Echoes… The Stone Tape (1972)

The Stone Tape is a made for TV play broadcast as a Christmas ghost story in 1972. It was written by Nigel Kneale who specialised in macabre tales mixing the supernatural with the scientific most famously in Quatermass and a host of other plays.

Filmed largely in studio it still packs an uncanny punch to this day as it shows men pitting technology against ancient “evil”… attempting to control and to commercialise that which they barely comprehend. Directed with superb timing and economy by Peter Sasdy, it featured some of the leading British actors of the time all of whom act their collective socks off in service to Kneale’s excellent script… you really wouldn’t expect a studio play to be so affecting but it’s unsettling in spite and because of the location.

Jill, Brock and the boys...

Ace computer analyst, Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) arrives at Ryan Electronics' new research facility “Taskerlands”. It’s an old Victorian property about to be transformed into a research hot-house to help the electronics firm keep pace with the Japanese competition. As she pulls up two Ryan lorries apparently start reversing into Jill’s car… she reverses away in panic into a pile of sand: it’s a foretaste of the ordeal to come.

Peter Brock (Michael Bryant) is the head of a research team and he is a natural leader, decisive, aggressive and always with an eye for the main chance. He’s married with children (and a horse) but has been having an affair with his computer prodigy.

Iain Cuthbertson and Michael Bryant

There’s something very strange about their new base and foreman Roy Collinson (Iain Cuthbertson), reveals that the builders have refused to work on one room saying that it’s haunted. Naturally Brock dismisses this but Jill is shaken to the core as she sees an apparition of a woman in Victorian dress, screaming in terror…

The sightings continue until even Brock is convinced there’s something awry… boldly he decides that this is something worth investigating: “… a mass of data... waiting for a correct interpretation.” He marshals his team and they move their kit and computers into the room to analyse and nail the phenomenon.

They’re a mix of sceptics covering the full gamut of 70’s TV scientists from rough and ready (Peter Angelis) to bearded and contemplative (Michael Bates).  But, not only do they not believe some, literally, cannot see of hear the apparition… there are sensitives like Jill who perceive the sound and vision and others who cannot.

Jill sees the image of a terrified Victorian servant girl who is running away from what she describes as the “others”… she trips and falls to her death. Jill and Brock investigate and find that this reflects and actual event form the 1890s… There were even several attempts to exorcise the ground although the local vicar is too disorganised to find the records.

But some of the locals have also had experience of the house and one reveals a deeply scaring event in which his friend was left alone locked in the room… he lost his mind surrounded by what seem to be darker apparitions than the girl…

After failing to record the images and sounds of the “ghost” they attempt to record temperature changes as there is always a perceived drop when the manifestations occur… this fails again but the scientists plough on in an attempt to rationalise. This is intelligent scripting form Kneale, a story that could so easily drift into melodrama is kept taught and suspenseful as scientific method is applied.

All are driven on by Brock and his authoritarian leadership… a peculiarly British type of anti-hero in the post-war years when our scientific ingenuity generated world-leading engineering. Science was clearly the way forward but the costs were only beginning to be counted.

Brock decides that the event has been imprinted in the ancient stone of the room… the stone “tape”.  The group celebrates thinking it has found a potentially ground-breaking storage device that would generate 3D sound and vision – “the big one” …their fortunes secured.

In typical fashion Brock aims to exert control and to trigger the manifestation through sound. He drives his team to the brink of exhaustion in his increasingly desperate attempts and only succeeds in erasing the “tape” – blasting the residual energies creating the apparition from the stone.

This failure is swiftly followed by head office running out of patience and curtailing his funding and control in favour of a washing machine project run by Brock’s rival Crawshaw (Reginald Marsh). The game is up and in spite of Jill’s gnawing feeling that there’s more as she tries to unravel the computer analysis, Brock has to move on and dismantle the project.

