The ghost box goes west… Enys Men (2022), On nationwide release 13th January 2023

This is a film unlike any you’ve seen and yet, something so familiar as well, from the grains on the colour film to the period setting, 1973, and Mark Jenkin’s haunting electronic score, this is perhaps the apex of the scene that haunts itself and has done since the likes of Ghost Box started released the sound of future passed a decade ago. On that most insubstantial of channels, BBC Radio 6, Stuart Maconie recently devoted an entire programme to the sounds of principles of “Hauntology” featuring contributions from the record labels, musicians and writers who contribute to this loose alliance of textures and moods.

As someone who grew up in the seventies, I can understand the nostalgic pull of revisiting the then futuristic but artists such as Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan (aka Gordon Chapman Fox), are much younger than me and are attracted to the style and the optimism of a time when we were on an irresistible path of, sometimes mis-judged, progress. Mark Jenkin is of this younger generation and here he not only provides his own electronic score, much in the style of  Warrington/Gordon’s stablemates on Castles in Space or Ghost Box artists, another label finding new grooves in the electronica trailblazed by Delia Derbyshire/BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Terry Riley and Stockhausen, then Morton Subotnick, the "Berlin School" of early Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, as well as Brits like Brian Eno and Francis Monkman. 

The detail is in the detail

This is but the subtext for his vision which recreates the feel of early seventies Folk Horror and other experimentations. The BFI have just released a set of Ghost Stories for Christmas including MR James’ enduringly creepy, Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) directed by Jonathan Miller and featuring a magnificently terrified turn from Michael Hordern. There’s something of the same existential dread in Enys Men and, as with Whistle, the ending wrongfoots the viewer in quite startling ways. But, every foot of Jenkin’s film is full of steps to this moment, each one sampling not just the sound but also the diverse source imagery of public information films, children’s horror serials such as The Owl Service, Children of the Stones, as well as the more psychological folk horrors, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Symptoms (1974), even later fare such as The Anchoress (1993).

You can have fun guessing inspirations and, realising exactly what we’re like, the BFI has kindly arranged a season, The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men, programmed by Mark Jenkin, will run at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player throughout January 2023. Including features, documentaries, TV programmes and shorts, the season will give context to Enys Men and the inspirations behind it, also giving audiences the opportunity to enjoy some rich and rarely seen content.

As with his previous film, Bait, Jenkin on grainy 16mm film stock and with his trademark post-synched sound, although this time he uses colour which not only provides more period feel but also illuminates numerous plot points.

The story is centred on a wildlife volunteer, played superbly by Mary Woodvine (also in Bait) whose job it is to monitor a rare flower on an uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall. Through her painstaking daily routines Jenkin slowly detaches the narrative from the linear and the viewer from their expectation of standard progression. On her daily trips to the cliff-face, near an abandoned tin mine (West Penwith), she checks the soil temperature, the growth of the plant and as she walks past the old mine, drops a stone down a shaft to hear is splosh in the deep dark waters. Back in her cottage she writes down the date and notes anything unusual: everyday is just the same “no change”.

Every day she starts the oil power generator outside cottage to provide light and power, closing the gate before switching on the over to make tea and update her minimalistic log, there’s a two-way radio that crackles occasionally into life and a medium wave transistor set that plays whatever signal can reach this lonely place. Our minds may begin to wonder as the Volunteer’s begins to wander and gradually, we’re presented with faces and events that may be real, imagined past or present.

Jenkins’ camera is relentless in its focus on minutia, odd-shaped rocks, an old, rusted rail from the mine, birds and plants, the volunteer’s walking boots on the crumbling steps… it’s hypnotic and riveting as any or all may be providing clues. There’s a pace that reminds you of Peter Greenaway (who made a few public information films in his time) as well as Derek Jarman certainly around the time of The Garden. This film will not be providing its audience with any easy answers and I can’t wait to watch it again to see what else I pick up.

People start to pop up, a young woman (Flo Crowe) who may be the Volunteer’s daughter or someone else entirely. She’s with her or is she. A visiting Boatman (Edward Rowe, also in Bait) asks her how it is being so alone and she replies that she isn’t, a reference by that point not just to the girl but to an old man/priest (the legend that is John Woodvine!), a collection of lifeboatmen, drowned in 1897, a group of women in traditional dress and dirt encrusted miners. All may be or may be not…

Then the landscape itself starts to intrude on the Volunteer’s thoughts and her physicality… is her solitude getting to her or is there something entirely more metaphysical at work. Does she burn her hands on the oven, how widely does the lichen grow, are events even happening in the right order?

Mary Woodvine is extraordinary and is in almost every scene of the film, engaging and yet lost in her character’s own world, as she, almost entirely wordlessly, guides us through the story. There are innumerable close-ups and, once again you have to think of silent film and technique when assessing Jenkin’s work. This is bold and absolutely to be seen in cinema where you can give it your full attention and be completely lost in the details the director and cast provide.

 

Enys Men, opens on 13 January 2023 at BFI Southbank and in cinemas UK-wide and there’s a preview/director Q&A tour with Mark Jenkin in Cornwall and other key cities from 2 January 2023. Mary Woodvine at some of the dates.

