Bob and Paulette go ghosting… The Cat and the Canary (1939)/ The Ghost Breakers (1940), Eureka Blu-ray out 5th December

"Don't these big empty houses scare you?" "Not me, I was in vaudeville."

These two films, available in the UK for the first time on Blu-ray, come from a time when Hollywood was re-making itself with post-modern takes on its already well-worn genres based on earlier silent films with the same premise, based on hugely popular stage plays themselves founded on early pulp fiction. Yes, it’s oh, the horror, the horror and, what’s more, the horror… dark and stormy nights with a nod and a wink, Bob Hope being the absolute master of fourth wall demolition even as he keeps the narrative mood intact.

As I child, I loved The Cat and the Canary especially, spooky, suspenseful and full of dark humour, nervy wise-cracking and secret tunnels, I loved the secret tunnels! I also loved Bob Hope and, together with Paulette Goddard, he makes these two mild-horrors, engaging and still charming. The subtle nods from players to audience are still intact, especially now when we think we’ve seen this all before. I have news for you buddy, Bob had too!

Paulette and Bob, ready for - almost - anything!

Kim Newman argues in his video essay, that Paul Leni’s gorgeously expressionistic Cat and the Canary (1927) was the first of the Universal horror films and with the talkies came Dracula, The Mummy and many more looking back to the mystery plays on the silent are. The Leni film looks splendid these days and is more sophisticated in its visual presentation, still comic but a lot weirder than Hope’s version. Thus did the talkies give and yet take away from filmmaking, yet as Newman suggests, by the late ‘30s, Hollywood was no longer looking down on the silent past but paying more of a tribute, advancing the art of fearful films.

 

The Cat and the Canary (1939)

This Cat and the Canary was exactly in this cycle, along with Stagecoach, Robin Hood and many more skillful remakes. Here Hope is “the ultimate light leading man going to an old dark house”, and he's more of a punk than you remember, nervy, yet to reach his peak, fast-talking – a radio star – self-effacing, who became the mode of comic leading man that still persists (yes, Ryan Reynolds, I’m looking at you). He's likeable and he's funny, two things that are not really a given in Hollywood history.

Directed by Elliott Nugent, this Cat was the perfect vehicle for Hope and was hugely successful, followed almost immediately by The Ghost Breakers to further capitalise on this winning formula. Comically-cowardly hero, who steps up, with feisty, female co-star in supernatural danger became an enduring trope and, in both cases, if it hadn’t been for these kids, the men behind the masks would have gotten away with it too!

Elevated camera angle revealing the tension as suspicion grows...

The film changes a number of aspects of John Willard’s 1922 play as well as Paul Leni’s silent by basing the action in the Louisiana swamps and the remote mansion of one Cyrus Norman who, living alone with his faithful retainer/mistress, Miss Lu played by the wonderfully ambiguous Gale Sondergaard who gives Paddington a run for really hard stares. Through the misty bayou paddles a boat carrying the executor of old Cyrus’ estate, a Mr Crosby (George Zucco), who is, quite possibly, so-called because of a running joke with Bob’s best cinematic pal with the voice and the ears…

All is not right when Crosby lands as his late client’s safe has been tampered with along with the will inside which he is to read to the deceased’s dispersed relatives, all of whom are to gather in the house before midnight for the reading. Gradually they arrive, Joyce Norman (Goddard, looking Crawford sharp and Davis sassy), Fred Blythe (John Beal), Charles Wilder (Douglass Montgomery), Cicily Young (Nydia Westman), Aunt Susan Tilbury (Elizabeth Patterson), and a Broadway entertainer, Wally Campbell (Bob).