Jane Asher

Spoilers ahead: As Crawshaw’s team arrives, the local vicar arrives confirming the story of exorcism, but it’s much earlier than the death of the maid… Now convinced that the maid was merely the latest in a long line of incidents, Jill enters the new data onto her computer model and discovers that the energies creating the phenomenon date back thousands of years and not just hundreds…

She returns to the room and is overcome by the full force of the others as the room seemingly connects with the ancient world…following in the footsteps of the maid she ascends the stairs and is overwhelmed. After her funeral Brock goes back to the room and to his horror now hears Jill’s voice screaming in terror, calling out to him for help…she has become imprinted in the stone.

The Stone Tape stands up very well and is rightly regarded as a classic of the era. Maybe that’s partly down to the imprints left on our televisual memory of the style and substance of dramas of the time… Kneale’s other ghost stories, Quatermass, Doctor Who. But even as retro-science-horror it works and yet the writing is sophisticated and the direction from Peter Sasdy is superb with the enclosed sets adding to the claustrophobic feeling: they knew how to use such limitations as a source of strength!

And the actors carry the story well with Bryant being superbly convincing as the careerist wiling to sacrifice almost all before his ambitions… he lets enough through to show he has a caring side and this sets us up for the shocking ending when, finally he becomes the haunted man.

Brock learns the truth...

Jane Asher is also superb, carrying the mystery with her for long portions of the film and being the sensitive human anchor amongst all the testosterone and scientific posturing… The men want to control but she wants to genuinely understand. Brock’s casual in-bred – “bloody women!” – rebounds emphatically on him in the end.

A genuinely moving and affecting story that stays with you for days afterwards, this has to be one of the strangest plays ever shown on mainstream British television. After even being reported lost at one stage, The Stone Tape has recently been re-released by the BFI complete with extras and commentary.

Dusty box rating: Ditch the VHS and buy the DVD

An ideal for love… Wonderwall (1968)

Jane Birkin is Penny Lane...

All these years later it would just be so easy to mock the pretentions of the psychedelic era but that would be too lazy and it would be to underestimate what some achieved. You have to try and view these things in the context of the time, respect their references and be sympathetic to their aims. After all, history makes fools of us all as we look back in hindsight and across subsequent cultural-references.

So it is that what I first heard of as an experimental soundtrack from George Harrison that inspired, in name only, a song (Noel Gallagher hadn’t even seen it… he just liked the title…), turned out to be a genuinely interesting movie…

Wonderwall is good – not great – and most of the substance comes from an excellent performance from Jack MacGowran along with the striking contemporary mis-en-scene from set designers The Fool  and cinematography of Harry Waxman, ably marshalled by first time director Joe Massot.

Jack MacGowran and Irene Handl

It also has Jane Birkin and a cameo from Irene Handl… two quintessential women of their time.

The story is a slight one and truly this is more of a mood piece than great drama.

MacGowran does his best Einstein impersonation (shades of The Fearless Vampire Killers…) as a professorial type so absorbed in his work that he needs to read notes to work out the steps from shutting up his lab to soaking his feet at home… He’s absent minded and he’s a professor…

Beginning to see the light...

His flat is decorated in pre-Raphaelite and gothic tones with images of kings and queens and fairy tale poems on the walls… most of this is hidden behind piles and piles of his papers. In a momentary anger he throws a book at his living room wall and it knocks his butterfly collection to the floor and, at the same time, opens a small hole in the wall…

As he sits back in his chair, a light is projected through onto the far wall and this reveals the silhouette of a dancing girl… he follows the light to its source and peers through to spy a lithe female figure posing in the room beyond. Transfixed, he stares at this beautiful vision and is shaken from his dull routine, instantly in love with what he sees.

Jane Birkin ...well red

The girl is gradually revealed to be a model, Penny Lane (see what they did there…), played by Jane Birkin. The Professor begins to switch his attention form his work to the new reality of the world beyond his wall… he picks out new holes and tries to follow as much as he can… This is an oddly platonic voyeurism… suggesting that spiritual enlightenment is more to the point than plain old lust.

And Birkin is perfectly suited to being that object of desire. Incredibly pretty, she has an obtuse alertness that is a match for the naive longings from the room next door.

The Professor is disturbed by his cleaner, Irene Handl, his mother and his work mates but he is onto something here and he knows he won’t find the answer in his books or anything he has known.

Iain Quarrier arrives in style...

