The UK cinema market isn't a big deal, globally speaking. There aren't enough of us here to make our island that important - from a purely financial perspective. Therefore, sadly ... annoyingly, a lot of films simply never see the light of day here, either because they can't get a distributor or because the distributor they do have doesn't think a UK release will be financially worthwhile.
Thankfully thanks to the miracle of internetography and free trade ... it is possible to import DVDs or download films you really want to see, irrespective of where they were released.
Nowadays, if you know a film is out there ... you can usually track a copy down. I hardly need add at this point that independent and art-house films need your support even more than big mainstream Hollywood releases and, therefore, downloading them illegally for free is even more damaging to the careers of the people who made the film. So, if you like their work please pay them for it. Then they will be able to make something else you enjoy.
Now, a few cases in point ... trailers for films which, unless I'm very much mistaken, will not be playing at a multiplex near you any time soon ... if you, like me, live in the UK.
Because of the page width of my blog, these YouTube links run off the side of the page on some browsers so, to see the full picture double click on the image. A second window will open taking you to YouTube where you can watch the trailer in glorious fullscreen if you choose.
Cos, well, cos this is my blog ... I'll start with science fiction films:
The first is a film that has just played at the SXSW festival - Cargo: a horror/sci-fi from Switzerland that bears more than a passing resemblance to Pandorum and contains not a hint of a cuckoo clock ...
Secondly, another SXSW debut: Mars, a film which seems to follow on the motion-capture work Richard Linklater did with Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly:
This atmospheric little piece was released in Europe in 2009, Metropia:
And finally, two films which became available on DVD in The States in 2009, firstly: Battle For Terra:
Last and very much not least is the only one of these films I've seen: Dreams With Sharp Teeth - a documentary about the great SF writer Harlan Ellison. I saw this film at its only UK screening at 2008's Edinburgh Film Festival. It is a great film about writing as a career, it's a great film about this particular writer and, even if you don't know how great a writer he is, he'll win you over in what is, essentially, as magnificent an extended interview as I've ever seen an SF writer give. A real must see ... and only available on DVD in The States.
Go on, try something the big corporations don't want you to see ... because they don't think you matter. If enough of us import enough films ... they might decide that we are important enough, after all.
“Never look back, Lawrence. The past is a wilderness of horrors.” - Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins)
For some, the definition of Universal Studios is “the company that made the monster movies” even though that cycle ended almost seventy years ago. I like Universal’s classic horror films! They still stand tall and proud in the imagination from those far-off childhood days when I was allowed to stay up til 9pm to watch them.
I also like Universal’s more recent raidings of its corporate tomb, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). I’ll sidle nonchalantly past Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), gazing innocently the other way, before admitting I also like Steven Sommers’ Van Helsing (2004)! It’s a weird, unwieldy mish-mash of pulp fiction tropes and camp as a row of tents but it delivers.
What it doesn’t do is pay due deference to its source material. Of course, one could easily argue that Universal itself didn’t treat its properties with appropriate respect, since the genre-defining monsters were all-too-soon reduced to playing straight men to Abbot And Costello.
Now The Wolfman has come along to redress that balance by using the finest of modern CGI effects to revisit the 1941 original. Benicio Del Toro was obviously doggedly determined to play Lawrence Talbot, having stuck loyally with the project through a long, traumatic gestation and a last-minute change of director. Initially, during the film’s long, slow first act, you really wonder why he bothered, since there’s very little for him to get his teeth into.
In terms of mood and mise en scène, the film has all the hallmarks of the original Universal horrors and their British Hammer siblings: the local village which is obviously a set, the moody, mist-shrouded forests of skeletal oaks, the dilapidated ancient monuments and statues hinting at civilisations long forgotten, the ancient circle of standing stones beside the gypsy camp and the snarling, drooling predator in the dark.
These latter two elements furnish the film with its first stand-out set-piece, as the beast attacks the gypsy camp with all the speed and ferocity of a lightning bolt. It is a furry blur hurtling between caravans but, oddly, when you do catch a decent glimpse of it, it looks disappointingly like a man in a teddy-bear suit. Bungle The Werewolf … be afraid!
But Hugo Weaving has no fear. He turns up at the beginning of act two and the film promptly comes vividly to life. He is playing Inspector Abilene of The Yard, fresh from failing to track down Jack The Ripper. This is an interesting inter-textual cross-over which owes more to Alan Moore than Lon Chaney. Weaving is wonderful, with his dignified cynicism and wry one-liners lifting the whole project into another league (not quite an extra-ordinary one, but you get my point). His performance successfully changed my mind over a film which, by this point, I had all-but written off as a failure.
