Identity crisis... Negatives (1968), BFI Flipside No. 053, Blu-ray

The trouble with you is you always want to be someone else, it’s a compulsion you have.

I’ve just watched the new Neil LaBute play* which uses a series of sexual relationships to deftly characterise a modern America in which nothing is as it seems and everything may or may not be transactional and following unseen rules too complex to state out loud. There is something in common with this film, director Peter Medak’s first feature and one that is unsettling, almost hard to watch, before ultimately revealing its true intent.

At its centre is the relationship between antique shop proprietors Theo (Peter McEnery) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson) which puts us on edge right for the start. For one thing they role play as the notorious Dr Crippen and his wife Cora/lover Ethel as the feeling takes them… This is very much Jackson on home territory, dominating with disdain and a vicious turn of phrase, leaving us unsure as to whether she is in character or within character. McEnery for his part is a most indecisive serial killer but clearly this is the point… when is a murder not a murder? When he is the victim or, and bear with me, a fighter pilot?

 

… when it comes to the action, you are a fool just like Crippen…

 

Dr and Mrs Crippen enjoy a moment

As Cora, Vivien relentlessly deconstructs her partner’s masculinity, and as Dr Clare Smith, historic collection curator at the Metropolitan Police Museum, points out in her interview on the disc about Crippen, Medak is clearly fascinated by British crime, with Jack the Ripper becoming the alter ego of Peter O’Toole’s character in The Ruling Class, and his films on the Krays and Derek Bentley. She provides excellent context on the characters Theo and Vivien play by detailing the extraordinary tale of the Crippen murder with the aid of clips of Donald Pleasance and Samantha Eggar in Dr Crippen (1962). Cora was indeed a dominant force in her marriage and her physically outmatched husband went to every length to support her ambitions on the stage… he found solace in the arms of the more diminutive Ethel but only after poisoning his wife, dismembering her and burying her in his basement.

 

It's an odd situation to base sex games on but original author, Peter Everett – who won the Somerset Maughan Prize for his book – who co-adapted the script with Roger Lowry, clearly knew what he was doing in his original tale of identity and the worlds we create for ourselves. Here the more defined personalities are the women and, as Dr Smith says, it is unusual to find a film of this vintage in which the projection of identity is focused on the male.

You always push me; you wind me up life a clock… 

Whatever the reasons, nobody seems happy in spite of all their trendy trappings and freedom to love how they like, is this the end of their relationship or the beginning of a darker turn? Like the shop they are surrounded and smothered by the past and cannot move without its direct consideration. If Hell was situated off the Fulham Road, this might well be it… an all the while, Theo’s father (Maurice Denham) lies in hospital dreading what he is convinced will be an operation he won’t survive. 

"All men are fools and what makes them so is having beauty like what I've got..." E. Wise

Then, as if the edge couldn’t get any sharper, into Theo’s life comes a German photographer, Reingard (Diane Cilento, so far away from The Angel who Pawned Her Harp…), who admits she has been following the couple for some time… and has a few suggestions to make to liven their sexual play time. She has her own “negatives” as she discusses meeting her father for the first time when she was 17 when, after appraising her, he tore off her dress leaving her naked. She wants to take positives of the couple but as with Vivien she is projecting a masculine fantasy onto the blank slate that is Theo, why a timid murderer and why not an heroic figure like Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron who shot down 80 allied planes in the First World War, honouring his victims with the casting of silver cups.

 

The battle for Theo’s persona rapidly escalates even though the two women are almost in alliance, but it’s a whirlwind of a film which is more about nuanced interpretation than a narrative straight line. Given their connection via Sparrows (see below) it’s interesting to see Stephen Lewis – who wrote that film – as a scrap metal dealer who sells Theo a Tiger Moth which is then planted on their roof terrace and painted in von Richthofen’s colours. Red… for anger and the mist of toxic masculinity descends on Theo and there is much to interpret and consider.

 

All I know is that talking about Crippen, Crippen, Cri-ppen… upsets you!

 

Mad about the Baron

Basil Kirchin provides the score including a winsome theme which is contrapuntal to so much of the human rage and conflict – some deceptively sweet sauce for the bitter battle especially when it’s used in a diegetic way as the camera pans up to reveal Glenda Jackson playing it on piano . Barrie Vince’s editing is whip smart throughout and whilst also providing visual counterpoints to the emoting, enhances the feelings of confusion and events moving out of joint with the character’s sense of wellbeing. He and Medak force the pace for the viewer and that’s something even modern viewers might find boggling in the cinema!

 

It's a very challenging debut and one that struggled to gain a release on completion but which we can now see as the foundation of Medak’s long career as well as being Glenda Jackson’s first film. She had been a member of the RSC with McEnery and he continued mainly in theatre and TV after films in the UK and France. Diane Cilento was well established as a film actress by this time – Academy Award nominated for Tom Jones (1963) and uses her experience to add so much sinister here, changing the direction and the mood with an impressive German accent.

