to Studley Constable, with a vengeance. And Churchill is about to arrive. It seems that all that stands between Steiner and success is one bumbling American officer.

The movie goes to elaborate lengths to establish that Colonel Steiner is a good German, a man who hates the Nazis and who is determined to do his duty, but to do it with courage and honour. The movie goes to equally elaborate lengths to establish that Steiner’s men are good Germans, Germans who will risk their lives to save drowning children. This does serve a very important purpose. The movie cannot work unless the audience can be persuaded to be at least half-hoping the Germans will succeed. Even Radl has to be a fairly sympathetic character. Michael Caine and Robert Duvall manage to make their characters effectively sympathetic without being too irritatingly virtuous. They are honourable men, but they are also ruthlessly efficient. The performances of Caine and Duvall are crucial and they are both superb. Caine, surprisingly, makes a convincing German officer and he has the advantage that Steiner is supposed to speak English without a trace of an accent, so the actor fortunately is not tempted to have a try at a Teutonic accent.

Anthony Quayle had played countless British officers and he plays Admiral Canaris exactly the same way. Donald Pleasence is delightfully and chillingly menacing as Himmler. Larry Hagman is deliriously over-the-top as the hapless Colonel Pitts. His performance is a treat although he does seem to be acting in a different movie from the other actors! When he makes his appearance the tone of the whole movie changes subtly, with a slight suggestion of black comedy. This could have ruined the film but fortunately the premise is itself so outrageous that it gets away with it. Fate can turn life into tragedy but it can just as readily turn it into farce, and the line between tragedy and farce is in any case often rather blurred.

The movie faces a bigger challenge in making Liam Devlin sympathetic. Donald Sutherland pulls out all the stops to make Devlin a loveable rogue and he does a good job of it but we can’t help remembering that he is a member of a terrorist organisation, and he doesn’t have the advantage of being able to claim that he is a soldier doing his duty for his country. Devlin is certainly charming but his charm comes across as having just a little of a  sinister touch.

This was a lavish production and some care was taken to give it the right authentic touches, even to the extent of having an actual German Fieseler Storch aircraft (or a remarkably good replica aircraft) and a genuine-looking captured British Motor Torpedo Boat. The action scenes are executed with considerable skill.

John Sturges already had an impressive record as a director of action movies and his handling of this one is confident and assured. 

The Region B Blu-Ray lacks extras but the transfer is faultless.

The Eagle Has Landed is a fine example of the excellent action adventure movies of its era. Great entertainment, highly recommended.

Fascination (1979) on Blu-Ray

Fascination, released in 1979, was the last film in Jean Rollin’s original cycle of vampire films which had started with Le viol du vampire in 1968, although he would return to the vampire theme in the late 1990s with Two Orphan Vampires.

If you’re unfamiliar with his work Fascination is not a bad place to start – the surrealist elements always present in his movies are less extreme in this one, or at least they’re less overwhelming. It also has (by the standards of a Rollin movie) a coherent plot. In the late 70s Rollin was moving towards a slightly more accessible style, but without sacrificing the strengths of his earlier productions. Fascination is still a million miles away from Hollywood notions of horror.

Right from the start we find ourselves in the world of Rollinesque surrealism, a surrealism liberally laced with decadence. We see two girls dancing on a stone bridge with a phonograph sitting on the roadway of the bridge. We then move to a slaughterhouse where two women are drinking ox blood from wine glasses. This scene was probably inspired by a short story, The Glass of Blood, by the French decadent poet and novelist Jean Lorrain (1855-1906). Lorrain’s story was in turn inspired by a somewhat bizarre real-life practice of the time in which wealthy people suffering from anaemia or similar disorders would start their day with a glass of cow’s blood at a local slaughter-house.

This strange obsession with blood provides the theme of the movie, another of Rollin’s very unconventional filmic explorations of vampirism. Oddly enough though the element of vampirism is downplayed for most of the film, only becoming explicit at the end (and even then it’s still more than a little ambiguous).

The story proper begins with a falling-out among a group of thieves, one of whom takes shelter in an apparently deserted château. The château is not quite deserted however. Marc (for that is the thief’s name) soon encounters two rather unsettling young women, Eva (Brigitte Lahaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Maï), whose interest in him is obviously sexual but equally obviously goes beyond the merely sexual. He is warned not to stay around until dark, as they are having other guests, apparently very dangerous ones. His problem is that he cannot leave because the other apaches, his former confederates, are waiting for him outside and they are armed.

Whether Eva and Elisabeth really want him to stay or not is rather uncertain. Elisabeth seems to be very attracted to him and (for reasons that will later become clear) that may be why she seems to hope he will leave.

The château is surrounded by a moat and the only means of entrance (or exit) is by means of a stone bridge. He seems to be comprehensively trapped, at least until Eva takes a hand. In one of the most iconic scenes of 1970s horror she deals with his quondam accomplices rather effectively by means of a scythe. 

