PUSHER TRIO, Nicolas Winding Refn, director/Second Sight Films
A Nordic noir classic trio is brought to our attention again by Second Sight Films – and very welcome it is. I spoke to its lead actor, The Bridge’s Kim Bodnia, some years ago, and he is particularly proud of Pusher, the first film. Frank, a drug pusher who is making a comfortable living, ill-advisedly undertakes a massive deal with a consignment of drugs he has not paid for and is arrested. He has managed to dispose of the drugs in a lake, but his real – and potentially lethal – problem is his supplier, to whom he owes a great deal of money. Even those who are only familiar with top drug dealers from the medium of film or the novel will be well aware that such individuals are not the kind that one should be in debt to – if it can possibly be avoided. Frank is obliged to plunge into the darkest reaches of Copenhagen’s underworld to get himself off the hook. This caustic and uncompromising Danish crime drama is handled with a steely intensity by director Nicolas Winding Refn (he was later to bring the same intensity to the American film of James Sallis’ Drive), but looked at in the 21st century, Pusher’s most interesting element is now perhaps the performance (as the beleaguered Frank) by the versatile actor Kim Bodnia, now much more familiar playing on the right side of the law the fish-out-of water Danish cop working in Sweden in the cult series The Bridge.
THE INQUISITOR & DEADLY CIRCUIT, Claude Miller, director/Radiance
The cinematic qualities of Marc Behm’s novel Eye of the Beholder are unsurprising – the author had extensive experience writing screenplays, including Stanley Donen’s often underrated 1963 thriller Charade and, rather strangely, Richard Lester’s 1965 Beatles film Help! And, in fact, his novel Eye of the Beholder began life as a screenplay for Philip Yordan. In the event, an adaptation was made by the celebrated French director Claude Miller as Deadly Circuit. A director with a dark sensibility evocative of Chabrol, Claude Miller made the two unorthodox ‘polars’ (French police noir films) included in this Radiance set with Michel Serrault, showcasing the actor in mesmerising performances alongside stars including Lino Ventura and Isabelle Adjani. In The Inquisitor, detectives cops Gallien (Ventura) and Belmont (Guy Marchand) interrogate Martinaud (Serrault), a wealthy lawyer, for the rape and murder of two young girls. The investigation becomes further complicated when his wife (Romy Schneider) gives a surprising statement… A gripping thriller with intense performances, The Inquisitor was a critical and commercial success on release, nominated for 8 César awards, winning Best Screenplay and acting prizes for Serrault and Marchand. Serrault also excels in the truly bizarre Deadly Circuit as a deeply disturbed sleuth who has a strange fixation on the target of his investigation, a serial murderer (Adjani) who he tracks across Europe on a killing spree. Surreal and unorthodox, this is a cult movie with a strong supporting cast including Stephane Audran, here made up to look spectacularly unprepossessing.
BLACK BAG, Steven Soderbergh, director/Universal/Spirit
Steven Soderbergh’s taut and strongly characterised thriller, while perhaps not the director at his most rigorous, utilises two of the most reliable actors in current cinema, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, in an ingeniously constructed espionage drama that may be reminiscent of other current outings in the genre (such as the very similar The Agency) but which quickly establishes its own identity. Another plus here is the sweeping cinematographic use of the city of London – the film is something of a love letter to the capital.
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, 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. Exploitation films need to be dispatched with considerable gusto, and Manogoonian demonstrates no shortage of that quality in this lively piece. The ragged edges are cleverly concealed by dynamic framing and choreography.
NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH, St John Legh Clowes, director/88 Films
A film for which Kim Newman and I provided a commentary. In the 1940s, one of the most influential of filmic challenges to the British status quo occurred, resulting in a radical rethink on censorship and a much more frequent use of the censor’s scissors. In British Crime Film, I talked about the astonishing furore that greeted the 1948 British film of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish now seems absurd. The direct replication of the screams of outrage that greeted the source novel were, perhaps, to be expected – given the fact that the director St John Legh Clowes (whose sole film credit this is) clearly set himself the task of producing the strongest and gamiest material (within the censorship of limitations of the day) that he could get away with, to match his source material. In fact, the very fact that Legh Clowes did (initially, at least) get away with it sent out a false signal: a new dark age of censorship was to follow the film, and the consensus between critics and moral guardians quickly coalesced along the lines of ‘how was this depraved drama allowed to be passed uncut’? In fact, the stricter censorship of sexual scenes and violence that followed the lenient treatment of this film was to be echoed in the 1970s after the then-head of the British Board of Film Censors Stephen Murphy took the decision to allow adult audiences to make up their own minds about such contentious films as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs – liberal decisions whose consequences were to create a similar drawing-up the battle lines between those who argued for the freedom of filmmakers to follow their vision without fear of upsetting the squeamish or the prudish.
WORLD NOIR VOL. 3, Hasse Ekman, Peter Lorre, Henri Decoin, directors/Radiance
A strong case could be made for the fact that Radiance’s ongoing World Noir series is one of the most welcome accoutrements to the crime film genre available to viewers at present. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the series is the fact that even seasoned cineastes (such as, in all modesty, this writer) are being introduced to films which were previously either known only by their title – or not even that. And the success rate of the offerings in the series is virtually 100%, as with volume 3, which can be recommended wholeheartedly (and there is a volume 4 available). For many viewers, the most intriguing item here will be the sole directing assignment of the talented actor Peter Lorre, The Lost One, that shows (as with Charles Laughton in his one directing assignment, Night of the Hunter) that an alternative career could have been at his disposal. Lorre’s film was a West German production, and the other titles – equally impressive here – are from France and Sweden.
JACK THE RIPPER, Robert S Baker & Monty Berman, directors/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 undertone 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.