It’s at about this time that Anthony Hopkins (who had, up to this point, been sleep-walking through his role as Del Toro’s father, Sir John Talbot) suddenly becomes a much more animated character – giving Hopkins the chance to present us with another of his wonderfully wicked, casually evil performances. Although, I still wonder about the thick Irish accent he (and only he) employs.
Other performers include Art Malik, who gives a confident and subtle performance with what could have been a horribly stereotypical character, Talbot The Elder’s Sikh manservant, Singh. Meanwhile, Anthony Sher turns in a thankfully brief cameo as the stereotypically German psychiatrist in charge of the London asylum into which Talbot Jnr is confined.
Once transformed, the lycanthropic Del Toro quite deliberately bears a distant resemblance to Chaney’s and, unlike any other screen wolf I can think of (except, unfortunately, Michael J Fox’s Teen Wolf – 1985) Del Toro can still give a recognisable performance through the make-up. Obviously it was important to make-up maestro Rick Baker (who, one hardly need mention, transformed all transformation scenes forever more with his still-remarkable work in An American Werewolf in London thirty years ago) to retain the subtle distinction between Man Wolf and Were Wolf.
The film’s truly stand-out sequence comes when Talbot The Wolf cuts loose in old London town, one part Phantom of the Opera to two parts Murders at the Rue Morgue, the scenes of him galloping across the rooftops really do make you yearn for someone to green-light An American Werewolf in Victorian London and to do so double quick!
After such a slow, contemplative start, it is delightfully shocking to have a crescendo involving a wolf fight that easily caps the Nicholson / Spader fight which concluded Wolf (1994), especially in a film which has also encompassed sub-textual considerations of the relationship between ancient myth and modern (by Victorian standards) Freudian analysis … I can’t be the only one who noticed that the son’s silver bullets were loaded into the father’s gun!
Director Joe Johnson makes the special effect sequences buzz with a drama and a vibrancy, as you would expect from someone who began his career at ILM but, sadly, he fails to draw out of the dialogue and character development scenes, despite sterling work done by a, generally, excellent cast. I appreciate the slow dramatic build to the big transformation and I bemoan the films that plough straight in with the gore and don’t bother establishing any characters; but, in a werewolf movie, the characters have to be thrilling and the dialogue positively electric to sustain a full hour of screen-time with no wolf.
They aren’t.
To be fair, they aren’t in Curt Siodmak’s original 1941 script, either. But they are in the afore-mentioned An American Werewolf in London which similarly waits a good hour before unleashing its wolf on-screen and which retains its crown as the best-written, best-performed, scariest, goriest werewolf film ever.
Dir: Joe Johnson
Stars: Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, Emily Blunt
As the shreds of the so-called British Film Industry quivers in the shadow of Hollywood’s big, bullying three-dimensional behemoth … one of the few things we can do that they can’t is create a musical biopic with balls. Possibly because of the lawyers, possibly because Americans are, reputedly, just so darn polite, their biopics tend to be limp, deferential affairs. Even when they do admit to their subject’s faults (like, say, in Ray - 2004 - or Walk The Line - 2005) they still manage to eulogise and forgive.
However, you can always rely on an independent British film to show you the grit and grime behind the glamour of the music business. From fictional depictions like That’ll Be The Day (1973) and Stardust (1974) through Slade’s Flame (1975) to the ugly truths of Sid And Nancy (1986), Twenty-Four Hour Party People (2002) and Closer (2004) we never seem to tire of demonstrating just what arseholes our musical heroes are. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is no exception but, in this case, its subject, Ian Dury, wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Taking the spotlight, centre-stage as Dury, is Andy Serkis who, as has been demonstrated many times in the past, is a very physical performer. He has shown impressive physical prowess and a mime-like finesse in throwing shapes for his pioneering of the mo-cap technology that nowadays underpins the creation of most cartoons and video games. He turned a soulless, mechanical process and made it an art.
He brings this same flexibility to the jerky, stumbling, spastic shapes of Ian Dury. His transformation into Dury is, like Tom Hardy’s transformation into Charles Bronson last year, quite extraordinary. Shedding weight to give his face the appropriate lined, worn look, and spending months exercising just one side of his body, he manages to ape Dury’s Polio-derived gait with painful accuracy … but the real revelation is the voice. Those deep, gravely, Estuary tones are reproduced remarkably, especially when he is performing Dury’s trademark numbers, which were all re-recorded with him by all the surviving members of the Blockheads. It is an extraordinary performance fully deserving of the BAFTA it didn’t win and the Oscar for which it wasn’t even nominated. The fact that neither this nor Hardy’s performance last year have received major award recognition is a travesty which leaves me almost lost for words.
Almost.