The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men on BFI Southbank/BFI Player from 1-31 January 2023.

Further details are on the BFI website, one of the films of the year and it’s yours to watch in January!

Spooking feathers… The Owl Service (1969-70), Network Blu-ray Out now

Any criticism that the series was unsuitably adult for children is untrue. Never underestimate the child; it is pure, it observes, makes up its own mind. But then is taught to see things otherwise. Gillian Hills speaking in 2008

 

It’s fitting that with Enys Men, the new film from director Mark Jenkin, being released in January along with a season of “folk horror” films that helped inspire it (The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men*), that Network have just put out this ground-breaking series on Blu-ray for the first time. The Owl Service was clearly influenced by some of the films of the period, and not just from the “horror” category, as well as casting its odd spell over the stories to follow, from Children of the Stones, Pendas Fen, even as far as The Box of Delights (1984)

 

The series was drawn from Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service (1967) and was scripted by Garner himself, who was present for the shoot. The story alludes to Blodeuwedd as featured in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, Welsh folkloric stories from the 12^th Century which, in this case refer to a love triangle between Blodeuwedd a woman created from flowers by the king of Gynedd, Math fab Mathonwy and a magician called Gwydion, who betrays her husband Lleu in favour of another man, Gronw, and is turned into an owl as punishment for inducing Gronw to kill Lleu.

 

Gillian Hills' character looks up from reading Mabinogion to see the two boys. We see what she sees on her glasses. There is so much detail here.

In Garner's tale three teenagers find themselves not only re-enacting the story but somehow inhabited by the spirits of the original three; they also interact with others from the generation above who have been in a similar possession; a cycle set to be repeated down the ages in slightly varied forms. In one of the interviews included in this set, Garner tells of his periods of illness as a child when he would will himself into an imaginary world above his bed in the wooden rafters of his family home on the Welsh side of Cheshire and also become obsessed with the details of the locale. I know the feeling, there’s plenty of mystery in Congleton still.

 

This drift into a world distorted by imagine and by the observed but unknowable countryside of North Wales, gives the series an edge of unreality and one the director, Peter Plummer, sets on enhancing by innovative cinematography; characters looking straight to camera, obscure angles placing them against the scenery, jump cuts and everything you wouldn’t expect to find at 5.00pm after school. In his enthusiastic and great value commentary writer Tim Worthington describes The Owl Service as being “the closest that you will find to a progressive rock album on television” which might be jumping the gun a little, but certainly Genesis’ Musical Box (1971) about a child possessed by the ghost of a murderous Victorian boy, may have been influenced by Owl. More likely, their sources were from the same arthouse and folk horror roots.

Hills, Holden and Wallis

The characters are Alison (Gillian Hills) and Roger (Francis Wallis), step siblings whose mother Margaret, her authoritarian influence felt even though she is never seen in another of the series’ oddities, has married Clive (Edwin Richfield), a well-to-do self-made man, common sensical in ways guaranteed to heighten the void between “down-to-earth” and other worldly. They are staying in a Welsh holiday home for the summer and the chance to get to know each other as a new family.

The house comes with a cleaner, Nancy (Dorothy Edwards) and her son Gwyn (Michael Holden) along with a rather odd odd-job man called Huw (Raymond Llewellyn) who seems to know far more than he lets on and to be in a state of reverie most of the time, not quite the village idiot but a joker, revealing the truth in short bursts to audience and other characters alike. If he was music, he’d be diegetic as close to Greek as a Welsh Chorus gets.

The narrative rolls in jarring ways with terrific changes of time signature and tone as you’d find in classic prog rock as well as the darker edges of folk rock too. Alison and Gwyn start getting on in rather adult ways – in the book they were teenagers but here they’re slightly older whilst the actors were even older, with Holden 22 and Hills a very experienced 25-year-old. She had appeared not only in Antonioni’s Blow-Up cavorting naked with David Hemmings and Jane Birkin, but also in Soho cinema neo-classic, Beat Girl (1960) aged just 16 and would go on to cavort at high speed with Malcolm McDowall and Barbara Scott the following year, in A Clockwork Orange.

Francis Wallis and Edwin Richfield

They awaken the legend by finding a set of dinner plates with an owl pattern, which unexpectedly for me, provides “the owl service" of the title. This proves to be one of a number of trails that don’t always reach a conclusion and fall away as other streams of the narrative flow together with intermittent force… the more I think about it the more this could well be something like a team up between King Crimson and the Incredible String Band. Either way, at eight episodes long, it’s at least a double LP and possibly a triple.

 

There’s a sepia tinted intro to each episode added as the producers weren’t convinced that all children would be able to follow the plot and, in addition to the never-present mother, there are references to and on one occasion a clip from action that we didn’t previously see. This is as complex as storytelling gets on TV and even now you’re left grasping for meaning, no doubt exactly as Garner intended.