The already febrile atmosphere takes a toll for the worse when the gong sound seven time indicating, as Mysterious Miss Lu says, that one of the eight present, will not survive the night-time hours. Hope is of course perfect as the epitome of American bonhomie and “modern” style who is quick to be unsettled by unfamiliar forces even as he finds it hard to grasp the uncanny may be real. He is our guide to this world of the unknown…

 

Paulette navigates one of the house's tunnels; the familiar undermined with horrors just around the corner

The same is true of Goddard who projects strength and intelligence as well as a sound healthy lifestyle; quick talking and a woman of agency who doesn’t faint or scream, but takes action. Her character reflects this even as she is told by Crosby that she will be the one to inherit the full fortune if, and obviously that will be a big if, she is able to stay sane by resisting the house’s haunting qualities and the very physical threats that start to emerge once Mr Crosby disappears, only to turn up stone cold dead and falling out of a passage behind one of the bookshelves in her room.

Now begins the process of careful misdirection and atmospherics as each of her distant relatives is shown to have a familial quirk, either comic or other-worldly. Once it is revealed that a second will exists and will come into force if she loses her sanity then the level of threat and disquiet can only increase. It remains an exercise in controlled comic horror and with the mystery buried deeply, still engages all these years later. And, like a child I remain fascinated and delighted by those mysterious tunnels that take the players and the feel away from the seemingly mundane insides of the house to the darker places below.

 

Death waits for you on Black Island… The Ghost Breakers (1940)

Bob and Paulette in The Ghost Breakers

"It looks as though Paramount has really discovered something: it has found the fabled formula for making an audience shriek with laughter and fright at one and (as the barkers say) the simultaneous time." Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

The Fulham Chronicle in London also described this film as a perfect blend of comedy and horror and, as Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby say in their commentary, it is one of those rare examples that gets the balance just right, a wonderful thing. Hope and Goddard are re-united in what is a more open yet equally intense scenario which spends much more time in the real world before the closing section in an old dark house on a mysterious island.

Hope is radio reporter Larry Lawrence, a guy with his finger on the pulse of so many underworld activities thanks to a very generous feed from the mobsters themselves. Goddard is yet again in receipt of an inheritance as Mary Carter and listens to Larry’s radio show as she’s instructed is visited by Mr. Parada (Paul Lukas), a sinister Cuban solicitor delivering her the deed to her inheritance—a plantation and mansion in Cuba. There’s something odd about Parada and the whole set up… and there’s also something off about Larry’s broadcast which says rather more than his mob pals want and he is summoned to meet boss Frenchy Duval.

Willy Best helps Mr Hope to his feet

Larry sets off with his man-servant Alex (Willie Best) who has what is a now an uncomfortable relationship with his boss who makes several comments that now carry a trigger warning. Best is energetic good value, and works well with Hope and our job is to contextualise and understand the racial aspects. Back in the story... a young man Ramon Mederos (Anthony Quinn in his first film) has gone to the same hotel to meet with Mary and explain the dangers of her inheritance. He reveals himself just as Larry walks along the corridor and, with a bang, falls to the ground shot dead, leading the hapless broadcaster to believe he’s the murderer. He seeks sanctuary in Mary’s room and, long story short, ends up squished into one of her cases and making his way inside to the ship taking her to her newly-acquired antique pile on Black Island.

The ship forms a bridge to the spookiness to come with misty encounters with Mr. Parada and then an acquaintance of Mary’s, affable Geoff Montgomery (Richard Carlson), who fills them full of dread with stories of ghosts, voodoo, and zombies. After their original “cute meet” Mary and Larry are flirting along just fine and we have that reassurance of the genre that their sparks will continue to fly. But now, having reached Havana, it is time for them to make their different ways to the island to encounter Mother Zombie (Virginia Brissac), an actual Zombie (Noble Johnson) and Mary’s ancestor, as she hangs on a giant painting in the castle stairway… the resemblance is remarkable and the first of many spine tingling moments as the film goes into overdrive.

Based on an even earlier source material than The Cat, a 1909 play from Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard, the film has more light and shade than the Canary but both are superbly crafted, pacey, entertaining and with their stars still shining brightly through the mystery and the mists.