Director Mat Whitehouse has learned a lot from his mentor Michael Winterbottom about shooting in a documentary style. Consequently, the aesthetic of the film is convincingly in-keeping with the grainy, poorly-lit music-films of the seventies. It is clumsy and amateurish and aggressive and passionate, much like its subject and very much like the Punk music scene through which he rose. Like Dury’s lyrics, there is a simple, dirty poetry to this film. At one point, musing about his disability, Dury comments: “Polio … it’s like love … There’s no cure for it!”
Dury comes across as a git, frankly. He’s needy but endlessly uncaring as a husband, selfish and manipulative as a boyfriend, mute and mostly useless as a father. But, as with all artists, he is surrounded and supported by people who tolerate all this because they love him. They love his passion and his talent, his angry joie de vive and his frequent moments of desperation.
To its credit, the film steadfastly refuses to sentimentalise Dury or even sympathise with him, he is a true grotesque and we see him here, warts and all. He calls the song Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll “ … a celebration for The Outsiders … The Uglies!” He is definitely an outsider but, in-keeping with his merciless refusal to feel sorry for himself, this status energises him.
Ray Winston, by contrast, gives a restrained, dignified performance as Dury’s father, appearing only in dreamy flashbacks. He represents a vanished, steadfast generation and the greatest lesson he teaches his little boy is about standing up proudly and hiding your pain inside.
By contrast, the other flashback narrative gives us Toby Jones as a cruel, disappointed warder at the Boys’ Home where Dury is deposited by his father. Here he is brutalised in ways that only young boys can conceive but this, sadly, is Dury Snr’s plan - to have his son beaten so severely and so often that, like metal, it makes him stronger. There is a mission statement on the wall in the dormitory: Men Made Here!
This is why the adult Dury maintains his steely exterior at inappropriate times with the people to whom he should actually be opening up.
We’re over an hour into the film by the time he first burst onto the stage as a Blockhead, spasming and scary like some brutal Bauhaus clown. But the unique man and his unique music were created by his unique circumstances. To appreciate the music (as, presumably, we must already do, since we’ve chosen to watch a film about it) we must experience the emotional swamps from which it arose like marsh-gas and mouldy corpses.
Sadly, once he achieves some modicum of fame, he promptly falls into all the stereotypical drink and drug traps of the untrained pop-stars of the time. I suppose this had to be here, since it’s the name of the film, but it does serve to make the whole project feel more familiar and far less unique.
Never-the-less, if you, like me, have always been intrigued and exhilarated by the music and more than a little curious about the man who wrote it, your appreciation of it will grow exponentially with having seen this film. Furthermore, if you feared that Serkis would be fated to forever play henchmen and heavies in expensive Hollywood productions (his role as Lumpy in King Kong - 2005 – Mr Grin in Stormbreaker – 2006 - and Captain Haddock in the up-coming Tintin movie all spring to mind) then fear not, with Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll he has proven himself to be a formidable leading man.
Even though BAFTA, this year, elected to go with the dapper charm of Colin Firth instead of Serkis’ scary, sweaty energy … his day will come. There are unfathomable depths of talent within that man, much more than can be contained within the fragile framework of Britain’s nebulous film-industry.
Dir: Mat Whitecross
Stars: Andy Serkis, Bill Milner, Olivia Williams, Naomie Harris
Of course, that’s the ground-breaking 1985 BBC TV serial I’m talking about. It gazed into the abyss of 1980s political corruption and asked doom-laden questions about mortality … all haunted by Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen’s sparse, jarring score and the fathomless depths of Bob Peck’s pain. Edge of Darkness also brought director Martin Campbell to the attention of Hollywood. Already 45 years old, he had worked his way up through directing TV shows like The Professionals (1977 – 83) and Shoestring (1979 – 80) to the pinnacle of Edge of Darkness, which showed a restraint and a maturity that has, sadly, been all-but entirely absent from his subsequent movies.
One such movie is … Edge of Darkness. Yes, the man who helped make the original an event which is still discussed admiringly 25 years on, has directed the big-budget feature-film re-make. I fear this will not live quite so vividly in the memory.
The film begins with dead bodies rising to the surface of a lake … something forgotten, long-buried, rising up to cause misery and confusion.
Of course, the main reason this film is considered of significance is because Mel Gibson has himself risen back to the surface after, what, seven years either behind the camera or in the headlines.
Here, he is well-liked copper and proud father, Tommy Craven, just getting on with his life when his daughter suddenly starts vomiting blood – something else unwanted coming up – and she is very soon cold in his arms. At this point Mel becomes the character we have seen before … a steely-eyed hollow man on the edge of sanity with nothing to lose and no fear of losing it. His confusion and grief gives way to flashes of fury and an icy determination … ole Mad Mel has resurfaced.