A young man (Iain Quarrier) arrives in a green car… he’s hip, vaguely scouse-sounding and has a cardboard cut out of himself… he turns out to be Penny’s boyfriend. He’s accompanied by a photographer pal in what seems a reference to Blow Up (on the surface a similar period piece but a far superior film which also features Jane B.).

The professor watches Penny and her man cavorting and makes more and more holes in his wall, ripping down the tapestry and setting up a ledge from which to watch events more clearly.

Penny models the orange shades and blue lipstick look

He is entranced by Penny’s modelling as she poses in a variety of fab skirts, coloured make up and scuba gear. Penny’s flat (also created by The Fool), is a riot of colour and decked out in more modern iconography… Garbo, Harlow and Mae West are there along with the shots of Penny and the trappings of 1968 fab gear…

Penny begins to invade his dreams and he sees himself duelling with her beau with pen versus sword, lipstick versus cigarettes… it’s amusingly well-crafted if superficially deep. British psychedelia was always more prone to whimsy than its US counter-part but none-the-less creative. That said, you could find Haight-Ashbury in Notting Hill and Camden even if not so much in Carnaby Street and Kings Road.

There’s a party and the Professor gets a visit from Penny’s guy who wants to borrow some ice… the two talk and the young man starts to reveal his dissatisfaction with being tied down… The party is wild and quite shocking for the professor who sees Penny’s growing sadness and her man’s incipient cruelty.

"Heigh ho! Who is there? ...Please come say, how do?"

The dreams intensify and there’s a lovely sequence as Penny, dressed in a diaphanous, neo pagan dress walks up the green steps smiling beatifically over her shoulder: she looks beautiful and the human response of the viewer is to want to follow. We want that look from her as much as the Professor does. But it’s a look of serene compassionate love and not anchored in physical desire… (although, having said that… she is quite lovely).

Jane Birkin

In a series of cartoonish inter-titles the core plot directions are revealed: Penny is pregnant, her boyfriend is sleeping around (a lot) and … he’s about to leave her. Things are coming to a head and sensing this, the Professor climbs through his roof and finally into Penny’s apartment. She returns and he quickly hides away… he emerges to find that she has tried to gas herself and taken an overdose of sleeping pills… He turns of the gas, returns to his flat and calls for help:  he has saved her!

The closing scene sees him return to work basking in the glow of his heroism, a new man infused with confidence. Newspaper headlines reveal that Penny, having been given a second chance, Is intent on starting afresh – it’s a re-birth for both.

Penny Lane saved by Scientist... Mrs Harrison meets Dr Doolittle...

But as the professor peers into his microscope he spots Penny floating amongst the microbes and urging him onwards to more new discoveries… Is she a force of nature, his muse, his obsession or a mythical creature – mermaid.

Clearly any interpretation will do. Wonderwall is more about the potential and possibility of life change than a prescriptive description of cause and affect… It’s a wake up call to…simply wake up and do what you should be doing for the best.

Mermaid in Notting Hill

It’s deliberately vague but then anything more specific might indeed be unbearably pretentious…

Throughout George Harrison’s music underpins the action in suitably psychedelic style and features a good deal of Indian noodling as well as electronic sounds. The “love theme” for Penny is one of the more fully realised songs and works well. Not as good as Macca’s efforts on The Family Way perhaps but still interesting and, for this type of film at this particular time, you could do far worse than get a soundtrack from a Beatle!

Jack MacGowran

Jack MacGowran gives a suitably nuanced performance of humour and mad-cap earnestness.  You can understand why Polanski rates him so well. And, Jane B, getting more screen time than in most other films I seen her in, does exceptionally well not just as an actress but also as an ideal for love. That’s a tough ask even for the best actress.

Wonderwall is available on DVD from a variety of sources. The German edition from 2011 promises the best quality and for such a richly visual film it’s worth getting the best you can.

A great future behind us… Journey to The Far Side of the Sun (1969)

The passing of Neal Armstrong was a timely reminder for those of us who grew up in the 60s that the future is not what it was.