 

There is so much to uncover in the story and I wonder sometimes if even the cast were fully aware especially as some scenes are alarming in their physicality and possibly coached on the spot. Garner made the three main characters, all the characters, hard work and difficult to comprehend or sympathise with and it’s no wonder some have criticised the younger performers but they had a tough job. Hills does especially well in these circumstances but the standout is Raymond Llewellyn who said that Huw never really left him years on.

 

Gillian Hills and Raymond Llewellyn

It's an experience like no other and, if you haven’t already invested, I heartily recommend it. You will watch it more than once and you’ll never trust dinner plates nor standing stones in quite the same way.

 

As is usual the Network Special Features are indeed very special:

 

• Remastered in HD and presented on Blu-ray for the first time
• Archive interviews with Alan Garner from 1968 and 1980
• Commentaries on selected episodes by writer/broadcaster Tim Worthington
• Image gallery
• Limited edition booklet written by Stephen McKay, Chris Lynch and Kim Newman

 

You can order The Owl Service direct from Network and, frankly, no home should be without one… even though, once familiar surroundings may take on a shadowy aspect once you watch it. Go on, be brave…

*You can also buy tickets for the BFI's The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men series on their site here. Happy Hauntological New Year!

The Advisory Circle from 2011, one of Hauntology's house bands

These are a few of my favourite things… 10 from 2022

 

And so this is Christmas and what have we done...? Turns out quite a lot more than in the Year of Our Covid, 2021 but still not as much as we’d like to have done… in this game you take what you can get though and savour each experience as much as you can. Silent film doesn’t throw itself at you like an overeager superhero flick desperate to win back it’s $200 million budget, oh my no, you have to make an effort and all of that is rewarded with the shocks and joys of unremembered humanity and artistic enterprise. All of which is a Boxing Day hungover way of saying; hey Ma, will you look at these apples (and no, I don’t really know what that means)!

Woman of the Year: Dora Brandes (1916)/Poor Jenny (1912) with Stephen Horne, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

She acts, that’s the thing… she does not just pose before the camera… She impersonates a character, she makes it live and have meaning, a hundred meanings… New York Times, 1921

Who could have foreseen that Asta Nielsen would be 2022’s MVP – someway ahead of Liz Truss in terms of relevance, attainment and talent – but Pamela Hutchinson and the BFI set out one of the finest seasons of silent treasures for many a year with screenings of rare Nielsen grooves propelling us into the year with a spring in our step and a growing appreciation of this most important actor. Sure, I’d seen Asta’s before but mostly in her greatest hits, Hamlet (thrice), Joyless Street (twice), Afgrunden (so many times…) but it was a real connoisseur’s delight to be able to dig deeper into a body of work that is very rarely screened in this breadth and depth.

Asta Nielsen

As an example of Die Asta’s almost unparalleled range I’ve picked these two with accompaniment from Stephen Horne who has a way with Silent Sirens (and a CD to prove it, available here if you are shameless and unhip enough to have not bought a copy!). Poor Jenny (1912) was from the early days of the Asta series, written and directed with partner Urban Gad who the actress insisted at the time came with her to Germany to carry on the work begun with Afgrunden. It’s a typical rags-to-riches-back-to-rags again narrative but, as she joked, this was more than enough to feed her dramatic energy.

Dora Brandes, directed by Magnus Stifter, following her break with Gad, plays with the already well-worn Star is Born tropes. Asta playing a successful actress who finds herself having to choose between an older politician and a much younger journalist. Drama ensues… hearts break. As you watch you can begin to fully understand Asta’s ability to express and connect. So often at the start of her films, she’s seen smiling straight to the audience before the action begins, melting hearts and renewing her intimacy with the watchers and unflinching honest look, the only time she’s out of character, or at least the character she’s about to play. As a person she’s a mystery and her pre-show smiles just hint at the complexity to come whilst showing how easily she can draw us in… it only takes a few seconds looking at those huge dark eyes. Queen.

Asta and her infinite variety...

Downfall (1923) with John Sweeney, introduced by Pamela Hutchinson, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

Sorry, but I’m not just having one Asta moment and this was a breath-taking film that showcased the full power of Asta’s performance level whilst also confronting the fact that she was getting older – she commissioned the film aged 41. Watching her character with minimal make-up. looking in horror at her unfamiliar face in the unforgiving mirror before being deadened by her lover’s unyielding humiliations and finally vanishing from the love of her life’s vision… is oddly rewarding. Certainly, she presents one of the most searing portrayals of aged tragedy in silent film and proof, if any were needed, of her ability to transcend melodrama and to give something extra special entirely from within character.

 

Back in Bologna… Foolish Wives (1922), Timothy Brock, Il Cinema Ritrovato 36th Edition

At last, I was back in Italy and it was too hot, there was too much to do and far too much to see: I loved it!! So many highlights, watching the restored Nosferatu with Mr Brock and full orchestra in the Piazza Maggiore,  watching, The Conformist and Singing in the Rain in the same space and then the almost supernatural hit of three hours’ worth of The Beatles in Peter Jackson’s third episode of Get Back, including the full Rooftop Concert: the gear does not get any fab-er than that, a revelation and a stunning twist of the Extended Scouse Universe.

