Marty's choice... The Legend of Hell House (1973)

 

Although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility but could well be true.

Tom Corbett, Clairvoyant and Psychic Consultant to European Royalty

 

The BFI recently screened this film as part of the series celebrating Martin Scorsese’s favourite British films not directed by Michael Powell (of course) and it fully justifies the director’s favour on a number of levels and it makes me wonder why I haven’t watched it before. If you want an engaging haunted house mystery that maintains its edge without resorting to gore and predictable jump scares then this is it. The performances of the four leads are what creates the tension and John Hough directs his players and atmosphere very well aided by an uncanny score from electronica pioneer Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

The premise is grand and simple with wealthy old man Rudolph Deutsch (the great Roland Culver) calling scientist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) to his fabulous country house (take a bow Blenheim Palace) to task him with proving the existence or otherwise of an afterlife. Barrett is a sceptic of course but this is why he gets the big bucks, to put the Deutch’s mind at rest either way, by staying a week at the incredibly haunted Belasco “Hell” House. Emeric Belasco was a reputed sadist and free-range pervert who is believed to have committed multiple murders after one excessively sordid orgy of evil. Any relation to the Great Mage Alistair Crowley and Boleskine House, the Scottish mansion where he attempted to summon the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, is purely co-incidental.

Pamela Franklin

The House’s horrific reputation is well earned with a previous scientific survey resulting in disaster with multiple fatalities and only one survivor Benjamin Franklin Fischer (Roddy McDowall – hurrah!!) who barely kept his sanity. Fischer is a “physical” psychic around whom supernatural phenomena is expressed through smashing household objects. He is joined by Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) whose gift is more cerebral and allows her to commune with the spirits of "surviving personalities" which to Dr Barrett are nothing more than residual electromagnetic energies. He ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Now, if all this sounds unpromising you have to have the cast who can not only say all of this with a straight face but also truly believe it and this is where the film utterly delivers… The three aforementioned, together with Gayle Hunnicutt as Barrett’s wife Ann, respect the story which is the only way to truly frighten an audience about supernatural possibilities by simply acting natural. Well, that and things going bump in the night but Hough’s touch is rather more delicate than many directing for Hammer, Amicus or Tigon at this time.

 

Clive Revill

From the opening quote from one Tom Corbett – an actual clairvoyant who probably did consult at least one royal family - onwards, the film adopts a “scientific” approach to the subject and with a course of events mapped out over individual days much like experiments that have taken place in these “haunted” locations. It’s very forensic approach to the narrative, allowing the building of an evidence-base for the unsettling events that unfold.

The four assemble at the house on Monday 20^th December, ghosts clearly love Christmas, with the Barretts driven over in Deutsch’s Daimler with his assistant (Peter Bowles) whilst Benjamin grimly walks from a train station and Florence floats past a church at a Dutch angle… Hough films his characters close up and often from below all of which creates an atmosphere of claustrophobic dread. As they approach the house there’s a wide angled shot before a close-up of Florence looking up the forbidding granite grey as the others, still in focus, approach the door. We’re already in the minds of these characters and Pamela Franklin is the ace in the pack, expressing intense sensitivity and innocence – her Florence is wide open to the possibilities ahead and if they are malevolent we know she will be hit hard.

Roddy McDowall

After dinner at 8.46pm, Florence begins to sense something and later in her room she not only feels the same presence who she believes is the son of Belasco, but her bed clothes are inexplicably rolled back. The next day Professor Barrett duly wires her up in an attempt to measure the energies causing these phenomena. It’s an impressive sequence that has the audience grasping at the possibility that we are still in the rational world. Hough’s camera is fixed on Franklin and, indeed on the legs she reveals wearing a leotard – the male gaze or a hint at the reasons she is the first to be “contacted”. Ectoplasm shoots from her fingers and even as the Professor notes this into his recording of the events we know things will get out of hand.

Later on, glasses are smashed as they eat dinner and during the night Ann comes under some kind of demonic sexual possession during which she attempts to seduce Benjamin. Her husband’s natural response is to bring in bigger machines in an attempt to drain the unnatural energies and cleans the building… but as the psychic assaults get fiercer will science win out or will they find the depth of the hell in the house?

Gayle Hunnicutt

Dusty verdict: As Roger Ebert said in his positive review at the time, this is far from the usual haunted house story and it allows for its characters to gradually get the measure of their situation as it, day-by-day, begins to reveal itself to them. Everything is explained but only in ways that leave the possibility of a rational scientific escape route… maybe.