Paulette Goddard holding a candle to herself

The Cat and Ghost Breakers is released with the usual fulsome extras:

• Limited Edition slipcase (2000 copies)
• 1080p presentation of both films from scans of the original film elements supplied by Universal, with The Ghost Breakers presented from a new 2K master
• Optional English SDH
• Brand new audio commentary tracks on both films with Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby
• Kim Newman on “The Cat and the Canary” and “The Ghost Breakers”
• “The Ghost Breakers” 1949 radio adaptation
• Trailers
• Reversible sleeve featuring original poster artwork
• PLUS: A limited edition collector’s booklet (2000 copies) featuring new writing by Craig Ian Mann

As a last thought on context, the appeal of comic-horror endures and even in an increasingly dreary reality in which audiences favour uncanny conspiracies of flesh and blood forces. The horror persists but we all hope to ultimately make light of the dark fantasies, just as, two decades after the Great War and flu pandemic, the World braced itself for even more blood to be spilt in Europe.

You can pre-order the set direct from Eureka here and, as usual it’s best to get in quick as the initial run is strictly limited. 

Way out south east… Tumbleweeds (1925)/The Gunfighter (1917), with Dr Ilya Poletaev and John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

Women ain't reliable - cows are…

 

That’s what you cowboys call yourselves, isn’t it, tumbleweeds?

 

See also:

 

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks

Let 'em be doctors and lawyers and such…

 

That was Wayland Jennings advice but at this stage it’s way too late for those of us keen to ride alongside William S Hart as he blazed his trails across South East London in an evening celebrating this most accomplished of silent actors and a genre that seemed to emerge fully formed from the start. Recently we’ve been watching The English in which Emily Blunt’s mannered aristocrat forms an unlikely alliance with a native American and shows the kind of resilience and toughness required to survive and exert yourself in these primal united states. William S Hart was, if not the first to embody this spirit, certainly the first to comprehensively show the cinema audience the brutal realities only just passed.

 

William S Hart makes his point to young Jack Murphy

Tonight, we had two films from different stages of Harts’ career The Gunfighter (1917) and Tumbleweeds (1925), including an introduction he performed in a 1939 release of the latter which featured the former Shakespearean setting out almost his own eulogy not to mention that of the cowboy. Tumbleweeds was, at 61, Hart’s last film and, here he talks of the many injuries that stopped him continuing as an action hero, with his anguished cry about “the thrill of it all”.

 

Produced by Hart, Tumbleweeds is based on the last major events of the opening up of the West, the Cherokee Strip land rush of 1893. when a huge swathe of land owned by native Americans and used for grazing cattle, was made available for claim from a new wave of “homesteaders” from the East. This provides the film with a huge cinematic moment when the army gun fires at noon, setting off a race featuring thousands of horses, wagons and one man on a penny farthing. Director King Baggot tracks the whole event and you feel almost as much a part of the conflagration as you do in Napoleon’s charges or those of The Chess Player. It sends a chill when you consider this event was just thirty years earlier, as close to 1924 as the collapse of the old Soviet Union is to now. Time flies comrade… and the pictures below show how clearly audiences may have been able to imagine the actuality as it was reported.

For this sequence alone you can understand why some have called this his best film, although reviews were fairly mixed in 1925 and understandably so given a narrative that is slightly assumptive and coded with expectation; as if all of the other characters know exactly what will happen with Hart’s character, Don Carver and there’s not the fierce dynamic uncertainty of say Hell’s Hinges (1915). Hart is of course excellent as the principled foreman of the Box K Ranch, and there’s a humble wistfulness to his performance here as he looks out at the thousands of cattle taking his hat off with his men to declare the “end of the West”.