When Gerry Anderson was in his pomp, we were in a state of perpetual improvement: life was just going to get better and better. Technology seemed to make everything possible and…we were going to the stars. The Moon first, then Mars and then beyond… science fiction was close to fact and the race for space was going to help mankind put earthly conflicts to one side as looking back on our single insignificant planet of origin we finally realised that there was a greater destiny beyond our petty disputes.

Anderson’s puppet shows tracked the technological obsessions of the decade and got more and more confident as he progressed from Stingray to Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. In all three a global entity addressed world-wide issues whether private sector or quasi-governmental… There were global threats too, but these were just confirmation of our need to act in unity.

By the end of the decade as the Moon landing approached, Anderson was successful enough to finally be trusted with a human cast to accompany the breath-taking vehicles of Derek Meddings and co… These were the men who were making our imagined future happen now.

Journey to The Far Side of the Sun (Doppelgänger in the USA) was an attempt at 2001-style inter-spatial-commentary…a look at the inner human condition from the outer-reaches of space. When I first watched the film in the 1970s it left me disappointed because there were no *real* aliens and, whilst the story arc contained the same let down this time – too literal and thin a plot – there is more than enough to enjoy the film as a whole.

Like so many plots from the time, the film starts off with space administrators arguing over how to follow up the discovery of a planet beyond the Sun. The planet is in completely synchronised orbit with the Earth, same distance from the Sun, same vector and thrust… The director of EUROSEC, Jason Webb ( played with panache by Patrick Wymark) makes a passionate case to send a manned expedition but he struggles to convince the other World powers to fund it.

Ian Hendry and Patrick Wymark

A familiar story perhaps but it just feels a little mannered, as does the character of Dr John Kane (played by the excellent Ian Hendry … a year or two from being sorted out by Michael Caine in Get Carter) who is a scientist with doubts and dubious fitness to undertake this arduous exercise.

The breakthrough is achieved and with NASA’s help, a mission is prepared to be led by experienced astronaut Colonel Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes, who gives a good performance as a man faced with his own destiny…literally).

Roy Thinnes

We go through the routines of training and preparation which gives Anderson the opportunity to show the futuristic craft that were his stock in trade. The scenes involving all of the craft are universally excellent as you’d expect, given a bigger budget than usual and his army of un-matched effects experts.

Lynn Loring

This is the best part of the film as the enterprise builds up momentum and we look forward to the surprise of just what is on our planetary double. It also provides Anderson with the chance to develop his human assets as well with details of space cowboy’s struggling marriage – partly undermined by his enforced infertility: the chance of irradiated sperm mutating was too high.
Lynn Loring – Thinnes actual wife – plays Sharon Ross and adds some uncharacteristic adult themes to Anderson’s film. Loring was featured in several nude scenes which were eventually cut, but she displays a very human sexuality in a series of contemporary almost there fashions…

Lynn Loring

He has a more sympathetic support from his colleague Lise Hartman, a EUROSEC official (Austrian actress Loni von Friedl) at the space centre… but it’s a sub-plot that’s never really taken anywhere.
The two men are pushed by Webb and it’s hard to see this as anything other than a per functionary attempt to create some tension. The story is pretty basic and might have made a decent hour-long episode of Thunderbirds but it feels a little stretched…

Eventually we have take off and the effects are genuinely special here, not quite a match for 2001 but still pretty good, founded in science-reality and not fantasy. The long trip in suspended animation ends as the space craft approaches the mysterious planet.

For some reason I didn’t catch, they crash land (all the more mysterious given the outcome…) and are rescued by a strange being in a metallic suite.

If you haven’t seen the film look away now…

The men are surprised to find their rescuer speaking perfect English and gradually it is revealed that they have landed on a world almost exactly like our own. Everyone they left behind has a counterpart here and all presume that they had turned the craft round and not completed their mission.

Roy Thinnes...  Mirror-World

It takes some time for the realisation to dawn that this is indeed another world and the exact reverse of Earth… a mirror in every respect with hearts on the right, clocks running counter and cars on the wrong side of the road.

Kane dies and Ross is left alone trying to convince the reverse Earth Jason Webb that he needs to be returned to his Earth and this will hopefully help his double to come home…

But, it is not to be and, for some spurious vaguely-scientific reason, the landing craft of this world won’t dock with the other Earth’s space ship and Ross crashes back down to another Earth.