Still Marc does not leave. The other guests arrive, all women and all behaving in a strange manner that is both seductive and vaguely menacing although Marc is too arrogant to take the hints of menace seriously. He is too intrigued, too fascinated, to leave. Staying at the château may prove to have been a rather serious mistake once the actual nature of the planned festivities becomes clear.

Fascination has the lyrical, poetic visual style you expect from Rollin.  It also has extremely competent acting, with Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Maï as the two disturbing young women and Jean-Marie Lemaire as the thief on the run all giving strong performances.  

The elegant chateau provides a perfect setting for a Rollin film. The movie is set in the early years of the 20th century and captures the feel of fin de siècle decadence very effectively. If you’re already a fan of Rollin’s brand of poetic and deliciously perverse erotic horror you won’t be disappointed by this movie.

Rollin was first and foremost a visual stylist. One gets the feeling that plotting only interested Rollin insofar as it contributed to the atmosphere and provided the excuse for creating striking images. In this case the plot, while rather thin, is relatively straightforward.  The surrealism comes from the manner in which the story is told and from the imagery.

Of course a Rollin vampire movie is going to feature lesbianism. While this was obviously good for the box-office it does serve a genuine purpose, lesbianism being (like vampirism) a sterile and rather self-reflexive kind of sexuality.

Interestingly enough, considering its release date, Fascination is fairly light on gore. Even the sex and nudity is even, by late 70s standards, rather restrained. In fact restraint is a hallmark of this particular film and it proves to be one of its strengths. Rollin’s aim was always to create a feeling of mystery and in this case the downplaying of the gore is accompanied by increased emphasis on mood. This is a movie that is for the most part subtly unsettling rather than shocking, which makes the few shocking moments all the more effective. In some ways it’s much more reminiscent of his 1973 non-vampire movie The Iron Rose than of his earlier vampire movies. It could in fact be argued that Fascination is not a vampire movie at all, but rather a movie about a group of women fatally fascinated by the vampire myth.

Rollin was never especially interested in horror as such, belonging more to the French tradition of le fantastique. He liked vampires not because they were frightening but because they were entrancing, creatures adrift in time and out of place in the real world. He was more anxious to create a sense of wonder suffused with melancholy than to scare his audience. That counted against him at the time but has worked in his favour as far as his enduring reputation is concerned.

Redemption’s Blu-Ray release is quite stunning and is a vast improvement over their old DVD release. Picture quality is pleasingly crisp and the colours and strong and vibrant. The extras include an episode of a 1999 TV documentary series called Eurotika dealing with European cult cinema, an episode that includes an extended interview with the director, and a booklet containing a perceptive essay on Rollin by Tim Lucas.

Fascination was one of Rollin’s most commercially successful movies and it’s also one of his most artistically satisfying creations. Very highly recommended.

Where Eagles Dare (1968)

The 1960s ushered in a kind of golden age of action adventure movies. There had of course been plenty of adventure movies made earlier but the 1960s variety added high-octane action with spectacular stunts and lots of explosions. One of the best of these movies was the 1968 Anglo-American production Where Eagles Dare.

The great strength of this movie is that it doesn’t try to be anything else other than a straight action adventure movie. It has no axes to grind, it offers no message, it gives us no insights into the human condition. It is pure entertainment, and it is all the better for it.

Alistair MacLean was probably the most successful of all the thriller writers of that era. It was inevitable that many of his books would be turned into motion pictures, which they were, although with mixed success. Some of the adaptations of his stories were outright clunkers but the immense success of the first Alistair MacLean movie, The Guns of Navarone, encouraged movie-makers to keep trying. Where Eagles Dare came the closest to repeating the success of The Guns of Navarone although the underrated Ice Station Zebra should not be overlooked. MacLean wrote the screenplay for Where Eagles Dare himself and it captures the feel of his novels rather effectively.

In early 1944 an American general is captured when his aircraft is shot down over Austria. That in itself would be annoying, but this general happens to be a senior member of the planning staff for the invasion of German-occupied France. The British know that he survived the crash and they are certain that he has been taken to the castle of Schloss Adler, the headquarters of German military intelligence. The castle is perched on an inaccessible mountain peak high in the Austrian Alps. Rescuing the general would be an impossible task but the British decide they are going to do it anyway. They assemble a team of seven agents, all of whom speak fluent German and all of whom are experienced intelligence agents. 

The team is led by Major Smith (Richard Burton). The other members of the team are British, apart from one American, Lieutenant Schaffer (Clint Eastwood), a member of the elite Ranger Division. What is known only to Major Smith is that there is an eighth member of the team, glamorous blonde Mary Ellison. Her job is to help the team gain access to the castle by posing as a member of the domestic staff. On arrival at a nearby village yet another agent joins the team. Heidi (Ingrid Pitt) works as a barmaid in a tavern frequented by members of the German Alpine division based in the village but she is in fact a British agent.

