BLOOD ORANGE, Terence Fisher, director/Hammer
The advertising copy for Blood Orange reads: ‘New article by crime and Noir expert Barry Forshaw on lead actor Tom Conway’, and I must admit to enjoying supplying this extra. Like all the very welcome product appearing from Hammer Redux , this Limited Collector’s Edition appears in 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray. Hammer Films – before their lucrative (and artistically rewarding) colonisation of the horror film – made a series of economical and well-turned crime movies, including Blood Orange (1953), with Tom Conway as leading man. The film (called Three Stops to Murder in the US) was directed by Terence Fisher in the days when he was regarded as an efficient presence at Hammer, before the company and the filmmaker found their macabre métier. The film was a straightforward crime story set in the world of fashion, in which Conway played a private investigator called – strangely – Tom Conway, investigating a double murder. Fisher, always crisply capable in delivering whatever material he was given, provides a solid 76 minutes, and Conway supplies what might have been perceived at the time as the necessary ‘American’ name to make the film more saleable in the US. The fact that he was actually Russo-British was incidental.
ENEMY TERRITORY, Peter Manoogian, director/Arrow
The kinetic level of excitement in Enemy Territory (appearing on Limited Edition Blu-ray) is maintained throughout in the capable hands of director Peter Manoogian — and it’s good to welcome this neglected action thriller back in a high definition new restoration. Adroit direction by Manoogian apart, there is some striking cinematography by Ernest Dickerson (who shot Do the Right Thing) and a good cast including Gary Frank, Ray Parker Jr., Jan-Michael Vincent, Stacey Dash, and an early appearance from the star of Candyman Tony Todd. Enemy Territory is a lively item, finessed with a new restoration, and extras include a new audio commentary by director Manoogian, along with an illustrated collector’s booklet.
WRACK AND RUIN: THE RUBBLE FILM AT DEFA, various directors/Eureka
we have come to expect produce splendid under visit byways international cinema (as in the recent set of German Ed Wallace films to which this writer contributed) and their latest such venture is a set of five remarkable post-war films from East Germany’s DEFA studio, gritty and uncompromising pieces which combine the tropes of crime cinema and social realism. The first film produced in post-war Germany, The Murderers Are Among Us has a concentration camp survivor returned to a rubble-strewn Berlin to discover a stranger living in her apartment – an ex-soldier with a dark secret. Like all the films in the set, this is something of a revelation, and the set as a whole is de rigueur for the more adventurous film lover.
HACKERS, Iain Softley, director/88 Films
Youthful hackers stumble across a humongous computer fraud in this tense thriller set against the backdrop of New York cyberculture. With its finger on the pulse of then-current technological developments, Hackers is a satisfying mix of rebellious antiheroes and unpleasant villains, with super-hacker Jonny Lee Miller and fellow expert Angelina Jolie (looking very young indeed — the film is from1995) encountering a variety of physical and electronic threats and menaces. The new print from 88 films looks particularly impressive.
FLAMING BROTHERS, Joe Cheung, director/Eureka
There is a dedicated following for what cinéastes now recognise as the ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre of 1980s Hong Kong cinema; the progenitors of this field were John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and Ringo Lam’s City on File. Flaming Brothers has all the accoutrements of the genre: aggressive, in-your-face cutting, attractive and charismatic leads and, most of all, operatic levels of bloodshed – mostly through the use of firearms which rarely seem to need fresh ammunition (the average side-arm in heroic bloodshed possesses the bountiful ammunition capacity of a machine-gun). And the effect of Joe Cheung’s energetic film is as colourful as its predecessors. The eponymous brothers are played by Alan Tang and Chow Yun fat, the latter now a legendary figure in Hong Kong cinema. As always with Eureka, the transfer is impeccable.
