Watching and waiting... The Sentinel (1977)

 

It’s 10, Montague Terrace, Brooklyn Heights…

When I walked along the Promenade that runs along the edge of Brooklyn Heights affording a spectacular view of lower Manhattan across the Hudson, it felt so familiar. Little did I know then that this wasn’t so much the constant exposure of the city on British screens but that I had spent a fairly intense couple of hours there watching this film in the old ABC Cinema in Lime Street, Liverpool. I remember going into town on my own to watch the latest horror film and would have gone record shopping in Probe Records as well before watching a film which was recommended by friends as in the same mould as The Exorcist and The Omen. The seventies was a golden era for modern horror in which the veneer of American civilisation was rudely compromised by demonic invasions.

On my first trip to New York ten years later, I’d again find the city familiar and, as I walked from my friends’ apartment where we were staying, I thought of Scott Walker’s song as we walked along Montague Terrace and on to the Boardwalk where I was filmed by a passing Japanese TV crew even after telling them I was English and wearing a Liverpool Football Club top. Now, almost 38 years later, I re-watched this film and finally connected the dots and have to say that, if nothing else, Michael Winner’s film is a superb record of Brooklyn Heights in all its brownstone glory as well as that particular view of the Twin Towers both of which I went up on later visits. Time moves on and not everything stays the same.

The Sentinel remains an unsettling film although it doesn’t hit me now with the same visceral force as in my teens when it was one of the first horror films I watched. It does feel very much like a “cash in” on the vogue for demonic horror following in the footsteps of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen but there’s an unhinged style all of its own. This you would expect from a film directed by Mr Winner, who also co-scripted with the author of the 1974 source novel, Jeffrey Konvitz. It has the pace and brashness you’d associate with his work – including the crass - something very much of it’s time as much as the flares and tight-fitting dresses of the discotheque Seventies.

We start off, Exorcist-style, visiting some senior Catholic priests in Northern Italy with Arthur Kennedy as Monsignor Franchino discussing the most serious of matters with José Ferrer credited as “robed figure”… the first of a number of high-end cameos in the film. The action shifts to New York’s Central Park and we’re in the world of high fashion with model Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) being photographed by an impossibly young Jeff Goldblum in the comfortably-shallow world of beachwear and slacks. Surely nothing could be less demonic?

Alison is going through a difficult time with her seriously ill father passing away and as she returns to the familial home after the funeral she has visions of herself as a schoolgirl discovering him in bed with two older women, nearly as great a shock for her as it was to me in 1977. Winner plays his first unsettling cards as we begin to understand why our heroine has had such a history of mental illness and even attempted suicides.

Her lawyer boyfriend, Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon) couldn’t be more reassuring and is a smart take-charge kind of guy who not only has her best interests at heart but also is a voice of reason not unwilling to face whatever “demons” she may encounter. Metaphorically speaking… he doesn’t know what’s coming…

Alison rents a smart apartment on Montague Terrace – a gorbeous brownstone that is still there if you want to visit – from Miss Logan, an estate agent played by the fabulous Ava Gardner who, as in Roddy MacDowall’s Tam Lynn, conveys depths only true movie stars can, she’s still magnetic and still deep… a far better actor than she gave herself credit for. She looks like she knows more than she lets on but she also looks like she’s selling real estate.

Alison explores her new home and meets another great star, Burgess Meredith who plays Charles Chazen a likeable but eccentric old man with a budgie on his shoulder and a welcoming smile. Then she comes across a strange couple of women in leotards, Gerde Engstrom (the ever unsettling Sylvia Miles) and her younger lover Sandra (Beverly D'Angelo) who whilst Gerde gets them drinks masturbates in front of Alison… Winner again using sex to unsettle. 

Alison makes her excuses and leaves but is delighted when Charles calls her into a party to celebrate his cat’s birthday or something. The whole crowd seem friendly and not in the least odd… well somewhat. That night Alison has vivid dreams of the party and wakes to hear footsteps from the room above with her chandelier shaking with the force of someone pacing relentlessly up and down.