The task seems difficult enough but in fact the real mission turns out to be not quite the mission these men were told about. It is part of an elaborate espionage game of fiendish complexity with double-crosses aplenty. While this adds additional interest the real point of  the movie is the action scenes. And there are action scenes in abundance. In 1968 these sequences were breath-taking and they remain impressive today. The cable-car scenes are among the all-time classic movie action sequences.

Brian G. Hutton directed very few films but his small output includes some extremely interesting items, including Kelly’s Heroes (another action classic), the very underrated Night Watch (Elizabeth Taylor’s only horror movie) and the excellent if rather outrageously over-the-top melodrama Zee and Co. (released in the US as X, Y and Zee and featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Susannah York and Michel Cane all at the top of their game). Where Eagles Dare demonstrates Hutton’s ability to orchestrate a very big-budget action movie on an epic scale, and to do so very effectively, with the very able assistance of cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson. Where Eagles Dare not only has copious quantities of action but it’s all set against a background of breath-taking scenery.

Richard Burton’s illustrious career included a couple of classic action adventure flicks, the most notable one aside from Where Eagles Dare being The Wild Geese. He might not have seemed the obvious star for such movies but he did them remarkably well. Real-life mercenary leader Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare who acted as technical adviser on The Wild Geese remarked on Burton’s ability to portray an officer with uncanny verisimilitude and that ability stands him in good stead in Where Eagles Dare. 

Burton himself felt that Clint Eastwood was a perfect choice as co-star, the two actors being about as different in style as could possibly be imagined and thus complementing each other very nicely. He was spot on about that. Burton and Eastwood make an unlikely but very effective team.

The supporting players include some faces that will be very familiar indeed to cult movie fans, with Ingrid Pitt and Anton Diffring (inevitably playing a sadistic SS officer) being particular notable. Derren Nesbitt is superb as a Gestapo officer, combining charm and evil in a truly chilling performance. Michael Hordern and Patrick Wymark are other noteworthy members of the supporting cast.

This was 1968 so while there’s an incredible amount of mayhem the violence is not particularly graphic. It doesn’t need to be. It relies on thrills rather than gore and it delivers the thrills. The expenditure of ammunition is also truly prodigious. Clint Eastwood mows down approximately half the German army while Richard Burton and Mary Ure mow down the other half between them.

The British Blu-Ray release is 16x9 enhanced and looks very good. It includes a brief contemporary “making of” featurette.

It’s really only fair to judge a movie on the basis of how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. Where Eagles Dare does just that, and does it to perfection. Highly recommended.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Don Siegel’s original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the most-discussed of all 1950s science fiction movies. There’s probably nothing that can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said. But here goes.

I’m sure everyone knows the basic plot of this movie, but there have been several remakes so it’s easy to misremember things from the remakes as having been in the original. For example, the term pod people is not used at all in the original.

The movie opens with a framing story which Siegel reluctantly added when preview audiences found the movie too depressing. 

Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) is about to be shipped off to the nut-house after being picked up on the freeway raving about some terrible danger that is about to destroy us. He finally manages to persuade the shrink to let him tell his story.

After being away at a medical conference Bennell returns to the small town of Santa Mira. Life here seems as serene as ever, but there’s some very subtle difference that at first he hardly even notices. Suddenly patients who had wanted urgent appointments with him have decided they don’t need a doctor after all. The few cases he does get are rather puzzling - a young boy who insists that his mother isn’t his mother any more, a woman who is convinced that dear old Uncle Ira isn’t Uncle Ira any more. Uncle Ira still looks the same as ever but she insists that something is wrong, that something is missing.

Miles isn’t too worried until his pal Jack makes a disturbing discovery. He has found a corpse, but there’s something strange about it. The face seems somehow unfinished, more like a wax model than a man’s face. And the corpse has no fingerprints at all. Most disturbingly, this corpse is just about the same height and build as Jack.

Then things get really disturbing. Miles finds another of these strange seemingly not-quite-finished corpses in the basement of the house in which his girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) lives. This one looks very much like an unfinished version of Becky. At this point the plot really starts to kick in and Miles realises that the people of Santa Mira are being replaced by exact replicas, perfect in every way except that they seem to be entirely lacking in emotion.

This is classic nightmare paranoia territory. How do you get help in dealing with a situation like this when every person to whom you turn for help could be one of these replica people? Or about to turn into one.