 

William S. Hart and Barbara Beford

All of the elements of the Western are here, faithful sidekick Kentucky Rose (Lucien Littlefield in what will become The Slim Pickens role), goofing but always coming up trumps, love interest, Molly Lassiter (Barbara Bedford) initially appalled but gradually warming and then the unacceptable faces of progress, men with capitalist intent who try to cheat their way to the money… honestly, America, you should have watched more of your own movies. The baddies here are Molly’s useless brother Noll (J. Gordon Russell) and his mate Bill Freel (Richard Neill), as cowardly as they are unscrupulous… emblems of the essential unfairness underpinning the dash for land something that could only be overcome by the decency and fight of men like Don and women like Molly. The good guys won or at least they did on screen.

 

It’s an engaging spectacle with the romance and resignation of Hart’s character at the centre as the whirlwind of history carries the hopes and schemes of the good, the bad and the greedy.

 

Accompaniment was provided by guest pianist Dr Ilya Poletaev, Associate Professor of Piano at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal, who graced the narrative with magnificent lines to accompany the epic sweep and the emotional minutia. Tumbleweeds is the precursor of other films based on the 1893 land rush, including Wesley Ruggles' Cimarron (1931), The New Frontier (1935) and Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992) and the spirit of the 1890’s all the way to Emily Blunt. The end of the old West and Hart’s career, until that final introduction in 1939.

 

The Gunfighter (1917), Mr Hart requests that you raise both hands in the air.

The Gunfighter (1917), with John Sweeney

 

The KB’s Christopher Bird provided two excellent introductions to these films but it was this one that he had the most personal stake in, helping to construct not one but two restorations based on two slightly different 9.5mm home-movie condensed versions from the late 20’s and the recent discovery of one and a half reels of 35mm nitrate. This part of the picture had French intertitles but luckily his colleague at Photoplay, Kevin Brownlow, had a copy of the script, producer Thomas H. Ince being one of the few to insist in a thorough script in a time of so much improvisation.

 

The script was invaluable in reconstructing the narrative and the sense of the film but there was no way of matching the font used at the time. At this point enter Fritzi Kramer, graphic designer by day and runner of the esteemed Movies Silently blog by night. Fritzi went full method on the typeface volunteering to recreate the extinct font by analysing the title cards of two of Hart’s other films. She also mocked up a wanted poster for Hart’s character and lovingly created and aesthetic that, combined with Chris’ painstaking work, has helped to restore just over half of what was once considered a lost film.

 

The Gunfighter was screened at the Hart retrospective at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2019 and tonight was presented with even more improvements from Mr Bird. The sense of this movie is entirely there and it’s a fine example of his output in the teens, with Hart playing an anti-hero rescued by the love of a good, and much younger, woman, here played by Margery Wilson (20 at the time, Hart was 53, plus ca change).

 

Old Bill and Margery Wilson 

Wild Bill Hart plays Cliff “Killer” Hudspeth, leader of a band of outlaws who have achieved supremacy in the local area through his despatch of notorious gun-bullies. His reign is threatened by the mixed-race El Salvador (Roy Laidlaw) who wants to muscle into the territory using less principled means of extortion. Cliff meets Norma Wright (Wilson) a milliner on the door of her shop, as he is in the middle of a gunfight with one of El Salvador’s senior henchmen, 'Cactus' Fuller (Milton Ross) and even though the later cheats, turning, shooting, missing and being shot dead on the count of eight… she is appalled, calling Cliff a murderer.

 

Cliff disagrees and promptly carries Norma off to his gang’s base in the Gila Mountains of Arizona, although this does seem to reflect an almost charming naivete on the gunslinger’s behalf. That said, Norma can see there’s more to him than meets the eye… Cliff is fully aware of his inner conflict though and spends the night drinking whiskey and seeing visions of all of those he has killed. In the morning he agrees with Norma not to kill again… he has seen the light. Choices are not always this simple in the West and the town make Cliff their sheriff on the grounds he eliminates El Salvador using ultimate force if necessary and then the Mexican attacks the town and kidnaps Norma…

 

I love the artwork for this promotional ad

There’s a harder edge to this film than Tumbleweeds and a more fearsome protagonist. Hart himself is playing a more faceted character and not the first nor last outlaw pardoned in exchange for enforcing law in the USA.