He begins his own investigation into his daughter’s death and that eventually brings him to the attention of (Darius?) Jedburgh a mysterious Security Specialist without portfolio. Joe Don Baker brought a real charisma to the original role, a flamboyant American amongst a cast of dour, grey Englishmen … Ray Winston here reverses the cultural divide … but plays Jedburgh as a very calm, still man.
I like watching Winston in a film, he is at his best when his obvious physical size is held in check, threatening to break out into acts of extreme violence at any moment. He was fascinating in The Proposition (2005) and, of course, utterly mesmerising in Nil By Mouth (1997); but Hollywood has never really found a role that fits him. This film is no exception. His role in the narrative is never entirely clear and I fear that is because the point of him was lost somewhere in the adaptation. His line “I don’t know what it means to have lost a child but I know what it is to not have one” should be redolent with sadness and significance but, instead, just sounds like fortune cookie rhetoric.
Much about this film is less than clear. To some extent that is deliberate because, after all, it’s a political thriller – filled with long scenes of people sitting in dark rooms delivering pages of exposition … a sure sign of a political conspiracy. But then the weighty nature of the conspiracy is interrupted regularly by the obligatory fist-fight, car-chase and shoot-out which interrupt the gradual accretion of suspense that sustained the original TV version through almost five hours.
Again, the original had a faceless, systemic corruption with no single villain at its core, but here we have Danny Huston who, like Winston, has pretty consistently failed to capitalise on the screen-burning potential he demonstrated with his breakthrough performance in The Proposition. As the evil industrialist, Bennett, he is asked to do nothing more than arch that eyebrow and exudes slimy charm. He may as well have ‘Bad Guy’ printed on his business cards.
Edge of Darkness doesn’t have the genuine political credentials of 1974’s The Parallax View or 1976’s All The President’s Men (the films that all conspiracy thrillers want to be) but then it doesn’t have the pace or energy of The Net (1995) nor Enemy of The State (1998) either … leaving it just floating between these two shores.
To be fair to Mel’s performance, you are actually more interested in his journey than in the details of the actual conspiracy. That’s irrelevant. What you are actually getting is the story of a man unravelling because his reason for being has been taken away.
As a character, Craven is infinitely more interesting and more convincing in the moments where he is hallucinating conversations with his dead daughter … these scenes are genuinely affecting.
Out of curiosity, I dug out my old DVD of the proper version just for comparison purposes and was very quickly reminded that Peck’s performance in those scenes, when he goes from joy to despair in a moment, joy at hearing his daughter’s voice, despair at realising it is just a memory and he is still utterly alone in the world, are genuinely heart-breaking. His performance is a master-class in how an actor can allow the calm surface of his face betray the turmoil roiling in the depths below.
Gibson gives of his all and is to be congratulated but, ultimately, this new version of Edge of Darkness merely has a few hidden shallows, it lacks the gloomy depths and solemn clarity of the original. Ultimately Jedburgh’s coda, in the original, has a grandeur which helped lift the whole serial far above the tame and tepid police procedural it could so easily have been. Here it just reads like a flaccid pastiche of the end of the Marky Mark movie Shooter (2007) a film that is, frankly, best left to sink without trace.
You see, some things are just best left where they lie, Martin.
Dir: Martin Campbell
Stars: Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic
Since this blog is mine and I decide the editorial policy, I write the reviews to whatever length feels right. In the case of Daybreakers this initially ran to a little over 800 words. Ultimately, I decided that the optimum length for the piece was to trim it slightly to 700 words for publication on the blog here.
But, of course, I understand the need for brevity and word limits, so I’ve presented this review here in its uncut 800+ word version, then a version trimmed to a healthy 500 words and, finally, a truncated and slightly re-written 200 words. Just to show I can hit any word count required without losing the essence of the review.
Uncut 835 word version:
Okay, it’s a rubbish title. Let’s get that out of the way to start with. A bad, horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreak? Nice. Break of Day? Classy. Daybreakers? Pah. Gack. Spit. That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. So offensive is the clumsiness of this title it almost stopped me watching the film. Only the presence of Willem Dafoe tempted me. He’s usually very reliable. Even if this were one of those rare films he did just for the money … it must have some value, surely it can’t be another Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) or XXX2 (2005) … can it?No, it can’t.
What it can be is another Gattaca (1997) mixed with more than a dash of the first Blade (1998) and just a hint of the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.
A rather confusing introductory montage gives us to understand that we are ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. It takes the vision we see in, say, Alan Ball’s True Blood TV series (and the Charlaine Harris books on which it is based) and extends that into a logical future where humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.
Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it needs – now refined as a supplement to add into coffee in place of milk. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried. Worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. His boss, played with practiced ease by the always malevolent Sam Neill, has no such qualms. He, like any good captain of industry, sees every problem as an opportunity to sell more product.
The Grendel at their gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.
Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by them. They are led by Willem Dafoe who has a secret, the key to unlocking the problem that both the vampires and the last remaining humans face.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats. Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed. If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway. Obvious. If you can’t see through the smoked-glass windows of your car, festoon the exterior with cameras so you can still safely drive around the streets. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change, to come up with all these wonderful coping mechanisms then put them into production so everyone has access to them. Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed. I bet they didn’t put any of these innovations through for planning permission. That’ll add a decade or two!
Don’t worry too much about the logic of the way vampires breed and evolve, nor about the plan that Dafoe and Hawke hatch which is, frankly, barmy. At least the Spierigs stay consistently within their own rules and successfully explore the problems that arise from them. The dénouement manages to be satisfyingly cunning while addressing a fundamental flaw in Dafoe and Hawke’s plan (that I can’t discuss without giving too much away) and gives vent to some spectacularly explosive blood-letting, all-the-while leaving the way open for a sequel.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food. Relationships with them will, given time, always devolve to the relationship a butcher has with his cow.
Edit #1: 500 word version:
Okay, it’s a rubbish title. A horrible, clumsy, committee-approved title. Daybreakers? That’s the name of a duff straight-to-video action pot-boiler from the early nineties. Starring Jeff Fahey or Wings Hauser. But, despite this, what we get is a film worthy of standing alongside its influences: Gattaca (1997), the first Blade (1998) and the ubiquitous Matrix (1999). Not a bad gene pool from which to draw inspiration.
The film is set ten years in the future and the world is entirely vampire. Humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. The vampire world is trundling along very successfully, having completely replaced our society with a dark mirror-image of it. Almost everyone seems happy with their immortality. Almost everyone.
Cue Ethan Hawke – who doesn’t make nearly enough films – as Edward, Chief Haematologist of the Bromley Marks corporation which provides the vampire world with all the blood it. Hawke is very good at looking worried and Edward is very worried, worried about the shortage of living humans and their blood, worried about the failure of his experiments to refine an artificial blood substitute but, above all, worried about the morality of reducing humans to food animals. Sam Neill has no such qualms as his blood-sucking boss, the slippery evil-doer of the piece, a role he has slid skilfully into many, many times before.
Inevitably, then, there will be a human resistance movement, led by Willem Dafoe, which Edward stumbles across, as you do, and finds himself adopted by.
The Grendel at their society’s gates is the effects of starvation. If a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with little remaining intelligence and a powerful, overwhelming thirst. I would make a joke about the film being made in Australia here, but I can’t think of one.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it, with some particularly striking images – such as the queue of vampire commuters standing on the tube station, all in silhouette, their eyes reflecting like cats. Even though this film cloaks itself in the guise of science fiction, it is undeniably horror – with enough moments of explosive blood-splattered violence to keep most gore-hounds happy.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed. If you can’t go out in daylight, then the preferred mode of public transport will be the subway. Obvious. The only problem I had with all of this is that ten years just doesn’t seem long enough for almost everyone in the world to adjust to such a massive change. Civilisation seems to have fallen then risen again with astonishing speed.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food. Now there’s a thought to get your teeth into.
Edit #2: 200 word version:
Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe star in this superior mix of Gattaca (1997), Blade (1998) and the ubiquitous Matrix (1999).
The film is set in the future, where the world is entirely vampire. Humans are a minority, grown in factory farms and bled for food. But the humans are dying out, blood is scarce and, if a vampire goes without blood for long enough, he becomes ‘a sub-sider’, a bestial creature with an overwhelming thirst.
Hawke is very good at looking worried, Dafoe is all about being earthy and wise while Sam Neill turns-in his trademark slippery evil-doer role.
Visually, the film has a very classy, noirish feel to it yet, even though it cloaks itself in the guise of several different genre, it is undeniably horror – with buckets explosive blood-splattered violence.
The work that writers/directors The Spierig Brothers have done in conceiving and then executing a modern world designed for vampiric convenience is very clever indeed.
All-in-all Daybreakers is a refreshing and enjoyable take on a clapped-out old sub-genre which reminds us that, however prettily and romantically vampires may have been re-packaged for selling to a naïve teen audience, they are, essentially, parasites that see humans as food.
BROADSWORD CALLING DANNY-BOY … the making of WHERE EAGLES DARE
This retrospective was commissioned and published by 'Film Review' magazine in 1998, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the film. As specified by the brief, it is 3,000 words long.
1: “He came out with the shittiest fucking title you could imagine.”
Film Producer Elliot Kastner doesn’t do interviews, but will occasionally make exceptions to discuss ‘Where Eagles Dare’, a film which he was involved in from before the word ‘go’:
“I rang Alistair MacLean at his home in Surrey, and told him that I would really like to meet with him. He refused; he didn’t wanna meet without my telling him more details. So I told him: I wanted him to consider writing an original story, directly for the screen. There was a moment of silence, followed by ‘Hmm, nobody ever asked me that before.’”