Siegel was a fine director of crime action movies with a hefty dose of film noir and he approaches this movie in exactly the same way. This is science fiction done in pure film noir style. And it works because nightmare paranoia territory is film noir territory. He doesn’t need to adjust his style in any way, and he doesn’t. This gives the movie a feel that  sharply distinguishes it from other 1950s science fiction movies. Siegel uses few special effects. He doesn’t rely on shocks, he relies on suspense and excitement and on driving the story along at the same breakneck pace as his crime movies. This is a science fiction horror movie, but it’s also a classic “couple on the run” movie and it’s also a classic film noir where a man finds that his orderly everyday existence has suddenly turned into film noir nightmare world.

There is not a dull moment in this movie. Even the early scenes, in which superficially everything is pretty normal, are tense because Siegel wastes no time at all in introducing the subtly unsettling elements that immediately tell an audience that the appearance of normality is an illusion, that something terrible is going to happen.

The temptation to give this movie a political interpretation has been impossible for most critics to resist. Attempts have been made to read the movie as an attack on “McCarthyism” but there is absolutely nothing in the movie to support such an interpretation. A far more convincing case can be made for the movie’s being a warning of the dangers of communism. That interpretation at least has the virtue that there’s nothing in the film to contradict it. Yet another interpretation is that the movie is a much broader warning against the dangers of conformity. The truth is that the movie’s great strength is that it carefully avoids any overt political commentary. Most importantly it avoids the dreary and hackneyed themes of calamity being brought about by wicked governments or evil corporations. The danger in the movie comes entirely from outside, it is entirely alien, and nobody is to blame. 

Fortunately there’s absolutely no need to find a political subtext. The movie functions perfectly as a terrifying and exciting science fiction thriller made with superlative style. Siegel was at the peak of his powers and he was never a director who needed a big budget. 

Kevin McCarthy’s casting as the hero was an inspiration. He’s a perfect everyman, a very ordinary man caught up in a desperate struggle for survival. Dana Wynter provides fine support.

Olive Films have as usual offered us an extremely good Blu-Ray transfer with zero extras. This is probably the best this movie is ever going to look and it looks very good indeed.

I've also reviewed the 1978 remake.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the two or three best science fiction movies of its decade (or any other decade for that matter). It’s also a very stylish unconventional film noir. Whichever way you take it it’s immensely entertaining. Very highly recommended.

Lisa and the Devil (1974) - Blu-Ray review

Lisa and the Devil is a movie I’ve written about before but now that I’ve had a chance to see it on Blu-Ray (in Arrow’s three-disc Region B release), and given that it remains one of my all-time favourite movies, it seems worth taking the opportunity to re-evaluate it. It’s a decade since I last saw the film and re-watching it has only increased my admiration for it.

After the success of Baron Blood in 1972 producer Alfredo Leone gave Mario Bava almost complete freedom to make his next movie in whatever way he chose. Sadly things did not turn out as either Leone or Bava hoped.

As is perhaps fitting for a movie about the Devil Lisa and the Devil was a very unlucky movie. It was a great success with audiences at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival but in spite of this failed to be picked up by distributors. A year later, with the movie still unsold, producer Alfredo Leone persuaded Bava to allow him to make major changes to the film, changes that involved not just recutting the movie but doing extensive reshoots. Bava initially was agreeable to this and did some of the reshooting himself but eventually decided that it had gone much too far and refused to have anything more to do with the process, leaving Leone to direct many of the new scenes himself. The result of the reshoots was a movie that would be released, very successfully, as House of Exorcism, but a movie that bore little resemblance to Bava’s original vision.

Leone is often cast as the villain for effectively trashing Bava’s masterpiece. This is a little unfair. The fact is that the horror market had changed dramatically by 1973. The loosening of censorship allowed horror film-makers to rely on sex and gore at the expense of mood and atmosphere and they took enthusiastic advantage of this new freedom (with results that were commercially successful but artistically disastrous). Audiences came to expect gore-fests and had little patience with subtle horror. Movies like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby made gothic horror seem old-fashioned and the mammoth success of The Exorcist in 1972 sounded the death knell for horror movies with period settings.

The result of these changes was that in 1973 no distributor was willing to touch a movie so  emphatically and deliberately old-fashioned in style as Lisa and the Devil. None of this was Leone’s fault and his only chance of getting any return on the movie was to turn it into something that could be marketed, such as an Exorcist rip-off.

The tragedy of Lisa and the Devil is that had it been released six or seven years earlier it might well have been a major success. The tragedy for Bava is that he did not live long enough to see his film rediscovered and finally earning the praise it deserved.

Lisa and the Devil was filmed in late 1972. Elke Sommer had starred in Baron Blood and she and Bava had gotten along well (probably because being a painter herself she understood a director who was more interested in the visuals than the characters). Sommer and Telly Savalas were signed to the lead roles, Sommer as Lisa and Savalas as the Devil. Bava had hoped to get Anthony Perkins on board as well but this idea fell through. Veteran actress Alida Valli was cast in the key role of the Countess with a strong supporting cast.