 

This BFI release uses Severin Films super sharp 4k restoration and is the first time Negatives has been made available in any format in the UK and will be of particular interest to those who have followed Medak’s half century career on both the big and small screen – he directed episodes of The Wire and Breaking Bad as well as films such as The Krays (1990), Let Him Have it (1991) and classics such as The Ruling Class (1972) starring Peter O’Toole, Arthur Lowe and Carolyn Seymour (his second wife). He even found time to direct concert films for Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel.

 

The most talented actor in her family...

He arrived in Britain from Hungary aged just 18 in 1956 and having begun his career with Associated British Pictures he gained experience in a variety of roles and worked on films directed by Anthony Asquith, Val Guest and others. In her booklet essay, the BFI’s Jo Botting says his experience on Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was particularly important in his development. As she says, he would later favour… “unconventional narratives with larger-than-life characters – so Negatives was the perfect debut.” Hard to get life larger than Glenda, Peter and Diane…

 

Long may he reign and there’s two recent interviews with him in the extra special features below – as usual with the Flipside, the BFI are spoiling us!

 

Newly remastered from the original camera negative by Severin Films and presented in High Definition

 

Audio commentary by Tim Lucas

 

Audio interviews with Peter Medak (2024, 89 mins): two interviews with director Peter Medak, the first by the late author and film historian Lee Gambin, and the second with Severin’s David Gregory which was conducted at the director’s home

 

False Positive (2025, 11 mins): a newly recorded interview with actor Peter McEnery

 

Editing Negatives (2026, 31 mins): an interview with Barrie Vince, the award-winning editor of Negatives, Smashing Time and Deep End

 

Positives From Negativeland**: Scrapbook from a Grand Debut (2025, 16 mins): Peter Medak takes us through his production material for Negatives, as well as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, recalling his memories of each experience

 

The Doctor Will See You Now (2025, 24 mins): an interview with Dr Clare Smith, the historic collection curator at the Metropolitan Police Museum, who discusses the life and crime of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen

 

Image gallery

 

And, with the first pressing only, comes a handsome illustrated booklet featuring new essays by Dr Josephine Botting and William Fowler with notes on the special features and credits

 

The Blu-ray is released on 16^th March and you can pre-order from all the usual places or queue up at the BFI shop next Monday!

*America the Beautiful is at the Kings Head Theatre until 21^st March, details available on their website!

**I see the reference to the "Krautrock" classic track from NEU!

Diane Cilento gets out of the VW opposite Stamford Bridge

The dark side of Tom Conti… Eclipse (1977), BFI Flipside #51 Blu-ray, out now!

 

In his commentary, BFI Flipside supremo Vic Pratt recalls interviewing Tom Conti for another recent release, Heavenly Pursuits (1986) in which he mentioned that Eclipse was one of the few of his films he didn’t have a copy of. Vic dutifully sought it out to make Tom a screener and discovered this disturbing and atmospheric thriller was ideal for the quirky, strange charms of the Flipside range.

IMDB describes Simon Perry’s film as a “… story of the possession of one man - his mind, heart and soul - by his twin brother”, but it’s rather more than that and possibly less. For all those in search of a neat Columbo-style ending to this emotional mystery they’d better look elsewhere as Eclipse is as full of shadowy meaning as a Mark Rothko picture painted with all the lights off and wearing sunglasses. It’s based on a novel by Nicholas Wollaston and by all accounts with less specificity.

Tom Conti is the most unreliable of narrators playing twin brothers Tom (oh yeah?) and Graham who is found dead on the beach at the start of the film with a nasty gash on his head and a moustache to match on his fore lip. Having recently seen him as the soulless advertising executive trying to manipulate the band Slade in Flame, you’re reminded of his deceptive skill in portraying empty vessels and, even when he’s emotionally wrought you’re unsure in this film what is driving him.

Tom was the only other person on the boat with his twin and throughout the film’s numerous flashbacks to the incident you’re never sure whether this is his own faulted memory or a gradual unrolling of the truth. In stormy seas out to view a total eclipse, the brothers lose control of their vessel and Graham falls into the water either struck by the boom or by something else… the flashes we see may be Tom’s imaginings or his recovering memory.

At the inquest Tom is equally hard to read with Conti playing with just a hint of guilt even as he tells the most plausible of tales. It’s death by misadventure and of a man referred to as The Big G by Tom’s sister-in-law and her son. Graham’s widow Cleo is played by Gay Hamilton who Conti had recommended for the role and who is every inch his equal in portraying her own range of barely decipherable emotions. Cleo had her darker views of G and the painting Tom finds on visiting her for Christmas shows him slighter of stature and naked on a beach. Tom cannot stand the image and asks for it to be removed.

There are clearly strong undercurrents running between Cleo and Tom, not just their mixed feelings about G but for each other too; a path well-trodden and now with new possibilities. Tom is also welcomed as the most familiar of uncles by young Giles (Gavin Wallace) who treats him almost like a father. But, as they play trains on Christmas day, Giles runs them backwards upsetting Tom by not playing to his rules and echoing Big G’s more dominant position.