The big silent showcase was this splendid restoration of the first million-dollar movie, as acclaimed the publicity… Spectacularly, Erich von Stroheim delivered on the ROI and Universal had another hit on its hands from the most complex man in most parts of Hollywood whose productions had the skill of DeMille, the scale of Griffith and a dark heart the latter could never explain to himself. This is a slick crime caper movie from before the days when slick crime capers set in this period were all the rage. But Erich is making sure we see the seedier side as well, he and his two “cousins” are charming con artists, but he has a debauched sexuality which makes his character all too difficult to root for and yet we are conditioned to try… even now.

Timothy Brock’s extraordinary new score was performed with vigour by L’Orcestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna which he conducted. His score included Russia themes reflecting the grandiosity on screen and also delicious lines of his own mapping every strange and unusual nuance from von Stroheim’s screen. It felt complete with the film and completed that magical connection between the place, the audience and the film that makes live silent screenings so compelling and which makes this place, almost uniquely, a truly silent city.

 

Les Misèrables (1912) with John Sweeney, Gabriel Thibaudeau and Silvia Mandolini

This was epic in length and was an unexpected joy equalling in its own way, the lengthier silent serial of 1926. Based in four parts totalling 168 minutes in length it was split into two screenings with different accompanists. The first parts, focusing on Jean Valjean and then Fantine, featured John Sweeney’s accompaniment and we were back the next day for Gabriel Thibaudeau’s piano and Silvia Mandolini’s violin as the story shifted onto Fantine’s daughter Cosette.

Recommended for students of French history and film alike; extraordinary clarity of purpose from Albert Capellani who was able to capture so much from the book with a narrative fluidity not often associated with this early period.

 

Evelyn Greeley

Phil-for-Short (1919), with John Sweeney, BFI

This film was introduced by me at the BFI and for a few hours at least, I was an honorary Nasty Woman.

Inspired by a remark made by the grandson of a one-time Yukon bordello owner, there has been an ongoing project to research and revive interest in unsung women filmmakers who broke new ground in the early years of cinema. This film is a deceptively nuanced take on gender roles in the wake of the Great War and increased recognition of women’s roles.

I wouldn’t say that Phil is a nasty woman, but she is a liberated one and just imagine how good it felt to watch her in 1919 newly enfranchised and with a range of choices starting to open up. As played by the energetic Evelyn Greeley, Phil stands out as practical, inventive and a leader; all very male characteristics for the older generation. She has to deal with reality as her aged father is still buried in the myths and legends of his books and, lovely and liberating though he is, she works the farm and is happy to step up to make things happen for herself and the men in her life.

There is now a magnificent new box set from Kino which includes this film and 98 others. It’s out now and is THE Archive Release of the Year – US and Canada can order direct.

  

Mary Johnsson - Gunnar Hede's Saga (1923) 

Gunnar Hede's Saga (1923) with Guenter A. Buchwald and Neil Brand, Bonn Silent Film Festival

Have Internet will travel and virtual Bonn was as excellent as usual. As many may know I’m always up for a Saga directed by Mauritz Stiller and based on a book by Selma Lagerlöf and, even though this one is still missing about half an hour, it is a thoroughly entertaining romp through snow, love and madness which features the humanity you’d expect from Selma along with the mastery of locations and character you can rely on from Mauritz. It’s a story about reindeers and redemption (the latter, always a Selma theme) and, how fitting that a film featuring two violin players and the healing power of music, should be accompanied by the Silent Film Supergroup of Guenter A. Buchwald on violin and Neil Brand on piano… I really wish I’d been there to witness this gig in the flesh but the streaming screening will have to do for now and how!

 

Norma Talmadge in The Lady (1925)

The Lady (1925), Daan Van Der Hurk, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Streaming

Oh, outrageous fortune! All set, ALL SET, for my first Giornate since pre-C, and I catch the latest variant a few days before I’m due to head for Venice Airport. So it goes, so it goes and at least we had the streaming version to give us some of the finest films from the full festival. 

Norma Talmadge has always been relatively undervalued in recent times, not afforded the screen time or respect of stella contemporaries Gloria, Mary or Lilian and so I was pleased to see her featured so extensively in this year’s programme and, if I had to pick just the one film to watch t would have been Frank Borzage’s The Lady, a film rated so highly by Talmadge scholars such as Greta de Groat. Norma and Frank did not disappoint and she provides perhaps the most affecting, emotionally powerful performances of her career although not one she wanted to repeat too quickly.

After the mid-teens, Talmadge called the commercial shots and as Jay Weissberg pointed out in his introduction, The Lady was too louche for middle American audiences and did not perform that well. As Talmadge herself said, quoted by Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs in their notes on the Giornate site, she wasn’t going to follow up the film’s style “… I am not going to do any more like it for a time, anyway. Not that I don’t like to do characterizations – I love it. But what can we do? We must play to the box office… So, for a while I am going to do modern things. I think they want to see me in gowns, in style.”

A great actor but also a smart businesswoman who played the game until, to paraphrase, she no longer needed to.