Roy Thinnes

The film is grasping for some profound meaning here but it is a bit thin (sorry Roy…). Whilst getting tremendously excited about the need for and experience of space travel…it’s conclusion that there’s – actually – no place like home is disappointing. It doesn’t know what to do with itself…

That aside, the acting is sincere with Thinnes, Hendry and Wymark being especially impressive. It’s also great to see future UFO stalwarts Ed Bishop and George Sewell and, indeed, some of the kit from this film were reused in that series – a far more satisfying effort form Anderson and perhaps his best.

The great Ed Bishop

UFO was all about build up and action and never really resolved itself as a story… perhaps that was what Anderson did best. He certainly did it brilliantly!

Journey to the Far Side of the Sun is now available on DVD and is well worth seeking out… but I think I’ll stick to my VHS copy... back to the future.

Lisztomania (1975)

Fiona Lewis and Roger Daltrey waiting for a train

Been a while since I braved the loft-archive, but last weekend I emerged with a very dusty off-tv recording of Ken Russell’s tribute to the soul and style of Franz Liszt.

Lisztomania was made in 1975 and came to my attention as a young teen still under the thrall of progressive rock (not that I was waiting to be saved by punk). The soundtrack was written by Rick Wakeman and I remember hearing him discussing the film on radio whilst some of the music was played.

I was especially impressed with his take on Liebestraum No. 3 and welcomed the introduction to this classical great… prog wasn’t entirely evil and genuinely helped open our minds to classical and other music outside the charts. The film sounded interesting but it was an 18 and my interest in cape-wearing synth players was on the wane so... I never got to see the film.

36 years on was it worth the wait or did I make the right call first time round?

Liszt naps with Little Nell (Nell Campbell)

Ken Russell was always a mixed bag of a director with a mix of cheese alongside genuinely original vision. Undoubtedly intellectual he often seemed to prick his own bubble with the outrageous and the unfathomable.

I was impressed with Women in Love, Mahler and even up to The Rainbow (a favourite DH Lawrence book anyway) but distressed by The Devils and unsettled in unfulfilling ways by Lair of the White Worm and other later works. I probably wasn’t understanding him clearly but the films seemed inconsistent in tone and almost slapdash collections of disparate imagery.

Lisztomania

Lisztomania was the film Russell made after Tommy and is, for me, a mixed bag. It has some great set pieces early on especially Liszt playing in front of hundreds of screaming teenagers who call out for Chopsticks. But by the end things have deteriorated  as demons rape nubiles, a gun-toating Wagner declares war half a century too early on Europe and Liszt returns from Heaven to exact musical revenge on the composer who inspired the Nazis.

Rock icons...

Maybe Russell deserves a lot of credit for interpreting Liszt’s life in such a way, there are many elements of truth in the story, Wagner was encouraged by the older composer and did end up marrying one of his daughters, Liszt did tour Europe under the patronage of a Russian countess and his love life was certainly complicated… just not this complicated!

Lisztomania did exist as a term at the time as the virtuoso defined the possibilities of the piano in stunning live performances across the continent.

Sara Kestelman

Russell uses a pop star to play the star and Roger Daltrey does a reasonable job. He is rather outclassed by Paul Nicholas as the demonic Wagner as Sara Kestelman as his Russian countess (I saw her at the Donmar Theatre earlier this year and she is still a fantastic actress).

Liszt, Wagner and Thor the God of Thunder

Rick Wakeman plays Thor the Thunder God (who pisses in the fire place) and Ringo Starr, in an obvious piece of typecasting, plays the Pope…

Pope Ringo

The story is heavy on sexual imagery, the Countess’ house has phallic pillars whilst Liszt has an hallucinated ten foot phallus chopped off as the metaphorical quid pro quo for being able to focus on his music thanks to her patronage as he took holy orders…

You keep on asking yourself is this necessary? Isn’t there another way?

Wagner-stein

So it goes until Wagner turns really bad and is annihilated by the virtuous tunes of Liszt and along with his lovers and daughter, the composer descends on war-torn Europe in a heavenly spaceship.

