PaulEss2

Here, Russell goes in-depth about his attitude to film-making. His main assertion is that people are sick of realism, so his films heighten reality to the point they become fantasy. Russell's theory as to why critics hammer his movies is superb: we filter images when we read a book, but film takes that filter away, and in that tiny space, a film director with things to say can manipulate the agenda - including by shocking. It's the lack of this filter in his films that critics don't like. It restricts their journalism-school precision analysing, leaving them dealing with emotion that they're unfamiliar with and can't handle.

Existential philosopher, Colin Wilson, a friend of Russell's, asks more pertinent questions than usual. There's no smirking at wrestling naked men, and he gives Russell plenty of space to lay out his influences : Cocteau, Vigo, Welles, Fritz Lang and German expressionism generally. Russell's on cracking form, full of fire and enthusiasm. The conversation is riveting, with clips from Russell's amateur early work, his 60's BBC art films and his early 70's cinema features.

Robert Webber, amnesiac due to an RTA, tries to rebuild his mind while a diabolical murder plot swirls around him.

'Hysteria' is the rarest Hammer. I don't think I've ever seen it on tv, tho I hardly ever watch tv so perhaps that's it . . Prime's never heard of it. It's worth a glimpse if you're a fan of all the other Sangster/Francis pot-boilers, or a Hammer completist,

Webber is an interesting one, not easy to pigeonhole. He was key in the blistering '12 Angry Men', so there's his spurs right there. Not often the lead, as he is here, but always solid character support.

In 'Hysteria' he's a stand up guy to begin with, changing darker as his memory returns. Tho he takes it seriously, you get the impression he could do this stuff on one leg with both hands tied behind his back.

Boorish remake of the Margaret Lockwood stormer, with an admittedly surging Faye Dunaway (who gave up a major role in a respectable film of 'King Lear' to appear!) doing the honours.

It's a Michael Winner film: choppy editing and rushed plot existing purely to veer from one lewd outrage to the next let that drop right quick. Another dead giveaway is the preposterous wealth of acting big-hitters - John Gielgud, Prunella Scales, Derek Francis, Alan Bates, John Savident, Denholm Elliott . . the list goes on - which seem bafflingly common in Winner bombs.

Glynis Barber is set to marry rich lord, Elliott. Her pampered sister, Dunaway, arrives for the splicing but within minutes she and Elliott are frolicking in the fronds and she's snagged him for herself. The wedding is coarse, mansion life a bore, and it's not long before the scowling newlywed has taken to roadside wrongdoing, shacking up with vulgarian highwayman Bates - brash, sweaty, no James Mason - along the way.

What Gielgud thinks of it all you can see in his face : a weary grimace every time he delivers a tawdry line. Scales is another whose deportment painfully demonstrates that she too has realised far too late in the day that she's signed up to a complete bummer.

A particular low, amongst many, is Glynis Barber's body-double and an astonishingly bad Oliver Tobias - slapstick wig, someone else's voice - doing a wretched fireside love scene. Listen to Tony Banks (!) gaudy orchestral swell as they manoeuvre into several unlikely and dull sex positions.

Controversy - a Winner requisite - was raised when British censors objected to Dunaway horsewhipping topless Marina Sirtis - another Winner requisite - at a public hanging and started snipping. A furious Winner engaged a posse of the great and the good to defend his film, only for them to later realise the censors were quite right. As the late, great Derek Malcolm once said of another Winner duffer: "I wouldn't have cut it, I'd've burnt it !"

Sirtis - ripe and sultry, for sure - a shoe-in for Mia Khalifa, does deliver the film's one good line, and Winner should have gone the full comedy route instead of the crass ribaldry, gurning and quasi-Hammer Horror music motifs he did. Fatally, the film doesn't know what it is, and ends up merely a clamorous mess dressed up to the nines in swanky costumes and pulchritudinous photography.

Points for the 'Directed by Michael Winner' legend set over a pair of advancing bare jigglies, which was either Winner puckishly anticipating the predictable critical hostility his film met on release, or actively participating in it.