Kastner, a native of Harlem and exponent of a typically dry New York sense of humour, was amused to be invited to MacLean’s house after lunch. “This was so he didn’t hafta spend any money feeding me. Well, he was Scottish.
Kastner is refreshingly candid about money: “I agreed to give him ten thousand pounds up front and an additional hundred thousand dollars when I had arranged the finance. The first ten grand being from my own money.”
“ 'So’ he said ‘What is it you want?’ ‘I want a team of five or six guys on a mission in the Second World War, facing enormous obstacles. I want a mystery. I want a sweaty, exciting adventure movie.’ That’s all I told him, just that.”
Inevitably, Kastner’s mind returns to the subject of money and what he considers his big mistake: “So, we made the business arrangement and ... shit, I even gave him ten percentage points of the profit. I tellya, to this day he and his estate collect money from ‘Where Eagles Dare’. Every February, they still get a cheque.”
Kastner found himself invited back to MacLean’s house some weeks later, for a progress report. “This time he invited me to lunch, well, I had given him ten grand. Anyway, after lunch, he took me into his study and showed me a globe. He gave me a magnifying glass and pointed to a spot in the Alps and said: ‘This is the Alder Schloss. This where it’s all going to happen.’ And that’s all he told me; he wasn’t a very demonstrative guy, but I could tell he was excited about it too!”
By this point, Kastner had brought his childhood friend Brian G. Hutton on-board as director; so, when the script was delivered, at a whopping 170 pages, the three of them worked on it and whittled it down to130 pages. “I never called another writer in, I stayed with Alistair and, with a lot of work, we got a screenplay that was absolutely delicious.”
Unfortunately, MacLean’s title didn’t leave such a sweet taste in the mouth; or, as a New Yorker might put it: “He came out with the shittiest fucking title you could imagine. I don’t even remember it, it was so bad, but I thought about this ‘Alder Schloss’ meaning ‘Eagles Castle’. That reminded me of a quote from ‘Richard III’, “Where eagles dare to perch”, so I snapped off the end and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ had a nice rhythm to it.”
Although Kastner had rapidly established a track-record of working with premier league talent (Paul Newman in 1966’s ‘Harper’ [‘Moving Target’ in the UK], Warren Beatty in 1967’s ‘Kaleidoscope’) he wanted Richard Burton for this one, and Burton was in a league of his own.
“I had enormous difficulties with his agent, a man called Hugh French, who was contemptuous of anything that didn’t come directly from the studio head offices. So I went round him. I chased Burton down to a Bistro near the Victory Studios in Nice.
“I did my tap dance with him, and he kinda agreed. Then I had another obstacle: I had to get him to go with a director who was totally unknown. We came through that okay, then I went through it all again with Clint Eastwood. They didn’t wanna pay $350,000 plus a percentage to a Spaghetti Western star.”
As it happened, Hutton would follow ‘Eagles’ a year later with ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, which also starred Eastwood, then quit the film business altogether. As for Kastner and Burton, they would work together again on ‘Villain’, ‘Equus’ and ‘Absolution’.
2: “The day I met Richard Burton, he set his dogs on me!”
Once he had the green light, it was time for Kastner to stop chasing, and for others to chase him. Ingrid Pitt crossed two continents to make certain of her place in the credits roll. “I was living in the States at the time, working on the TV show ‘Ironside’. Ralph Meeker rang up and asked if I wanted to join him in a poker game. Well, you don’t pass up any invite in Hollywood; so I played poker with him, John Wayne, Yakima Canutt and a few others.
“Yakima told me he was preparing for ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and urged me to speak to the director. So, the next day I got Brian Hutton on the blower, we met, I blew in his ear and all was well.
“Months later, I was having my hair washed when I got the call. I was needed ... immediately. I ran around the house, packing, with my hair dripping all over my clothes as I packed them.
“I arrived in Salzburg in the evening, was due on set next morning and didn’t have a costume to wear. However, Ever-Ready-Ingrid had foreseen that something like this might happen, so I had brought some things with me ... The waistcoat they found for me was loose and horrible, so I had to sit up all night on my bed, sewing the bloody thing.”
The next morning would be her first chance to meet Richard Burton, one of her screen idols: “I arrived and Brian wasn’t ready for me, so I had to go and sit in this lean-to and wait. “I went in, and suddenly these dogs rushed out of the dark at me, barking and biting at my ankles. I yelled ‘Call your dogs off!!’ Then, there he was, Richard Burton, my idol, with this huge fur wrapped around him, sitting by a fire. The day I met Richard Burton, he set his dogs on me!