When she mentions all this to Miss Logan she’s told that the house is empty save for her and the mysterious priest who sits alone looking out of the top-floor window. She shows the model the other rooms and they are indeed empty. Concerned at Alison’s growing obsession with the place, Michael employs a PI, James Brenner (Hank Garrett) to investigate. That night things take an alarming turn as unable to sleep, Alison goes upstairs to find out what the noise is and armed with a knife, encounters her dead father and other ghouls. She lashes out with a knife and flees into the street and collapses.

I saw my father. I stabbed him and he’s already dead… it makes me feel like I should take my life again!

Alison is distraught in hospital but I’m reminded of Harrison Ford’s comment to George Lucas – you can type this shit but you sure as hell can’t say it! – and some aspects are unintentionally jarring in the wrong way but Winner is playing this almost for laughs counterpointing the film’s sometimes repulsive visual shocks.

A body of a man is found the next day but it’s investigator Brenner, stabbed in the very places on the chest that Alison thought she had hit her father. This is getting stranger and Michael soon establishes that everyone of the people Alison has met is not only dead but in life were murderers.

The police are called and we have the pleasure of Eli Wallach as Detective Gatz accompanied by baby-faced Christopher Walken as Detective Rizzo who suspect more earthly motives even casting doubt on Michael. Another juxtaposition of “reliable” human weakness with the most unlikely of demonic appearances. Meanwhile Alison seeks spiritual counsel and encounters Monsignor Franchino in the local church who urges her to seek answers from God…

But, can the Lord, the police or Michael save Alison from what is coming?

Dusty Verdict: There’s a lot packed into The Sentinel and it’s an entertaining if jumbled ride with the audience having to join a variety of dots from among the dead herrings. It has some truly unsettling moments and with a touch of Ken Russell Winner even uses deformed people from side-shows and elsewhere to play hoards of demons at one point, something which hits you in unpleasant ways on so many levels.

A one ulcer man in a two ulcer job…

There are some good lines of dialogue, such as Michael’s description of Detective Gatz and then the moments when he realises that Alison is only seeing the same latin passage in every book he shows her. It’s Milton, Paradise Lost of course and there’s a biblical ending that still leaves you shaken still. 

Sometimes even Good is as terrifying as Evil.

Kitchen sink or swim? No Trees in the Street (1959)

There are aspects of this film that remind me of the previous year’s Violent Playground directed by Basil Dearden and featuring Stanley Baker as a policeman with a soft spot for a working-class woman (Anne Heywood) and who tries to stop her brother (David McCallum) from turning bad, in Liverpool of all places. In Ted Willis’ story, there’s the same triangle with the added spice of a charismatic gangster played with vulnerable intensity by Herbert Lom.

There was clearly something in the air in a post-war Britain concerned about the direction of youth and criminality and Ted Willis, growing up in working-class Tottenham, was closer to it than many writers of the time. His father had been a bus driver and leaving school early he had been told by his headmaster to learn a decent trade as 'You will never make a writer in a hundred years. You haven't got the imagination for it or the intelligence…' I’m sure this was well-intentioned but Willis persisted serving in the Army Kinematograph Service during the war and gaining success as a playwright and script writer.

Willis wrote No Trees as a play in 1948 and adapted it for this film directed by J. Lee Thompson and described the story as being "Loosely based on characters I'd met in childhood in the dingy back streets of Tottenham, I think I wrote it to exorcise certain ghosts." In this Thompson’s film is perhaps better at detailing the world of the time than the dramatic choices of its main characters. The set up is an impressive one mostly set in the claustrophobic constraints of a single street reminding me of many a silent film backdropped against such tableaux – think of King Vidor’s masterpiece The Crowd not to mention Italian neo-realist films from earlier in the fifties.