The Christmas is tense as the discourse between Cleo and Tom unwinds with the former having developed a taste for gin since the accident – maybe before – and the latter still unable to recall the events of the fateful journey. Both are grieving and yet both have reason to resent Big G’s dominance in their lives. Tom, twenty minutes younger, has been overshadowed by Graham and the two would conduct conversations by completing each other’s sentences. Graham wasn’t just dominant he was the driver of so much of his brother’s choices, driving him to extremes in order to stake a claim to his identity.

Is this reason enough to kill or just to be ambiguous about his brother, and for Cleo, is she too now liberated in terms of her feelings for Tom and her choices.

It’s a broody and unsettling tale and one that offers no easy answers or resolution, you are wrongfooted throughout and the skill of the actors keeps you guessing. Vic mentioned thematic similarities to Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022) and there are similarities in a narrative that shows and certainly doesn’t always tell as well as the brutal psycho-geography of the coastal location. At one point Cleo jumps into the stormy sea as if communing with the unrelenting power that took her husband and then there’s almost a re-run of the fateful voyage when Tom takes Giles out on a small sailing boat.

It’s fascinating and well worth inclusion in the Flipside alternative canon of British and Irish oddities and should have beens!

 

The special features below clinch the deal… especially the three classic public information adverts that amused and frightened my generation of children. Be very careful near deep waters… stay in your depth.

 

• Newly remastered in 2K and presented in High Definition
• Audio commentary by Vic Pratt, co-founder of BFI Flipside
• Sun & Moon – Tom Conti Discusses Eclipse (2025, 10 mins): the actor on his experience of making the film
• Relative Strangers: two stylish short films, The Chalk Mark (1989, 24 mins) and Marooned (1994, 20 mins), that echo the disjointed relationships central to Eclipse
• Not Waving, Drowning: Joe and Petunia: Coastguard (1968, 2 mins); Charley Says: Falling in the Water (1973, 1 min); Lonely Water (1973, 2 mins): three haunting water-safety Public Information Films eerily adjacent to the psycho-geographic headspace of the main feature
• 2025 trailer
• Image gallery

 

The first pressing only includes an illustrated booklet with new writing on the film by Vic Pratt, an archival interview with director Simon Perry, an original review, an essay on the film’s locations by Douglas Weir and writing on The Chalk Mark and Marooned by the BFI’s William Fowler.

 

You can order direct from the BFI from their online shop. Another winner and a missing piece for Mr Conti’s shelves as well as those of us who appreciate under-appreciated British film!

Irish Archers? The Outcasts (1982), BFI Flipside No. 49 Blu-ray

A sense of time when magic had a meaning... I wanted to create a myth that was relevant to human experience.

Robert Wynne-Simmons

 

This film is set in a time before the potato famine, when Ireland was a much more populous place and a happier one. Maybe that’s a projection – a long standing one – but so much of the country becomes so hard to view at this distance, especially when every one of you was called James speaking personally, that it’s much clearer to imagine. So it was that a man from Sussex, educated in Cambridge University, came to write and direct what was the first independent Irish film made in half a century.

 

Robert Wynne-Simmons had previously tackled William Blake and then the screenplay for the ultimate “folk horror” film, Blood on Satan's Claw directed by Piers Haggard the man who really coined the phrase. Wynne-Simmons had been working in Ireland and managed to, just about, secure the funding for this labour of love which both answers the question about what Irish cinema could be and highlights the riddle of why not more? It is after two viewings, a film to bewitch and fall in love with, something the director has been shocked by when he meets people who have been so deeply affected by the tale.

 

Cyril Cusack is the big name in the film and he was, according to his director, very proud to have been in both this film and the last independent Irish film, Guests of the Nation a silent film from 1934, directed by Denis Johnston, and including Barry Fitzgerald. The Irish Film Board was set up in 1981 to boost the local industry, and Outcasts certainly benefited from this backing along with Channel 4.

 

Cusack is of course wonderful; he was a master of nuanced uncertainty and always conveyed mystery in his thoughts in ways utilized so well by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger whose style of “magic realism” runs through this film like the words Galway Bay running through a stick of seaside rock. But there’s a young performer called Mary Ryan who steals the film with an almost mystical connection to the camera that you wouldn’t credit from someone who was stage trained and with scant film experience.

Mary Ryan

Ryan plays Maura, a woman out of step with her fellow villagers and even her family. She describes herself as a “mistake” and her father’s regular if “well-intentioned” beatings are testament to her inability to bend to his will. She is out of joint, seeing things her sisters don’t and being relentlessly teased by the locals as we see at the film’s beginning when two other girls throw her petticoat into the mud, forcing her to face the indignity of wearing them. People are cruel but she has a strength in not responding, almost as if she sees through their mundane games.

 

Like much else in the film, the explanation is left open to the audience to interpret, as the BFI’s Vic Pratt says in his booklet essay, ambiguity abounds; slippage of meaning is manifest... Maura’s sister Janey (Bairbre Ní Chaoimh) is due to be married to Conor Farrell (Tom Jordan) who has, it seems, put her in the family way. Their issue is discussed with local civic leader Myles Keenan (Cyril Cusack) who arrives imperiously on horseback with a shiver at the prospect of his old adversary Scarf Michael (Michael Lally), who appears to him as a reflection in a pool. This apparition and the plaintive fiddling is surely in his imagination or is it?