While the screenplay is credited to Bava and Alfredo Leone several other writers had been involved, most notably Roberto Natale and Romano Migliorini. Right from the beginning though this was Bava’s project and he seems to have been the one responsible for most of the key ideas.

The story itself is less important than the way it is told. Lisa (Elke Sommer) is a tourist in Toledo in Spain. In a square in the city she sees a fresco depicting the Devil transporting the dead to Hell. This establishes the movie’s major theme. She becomes lost and encounters a man who bears a striking resemblance to the Devil as depicted in the fresco. She will later discover that the man, who is buying a mannequin in an antique shop, is Leandro (Telly Savalas). And the audience will later discover that Leandro is the Devil. Leandro gives Lisa directions and she turns into a narrow street at which point the blurring of reality and illusion, of past and present, begins. She accepts a lift from a wealthy couple, the Lehars, in a vintage Packard limousine. The car breaks down and Lisa, the Lehars and their chauffeur are put up for the night in the palatial villa of a woman we know only as the Contessa (Alida Valli). The Contessa lives there with her son Maximilian (Alessio Orana) and her butler Leandro.

From this point on the narrative becomes less and less linear and more and more elliptical.  Lisa is apparently the exact double of a woman named Elena, a woman who had been involved in a perverse romantic triangle with Maximilian and the Contessa’s husband (and Maximilian’s step-father) Carlos.

The movie starts out quite clearly in the 1970s but from the moment that Lisa encounters the Lehars in their vintage limousine the time element starts to become doubtful. Perhaps Lisa has found herself in the past, or perhaps these other characters have somehow found themselves in what would be for them the future. Or perhaps we’re in a world outside of time as it normally understood (the broken watches and the clock without hands certainly suggest this). We may be in a world of ghosts, or even in Hell.

Bava is careful not to offer us any certainties on these matters. Dream and reality, life and death, seem to merge. This may be a dream of death dreamt by the living or a dream of life dreamt by the dead. Or a little of both.

The movie is liberally littered with mannequins, a fitting symbol for the blurring of the lines between reality and illusion. Leandro is a kind of puppet master and perhaps in truth we are all puppets manipulated by the Devil.

It’s quite possible that the people Lisa encounters in the Contessa’s house have been dead for forty years.

There’s a good deal of black comedy, more than one expects in an Italian horror film, but the comedy adds to the horror rather than defusing it. Leandro is a humorous kind of Devil and the idea that the Devil would have a sense of humour is entirely consistent with the mood of the movie.

The movie was to some extent inspired by Bava’s admiration for the novels of Dostoyevsky and the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. While the movie might be stylistically old-fashioned thematically it’s extremely modern. It deals not so much with the supernatural itself as with the nature of reality and the mystery of death. Bava was a religious man so it’s fair to say that it also deals with the question of damnation.

Telly Savalas and Elke Sommer were inspired casting choices. Savalas gives a career-best performance as the Devil with a twinkle in his eye while Sommer has exactly the right kind of slightly doll-like look.

Arrow’s Region B Blu-Ray offers an anamorphic transfer. While this is probably the best the movie has ever looked there are some minor problems. The picture is a little soft at times. Whether the Blu-Ray offers any significant advantage over the DVD (also included in Arrow’s three-disc package) is somewhat debatable. Either way the transfer is good enough to allow us to appreciate the visual brilliance of the film and that after all is what matters. Both Italian and English soundtracks are included. The English dub is excellent and there’s no real reason to prefer the Italian, especially given that Italian movies of this era were always post-dubbed anyway. Arrow have sweetened the deal with a host of extras including a commentary track by Tim Lucas and a booklet including an essay on the film by Stephen Thrower. Arrow’s release also includes the House of Exorcism version, with both movies on both Blu-Ray and DVD. The inclusion of both the English and the much rarer Italian dub is another bonus.

Lisa and the Devil had a limited theatrical release in Spain and then vanished from view for many years. Today it stands as not only Bava’s masterwork but also as possibly the greatest of all European gothic horror movies. Very highly recommended.

The Wild Geese (1978)

The Wild Geese, released in 1978, is a full-blooded action adventure movie. The Wild Geese is also a movie about mercenaries in Africa. This subject matter made it highly controversial at the time although needless to say most of those who objected to the movie hadn’t bothered to see it. If they had they would have discovered that the movie’s message was the complete opposite of what they had assumed.

Mercenary leader Colonel Alan Faulkner (Richard Burton) is hired by wealthy industrialist and merchant banker Sir Edward Matherson (Stewart Granger) to snatch a deposed African leader named Limbani (Winston Ntshona) from his prison cell. Matherson is trying to negotiate a copper concession with the man who deposed Limbani. The new president wants Limbani dead but Matherson’s plan is to double-cross him and get Limbani out of the country.