 

Faces of Children (1925), with Meg Morley, Kennington Bioscope

2022 we were back home to the Cinema Museum and here was one of the great films of the French silent period, and one accompanied with consistently emotive, compelling improvisation with hints of period classical as well as Meg’s diverse jazz chops, so in tune with Jacques Feyder’s tale of childhood grief. The film was critically-acclaimed yet a commercial failure and for a long time this it only circulated as a two-reel 9.5mm condensed version – available on YouTube and worth watching! – and as Christopher Bird said in his excellent introduction, this encouraged the young Kevin Brownlow to seek out more complete versions. The film was finally restored over a twenty-year period starting with the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique in 1986 and ending with Lobster Films in 2004 but it is still rarely screened which is exactly why we need the Kennington Bioscope more than ever!

 

Face off: Ivan vs Brigitte

Manolescu (1929), with John Sweeney, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming

This was like watching Fantasy Silent Film, a game in which the combination of two of the best strikers in cinema muto score hattrick after hattrick combining in ways that seemed impossible especially to this viewer who had no idea they had ever played together. Manolescu… Ivan “The Cat” Mosjoukine versus Brigitte “The Panther” Helm in a battle for our eyeballs, our attention… our love. Honestly, you could have taken the script for Carry on Cabby and given it to these two and we’d all be collapsed in a pool of utter distraction. You want engagement well here he and she are…

Mr Sweeney was fully aware of all of the above and slotted into musical midfield as the great playmaker he is (that’s enough footie references. Ed.)

 

Up in Mabel’s Room (1926), Günter A. Buchwald & Zerorchestra, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Streaming

Directed by E. Mason Hopper, this perfectly executed farce was based on the play by Wilson Collison and Otto Harbach from 1919, and like every successful comedy of this type it relies on perfectly executed performances and timing, whether from the performers and director or in the editing suite. There’s also some exceptionally pithy title cards courtesy of F. McGrew Willis’ script and Walter Graham’s text… and if a picture paints a thousand words, the expressions on Marie Prevost’s face are a British Library’s worth of inuendo!

Extra spice was added by accompaniment recorded right at the start of this year’s festival at the screening in Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, it had that live energy some of the streaming films don’t always get, although, to be fair this was an ensemble, with the local group Zerorchestra improvising alongside Günter A. Buchwald’s piano and violin. This film was the perfect finale for the streaming version though, setting us up for a physical return in 1923, sorry, 2023!

 

We’re back up and rolling and 2023 I aim to attend as many screenings and festivals as possible, I’m looking at you Hippfest, Slapstick, Europe and even further afield… as for Pordenone, we are long overdue!

Happy Christmas and a let’s have a brilliant 2023!

 

 

Look to the future now, it's only just begun.

Click on the cover to order this set!

Really big finish… The Hound of the Baskervilles (2022), Barbican with BBC Symphony conducted by Timothy Brock

I love radio plays, from the BBC or specialist imprints like Big Finish, particularly, as the performers always say, the format allows you to be the set designer, art director and cinematographer, creating your own visuals in response to the aural narrative, the music and the words. It is, as we media types say, engaging, “lean forward” or “hot media” in Marshall McLuhan theorised, something you need to concentrate on unlike most modern films who leap out of the screen with disjointed menace, multitracked drums beating you senseless to cover the sheer lack of real originality, purpose and coherence. No, what we really want for a dramatic night out is a group of actors being directed from the stalls by their scriptwriter whilst the full might of the BBC Symphony Orchestra plays out music composed by the same man all marshalled by one of the leading cinematic conductors on this planet.

 

Neil Brand is a multitalented man but he’s also a bravely ambitious one in producing this work under such circumstances and it was a pre-Christmas stunner.

 

The last time I saw The Hound at the Barbican it was the Stoll silent film version from 1921 directed by Maurice Elvey and starring Eille Norwood, the only Sherlock Holmes personally approved by the original author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, the accompaniment was provided by one Neil Brand. Fast forward seven years and it’s another chance to be genuinely astounded by the energy and imagination with which Neil's constructs his orchestral scores. There’s an obvious connection between being able to work with sight and no sound and sound with no sight, but Lord knows how it's accomplished...

 

Doyle's favourite Sherlock

Neil is so well versed in the conventions of scoring it comes across in the language of his music, tonight cinematic on stage even as the small group of players read from scripts, as you do in a radio drama, even one with this much orchestral clout. But he’s not just a technician, Neil’s music has instinct and heart and he has great lines that uplift and threaten, create suspense and dread always helping the story along with almost imperceptible prompting. Perhaps his extensive grounding in silent film has reinforced his collaborative instinct and the need to let the narrative breathe whilst others, sometimes, smother what’s on screen with too much of their own ideas: it’s a duet not a cover version.

 

I have seen this with Neil’s scores for Robin Hood and Blackmail at Saffron Hall as well as The Lodger in Pordenone’s Teatro Verdi, which ended the magnificent festival of 2019 on such a high note. Tonight’s entertainment was styled as a concert drama for actors and orchestra and in this context, it was part radio play, part theatre and part concert, all held together by stage director David Hunter as well as his partner in the stalls and Timothy Brock with the 50-piece orchestra set out in forceful formation on the Barbican stage.