 

The wedding is agreed with old grudges put aside by stubborn, grounded men, as much a part of the scenery as the buildings and even the clothes feel rooted in the muddied earth, the dampness working its way up the hems as the actors struggled against the elements. This is a “folk film” before it’s a horror and the old behaviours and traditions are as mysterious as any witchcraft. For the wedding party the youngsters run to the house and then a band arrive carrying fiddles and dressed as Straw Men, Maura stares at these unknowable men who ae welcomed in to serenade the party without question. That’s wyrd in the old sense of the word and as frequently quoted by Dr Diane A Rodgers in her excellent and informative commentary. Another level of the uncanny is added by the faraway sounds of Scarf Michael’s fiddle… causing anxiety among the adults.

Michael Lally appears

 

As the evening progresses the younger members of the group wander off into the woods, leaving Maura alone as they pair off. She waits in the eerie darkness with slivers of moonlight hinting at the uncertainty of what’s beyond. Now she sees the figure of Michael, who appears to be there and not there until he solidifies and approaches her. She joins him as he exacts magical revenge on her tormentors as the drink and make love and she enjoys the tables turned while it lasts.

 

The next morning, she wakes in a graveyard with Michael – he often sleeps in such places “for the company” – only to find herself covered in snow. It’s as if the world has changed but the reality was more prosaic as the unexpected snow had slowed production even as it allowed for this deft stroke from the director. Soon though the locals are turning on Maura and blaming her for blighted potatoes and consorting with the unnatural Michael. Will he save her, and, even as he holds back from revealing the truth of what he knows and she longs to find out, we wonder what will become of her…

 

Wynne-Simmons’ team clearly laboured with a love of the subject and in his essay in the booklet he is quick to credit them feeling privileged by the way in which both cast and crew responded to the creation of this ‘other world’.

 

People and the earth

Séamus Corcoran, the lighting cameraman, had a deep understanding of the countryside and of the light in people’s eyes. Consolata Boyle created costumes that seemed to grow out of the ground itself. Stephen Cooney’s beautiful music was enhanced by dark didgeridoos from his native Australia, emphasising how the human subconscious unites all the world.

 

As the Englishman telling this most resonant of Irish folk tales there’s a touch of Bruce Chatwin’s belief in the universality of folkloric “songlines” which echo down from the past through our generations be they describing Cooney’s outback, the Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury or the invisible ties that bind in Isle of Kiloran. Maura experiences her landscape as a revelation and one that she will have to discover how to share with her family and others outside of her higher consciousness.

Extras are magical:

·         New 2K restoration by the Irish Film Institute

·         Newly commissioned audio commentary by Dr Diane A Rodgers

·         Writing Folk Tales (2024, 9 mins): a newly recorded interview with director Robert Wynne-Simmons

·         The Fugitive (1962, 31 mins): Robert Wynne-Simmons’ first film with an outsider at its heart is this dark tale of violence, guilt and retribution shot on 8mm film amidst Mods and Rockers violence on the backstreets of ‘60s Brighton

·         The Outcasts in Pictures (2024, 15 mins): a gallery of stills from the film with audio commentary by director Robert Wynne-Simmons

·         The Wanderings of Ulick Joyce (1968, 5 mins): this distinctive animated short by Gillian Lacey was inspired by Irish folk tales, and was made with the assistance of the BFI Production Board

 

With the first pressing only, there’s a very impressive booklet including director’s statement, new writing on the film by the BFI’s Vic Pratt, an archive essay by Dr Diane A Rodgers and recollections of The Fugitive by Robert Wynne-Simmons.

 

It’s out now, so get your order in quickly – this is a film you’ll want to watch over and again, a puzzle open to interpretation and one that will touch each of us in different ways. A wonder.

 

In the navy… Remembrance (1982), BFI Flipside #48 Blu-ray

Well, I’m in the navy see, and that’s work of national importance. That’s why we can’t go on strike, that’s why we sign on for fucking years… I’m proud of what I do!

 

I missed this first time round, busy in the college bar and having an easier time of it than many of my generation. My cousin became a marine a decade later but I did know people who were in the Navy at this time, some who served in the Falklands that preceded this release by a few months. I still remember the chill I felt as Ark Royal and the other ships headed off to a war I never expected to be fought. My college hosted HMS Glamorgan’s rugby team the year later and they were a different breed, out-drinking and out-playing is with ease, men of the world.

 

Remembrance never set out to be as political as it turned out but… the elements were always there given references to Northern Ireland and John Altman’s outburst to a drunken teacher at a middle-class party reproduced with minimal swearing above. In truth this is always the bottom line for the armed services and for the young men who make up the majority of the recruits and it was always writer Hugh Stoddart and director/producer Colin Gregg’s intention to make a story that focused on their first big sacrifices: their time, family and friends.

 

The result was one of the first films produced by Channel 4 and featured a now astonishing cast of soon to be highly successful, cast members from Timothy Spall to John Altman via, in his first substantial part, Gary Oldman but there are many more who have made their living on stage screen and TV since this film.

