In the world of books, January used to be considered something of a graveyard slot – and hardly a month in which an author would be advised to have a book published. Those days are gone, and January is now as lively a month in publishing terms at any other time of the year. Similarly, January is (as of 2022) an equally interesting month in terms of Blu-ray releases, as the current batch comprehensively proves. Kim Newman and I worked on commentaries for two intriguing (and, in one case, very provocative) films for Via Vision, Walter Grauman’s once-banned Lady in a Cage, with Olivia de Havilland menaced by marauding thugs (the leader being a young James Caan) — still a shocking movie — and George Pal and Byron Haskin’s lively The Naked Jungle, with a sexually frustrated Charlton Heston tempted by a négligée-wearing Eleanor Parker; and, of course, it’s the film with the army of killer ants at the climax). Arrow has the film that splendidly launched John Milius’s career, Dillinger, with Warren Oates on rare form, while Indicator has the unflinching story of spousal abuse The Brute (I once spoke to the actor Julian Glover about this, and he had a strange mixture of pride and shame about it – he is the abusive husband). Studio Canal has Last Night in Soho – which needs no introduction — and Kino Lorber offers the Thomas Alfredson version of John le Carré’s Tinker, Taylor Soldier, Spy, while Eureka boasts an early John Ford classic, The Sun Shines Bright.
But on to my star guest for this month’s Barry’s Blu-rays. One of the pioneers of serious genre film criticism, TIM LUCAS is now in his 50th year as a published writer. He’s an award-winning biographer (MARIO BAVA – ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK), magazine founder/editor (VIDEO WATCHDOG), novelist (the cult classic THROAT SPROCKETS), and a popular silver disc audio commentator. We’ve been in touch for a while in regard to our mutual Blu-ray commentaries, and my colleague Kim Newman was a long-time contributor to Video Watchdog in its printing incarnation, but this was the first time we were able to chat. I began by telling him about my earliest film memory: being taken to Pinocchio as a child. I asked about Tim’s early film experiences…
I assume, Tim, that you’ve always been a film buff. What was the first significant movie in your life as a child?
Well, at the age of four, my grandmother took me to my first indoor theatre and we ended up arriving in time for the last half hour of The Incredible Shrinking Man. She must have intended for us to see the co-feature, but I remember walking down the aisle into the dark just as the giant spider appeared and ran out of the theatre screaming! I had always been afraid of her basement, which had bugs and things, and I thought I’d been led into the biggest basement in town, with the biggest bugs! I was also affected by an early viewing of Disney’s Pinocchio, but it wasn’t the scary things in it that stuck with me, but rather the growing, nearing glow announcing the arrival of the Blue Fairy. When she appeared, I thought she was too beautiful to look at, so you could say I hid my eyes at the movies as often for reasons of beauty as ugliness – an early indication of my poetical sensibilities, you could say. I also remember hiding my eyes at a particularly, blindingly beautiful moment or two in Aleksandr Ptushko’s Sampo, which I saw under the title The Magic Voyage of Sinbad. Another kind of terror I experienced on the occasion of my twelfth birthday, when my mother took me downtown and gave me my choice of film. We ended up seeing Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood, and that was a case of a film’s realism being too intense for me, coupled with Quincy Jones’ disturbing jazz score. I hid my eyes during the murder scenes, but the music implied much more than the film didn’t show. I remember going back and seeing it twice more in second run, just to find the courage to watch it through – a kind of rite of courage. I still have a strong aversion to “True Crime” subjects, actually; but at the same time, I’m very much attracted to criminal fantasies such as Fantômas and Judex.
Your Blu-ray commentaries – and your writing (in Video Watchdog and elsewhere) demonstrate a massive knowledge of (and enthusiasm for) a wide range of films. Are there particular genres that you respond to, or is it the whole of cinema, from arthouse to exploitation?