 

The actors were positioned in a thin strip along the front of the stage and the drama switched from voice to orchestra throughout, occasionally threatening to overwhelm the script but only ever heightening the drama. Baskervilles is one of those stories we all think we know and, whilst I was mentally reaching back to the Elvey film for imagery, the story showed added dimensions, not least because it allows Watson to shine whilst The Great Detective is seemingly otherwise engaged.

 

Centre stage: Mark Gatiss and Sanjeev Bhaskar

That detective was played by the protean Mark Gatiss who tonight became only the second actor, after Christopher Lee, to play both Holmes brothers, Mycroft and Sherlock. He was cleverly commanding of course and is always so good at seeming one step ahead. His Watson was Sanjeev Bhaskar who stepped up wonderfully as the redoubtable Doctor faced with confronting the horrors of the hound without his mentor. Watson is always a man of action though and Sanjeev ran with it.

 

They were joined by another fourteen characters played by just five actors, Ewan Bailey (Barrymore/Mycroft/narrator), Clare Corbett (Mrs Barrymore/Beryl Stapleton/Billy/narrator), Sam Dale (Dr Mortimer/Frankland/narrator), Ryan Early (Henry Baskerville/narrator) and (Carl Prekopp Stapleton/Selden/narrator). They are all experienced voice artistes and you didn’t have to close your eyes to hear them as someone completely different, yes, even Clare as Sherlock’s chirpy Cockney gofer, Billy.

 

In their hands we moved from 222b Baker Street to misty moors and gigantic halls, from the sanity of Capital rationality to the wuthering madness of impossible creatures, old legends, escaped murderers and irresistible improbabilities racing toward immovable intellect. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth…" sometimes Neil seems impossible but then he proves his actuality time and again.

 

Timothy Brock conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra

It was a grand experience of dramatic musical theatre and I do hope the BBC caught the loud whooping from the right-hand side of the stalls – that was Michelle Facey! You can find out for yourself when the production is screened on BBC 4 in 2023. Before that it will feature in audio-only on BBC Radio 3 and it will be fascinating again to imagine it all again. But I won’t forget the experience of seeing it all come together, dozens of people working together to create a wondrous entertainment and to fill our minds with Devonshire moors, hellish hounds and the battle of the most noble intellect against the evil of men.

 

If this was on my theatre blog it would have ***** stars. Happy Christmas every one!

 

Neil Brand takes a bow having done Sherlock proud.

 

Home truths… Back Pay (1922), with Andrew Earle Simpson, Undercrank Productions DVD

 

The story of Hester Bevins is as old as sin, but sin is just a little bit younger than love, and often the two are interchangeable…

This film is about karma but in terms of its survival, it’s hardly been instant given that we can only now rewatch it a century after its release. Any film directed by Frank Borzage you’d expect to be not only commercially viable but also available and yet it took a Kickstarter campaign from composer Andrew Earle Simpson, supported by Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions to produce the DVD I now hold in my hand (typing with my right!). My name is on the credits along with hundreds of others world-wide who have pitched in on this one and it feels good to be a small part of preserving these films not just in digital formats but also in memory and wider study.

The only copies of Back Pay and its companion on this project, Borzage’s The Valley of Silent Men (1922) are held as part of the Marion Davies collection in the Library of Congress, and Back Pay is presented from a new 2K scan of the LOC’s 35mm acetate duplicate negative, printed from the sole surviving 35mm nitrate print.  It includes the film’s original tinting scheme and looks fabulous, especially as it also includes Grace Waller’s original art titles and “art” is what they are with illustrations enhancing the witty script from the great Frances Marion, who adapted from the short story of the same name by Fannie Hurst.

It’s 1922 and there’s still plenty of women involved in Hollywood and Fanny Hurst was arguably the most popular writer in America with a stonking twenty nine films based on her stories. Hurst chronicled the lives of working class urban lives and was, according to Grace Paley in The Stories of Fannie Hurst*, “…a pioneer in writing about working women, from maids to secretaries to garment workers, from prostitutes to artists,” weaving these together into “… captivating, deeply human stories that capture her characters’ struggles, triumphs, conflicts, and loves.”

Seena Owen

You can see the huge cinema going everywoman audience relating to this and especially Back Pay, which ponders the right of women to hold ambition in ways reflective of post-War equality – in the US as in the UK – women’s role in the war effort had earned them more respect and recognition. It’s easy, but remiss, to overlook this context in viewing what is a melodrama and also to take the proximity of the Great War for granted; four years on, countries were still full of physically and mentally damaged veterans who had lost their place in a society that didn’t always understand their sacrifice. In this way Back Pay reminds me a little of Maurice Elvey’s Comradeship (1919), which dealt with the social and welfare aftermath of the conflict.

Hester Bevins had spent her life in Demopolis, one of those small, changeless towns which stand like sentinels beyond the outer gates of New York.