Mr Oldman feels a little worse for wear...

The film has a lot of characters, all of whom feel real, well-written and well-acted by this young collective, and its narrative keeps you guessing as the story slips forwards and backwards between elements that will eventually coalesce into a poignant whole. It begins with a group of lads laughing and joking as they watch an old cinefilm of themselves at the Royal Albert Hall for the annual Festival of Remembrance. As they watch they recognise faces and their younger selves until the Army gymnastics team perform and one of them spots and unfamiliar face…

 

Cut backward and we see an inebriated youngster walking on his hands in the dark, he’s ten-pint drunk staggering around in search of even more cheap lager. Gary Oldman is almost unrecognisably youthful but protean as ever, is the individual who we later learn is called Daniel and he displays one of the most convincingly painful depictions of what we used to refer to as “paralytic” back in those days of 35p pints. He finds his way into a disco bar on the notorious Union Street drag between Plymouth and naval base at Devonport, home to thousands of off-duty sailors and dozens of pubs, strip joints and cheap restaurants.

 

He quickly upsets some of the older regulars who berate him for being out beyond curfew and, following his brief and emphatic suggestion that they go away, wait for him to pass out. He staggers over to a baby-faced jack tar, Mark (David John) who invites him to join him and two young women, even though he’s nearly as incapable. The two talk, as drunken men do, and Oldman’s character talks about his dream of becoming an acrobat and there’s a haunting keyboard motif accompanying his reveries on this subject each time provided by Brian Eno’s track Aragon (from Music for Films (1978)*), which carries the sense of stillness both of the skilled athlete but also the moment in time when decisions are made.

 

The not-so-nasty John Altman

The young man also says he can dance and after encouragement from Mark goes onto the dance floor and does indeed dance attracting the attention of the watchers at the bar who then thrown glasses onto the dance floor. The in-house bouncer steps in and drags the by now sick youngster outside where he administers an horrific beating – the lad is too drunk to defend himself - witnessed by local preacher/down and out Joe (Kenneth Griffith) who does all he can, he prays and watches.

 

The next day Mark’s hangover is made all the worse by the arrival of his sister and parents for his last day before his next tour and then by the knowledge that his temporary friend was now in a coma in hospital. Gradually he gets involved trying to remember what the two had talked about and even visits him as the newspapers have reported that there was no wallet on him and no name tag. Meanwhile others plan a revenge mission the next night on the bouncer even those that started the glass throwing.

 

But there’s more going on in Plymouth than this unfolding tragedy, and we meet Mark’s pal Vincent (the excellent Pete Lee-Wilson) who likes his friend’s sister but hates his parents, one of whom is now married to the man who runs the bar in which Daniel was injured. Vincent and his parents have yet to come to terms with their separation and his, resulting in some of the film’s most emotional moments.

 

A golden age of rail, sailors plus McEwans and Carlsberg

There’s also a young married couple, Douglas and Christine played by Timothy Spall and Kim Taylforth sister of Gillian Taylforth – the Eastenders connections are very strong here including the fact that Oldman’s older sister Laila Morse plays Little Mo. Christine is heavily pregnant and her husband will be at sea on the due date, another painful separation.

 

More pain could well be felt by John Altman’s character Steve who has started seeing the girlfriend of one the toughs from the older ratings who is intent of engaging in irrational debate about the situation. All is set for another lively night on Union Street and there will be blood…

 

 

This new 2024 restoration by the BFI marks the first time Remembrance has been available in this format and it’s so surprising that the film has not received more attention over the years given the quality of cast and crew. Still, now it’s here and I would recommend it very highly.

 

The 80s, they say if you can remember them you weren't really there...

Special features

 

• Newly remastered from original camera materials by the BFI and presented in High Definition
• Gary Oldman on Remembrance (2018, 3 mins): an introduction recorded for a screening on Film 4
• Vivid Memories (2024, 21 mins): newly recorded interview with director Colin Gregg
• Working Away (2024, 21 mins): newly recorded interview with screenwriter Hugh Stoddart
• Acting The Part (2024, 13 mins): newly recorded interview with actor John Altman
• David Rose in Conversation (2010, 11 mins): extracts from a career interview with the former senior commissioning editor for Channel 4 Television, conducted by Sir Jeremy Isaacs
• Raleigh: The First Few Weeks (1986, 19 mins): following the daily lives of new naval ratings, from their arrival at training establishment HMS Raleigh, beginning the first phase of their training and onwards to the day of their passing out parade
• Royal Navy Amazon (1980, 1 min): a made for TV advert used to bolster the recruitment of ordinary naval ratings
• Galleries – a collection of materials including an early handwritten draft of the screenplay

 

Illustrated booklet with a new essay by screenwriter Hugh Stoddart, new writing on the film by Johnny Mains, an essay by the BFI’s Dr Josephine Botting and full film credits. This is limited to the first pressing only and so you better get in quick!

 

You can order Remembrance now from the BFI shop and other reputable retailers.