DARBY AND JOAN, SERIES 2, various directors/Acorn
A welcome second series for two charismatic stars, Emmy award-winning Greta Scacchi (known for her coruscating turns in White Mischief, and, more recently Bodies) and Emmy-nominated Bryan Brown (Cocktail), team up in the warmly entertaining Darby and Joan. This Aussie mystery series follows two unlikely strangers whose lives unexpectedly collide and who embark on the adventure of a lifetime as they hit the Australian open roads for a variety of sleuthing encounters. Cosy crime? Certainly, but enjoyable fare
DERELICT, Jonathan Zaurin, director/Miracle Media and 101 Films: Digital: August, Blu-Ray: September
Indie cinema – as opposed to the heavyweight studios – can often produce highly distinctive and unusual work, particularly in the more quirky corners of the crime film idiom. That’s very much the case with the unsparing crime drama Derelict, which numbers among its bushel of writers two leading lights of the current Blu-ray industry: Kat Ellinger and Michael MacKenzie. Although the film is very specifically English, with its caustic, unromanticised picture of urban decay, there is something Gallic in its sensibility – no doubt because the film’s director, Jonathan Zaurin, was born in the small town of Audincourt in France and based some of the plot on actual events that took place in the town. And the minatory, dangerous milieu of the film – despite its British setting – has echoes of the work of Albert Camus, notably the murder in The Outsider. The narrative centres on the bitter, traumatised Abigail (Suzanne Fulton), a young woman attempting to deal with the after-effects of the savage killing of her father. A separate strand of the film deals with one of the killers, who with his brother leads a life of petty criminality that finally descends into another brutal murder. With its uncompromising scenario, this is a film a million miles away from the current wave of ‘cosy crime’, and it is aided by its striking cinematography (the film was shot by the director himself) – many shots are given a distinctly painterly quality, despite the unprepossessing locales with which the viewer is presented. Other considerable pluses are the aforementioned writing – always idiomatic and truthful – and the strong performances. There is also the artfully managed soundtrack, which is always at the service of Jonathan Zaurin’s imagery. If there is one caveat, it is perhaps that the director occasionally makes some narrative points at greater length than they warrant, but that’s not a serious reservation. Derelict is a strong and compelling addition to the library of British crime film.
JACK THE RIPPER, Robert S Baker & Monty Berman, director/Severin
The fascination with Jack the Ripper continues unabated to this day, with Saucy Jack remaining eternally malleable – as the facts of the case were never really known (despite a million conspiracy theories to the contrary) and the fact that Britain’s best-known historical serial killer was never caught, makes it possible for filmmakers and writers to simply utilise (and create filigrees upon) the genuinely mythic figure he has become. With their keen eye for exploitable properties, it was hardly surprising that the canny Baker and Berman duo would come up with a version of the story. The original script that had been considered was firmly rejected, and Baker and Berman once again employed the reliable Jimmy Sangster, who presented for the duo a story which peripherally touched on historical facts but wove a new and intriguing scenario around them. This screenplay, when realised by the team, was to prove perfectly serviceable, not least when set against a vividly realised late 19th-century London; what’s more the film was stuffed with reliable character actors including a particularly dour John le Mesurier (long before he became known as an effete comedy performer), and, in a particularly appropriate piece of casting, the sombre and imposing actor Ewen Solon, who alert viewers might have recognised even in 1959 as the knife-wielding maniac concealed beneath a veneer of respectability (although Sangster threw in a host of red herrings, including a facially deformed laboratory assistant, audiences were beginning to be aware of the tricks that filmmakers played upon them – and had become notably harder to fool). Solon’s character, Sir David Rogers, fits in with the most commonly utilised notion of Jack the Ripper’s hidden identity in movies: a titled professional man whose brusque manner barely conceals his contempt for those around him (particularly women). The motivation given to his version of The Ripper by Jimmy Sangster was the customary insane hatred of prostitutes and in particular the woman, Mary Clarke, who he believed had given his son syphilis. The actor is given a splenetic speech justifying his murderous activities, but in the uncut print of the film (at one time shown on British television although only ever shown in cinemas in its truncated form) incorporates a twisted sexual motif into his killings; one lingering sequence of mutilation and murder has a clear orgasmic undertones for the character; his death (crushed by a lift) occasions the film’s only use of colour as the blood of The Ripper seeps through the floorboards in distinctive red hues. It was perhaps inevitable that the script (when submitted to the BBFC) would provoke the customary outraged denunciations, with objections raised not just to the grisly killings, but also to some ‘lascivious’ scenes of cancan dancers, which were considered to be too shocking. On this occasion, despite the duo’s sympathetic relationship with John Trevelyan, they made an attempt to defend the integrity of the film and resisted the suggested censorship cuts. Foreign buyers of the film had no such reservations, and Jack the Ripper was already potentially profitable even before it had run the gauntlet of the British censors. If the film succeeds on a straightforward Gothic level rather than incorporating any kind of interesting subtexts, it is none the worse for that, and given the slew of truly woeful film incarnations of Jack the Ripper, Baker and Berman’s version was one of the more memorable. The success of the film led to the duo considering another historical monster – two, in fact: the Edinburgh grave robbers Burke and Hare.