As a kid, I was more or less a horror or monster movie purist. It was my passion. But as I got into my pre-teen years, I became more exposed to art films on television. We had a weekly Sunday night broadcast called For Adults Only, which is what you want to call a program if you want teens and pre-teens to tune in! It was there that I saw my first Bergman, Godard, Truffaut films, as well as certain British films like Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies, Room at the Top, and A Taste of Honey. I was drawn to European films of any kind because they had funny soundtracks and had a dreamlike quality and they also had European scenery! And on those funny soundtracks I recognized some of the same voices I’d come to know from watching dubbed horror movies. I always yearned to find out the names of those mysterious voice actors, and I eventually did, even got to befriend a couple of them. So, it’s undoubtedly the whole of cinema for me, though my taste for the macabre and the fantastic is at my core. And the films I love most are those where the elements of the fantastic film and the art film are both present, as in the movies of Georges Franju, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and a certain Italian director who I think you also admire, Barry!
Ah, yes, Mario Bava! Your study of the director, Mario Bava: All the Colours of the Dark, is absolutely monumental in every sense, and clearly never to be challenged as the definitive study. There was a time when those of us who were waiting impatiently for it were beginning to wonder whether it would ever appear! The Italian horror film was probably the finest flower of the country’s popular cinema, along with the stylish murder thriller (or gialli). The first key exponent in these fields (apart from the groundbreaking Riccardo Freda) was Mario Bava. I imagine you agree with that statement?
Yes, because Bava – though remembered primarily for his horror films, which were as personal as the horror films of, say, Tod Browning, for example – was actually present at the beginning of every genre specific to the Italian cinema. He was there at the beginning of Italian opera films, Gina Lollobrigida pictures, Italian teenage films, the sword-and-sandal films, the Spaghetti western, and of course, the Italian horror films and the gialli. Riccardo Freda was responsible for giving him his start as a director, by walking off a couple of his own films and leaving them in Bava’s hands; he reasoned that Bava was not a self-promoter and needed a push. Horror was never Freda’s own interest, but it was ideal for Bava. My book is so massive because it kept expanding as I learned more about him – for example, the fact that he spent as many years as a director of photography as he later spent as a director. I had to find as many of the films he photographed as were available and, once I saw them, I couldn’t deny that the early work informed his later work. I know that Crime Time is mostly oriented towards crime, so Bava’s definition of the giallo with The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo, 1962) and Blood and Black Lace (Sei Donne per l’Assassino 1964) should probably be singled out for mention. He casts a shadow over everything that continues to be done in that genre to this day.
Of all the Blu-ray projects you’ve worked on, of which are you particularly proud?
I should stress that I never submit a track until I am 100% satisfied that I’ve given the project my all and have learned something in the process. So I really am proud of each and every one, though less proud that my pronunciations of some foreign names and titles fail me on some of the older ones. My favourites include the BFI Alain Robbe-Grillet Six Films 1963-1974 box set (I commented on five of the six, and got to translate into English for the first time a poem that he wrote – with his widow’s kind permission); several for Kino Lorber, including Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (scripted by Robbe-Grillet), Compulsion (Richard Fleischer’s film inspired by the Leopold & Loeb case – a great crime picture), Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, and the forthcoming Touch of Evil (yet another great crime picture); Arrow Video’s recent True Romance box set, and of course my Mario Bava commentaries, which Kino and Arrow have both released in different configurations. I can’t keep listing them, but there are others that belong in this group as much as those I’ve picked.
Anything else?
At the moment, I’m looking forward with excitement to working on Freda’s Samson and the 7 Miracles of the World (1961) for Kino Lorber. They sent me a time-coded proxy of the original Italian version with English subtitles. I had only seen it before in languages I don’t speak. And when it was over, I realised it was quite different and, frankly, not as satisfying to me as the version released here in the States by American International. It was good, it was interesting to see the film in its original form, but it wasn’t the movie I remembered. AIP did extensive re-editing of the picture, even going to the extent of having Les Baxter rescore it, but most importantly, the English voices on the Italian export print were terrible! Samson didn’t sound manly, and neither did his evil adversary – but on the AIP soundtrack, they do! I spoke to Bret Wood at KL about this and later this week he is going to start digitally reconstructing and recreating the AIP version for this release. I’m very proud to have instigated this, and so grateful that the technology exists to do this.