Faulkner knows the men he wants for the mission but getting some of them could be difficult. Lieutenant Shawn Fynn (Roger Moore) has a Mafia contract on his head, but Matherson assures him he can get the contract lifted. Captain Rafer Janders (Richard Harris) has given up the mercenary business to concentrate on raising his young son Emil. Janders is a different kind of mercenary from Faulkner. Faulkner has always been happy to work for anyone who will pay him, but Janders is an idealist who will only work for the good guys.

These difficulties are overcome and then the rest of the team is assembled. They will need a fourth officer and ex-South African security policeman Pieter Coetzee (Hardy Krüger) knows the bush as well as anyone and is an obvious choice. Faulkner will also need a sergeant-major to get the men into shape and R.S.M. Sandy Young (Jack Watson) is as tough as they come.

Four sergeants and a medic as well as forty other ranks will also be needed. Witty (Kenneth Griffith), an alcoholic homosexual but under his effeminate exterior he’s not only a good medic but a very tough soldier and he seems an ideal choice as the medic.

Rafer Janders will plan the mission. Planning is his speciality and Faulkner has complete confidence in him.

The mission goes like clockwork but then the mercenaries strike a small snag. An aircraft was supposed to extract them after they had completed their mission but it takes off without them and they realise they have been double-crossed. Now they will have to fight their way out, fifty men against a whole army.

Euan Lloyd was an independent producer but he had a knack for raising the money for big-budget movies like this. With a generous budget to work with director Andrew V. McLaglen delivers plenty of thrilling action scenes. Action was something that director McLaglen was particularly good at. Jack Hildyard was one of Britain’s best cinematographers while editor and second unit director John Glen would go on to helm several Bond movies. The movie looks as impressive as you’d expect with personnel like this involved. To ensure accuracy the most famous mercenary of them all, Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare, was brought in as technical and military advisor.

The cast is equally strong. If ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare was impressed by Richard Burton’s performance as the mercenary leader who am I to argue with him? Richard Harris is careful not to make his character, the mercenary with a conscience, irritating. Roger Moore plays a rather more ruthless character than usual and does it splendidly. The supporting cast is a veritable galaxy of great British character actors all of whom excel. The cast also includes quite a few real mercenaries like Ian Yule as Sergeant ‘Tosh’ Donaldson (who does a fine job).

Reginald Rose wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Daniel Carney. It’s a fine screenplay. Its one minor weakness is the political angle, with ex-President Limbani doing a bit too much speechifying (and Winston Ntshona’s excessively earnest performance doesn’t help). The political subtext feels a bit like it was tacked on to placate those who might have objected to a movie about mercenaries filmed in South Africa. Fortunately this proves to be only a temporary distraction from the movie’s main focus which is on the mercenaries themselves, their varying motivations, their military ethos and their response to the very nasty situation they find themselves in. This is (apart from the action scenes) the movie’s strength and the fine performances and the subtle characterisations carry it through.

By 1978 standards the violence in this movie was considered to be rather graphic. By today’s depraved standards it seems to strike the right balance, being graphic enough to be convincing without going overboard. As you might expect from a movie made in 1978 it has some rather politically incorrect moments as well, making it a refreshing change from the mealy-mouthed conformism of today.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release boasts a superb anamorphic transfer and a host of extras. These extras include a commentary track featuring producer Euan Lloyd, editor and second unit director John Glen and star Sir Roger Moore, a making-of featurette, a documentary on Euan Lloyd’s career and another on director Andrew V. McLaglen and an interview with ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare himself (Hoare has particularly fond memories of working with Richard Burton).

The Wild Geese is a boys’ own adventure in the best possible sense. Immensely entertaining and highly recommended.

The Mummy (1932) on Blu-Ray

The Mummy has always been one of my favourites among Universal’s 1930s horror movies. My DVD copy being a very poor one it was not difficult to convince myself that the Blu-Ray release would be a worthwhile purchase.

I’ve always thought that The Mummy can be best appreciated by being seen as both a horror movie and a tragic love story. It was slightly unusual among Universal’s early horror offerings in not being based on a classic of gothic literature, although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories Lot 249 and The Ring of Thoth were certainly influences. Interest in ancient Egypt was already high when the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen by a British archaeological expedition in 1922 ignited a full-blown craze. Nina Wilcox Putnam’s original screenplay was drastically rewritten by John L. Balderston. The movie was originally going to be about Cagliostro but it eventually evolved into a story much more closely focused on ancient Egypt.

The movie opens with a superbly mounted suspense set-piece as an assistant to Sir Joseph Whemple’s 1921 dig unwittingly restores to life the mummy of the high priest Imhotep. The mummy then disappears. A decade later a mysterious Egyptian named Ardeth Bey (Boris Karloff) leads another expedition to an extraordinary find, the tomb of the Princess Ankh-es-en-amon. The audience already knows that Ardeth Bey is in fact Imhotep.