 

Here we start with a small town called Demopolis in which young Hester (Seena Owen) is gradually suffocating, every train heading away breaking her vaguely ambitious heart just a little bit more and with all around her seemingly satisfied with their lot. “She was filled with a passion for excitement and luxury – and certainly neither of these could be found in the boarding house of Mrs Elmira Simmons…” with every mealtime a thudding reminder of the past, present and potential future if she stayed.

Her one bright spark is boyfriend Jerry (Matt Moore) who loves her even more deeply than he loves the town and his job at the General Store. He’s scrimping and saving but $150 a month isn’t going to buy Hester the lifestyle she wants as she tells him they’re simply too poor to marry.  Borzage and his cameraman Chester A Lyons, capture some idyllic scenes of country life, especially the town’s annual picnic with egg and spoon plus sack races, dancing and music; it’s like something from a Sjostrom outdoor adventure with some craggy-faced locals providing realist flavour.

Hester and Jerry make their way for some peace and quiet and have their faithful disconnection as he proposes and she smiles briefly before declining as they talk into the night. She sings a partially finished song for them and tells him she will finish it later… only much later, as she decides she must find herself in New York. Hester’s train leaves Jerry abandoned as Frances Marion writes, two decades before Cole Porter, that to say goodbye is to die a little…

To New York City and a jump five years ahead, years of struggle… in which old beliefs and high ideals went one by one… Until luxury claimed her – on its own terms. Hester’s journey is only thus hinted at but she is now living in a fine appartement maintained by her wealthy boyfriend, the presumably married, and certainly much older, Charles G. Wheeler of Wall Street (J. Barney Sherry). She has other friends with names such as Kitty (Ethel Duray) and Speed (Charles Craig) and life is one long, well-dressed, well-watered, party with jazz music on tap and plenty of joie de vivre. Hester has a Rolls from Charles but now wants a $22,000 fur coat from her sugar financier, and she’ll get it too by making him have to out-compete friend Speed’s generosity.

 

The wages of sin is death. If sin has any wages, some of us are going to collect a lot of back pay!

On a weekend away, she asks to get dropped off in the old town and, spotting Jerry, reconnects with the man who has never stopped loving, or waiting, for her. Jerry is now on $200 a month but, as Hester says, that wouldn’t even cover her mink stole. Hester still loves Jerry but she loves the high life more… The story moves on and, as the parties continue, Hester in platinum gown dancing on a chair, we see Jerry fighting in Europe, and calling out Hester’s name as the bombs fall in No Man’s Land. The film is about to pivot as Hester reads of Jerry’s heroism and his return, injured from the front… everything she knows is about to be challenged by the conflicting realities of love, war and commerce.

I love a good location

 

It's a measured film, slow by modern standards but the narrative doesn’t feel forced from Borzage who is more than willing to let his talented cast pull the viewer along. In this so much rests on the almost ever-present Seena Owen whom I have not seen before but is so good here. I must seek out more of her work.

 

The new score from Andrew Earle Simpson is also very enjoyable, lyrical and rich in tone it provides the sincerest of accompaniments and elevates the whole experience; I’d love to hear it live. Until then, we have this excellent release from Undercrank which in addition to a 4k restoration of The Valley of Silent Men** also includes a video essay on Borzage at Cosmopolitan, Randolph Heart’s company for which he made these films. The sets also have informative Film Facts that run along the intertitles to explain the background to the films.

 

The set is being generally released in February/March 2023 and you can order direct from Undercrank right here.

 

* The Stories of Fannie Hurst, (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004) Fannie Hurst, edited by Susan Koppelman and with and introduction from Grace Paley.

** This film does raise the question of whether Ben Model can see Steve Massa’s house from his roof… if there is a Valley of Silent Men, these two surely live in it, along with Mr Simpson!

Unexpected... Tales of Unease: The Complete Series, Network Distribution, DVD Boxset, out now.

I was far too young to have watched this series of short, sharp shocks at the time although some of the children’s “horror” anthology series were more than a match in terms of their ability to unsettle. Even Tom’s Midnight Garden had me worried about waking up in the Victorian era, such was the magical power of suggestion, ghostly ideas and filmmaking skill at the time.

There are various theories about the preponderance of uncanny tales at certain times more than others, but the late sixties bled into the nervy seventies and an outbreak of stories designed to take us away from everyday fears and towards the supernatural and the strange. We like to lose ourselves in other fears, and the older the house, the deeper the shadows as the characters in these inventive, gobbets of terror show. They may only have been half an hour long but they are engaging and forceful all the more so for their vintage, as swinging sixties couples suddenly encounter deeper realities than Biba…

Tales of Unease was based on a series of horror anthologies edited by John Burke and have rarely been seen since broadcast in 1970. This is the first time of home media for the series and it’s an entertaining time capsule that resonates with the atmosphere of the source material helped by Network’s cover design that looks like one of the Pan paperbacks we used to devour in junior school.