 

John Sweeney rode along adding much dramatic accompaniment to further restore the film’s intent. The Western genre is so endlessly fascinating, with questions of morality, loyalty and bravery that never truly grow old, much like William S Hart who one hopes, died with his cinematic boots on.

 

Another special Bioscope evening, you just don’t see these films anywhere else, certainly not on 16mm from private collections. Still London’s Silent Speakeasy as Pamela Hutchinson said way back on Silent London, and full of passionate souls who pay all due respect and reverence to these wonderful films and their history.

Photographs from the actual landrush in 1893... 

Jigsaw feeling... The Exquisite Cadaver (1969), with Judy Matheson, Festival of Fantastic Films, Manchester

The more I think about it as I think it’s a fantastic piece of art… Three wonderful parts for women. all very good actresses, well at least the other two!

The very modest and very talented, Judy Matheson

 

There is no doubt that watching a film with an audience makes the experience richer and more emotionally engaging. That word, engagement, does so much heavy lifting these days, especially in the media world I live in where we fixate over how to truly measure it. Here, in what one of the film’s stars, Judy Jarvis (nee Matheson) described as probably the UK premiere for a film rarely seen anywhere for the last half century, I sat as the audience of cinephiles were absorbed in silence as they watched this most engrossing tale at the Festival of Fantastic Films.

“Fantastic” has, of course a double meaning as many of the films on this splendidly eclectic programme were not only Fantastic but Fabulous too, with others just beyond the descriptive reach of either word although Marian Marsh and John Barrymore were definitely both in Svengali (1931), the deeply “pre-code” first film of the day and, incidentally, I’m still having anxious flashbacks… “run Marian, run as fast as you can and do not look back!”

The Exquisite Cadaver was definitely the most fabulous and fantastic film especially when watching it in the company of 25% of the original cast. I think Judy was slightly apprehensive about how it would be viewed but she needn’t have worried, it’s a cerebral film and one that was exceptionally well choreographed by its director and co-writer Vicente Aranda (not a Svengali, just a very smart man!) known for his considered and personal films which included a long working relationship with the great Victoria Abril, and hits such as Forbidden Love (1991) and Forbidden Love/Cambio de Sexo (1976) – both with Abril – along with Lolita’s Club (2007) and The Blood-Splattered Bride (1972). Not bad for a man who didn’t direct his first film until his forties and, as Judy pointed out, is listed as an influence by Pedro Almodóva and many more.

Capucine

For this film he cast the legendary Capucine, whose next film was Fellini’s Satyricon (1970), established Spanish actor Teresa Gimpera, perhaps best known for The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), and the darkly handsome Argentine, Carlos Estrada whose first film was in 1954 and last in 1999. To complete his quartet of characters Aranda selected a young British actress whose only previous film experience had been in a bit part in Gregory Peck’s The Chairman (1969), Judy Matheson.

I met up with Judy before the screening and we talked about the film and her early career. Having learned her craft at drama school Judy joined the company at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, the oldest performing theatre in the UK, with whom she had toured the USA performing in a triumvirate of Shakespeare plays, Hamlet, Measure for Measure and Romeo and Juliet with Jane Asher as the latter, who’s fab boyfriend Paul McCartney once joined them on Jane’s 21^st birthday.

There’s so much luck in my life. There was a little bit of imposter’s syndrome… the other actors were very serious and intimidating, I wasn’t quite ready for that.

Judy Matheson now Judy Jarvis

Judy is remarkably honest and modest but I think she is self-aware and recognises the stages of learning in her career. Working in repertory theatre was a way to get your Equity card but it also gave you a fast-track to the visceral learnings only being dropped into the deep end can provide. The American tour must have been the richest of experiences with Judy getting to meet Robert Kennedy, Louis Armstrong and many others. Meeting a Beatle must have felt almost routine in what was, as Judy says, the most brilliant first job!