As the story unfolds we learn of the tragic love of Imhotep and Ankh-es-en-amon. Imhotep believes that a young half-American half-Egyptian woman named Helen Grosvener (Zita  Johann) is Ankh-es-en-amon reincarnated and he is determined that this time their love will endure.

While Imhotep/Ardeth Bey is certainly ruthless and is certainly a danger to anyone who gets in his way he is never a true monster. He has no interest in killing random strangers or in destroying civilisation or in ushering in a reign of evil. All he wants is to have Ankh-es-en-amon restored to him and for the two lovers to be united forever. He is thus, even by comparison with some of the rather sympathetic Universal monsters, a very sympathetic monster indeed. Karloff doesn’t just make him sympathetic; he gives the character a great deal of weight and dignity. If it’s not Karloff’s greatest performance it’s certainly among his very best.

It remains a mystery why anyone ever thought David Manners, who plays Sir Joseph Whemple’s son Frank, was worth pushing as a potential star. He had the matinee idol looks certainly but he was always much too bland. Fortunately there’s a fine supporting cast here with Edward Van Sloan being particularly good as Doctor Muller, who is Helen’s doctor as well as Sir Joseph Whemple’s close friend and also happens to be the expert in the occult that such a movie has to have.

This movie also benefits from having one of the best female leads of any of the Universal horror pictures. Zita Johann was known mostly as a stage actor and although her performance is a little stagey that actually suits both the movie and her role perfectly. Most importantly she looks convincingly exotic without coming across as a femme fatale.

This was Karl Freund’s first movie as a director and he not only brought the film in on time and on budget, he also added the kind of visual flair and sophistication you would expect from a man who was one of the greatest of all cinematographers. Despite the potentially lurid subject matter Freund avoids sensationalism. He clearly wants to entertain but he also wants us to take the love story seriously, and he succeeds on both counts. And the movie delivers the chills that a horror movie requires.

Universal had not been making horror movies for very long when this one was made but they were already very very good at the technical side. Jack Pierce’s makeup for Karloff is perfect, striking the right balance. It is creepy but it still gives Karloff’s character the dignity that the story requires. The sets are wonderful and in general this is one of the handsomest horror films ever made.

The Blu-Ray boasts a superb transfer. It is loaded with extras although personally I found them to be rather disappointing. The commentary track is unfocused, partly because there are just too many people involved, but more seriously they simply have not done their homework (their most egregious error being to credit H. G. Wells as the author of the two short stories that inspired the movie even though a minimal amount of research would have told them that the stories were in fact from the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). There’s a documentary as well but it’s rather superficial.

What matters though is that The Mummy is one of the greatest of all horror movies and it looks magnificent on Blu-Ray.

Black Sunday (1960)

It’s almost superfluous to write a review of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio). This movie has already garnered so much adulation. I’d seen it before of course, but now I’ve had the opportunity of seeing it on Blu-Ray.

The plot is hardly original and would itself be much imitated. It was very loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s famous short story The Viy but by the time it made it to the screen very little if anything remained of Gogol’s story.

This was Bava’s first official assignment as a director although he had already completed a couple of movies begun by other directors. It was to be his only black-and-white movie and it demonstrates his artistry in that medium.

A man and a woman are burnt for witchcraft in the 16th century. They pronounce the usual curses upon their persecutors, and their persecutors’ descendants. Asa’s chief persecutor had been her brother who held the office of Grand Inquisitor.

Two hundred years later the witch Asa will have her chance to execute her vengeance. The Princess Katia is the spitting image of Asa (both women being played by Barbara Steele). A middle-aged doctor and his young colleague unwittingly offer Asa her chance. The doctor cuts himself and the blood falls on Asa’s long-dead face, reawakening the witch to life (life of a sort anyway). What Asa now needs is a new body, and Princess Katia’s will do her just fine - thus neatly combining vengeance with her desire for renewed life.

Bava had been director of photography on Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri in 1956 but the Italian horror boom really started to take off in the wake of the success of Hammer’s 1950s gothic horror films. Black Sunday shows an obvious Hammer influence but being shot in black-and-white it also shows the influence of the old Universal horror movies.

Bava did the cinematography for Black Sunday as well as directing so the movie’s visual style can be entirely credited to him. And the visual style is of course stunning. Bava offers us some very memorable images. Apart from the famous scene that introduces Barbara Steele to the film (the scene with Princess Katia and her two mastiffs) there’s also a particularly wonderful sequence of a carriage in the mist. The entire movie is a succession of wonderful images.

Barbara Steele’s extraordinary looks, her ability to appear both beautiful and evil with such ease, was obviously a huge contributing factor to the movie’s success. There was apparently some tension between Steele and Bava which might explain why he never worked with her again. The other cast members are all quite competent but it’s Steele who dominates the movie.

Arturo Dominici as Asa’s lover Javutich is almost as striking in appearance as Steele.