*Ironically perhaps, the middle-class party attended by John Altman’s character features first a Genesis track sung by Phil Collins and then a solo track. Collin’s the epitome of MOR rock/pop success was also the percussionist on the Brian Eno track that acts as the film’s and Daniel’s theme, more than anything, Collins was one of the finest drummers of his era and Eno tended to work with the best (and U2).

The shock of the old… Short Sharp Shocks Volume 3, BFI Flipside 47

“Dead letters, sir. Doesn’t that sound like dead men?”

 

The BFI’s ongoing mission to explore strange old worlds continues with another splendid set of shocking shorts for the Flipside series. What we have here are two Blu-ray discs of strangeness and charm ranging from Orson Welles in Ireland to Dexter Fletcher’s junkie dreams via a very disturbing slice of “found-footage” horror. As a whole the stories twist and turn in delightfully unexpected ways, and each leaves its mark even in the most relaxed of viewing environments: a home invasion of unexpected impacts.

 

As with the previous two sets, BFI Flipside series that revisits the heyday of the supporting programme, with a series of very off-the-beaten path British short films presented in High Definition for the first time, all the better to absorb the uncanny atmosphere of three decades and more of filmmaking in the inner reaches. As before there’s a fabulous booklet* and extras including specially commissioned interviews with some of the directors of these films.

 

Michael Laurence amd Orson Welles take a trip

Return to Glennascaul (1951) kicks off in fine style with Mr Welles being interrupted on the set of Othello to recant the strangest of encounters in the darkened roads of western Ireland. Written and directed by Hilton Edwards it is a tidy tale that was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Subject.

 

We find Orson driving through some mean weather on a dark and tempestuous night when he comes across a man (Michael Laurence) who’s car has broken down. He offers a lift and the man accepts before describing a similar road-side incident some years previously when he’d been invited for a cup of tea or something stronger… by a mother and daughter who lived in a large house near his own. After staying longer than he wanted to he returns the following morning to find his uncle’s cigarette case which he’d left on their mantlepiece only to find the building dilapidated and long empty… and more mystery awaits.

John Laurie

Strange Stories (1953)

Here are two odd tales told by John Slater (later Detective Sgt Stone of Z-Cars!) and Valentine Dyall, the first of which is an adaptation of The Strange Mr Bartleby a short story written by Herman Melville after Moby Dick and which was later turned into a film with John McEnery as the titular Bartleby and Paul Scofield as the man who employs him. Here John Laurie is the man who would “prefer not to” after being recruited by Norman Shelley at his solicitor’s office. There’s an added character in a young woman (Naomi Chance) who employs the lawyer to track down a missing man. It's an eerie tale and Laurie is perfect as the inscrutable and exasperatingly alien Bartleby.

There’s a second story with a young couple, Charlie (Colin Tapely) and Marie (Helen Hunter) attempting escape to Tasmania after the accidental killing of a man they owed money to. Whilst the captain of the merchant vessel they book is suspicious it’s their own paranoia and guilt that makes the journey a painful one.

Strange Experiences: Grandpa’s Portrait and Old Silas (1956)

These are two, blink and you’ll miss them minisodes – as no one calls them – featuring the urbane Peter Williams sat in a comfy chair reading these tales of the mildly unexpected.

 

George Votsis in old Covent Garden

Maze (1969)

Things get decidedly groovier 13 years later with this free-running tale of mysterious London connections all soundtracked by a band made up of members of the legendary prog band Family. The music is fab as are the locations as we follow a series of ace faces, an immigrant dishwasher (George Votsis) starts from Covent Garden when it was still a vegetable market, through the West End to a restaurant where a blonde woman (Stephanie Cleverley) who we’d seen arguing with a man near Bow Street, is finally reconciled. It’s a very neat construct and was put together by Bob Bentley for his degree show at the Royal College of Art’s Film and Television School.

There’s so much going on it’s a delight of atmosphere and expectation its rediscovery heralded by Bentley: It is a wonderful thing to share this ancient film. I had imagined it lost in the labyrinth itself, never to be seen again, but it has re-emerged from the subterranean depths and into the light, like Proserpine, Empress of Hades.

 

Skinfliker (1973)

Disc two gets off to an uncomfortable and hard-hitting start with Tony Bicât’s experimental film about the kidnapping and killing of a government minister by a group of dissidents, who aim to document everything on camera in an echo of mythical “snuff” films as well as a precursor of the ‘found footage’ horror genre.

It’s got rough edges and an uncomfortable restless energy that reflect the almost banal humour of the situation and the protagonists’ amateurish terrorism, all the more frightening and neither they nor we know if they’ll be able to follow through.

The film itself went through a similar test with Bicât challenged by the BFI who asked if he had any experience of film making; “I said I’d seen a lot of films. ‘So why should the BFI Production Board give you money to make Skinflicker?’ Because, I said, I love the script and only I know how to make it.” Turns out he was right and you won’t forget this in a hurry.

 

Banal tortures, boardering on the slapstick and yet...

COI: Broken Bottle and Don’t Fool Around with Fireworks (1973)

As is often remarked, it’s amazing that my generation survived into adulthood what with all the dangers to life constantly highlighted by public information films. The titles speak for themselves and we did take heed… hence the people at the BFI wouldn’t be around to tell the tales via Flipside!