Back in London, one of her fellow cast members, Janet Key, put her in touch with the agent Hazel Malone, whose roster included the cream of a new wave of up-and-coming British talent: Susan George, Judy Geeson, Malcolm McDowall, Richard O’Sullivan, Robin Askwith, Carol White and Luan Peters. Judy made an immediate impression with Malone and, as her next job was to prove, her eloquence and emotional intelligence helped her to establish common ground very quickly.

One of the things she sent Judy for was Vicente Aranda’s latest project, The Exquisite Cadaver. He was looking for a young English actress and after meeting Judy, cast her without a screen test, after which she was flown to Spain for fittings and what turned into an incredibly enjoyable, glamorous six-month production. Whilst this speaks of the budget Aranda had at his disposal, the film is so polished and well shot, there was also distributor pressure for some reshooting of “sexier” scenes as if these for performers could get any more eye-catching. They also asked for the film to be retitled Las Crueles a sexier title with a nod to Cluzet’s Les Diaboliques.

She was cast out of some 500 others up for this role (according to IMDB) and to get such a meaty part with equal screen time as these three more experienced performers shows how much Aranda saw in her. But there is, indeed, something about Judy and to this we can now add The English Abril… an actress who can emanate conflicting emotions from an almost unknowable core. She was clearly on the same page as Aranda and, as she points out how much harder it is for young actors now who have to audition via smart phone, back in the age of the landline, she was able to meet directors talking to them in depth, discussing ideas and finding that common ground. Not so luck but intellect.

Aranda was very considered and intellectually precise, he clearly had a deep vision for the kind of film he wanted to make as well as the kind of performer who he needed. The connection they made was key to the film’s success, after all, you know what you’re going to get with Capucine, but not from a relatively inexperienced English actress in Spain. His trust was palpably rewarded.

This is patient film making requiring discipline and perfect teamwork in front of and behind the camera. The title refers to the practice of assembling a collection of words or images from a number of people none of whom knows what the other has done. Invented by the surrealist movement, leading light André Breton reported that the exquisite cadaver started in fun, but became eventually enriching presumably by being either a mess or revelatory. Here we have four characters in search of meaning and a puzzle with four moving parts that includes so much that is open to interpretation; a real challenge to the audience to wrestle our presumptions away from the narrative we expect and the people we think they look and act, like.

Carlos feels the heat from Capucine

The film begins with Esther seemingly about to take the ultimate action of self-determination… walking towards a railway line and gently placing her head on the track as a freight train rapidly approaches… We then switch to Barcelona and a fractious publishing company where an executive referred to only as The Editor (Carlos Estrada) is in the middle of putting one of his writers in his place. It’s no accident that the character carries this title, he’s trying to control his existence, cutting out the sections he doesn’t like and imposing his own will, as far as possible on those around him. His pomposity is punctured by the arrival of a yellow (Giallo?) box containing what appears to be the hand of a young woman, although he firstly balls out the writer assuming it’s his “joke” and then quickly tells his secretary that it’s wax. All the same, he takes the hand and buries it.

At home he is also shown up as something of a stuffed shirt as his two boys shoot him with toy guns and ask him far too many questions about their pet tortoise, which he calls a reptile. He’s reminded of this when the poor creature dies and, in a pure Almodóvan moment, he throws it over into next door’s garden.

Also well aware of her old man’s tumultuous struggle with calm is his wife (Teresa Gimpera) who has endless patience coupled with growing suspicions, especially after a second yellow parcel arrives. Too panicked to open the parcel he walks into town and leaves it on a bench hoping someone will steal it, but it ends up back at the house where his wife opens it to find a dress and a photograph of a woman, Lucia Fonte (Capucine) not, as we expected, Esther. The Editor’s explanations do not convince his wife and she begins to follow him when she notices a glamorous woman in a chauffeur-driven Citroen tracking him as well.