 

Susan George

Ride, Ride (1970)

This first story, written by Michael Hastings and directed by David Askey, is a classic story of a haunting that may or may not be from an event that has yet to happen. You can over analyse; the trick is always in the reveal and the shiver of fatal recognition.

Here a group of art school students are planning for their end of term show and the college party. Nothing could be more confidently normal than the banter between Derek (Anthony Jackson), Susan (Janet Lees Price) and Gerald (James Hazeldine) and the story is well paced without telegraphing its supernatural elements. Derek’s not too fussed about the party but he finds himself there anywhere dancing with one of the girls before spotting a beautiful blonde called Sarah (Susan George, one of The It Girls of the times) who seems as half-hearted as he is about the dance.

She asks Derek to take her home on his motorbike, and, as we start to second guess where this is going promptly disappears… Derek investigates the following day and, well, what do you think happened?

 

Calculated Nightmare (1970)

A change of pace in John Burke’s story which addresses the eternal issues of business automation and human resources which, as you youngsters may not know, was as much a pre-occupation in the seventies as now. Perhaps we could see the future more clearly when it was science fiction rather than creeping reality?

Anyway, two executives in charge of “rationalising” the workforce, Mr Johnson (Michael Culver) and Mr Harker (John Stratton) find themselves something of a ghost in the machine as a disgruntled worker uses their own building’s technology against them… Chilling, especially given their calculated view of workers’ value. Sometimes the sums don’t add up.

The Black Goddess (1970)

It’s back to the supernatural for Jack Griffith’s tale of mortal dread in the ancient depths of a Welsh colliery. Port Talbot-born Ronald Lewis plays Bill Rees who suddenly starts sensing a shadowy presence in the rocks a mile underground. His pal, Iestyn (David Lloyd Meredith) can see nothing and we proceed with the push and pull between the normal and abnormal that is the foundation for all these stories. Slowly, without playing his hand too hard, director Gareth Davies ramps up the tension and the very real threat from a collapsing tunnel. Not one for claustrophobics this.

 

It's Too Late Now (1970)

Of all these takes this is the one that most feels like Roald Dahl’s later Tales of the Unexpected, with a put-upon wife, Sarah (veteran legend Rachel Kempson) run ragged providing for her writer husband’s every need as he taps relentlessly away at his latest novel, shut in his office. The author (Kenneth Keeling) is very successful but also single minded and, not only had he bricked up his windows to stop the distractions of daylight, he also expects to be waited on hand and foot without the annoyance of having to interact with Sarah… you do wonder how he manages to use the bathroom?

Written by Andrea Newman, you wonder if she was drawing on experience as finally the worm turns and Sarah decides if her husband wants to be left alone then she can arrange that by locking him in… only now doe she reach out and try to reconnect with a woman he hasn’t really “seen” in a long time…

 

Superstitious Ignorance (1970)

This one’s about the housing market, or at least the kind of area that we now find in North London that is gentrified and unaffordable to all but the highest paid or longest lived. Written by Michael Cornish, it starts off with a hip young couple driving their beach buggy from Knightsbridge stores up to a Victorian pile in Westbourne Grove (or similar) with plenty of potential.

Jeremy Clyde is upwardly mobile executive Edward and his partner Penny is played by Tessa Wyatt, another It! Girl of the period. Despite their keenness on this run-down bargain, the family inhabiting, Mrs. Laristo (Eve Pearce) and her family of waifs, try at every turn to put them off… the atmosphere builds and again it’s the contrast between those convinced of everyday reality and those who fear the unreal.

 

Presumably Peter Wyngarde wasn't available...

Bad Bad Jo Jo (1970)

This is the strangest moods of all the stories and the hardest to enjoy, with Roy Dotrice playing writer Kayo Hathaway who has created a gonzo character called Bad Bad Jo Jo, an extravagant adventurer who has been incredibly successful winning Kayo a legion of fans who would nowadays be called geeks. Kayo is nasty and bored with his success and his devotees but agrees to be interviewed by one called Frank (Richard Pendrey) who he toys with in condescending ways.

Perhaps Kayo has underestimated the influence of his casually sociopathic creation on his fans though and, no matter how detached and aloof he feels in his wealth, a cracked imagination is a great leveller… This was written by written by James Leo Herlihy, who also wrote Midnight Cowboy, and it shows.

 

The Old Banger (1970)

From the unsettling to the ridiculous still, if you like period motor vehicles and homing pigeons you’ll love this. Written by Richardson Morgan it features one of my favourite actors, Terence Rigby (Z-Cars, Get Carter, The Beiderbecke Affair, everything else…) as John, a pigeon fancier married to Pinkie (Susan Partridge) who must be a saint to put up with his hobbies. John’s also a but tight with his money, buying them an old banger that he can’t even start. Eventually deciding to get rid of the car, he kicks it and the engine jumps into life, this is a chance too good to miss and so he drives the car south of the river, parks it on a back street and assumes that’s the end of it. But… what if cars were like homing pigeons? You hadn’t reckoned on that had you, John?

 

This is an unsettling and entertaining series that brings a frisson of old fears and plenty of good performances. You can buy it direct from Network…if you dare!