“I got my revenge, though! In my first scene, I got to slap Richard. ‘You’re not really going to hit me are you?’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t be daft, I’m gonna hit you, take it like a man!’ I kept him on tenterhooks all morning, then when we did the take, I just missed him.”
Then there was another hold-up for Pitt, her costume was fine, now her hair needed altering: “Mary Ure insisted on being the only blonde in the film, so my hair had to be dyed, which eventually sent it all green and brittle. I should have just told her what she could do with her blonde hair, but it was my first big film, so I rather did as I was told.”
Peter Barkworth went along to audition for the role of a German spy: “Brian Hutton and I got on so well, he changed the nature of the character to an Englishman and the name to Barkley, to accommodate me. Unfortunately, after all that trouble, I only had five lines.”
One can be forgiven for asking why Kastner had cast actors like Burton, Barkworth and Michael Hordern in roles hardly befitting their abilities. “Well,” He explains: “Any actor worth his salt can bring something great to any material. The English have always been known for their pool of character actors, and we deliberately picked the best.”
Peter Barkworth remembers the day he, Burton, Eastwood and the others had to cross a bridge and saunter through a German check-point: “Now, gentlemen”, Brian Hutton had told them, “I want you all to look at those German guards and think ‘oh shit, what do we do now’. In fact, this is the Oh Shit Bridge!’’
“We laughed a lot on ‘The Oh Shit Bridge’ that day.” Barkworth confesses. “Brian and Richard were ribbing each other off camera, while Richard and Clint were ad-libbing the bits no one has bothered to write, on the bridge. By the time we finished work, we were all weak with laughing.”
Extracts from Barkworth’s film diary beautifully sum up the atmosphere on set: ‘January sixth, 1968: It’s extraordinary, we actors are given wooden boards to stand on, so our feet don’t get cold in the snow, chairs to sit on, capes to protect us from the bitter wind, and caravans to rest in. It is lovely, I enjoy being pampered very much.’
Summing this up, Barkworth adds: “During those first five or six weeks, I felt at the heart of something, like I was really working on a big film. That feeling soon departed when we got back to England to shoot the rest at MGM. That was just months of hanging around. In fact, all-told, it took me six months to say my five lines!”
3: “All the cattle for miles around spent the next week suffering from diarrhea!”
Veteran stunt-man, Alf Joint worked closely with Burton throughout, not only taking the falls, but, because of their striking physical similarity, literally doubling-up as the star’s on-screen stand-in. Spending so much time at the centre of the action afforded Joint plenty of opportunity to see Burton at his best, and his worst:
“You hear stories that Burton was inept; people talk of his suffering from vertigo and needing a hoist to help him climb walls, but this was just him being lazy. When his family visited, he was jumping of the cable-car and running around and showing off to his kids.”
But, on the other hand, Burton did like his drink: “I remember one time he went to Paris on a drinking spree with O’Toole, Harris and Trevor Howard, his usual drinking set. They set off on the Friday, promising that they’d be back on the Monday. They were carried off the plane on the Thursday.
“Because of that, Brian decided to use me as Richard’s double more extensively. I worked on three or four sets that Burton himself never even saw. It saved them a lot of money.”
One set Joint shouldn’t have seen, was the baronial hall, scene of Burton’s big monologue. “Of course,” Alf explains, “Burton had had a few, and, as he’s striding around, walks straight into the mantlepiece over the great fireplace, knocking himself out cold.
“After that it was, ‘Alf, get into uniform’, and we shot the rest of the scene from behind. I must have the most photographed shoulders in the business.”
One temperamental star can’t hold up a production the size of ‘Eagles’ by himself. If he really was doing it deliberately, Burton must have enlisted the help of Mother Nature. Alf Joint again: “Burton kept getting the blame for the shoot going on and on, but, at least during the location shoot, it was actually the drastic changes in the weather. For example: there was the jump out of the cable-car into the river. The first time we did it it didn’t work because the snow was gone, we’d been filming for so long it had turned Spring.
“They were up three nights covering the ground in commercial epsom salts and then, of course, there was a torrential downpour which washed all the salt into the river and all the cattle for miles around spent the next week suffering from diarrhea!”
Still, while the cast and crew were away from home far longer than planned, they managed to maintain a holiday atmosphere. Peter Barkworth’s diary recalls: ‘Long talks with Richard and the gang, led to an invitation to the Burtons’ for drinks and dinner. Elizabeth Taylor was visiting. She was wonderful, exquisitely dressed, a perfect, oh-so-relaxed hostess’.
‘Elizabeth told me that she had been lost as to what to feed us all, then thought of cold roast pork and chips! The best cold roast pork comes from The Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane, London; so she had sent her jet over to London that morning to collect a leg of pork.