The Editor gets driven by Lucia – calling herself Parker, so much misdirection – to her mansion where she has the strangest of encounters with him. She says she has an artificial hand, did she cut it off to scare him?  She makes him take LSD and leads him deep into the house listening to recording of Esther’s voice before revealing her perfectly preserved body in a fridge. It’s not a tiny British fridge but nor is it a grand American one, but it’s just about Judy sized and she must have struggled to stay cool in such a crushed position.

The Editor wakes up at home on his couch, was it a dream – did anything actually happen?

Lucia had called his wife to her house after, she says, The Editor, turned up looking for her… neither wife nor watcher are now sure who or what to believe. There follows a neat Antonioni-esque moment at the park when Mr and Mrs Editor utterly fail to communicate, talking in turn as the focus is pulled from one profile to the other. All the while, young men are flying a toy plane – it buzzes around like nagging doubt before landing on the couple and being snapped into pieces by The Editor, just like our constructed theories about the narrative.

In and out of focus: Teresa Gimpera and Carlos Estrada

Finally, we begin to discover the relationship Esther had with The Editor, with their initial meeting in a hotel and a fascinating interplay between a seemingly carefree young woman, counting what she calls sweets but what are treatments for her cancer. She asks him his star sign before saying hers is Cancer, another double meaning… in a world where reality has simply fallen through the floor. Later she will meet Lucia in a similar setting, and the two will begin a relationship after she has had her heart broken by The Editor’s unforgiving red pen.

There’s another fascinating scene with Esther and The Editor walking near a cliff, she says she could take the step to oblivion and, testing her, she takes ten paces back, removing her shoes and throwing them over and down, the final step made only conceptually this time. Is the hand Esther’s, did she die on the railway, was she killed by Lucia or by some other means of self-destruction? You’ll really have to watch and work it out for yourself…

As Judy says, this is an unusual film for featuring three strong roles for women and for a storyline in which the leading man is the least sympathetic character. He is the the centre of the disruption in their lives and the reason for that is his own insecurity and faithlessness. The women, distracting though one of them is, are only looking for sincere connections. It's a woman's film in so many ways as Judy says, addressing the consequences of selfish masculinity on their impact on the lives of those he loves.

Carlos and Judy on the cliff edge

Aranda sets so many traps for the viewer, unfolding the narrative via the individual character’s testimony either within the story or through their words. He is in the great Spanish tradition of Luis Buñuel, who knew Breton and those surrealists, through to Almodóva, a storyteller creating a distinct world and using atmospheres to unsettle and intrigue. He’s also clearly a fine director of his company and the love quadrangle is exceptionally well played.

Capucine, a near physical impossibility, has such protean depth that you are convinced her character is capable of anything, which is grand as you don’t really know what she has done. Carlos Estrada plays broodily confused so well and has the confused masculinity of an Antonioni male, lost in the subtext of life while all the while expecting that success and dominance will enable him to have his way. Teresa Gimpera’s portrayal shows she has already reached a position of distrust, batting away his excuses even whilst giving him the benefit of doubt as she fearlessly seeks out the truth. She is the detective in the film to Estrada’s perpetrator/editor.

And… Judy's is quite the most complete performance you could expect, especially for a youngster, away from home in Spain, facing a challenging role in circumstances quite different from touring with pals. Capucine especially was very supportive and both the other actors are generous in how they played alongside her. There’s a real curiosity and centred unpredictability about Judy’s character, Esther Casino (running out of luck?) a febrility somehow mixed with an interior detachment. She reminds me of Ian McShane in The Ballad of Tam Lin, another overlooked gem I watched the day after this one – whose character has to be almost a cypher but also one with agency when the moments come. So, Esther is to the maximum degree and with the added element of only gradually being unveiled to us.

Half a century after it’s premier at the San Sebastian Film Festival, The Cadaver was equally well received in Manchester. Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a wider rediscovery and that, as I suggested to Judy, we can look forward to a screening at the BFI with her and Theresa being interviewed by Mark Gatiss. Let’s make it happen!!