It's a time capsule of Fifties style and shops, and the beginnings of multi-cultural Britain as well as one with limited opportunities for many. At the heart of the story is a family living in one of the tenements, Hetty (Sylvia Syms) and her younger brother Tommy (Melvyn Hayes) and their mother Jess (Joan Miller) who is more interested in having a good time than parenting. Clearly she had Hetty early on and perhaps out of wedlock as folk used to say and has missed out on the luxury of being young and free. She entertains Kipper (Stanley Holloway) who is full of fun and usually brings beer along to lubricate his story telling.

The film starts with a flashback as plain-clothed copper Frank (Ronald Howard) chases a knife-carrying thug across a landscape of new tower blacks mixed with demolished streets either still left over from the War or knocked down by councils looking to improve conditions for the communities they have uprooted. Frank catches the young lad, called Kenny and played by a Mr David Hemmings, and tries to pass on the benefits of his experience. Initially Kenny is resistant but he and we are about to be transported back to the late 40s and a world away.

Tommy is the Kenny of his day and Melvyn Hayes is splendidly wired, perhaps too wired… he’s reached the age at which he wants to strike out on his own and prove himself and is torn between the good advice of his straight-laced sister Hetty and the powerful example set by local kingpin, Wilkie (Herbert Lom) who has his eye on the lad but won’t push him, partly out of respect for his sister. He gives Tommy a try out but the lad gets nervous and blows the job forcing him to go into hiding and this is where the film gets bogged down.

Herbert Lom and Sylvia Syms

Lom, Syms and Hayes are all good performers but as a three with this plot and this director, they just don’t meld. Syms and Hayes are unlikely siblings whilst the maturity of the former clashes with the forceful yet too hyperkinetic presentation from the latter. It’s as if they’re in two different films and this is surely down to the director as much as anything else. Lom and Syms also lack chemistry no matter how much technique is deployed perhaps the script just doesn’t give the couple enough reason to be romantically aligned. There are moments but nothing to compare with the best of either’s work.

It's all a bit predictable but still not without merit and it looks fabulous on the latest restored print as used for the Studio Canal Blu-ray which I watched and which was screened with a Melvyn Hayes Q&A last year – one I’m very sorry to have missed. There are moments here when he really does capture the angry young men spirit and the fire inside his Hollywood heroes but overall, it’s an occasional stretch and that’s not his fault but the adaptation.

Similarly, with Hetty and Wilkie, there’s a spark in the latter’s inability to trust and to truly give himself to love, with only the slightest misunderstanding all it takes to drive him back into his shell and to lash out. But I personally couldn’t see how the relationship would work for Hetty other than as an escape or to help support her brother but these are not behaviours you’d expect from her character who has presumably already decided on her moral stance on these issues having grown up in this environment.

Plenty of cemras in the streets...

Dusty Verdict: ANYWAY… I still recommend the film… fabulous atmosphere and you can almost smell those streets. It is dramatically satisfying too and even with those weaknesses the main cast are all eminently watchable – Lom and Syms especially are great technicians and there probably is a more believable relationship in there because of their skill “off the ball” and the set narrative. It’s as if they add sub-text of their own which is definitely something Sylvia talked of with other films such as The World Ten Times Over.

Also. Stanley Holloway is lovable and roguish as always, looking on the bright side of life and all to aware of the slings and the arrows. Mr Hayes, gives his all and it ain’t ‘alf hot when he’s on screen which is why, in spite of the mixed critical reception the film had at the time, you have to give it more reverence now as a document of the emerging talents of the time as well as the view it gives of a society in the midst of change. ALL films date because time moves on, but they also become historically significant in the process.

The Studio Canal Blu-ray looks fantastic so well worth the upgrade, you can buy it from all good online retailers and those shops on the bigger high streets!

There's a decent score from Laurie Johnson which was released on a flexi disc to promote the film... scour the charity shops to see if you can find it!!