We also had to worry about boot boys, skinheads and large groups of lads by the chippie but some risks stood out for themselves.

 

The Terminal Game (1982)

We’ve been worried about AI for a lot longer than the Daily Mail might suggest and this slice of near-sci-fi shows just why as a computer programmer investigates a colleague’s suspicious death against a backdrop of irresponsible big business and uncontrollable new technology… Geoff Lowe, you saw the future and it doesn’t work…

Some great locations here too including the darkly sentient St Alphage House on the Moorgate to London Wall Highwalks, now mostly lost to new buildings as we keep on building forward.

Music is provided by the excellent Colin Towns who I saw playing keyboards with Ian Gillan in 1982!!

 

St Alphage's Tower, looking increasingly like a computer

Wings of Death (1985)

This is the short that first impressed Derek Jarman with the exceptional Dexter Fletcher whom he subsequently cast in Caravaggio, although he clearly failed to watch him in Bugsy Malone and Stephen Moffatt’s The Press Gang!

There are echoes of Chatterton in the opening shot, as Nichola Bruce and Michael Coulson’s film explores the fevered dreams of the young addict played by Fletcher as he tries to escape his fate. It’s fraught with a twisted magical realism that bears comparison with Lynch as well as Jarman, as Fletcher’s character finds weirdness in everyone, he meets even the little girl playing with her “dead” dollies on the stairs, and the hotel receptionist eating like a pig and resembling his mother.

It's a standout on the set and reminiscent of so many shorts that accompanied longer films up to this time, often at the Scala in Kings Cross and which would leave us slightly out of joint as we staggered back into the night air after a viewing, a little bit more eager to get home than when we arrived…

Dexter Fletcher

 

Shockingly special features!!

A Vandyke Production: Roger Proudlock and Strange Stories (2023, 7 mins): the BFI’s Vic Pratt looks back on the tiny post-war independent film company that produced Strange Stories

Getting Lost (2023, 20 mins): interview with Bob Bentley, writer and director of Maze

Touch a Nerve (2023, 26 mins): interview with Skinflicker director Tony Bicât

Actor Henry Woolf’s personal pencil-annotated copy of the Skinflicker script by Howard Brenton

A Game of Two Halves (2023, 28 mins): interview with The Terminal Game writer and director Geoff Lowe

Playing Music (2023, 8 mins): renowned composer Colin Towns looks back on his score for The Terminal Game

The Terminal Game original trailer

Wings of Death: Behind the Scenes (2023, 7 mins): co-director Nichola Bruce’s chronological edit of her 8mm footage of the shoot

Flying High (2023, 31 mins): the directors of Wings of Death look back on the film

Rare photographs taken on the set of Wings of Death by Steve Pyke

Image galleries for Maze, Skinflicker, and Wings of Death

Newly commissioned sleeve artwork by renowned illustrator Graham Humphreys

*First pressing only: Illustrated booklet with an introduction from the BFI’s Vic Pratt, William Fowler and Josephine Botting, an essay on Skinflicker by Sarah Appleton, notes and credits for each film and for the special features

 

So, yet another must-watch set and you must-buy either direct from the BFI’s online store or the shop itself on the Southbank.

 

Always look on the Flipside of life!

 

Hybrid horror… Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (1978), BFI Flipside No. 46, Dual Format (4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray)

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Isaac Newton's third law of motion

 

Richard Loncraine is as responsible as anyone else for the widespread deployment of Newton’s Cradles in offices, having spotted the opportunity to manufacture these kinetic art toys for a UK market deprived of their intellectual ambience. In the late sixties, he was specialising in sculpture and designed a chrome model for the Carnaby Street store Gear which was clearly fab. Studying at Central St Martins, he opted for the film studies course and soon was directing at the BBC with an Alan Wicker documentary followed by work for Tomorrow’s World and he then moved onto fiction and from there to film.

 

His subsequent achievements include his first film, Slade in Flame (1975), an award-winning Richard III (1995) with Ian McKellen and Robert Downey Jnr and his Emmy Award winning work on Band of Brothers. Then we have this film, Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia which sank with little trace at the time of release and which has previously only enjoyed a short afterlife on VHS. Not everyone forgot it though and one man, writer and cinema historian Simon Fitzjohn, has campaigned for Full Circle for many years and has helped put this splendid BFI Flipside release together so that we can all see what should not have been forgotten.

 

What we have is a very interesting film, which is part horror/part psychological thriller, and which illustrates the Newtonian principle above with a story focused on the human reaction to the massive force of tragedy and dark deeds. Loncraine sees flaws but still thinks overall it’s a good end product, praising his cast and crew with the enthusiasm of experience, and confessed that both he and his star, Mia Farrow, both felt they were working on a psychodrama whilst the producers definitely wanted another horror in the vein of The Exorcist and, more specifically, Rosemary’s Baby.

