Brimstone and Treacle
Dennis Potter at his macabre and mischievous best. Unfortunately it also stars Sting, who’s largely crap, but the story is still superb.
The complete original teleplay (before Sting got in on the act) is on YouTube, from the BBC ‘Play for Today’ series, which I was hooked on as a kid.
The tale is inspired by the Kierkegaard quote ‘There resides infinitely more good in the demonic man than in the trivial’, and concerns the ‘visitation’ of an apparently angelic boy to the home of a supposedly god-fearing man, his wife and their paraplegic daughter.
The boy gradually gains the trust of the wife and begins to take over as a kind of surrogate son, before starting to undermine the husband and slowly, horrifically, drags the ugly truth out of him.
It was banned for eleven years in the UK, as films starring Sting should be.
I love the idea of visitations – the arrival of strangers coming into a relationship, a place, or a situation, who may be by turns demonic or angelic. It’s what the great North European fairy tales dealt with repeatedly and it’s something Pinter loved to play around with too.
A fabulous psychological thriller, filled with biblical portent, in a claustrophobic domestic
environment.
The trailer’s here.
Shane
Well, just one of the best westerns ever made, and interesting again as with many great westerns it involves a stranger coming to a homestead.
The western landscape was always great for that – a lone gunman or a group of potentially dangerous men on horseback coming across an isolated farm. And of course there’s the frisson of suspicion rubbing up against the unspoken rules of hospitality in such a lonely, brutal place, and that collision of idealism with stark reality.
I love the idea of landscapes that are so filled with a sense of themselves that they could conceivably just conjure something or somebody up.
Good versus evil, right versus wrong; all that great, gritty stuff that gets washed away in so many films of our times that tiptoe around the grey areas afraid to get their hands dirty.
This film’s interesting from a technical writing perspective too as it’s really about the boy, who is the central character of the film, while Shane the gunman is the protagonist. Lucky Country was constructed in much the same way, except that Tom gradually learns to act as the story progresses and becomes more of an active force in it as he sets out to confront his father’s nemesis.
Here’s the trailer. ‘Acclaimed’!
Straw Dogs
Gentle, law-abiding, decent, moral people suddenly faced with an inexplicable explosion of violence. And perhaps the most unvarnished depiction of Peckinpah’s belief that violence is a necessary rite of passage.
It’s set in an isolated dwelling and a landscape in which everything is alien to the naïve couple, including the local characters who invade their home and who seem to have been manifested from the inherent violence and menace of the place itself.
It was filmed in St Ives, Cornwall, where my fabulous Uncle Alan lives, and who was around at the time, trying to get a glimpse of Susan George in the buff. I spent a lot of my childhood down there and it’s not half as bleak as Peckinpah makes it out to be. Peckinpah perhaps did for Cornish tourism what Kriv managed to do for Mount Bold.
I just love Sam Peckinpah.
And once again, the trailer’s here.
Unforgiven
No surprises there. Of the ‘modern’ westerns I could watch this and Andrew Dominick’s Assassination of Jesse James over and over again.
The opening and ending of this film were a huge influence. Again an isolated dwelling going to wrack and ruin, and a man trying to cope with a young family after the death of his wife.
Although it’s fundamentally about different subject matter the elemental visual textures of this film really got to me, from the bleakness and cold of the start to the rain, mud, bare wood and lamplight of the finale.
It’s also a film that’s just chock full of memorable lines and characters, as I think great movies should be. Gene Hackman’s Little Bill taunting Richard Harris for being the ‘Duck of Death’ is absolutely priceless.
I wanted Lucky Country to be filled with the same kind of characters – archetypes yet oddities at the same time – and lines that remain in the mind after the film has ended.
This film also masterfully plays around with the other great western theme, which was seeded all through Lucky Country: the death of the pioneer dream and the encroachment of modern technology.
Here’s one of a couple of trailers. Interesting difference on the takes. ‘It’s a helluva thing killing a man…’
The Night of the Hunter
Another laugh a minute movie. At the fragile heart of Lucky Country is the vulnerability of the children, and there’s perhaps never been a greater menace in that regard on film than Robert Mitchum as the traveling preacher from hell, ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles, hounding down the kids for the money that’s hidden in the doll.
There’s a great scene, a snippet of which is in the trailer, where Mitchum has taken over the family home and is sat in the kitchen with the kids pretending to be their father, trying not to lose his temper, but exploding at the little girl when she won’t tell him where the money is.
Here’s greed again, and also that convoluted religious aspect to it all; the great dramatic element of trust undermined and appropriated.
Robert Mitchum on horseback in silhouette singing ‘Children…children…’ as the two kids huddle in the barn is one of the most enduring and terrifying images in cinema for me.
Great trailer. And it’s here…