‘We had that wonderful leg of pork, with french fries and a salad. Elizabeth advised me to spread some Heinz salad cream on a roll and make a sandwich of the whole lot, which I duly did and it was delicious.’
4: “I ended up hanging upside-down from the platform.”
Back in England, delays continued to dog the production, and presented Burton with yet more distractions; as Pitt remembers: “He used to invite us all to luncheons in a thatched barn in Borehamwood.
“Sometimes Robert Shaw would visit, or Peter O’Toole, and, inevitably, these luncheons would turn into marathon drinking sessions. I’d sit there, sipping a wine and feeling so guilty, I’d apologise to Elliott Kastner, but he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t need you, we need him’.” That’s New York diplomacy for you!
Continuing to fly in the face of received wisdom , Kastner had insisted on employing retired living legend Yakima Canutt as his stunt co-ordinator. He gets positively misty-eyed when recalling his collaboration with the man they called ‘Yak’: “My partners couldn’t unnerstand why I wanted to pull this old guy out of retirement, but it was because I knew he was the best. He forgot more than most young stunt-guys know.”
Yak’s major responsibility - the big showpiece stunt on ‘Where Eagles Dare’ - was organising the jump Alf Joint was to make from one moving cable-car to another. This was supposed to have been one of Canutt’s first jobs on the film, to be shot using a real cable-car. It ended-up being one of the last things shot, back in London, using a full-size model; as Joint explains:
“In Salzburg, Yakima asked me to go out and look at the cable-car with him. He explained that I had to jump from one to the other, while they were moving. I said ‘Do what?’ So, we climbed out on the roof of the cable car and I was explaining to him that there was no way this would work, when the other car passed by - whoomph - and was gone. Yak said ‘God. What was that?’ ‘Oh, that was just the cable-car you want me to leap onto.’
“Next Sunday, Plan B: He’s built this platform onto the side of the mountain, from which he wanted me to leap onto the passing cable-car. Fair enough; ‘Supposing I miss?’ I asked. It was a long way down. So they tied a rope to me.
“I leaped it and just made the cable-car. Problem was, they forgot to tell the guy in the control station to put the brakes on, so the car kept going and I was still tied to the platform. I ended up hanging upside-down from the platform. Yak whipped his lasso out, lassoed my leg and pulled me up; but I wasn’t too pleased.”
Consequently, all talk of doing the stunt on location stopped and plans were laid to build a full-size set, back at MGM. “When I actually did the job, it was against a front projected screen. I more or less dove off a small trampoline at the car as it came up, grabbed hold, and everything worked out alright.”
“Except ... when I did the dive, I hit the car with all my body weight and smacked my mouth into the safety bar. It saved me from sliding off and falling sixty-odd feet, but I lost three teeth.” Of course, it is only fitting that Joint’s most famous job should have made a permanent mark on him.
This same set provided Peter Barkworth with the climax of his part: the vicious fist-fight with Burton on the roof of the cable car, during which the two combatants never actually met: “They could only manage one shot per day, because it required such precise setting up. Then, if the camera was pointing at me, Richard wasn’t needed, so Alf Joint would stand in, with his back to the camera. We would swing one punch, and that would be that for another day. We had that ferocious fight, which took weeks to film, and never actually laid our eyes on each other, let alone our fists.”
While this second unit work was going on, Ingrid Pitt was still waiting around to finish off her first unit chores. “I wasn’t working very often, but I had to always be on call in case they changed the schedule (because Richard hadn’t shown up), so I sat in the Hilton Hotel for days and weeks on end. I must have read every book in the library. God it was boring. I tell you, sitting in that hotel, fending off the Arabs who kept sending me bloody roses, was horrendous.”
But there were moments when the camaraderie of the Salzburg shoot would return, usually thanks to Burton and Eastwood’s mischievousness: “Never more-so,” Pitt concludes, “Than after the last day of shooting. We were driving back from Borehamwood in Richard’s Rolls when Clint said to Richard ‘Shall we tell her now?’ I said ‘Tell her what?’ ‘Well, we had a bet over who would get you in the sack first, him or me!’ I thought that was very ... cute. Bloody actors.”
For Kastner, the problems of the shoot are now a dim and distant memory, a lot of water has flowed under The Oh Shit Bridge these past thirty years: “That film was a joy for me, from beginning to end,” He enthuses, “I was making the perfect meat and potatoes movie movie. The kinda movie I love, the kind that grabs an audience for two hours and sucks ‘em in! It was like a Michael Curtiz or John Huston film: ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘The Maltese Falcon’, rolled into one. Those were movie movies, and so was this.
“Everything about that movie was so tremendously satisfying, to relive those moments is delicious for me; that’s why I’ll talk about that film and no other. I just enjoy remembering it; you know what I mean!?”
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