 

This looks to have had an impact on the film’s enticing narrative ambivalence, horrific things do happen but they are never lingered on, the plot gathering an eerie momentum and the camera focused on Mia who excels at the catatonically unsettling, underscoring dialogue and action with an uncanny intensity that bubbles just under the surface to devastating effect. In his interview for this set, Loncraine explains how at one critical moment – as Farrow’s character attempts a tracheotomy to save her choking child – his producer decided to throw fake blood over Farrow’s hands which convinced her that she had hurt the young actress (Sophie Ward no less) – she screamed and ran away for hours. The film doesn’t need such cheap shots, all you need is shown on Mia’s face and features that reflect her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan’s delicate beauty.

 

Mia Farrow plays Julia Lofting, a young mother with a large trust fund, married to city financier Magnus (Keir Dullea) who, as the film opens, are sharing the odd snipe as they prepare for the day with their daughter Kate (Ward). Suddenly Kate starts choking on an apple and the couple fly into a panic quickly reaching the point at which cutting her throat open might be the only way to save her. It’s a very difficult scene to watch, far more horrifying than any supernatural event a graphic depiction of everyday nightmare.

 

Some months later, her daughter dead, we find Julia in hospital recovering from the event but when Magnus arrives, she leaves and, soon makes it clear that she no longer wants him or their marriage which had been failing long before the accident. She impulsively buys a large townhouse in Holland Park, number 3 Holland Park as Simon Fitzjohn informs us in one of the extras, and now worth multiple millions. All of her wealth can’t protect Julia from the guilt and the nagging horror she still feels and she begins to sense things in her new home, a radiator that won’t stay turned off, atmospheres in certain rooms and the feeling of another presence.

 

Out walking she glimpses a girl who looks like Kate only for the vision to disappear, she watches children playing in the park, and sees Kate again only to discover a dismembered pet tortoise… Is this all in Kate’s mind or is this a genuine haunting? Either way her friend Mark (Tom Conti, who was also in Slade in Flame fact fans!) won’t believe it and provides the common-sense rationality and good humour that offsets our expectations. Meanwhile Magnus is determined to bully his wife into submission, an all too real threat to her wellbeing not that she needs anything more than the looming dread of a house she is strangely committed to staying at.

 

Convinced that there’s something otherworldly about the house, Julia brings expert help in the form of Rosa Flood (the excellent Anna Wing) who hosts a séance with the help of some fellow sensitives. Mark jokes and keeps our expectations light until Mrs Flood is suddenly overcome with a malevolent spirit and has to leave in terror. Julia is convinced that the spirit is that of her daughter but revisiting Rosa, she learns it was a young boy she saw being murdered in the park by children during the war.

 

Julia begins to investigate the story and tracks down the story in the British Library and from there finds the dead boy’s mother who reveals the full horror of his death leading her to seek out the last surviving members of the group who were involved in his murder. We’ve come a long way from a story of grief and into a whole other haunting but is any of this real or has Julia just not recovered her sanity?

 

The films manages to saddle both possibilities pretty well… and we’re going to have to figure this one out for ourselves. I can well understand the fascination this continues to exert on Simon and I’m sure there will now be many more after this release.

 

There’s an uncanny score from Colin Towns which was instrumental in persuading Mia Farrow to undertake the project with the exquisite main theme conveying just the air of sad confusion that helps this film transcend any limitations of the “horror” genre. Mr Towns is well-travelled composer and musician who I once saw playing keyboards with his pal Ian Gillan in 1982, they played Child in Time which is close yet so far away from the mood he sets in this film. There’s a lot of lovely piano lines as well as synthesised moments that could only be from this era yet are always used to good effect. Not surprisingly he now has some 139 composing credits on IMDB and counting.

 

The special features as particularly fine on this release:

 

4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) or High-Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation

Audio commentary by director Richard Loncraine and film historian Simon Fitzjohn 

A Holland Park Haunting (2023, 24 mins): director Richard Loncraine reflects upon his artistic career and the making of Full Circle 

Park Life (2023, 16 mins): Simon Fitzjohn revisits the film’s London locations. 

What’s That Noise? (2023, 25 mins): soundtrack composer Colin Towns on one of his earliest film works. 

Coming Full Circle (2023, 11 mins): Tom Conti recalls his time on the film. 

The Fear of Growing Up (2023, 10 mins): Samantha Gates looks back on the production.

Joining the Circle (2023, 7 mins): producer Hugh Harlow recalls making the film

A Haunting Retrospective (2023, 25 mins): film critic Kim Newman revisits Full Circle

Images of a Haunting (2023, 13 mins): Full Circle aficionado Simon Fitzjohn talks us through his extensive collection of memorabilia. 

Rare stills and transparencies from the BFI National Archive’s collections 

First pressing only - illustrated booklet with a new Director’s Statement, an essay by film historian Simon Fitzjohn, a biography of Richard Loncraine by Dr Josephine Bottting, credits and notes on the special features

 

 

Full Circle is available on BFI 4K UHD and Blu-ray dual format, as well as iTunes and Amazon Prime from 24 April 2023, you can and should order the physical product direct from the BFI online shop.

 

It’s another lovely release from the BFI Flipside series, collect the set and be assured of happiness but not without some emotional after effects.