By the standards of 1960 this movie was fairly strong stuff and several scenes were considered to be too strong for the US theatrical release. In some later movies Bava would overdo the gore but in Black Sunday he uses shock effects sparingly and they therefore have maximum impact.

An interesting point raised by Tim Lucas in the accompanying commentary track is the surprising but apparently considerable influence of Disney’s Snow White on Italian horror in general an this film in particular.

The US Blu-Ray release comes from Kino. It really offers very little that a good DVD release couldn’t have offered. Picture quality is good but there is a little graininess at times. If you already own the movie on DVD I wouldn’t bother upgrading to this Blu-Ray edition. Extras are also sparse, the only one of importance being Tim Lucas’s commentary track. Lucas certainly knows Bava’s work well but I was slightly disappointed by the commentary track. It offers no great revelations about the movie. Perhaps I expected too much,

A great horror movie from a director whose name is synonymous with visual brilliance.

London in the Raw (1965)

The huge success of the Italian film Mondo Cane in 1962 engendered a horde of imitations, among which were a trilogy of documentary films by enterprising British film-making partners Arnold L. Miller and Stanley A. Long - West End Jungle (1961), London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), all emanating from their own production company, Searchlight Films. It is with the second of these films, London in the Raw, that we are concerned.

The mondo formula was to present a series of vignettes of outrageous and bizarre, and preferably titillating, aspects of human culture. The advantage was that these movies were not only money-spinners, they were also relatively cheap to make. While they presented themselves as slices of real life the one thing that virtually all these films have in common is that much of the footage was either faked or staged. London in the Raw is no exception.

The subject matter of London in the Raw is the sordidly glamorous side of London life in the mid-60s. This gives it a certain focus that is lacking in some other mondo films.

The mondo film is in fact a sub-genre of the exploitation movie, and like the American exploitation movies made from the 1930s to the 1950s these films try to get away with salacious material by presenting themselves as being educational or in the public interest. This is an aspect that gives the exploitation movie much of its charm (and amusement value) to audiences today.

Miller and Long had started their careers as pornographers, so while much of the footage is staged the movie does depict a world with which they were extremely familiar. The world of the sex industry, of clip joints and strip clubs, of “glamour” photography, of night-clubs owned by gangsters - this was their world and they were quite prepared to show it more or less as it really was. The result is an enthralling time capsule and much of the footage shot in real clubs such as Churchill’s in unique and of considerable interest from the social history point of view.

Of course like all exploitation movies this one promises more titillation than it actually delivers but it was not going to succeed at the box office without at least some nudity. The nudity is provided in a number of ingenious ways, including an art life class for beatnik painters.

Beatniks feature in several segments of the movie, offering an intriguing view of the developing counterculture of the 60s. One of the more interesting facts revealed by the extremely informative liner notes is that the counterculture was in fact to a very large degree financed by the sex industry (a fact that apologists fir the counterculture are eager to ignore), so the scenes of beatnik artists earning a living through porn are in fact disturbingly accurate.

The movie is not all sex clubs though. The intention was to present the movie as a portrait of London life in 1964 and it includes a number of segments dealing with health clubs (an industry that possibly has even lower ethical standards than the sex industry) and a surprisingly gruesome segment dealing with hair transplants, these segments being intended to demonstrate the lure of beauty.

While it is quite unequivocally an exploitation movie it is also a rather depressing look at the loneliness of modern life. Virtually every aspect of contemporary London life that is examined in this movie is to some extent driven by the fear and despair of loneliness, giving the movie a rather melancholy feel.

Miller and Long were skillful enough film-makers and the movie is, within the limitations of its budget and the difficulties presented by some of the locations, technically very competent.

The BFI Blu-Ray release comes with a host of extras including an alternative cut of the main feature and three short documentary films of varying interest. All three were made by a British duo of documentary film-makers, Staffan Lamm and Peter Davis, and oddly enough were originally intended for Swedish television.

Pub, made in 1962, is a tediously unwatchable exercise in social realism. Strip is a look behind the scenes at a London strip club in 1966. Chelsea Bridge Boys, shot in 1965, is much more interesting - a look at the Rockers, the British motorcycle youth subculture that gained such notoriety from its violent clashes with the Mods, a rival youth subculture. The members of the unofficial motorcycle club (which despite its name includes quite a few female members), the Chelsea Bridge Boys, come across as being not overly intellectual but a great deal more honest and intelligent than the pretentious and insultingly condescending interviewers.

The BFI’s Blu-Ray transfer of London in the Raw is exceptionally good and looks crisp and vivid. The three short subjects suffer somewhat from the less than perfect condition of the surviving source materials. The BFI clearly out a good deal of effort into the presentation of these cinematic oddities.

London in the Raw is by its very nature a mixed bag but it’s certainly a fascinating look at the 60s. If you’re interested in this time period then it’s most certainly worth a look.