Several years ago in the UK, we’ve had moral panics and calls for more censorship. The US has had fewer alarms in that area, but do you foresee a return to more stringent forms of censorship?
To be honest, I think our politicians and lawmakers these days are such a shoddy and contemptible lot, I don’t think they’re in any moral position to dictate what the general public should see. It’s shameful enough to have to look at them on the daily news. Strong language has now been de rigueur on cable television entertainment for a good 30 years or more, and over here in the States, all kinds of graphic violence and language are part of the network television landscape. I remember watching an episode of Hannibal and seeing the uterus of a racehorse implanted with a dead body, which the police promptly released in a gruesome torrent. When I saw that, I knew I’d seen just about everything. Truthfully, I do think most people get their ideas of how to comport themselves more from television than from the people around them, and I wish we could get away from the constant punctuation of effing talk and teach people how to speak in a more civilised way through the example of drama. That said, I am glad to be living in a more liberal age.
We talked about your Mario Bava book. What about your other literary endeavours?
My first published novel was Throat Sprockets, which I’ve heard called an “alt-horror novel,” and which your London friends Kim Newman and Stephen Jones included in their influential Horror: Another 100 Best Books. I was very honoured by that recognition, which was submitted by the wonderfully talented Tananarive Due. (She wrote: Before there was The Ring, there was Throat Sprockets… this is a story about a video that seizes the viewer and won’t let go — and that was the impact Lucas’s novel had on me when I read it.’) And speaking of Kim Newman, he was so generous with help as I was writing my second novel The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula, which is neck-and-neck with something else as the first horror-themed “mash-up” novel and runs parallel to the events in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from the perspective of the Count’s fly-eating minion. Kim helped me with historical and geographic detail, telling me for example how long it would take for a coach to get from here to wherever. It didn’t occur to me when I took the book on that I wasn’t particularly qualified to write a story set in Britain, even less so in a Britain of the past! So even though we’ve never properly met and have only spoken once briefly on the telephone, I consider Kim a great friend – and of course he’s quite an ingenious novelist in his own right.
Late last year, PS Publishing released my novella The Secret Life of Love Songs, which is a sort of Magic Realist consideration of the full spectrum of love, inspired by Nick Cave’s similarly titled CD lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song. For this, I wrote the lyrics to nine different original love songs, which were put to music by my musical heroine and friend Dorothy Moskowitz, who once upon a time was the lead singer with the cult psychedelia group The United States of America. It’s a slim book but the product of nearly a decade’s solid work. And just announced for early Spring by the PS Publishing imprint Electric Dreamhouse is my first full-length novel since The Book of Renfield: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, which is a comic novel about how film director Roger Corman prepared – with a little help from friends like Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Bogdanovich — to make his 1967 film The Trip. It’s based on a script that Charlie Largent and I wrote for Joe Dante, which he’s been trying to get made for a long time. Our fingers are crossed that the book will finally convince the Powers That Be that there’s an audience for this story, which is really about the giant courageous steps artists sometimes have to take to raise their game and even make sense of their lives.
I assume that the Blu-ray companies are still beating a path to your door for contributions?
I’m fortunate to say I have as much work as I can handle. Companies generally send me lists to pick from, or they suggest individual titles, and I’m sometimes approached because I have a known favour for certain titles or filmmakers. In all the time I’ve been doing this – some 23 years now – I think I’ve only done a few commentaries that I chose out of necessity, and by the time I was done with them, I had either added to my appreciation of them or at least had learned some useful new things as a result. I do feel blessed; it’s a great privilege to represent films that I love, and to be in people’s homes as they discover them, maybe for the first time.