It definitely means something but it’s hedging its bets. Russell did brash and entertaining and my teenage self would have laughed like mad at this film. I’m glad I watched it but I just had the feeling he could have done it better… and that’s my over-riding reaction to many of Ken Russell’s films after this point.

Flying muses...

Crimes of Passion proved that he could still make good films and he is undoubtedly one of the leading British director's of the last half century.

Lisztomania is now available on DVD and is worth watching as entertainment. It might make more sense though if you know about Liszt, Wagner and the influence of classical music on nationalist thinking in the last century.

Quality exploitation… Vampiros Lesbos (1971)

This film is frankly a bit ridiculous and yet it has sufficient quality to overcome its more exploitative traits and I would guess that’s precisely why Jess Franco is so highly rated by aficionados of the obscure, exotica of cult 70s “horrotica”.

Like daydreaming on a hot Mediterranean summer day, you awake from this film with a dislocated sense of reality, slapped in the face by ludicrous sexual set pieces but also disorientated by the repeated imagery of mediterranean shores, butterflies and scorpions… Soledad Miranda.

Franco cuts up his narrative and you’re never quite sure what is actually happening, to whom and when but that’s a strength in a film of this kind and which attempts a new take on the well-trodden Dracula story. We all know what happens to the vampire in that story but maybe here is something different? And maybe it’s more effective to be less than direct in addressing the subject matter…there’s more mystery.

Soledad Miranda plays Condesa Oskudar a mysterious figure who haunts the dreams of her female prey only to ensnare them in Sapphic submission and then drain their life blood to replenish her own. It’s a saucy take on the Dracula theme that has been re-worked and spoofed many times over. Given the film’s vintage, this feels a little more transgressive and it certainly makes The Vampire Lovers look a little staid in comparison.

The Countess also performs a long drawn out cabaret act in which she seduces a blank-eyed, almost motionless woman… this is watched by the kind of audience you’d expect on the chicken and a basket circuit: passive and distant.

This turns out to be one of many dreams experienced by the Countess’ latest prey,   
Linda Westinghouse (well played by Ewa Strömberg),  a lawyer involved in the inheritance of a certain Transylvanian property.

She travels to discuss this with a mysterious Countess on her island retreat – contracy to accepted form, this turns out to be an ultramodern designer house: just as scary as a dusty old mansion. Here she is seduced by the Countess and left in a confused tstae and minus a pint or two of blood.

 She is take to a sanatorium where her boyfriend Omar (Andrés Monales wearing a standard-issue period ‘tash!) finds her in delirium. The place has its own mysteries and is run by Doctor Alwin Seward (British veteran Dennis Price in one of his last films) who not only wants to understand the vampires he wants to become one.










Here also is another woman, Agra (Heidrun Kussin) who has been feasted on by the Countess and driven mad by the experience. Kussin acts her socks off as she throws herself around in unrestrained fashion – tormented by her lost love, helpless to find her self. Her madness has in turn made her husband (played by Mr Franco himself) into a psychotic killer…an unpleasant aside and one that adds to the shocks of a largely dreamy film.

Linda recovers slowly and learns that the Countess has truly fallen for her – she is to be  a special one who will share the vampires existence. Will she succumb or fight her way back to normality?

Vampiros Lesbos is unsettling in a lysergic way all of which is aided by the groovy experimentalism of the soundtrack by German duo Manfred Hubler and Sigfried Schwab (which I’ve had on CD since the 90’s retro beat boom)!

There are plenty of rough edges but the overall direction and tone is cohesive. The flesh on show adds to the reverie and the action is almost quaintly restrained – the kind of soft porn that was edging itself gradually into the mainstream… I would have liked the film less if it had been more overt. The charm and the horror is in not revealing too much…

The undoubted star is Soledad Miranda who is not only beautiful and willing to show all but is also an actress of control and expression. Her tragic death in a motor accident surely robbed her of a long career in more mainstream films. We’re lucky to have this to show what she could do.

Vampiros Lesbos is now available on DVD but I think it suits the medium of video on all kinds of levels not least as the slight blur of the image heightens the appearance of the dream...