The script was by Richard Matheson, adapted from his original book but with more graphic sexual scenes left mostly to our imagination – apart from one gratuitous scene with Ms Franklin. The score from Derbyshire and Hodgson combines electronica with some traditional instrumentation and is sadly not available separately although the film is on Blu-ray now.

Talking of music, I finally got to place the quote from Orbital's I Don't Know You People - from the Middle of Nowhere album – when a spirit possessing Florence calls out about their intrusion. Clearly a generation and more have been struck by the film and its influence is still felt… in fact, I’ve just felt a chill down my spine. Wait, what is that?!

Looks harmless enough...

 

Law of Desire... Amantes/Lovers: A True Story (1991), Vicente Aranda

Before Almodóvar, there was Aranda and this is the ninth of Victoria Abril's thirteen collaborations with the Catalonian director and it is a film which leaves you devastated and grasping for meanings. Aranda is such an interesting director of women's stories and in every film I see women at the forefront of the purpose and the message. Even after the end of the Franco regime, Vicente continued to examine the role of women under the strictures of the previous forty years and Amantes is rightly regarded as one of his, and Spain's, finest films of the nineties.

The basic premise is the choice one man must make between two extremes of womanhood and the crimes he must commit if he goes one way of the other – betrayal is unavoidable either way. Set in the Spain of the early 1950s when the original “true crime story” took place, it features Jorge Sanz as Paco, the young man with the choice. His fiancée Trini (Maribel Verdú) is the catholic, rural home-maker, quiet and dignified and yet with a will of steel to match her principles of life, love and religion. Luisa (Victoria Abril) on the other hand, is a very modern woman, of the city and at one with its vices, including crime. She dominates Paco sexually – he is the object of attraction in the film and not the two beauties he is between and this is very well done by Aranda, inverting the sexual power relationships just as he highlights the limited choices available to either woman at the time.

Paco is entitled and simply not focused on the same desperate realities as the women… he’s deservedly a sex object but one on whom the women project their desire and the life they hope to lead. This is not to say that he is without feelings he just can’t shake the normality of the moment and when he does it’s entirely at the behest of both his competing lovers.

The film starts with Paco, fresh out of his army service, visiting his long-term girlfriend, Trini, who works as a maid for his commandant (Enrique Cerro) and his wife (Mabel Escaño). She is beautiful and a home-maker, ideal for him and yet she refuses to consummate their relationship until they are married. Paco also needs to provide and ends up going to Madrid to find work although he quickly finds a means of satisfying his frustrated desires in the form of his new landlady, Luisa who greets him eating candy and covered in Christmas decorations, an earthy, corporeal counter to his virgin fiancée.

Their first sex scene is feral and daring with Aranda later explaining that he discussed the choices with his two actors and it was Sanz who came up with the innovative use of a towel by Abril’s character. It’s transgressive but on purpose and anyone who finds this overtly sexy needs to re-examine their attitude towards the use of soft fabrics in the home.

Sadly, work doesn’t entirely suit Paco and after failing a job or two he becomes a kept man and increasingly caught up in Luisa’s criminal side lines. Yet his plan is always to return to his intended as this is what has been planned and he feels an obligation as well as affection for the younger woman. Inevitably, it will not be possible to satisfy both of his lovers and once they know of each other’s existence, a battle begins which, whilst initially having the trappings of a romantic comedy, soon delves into the darker depths of both women’s desires…

Dusty Verdict: Aranda pulls you into the depths of these characters’ lives and delivers a film that stays vivid in your mind even weeks later. The performances of Abril and Verdú are both astonishing, so febrile and nuanced with the fire of still waters running even deeper than the surface passions they display. It’s a visceral watch that leaves you in that uncertain space between watching and wanting to avert your eyes from certain scenes… not because they are graphic but because it feels intrusive and you ultimately care for these characters.

The cinematography from frequent collaborator José Luis Alcaine is superb and captures the stark differences between city and country, dark, warm interiors of boudoir and rustic cool for kitchens and sparse barracks. The moments around the church towards the end are also so well shot including the unexpected snow… as if nature was intervening in the story.

Abril was originally intended to have the role of Trini and when the role of Luisa was vacated she decided to accept it. She was only 32 at the time but watching the film it’s hard to imagine better casting for either part especially as the 21-year-old Verdú who, at the beginning of her remarkable career, is very powerful in this moral fable just as Abril is, using her experience to play the older woman fighting with her for the love of a – reasonably – good man. Jorge Sanz has just the right amount of fresh-faced guilelessness in a part initially marked for Antonio Banderas who was unavailable.

Much lauded on its release – it won two Spanish “Oscars” for best film and best direction – Vicente Aranda latter said “Whenever someone wants to flatter me, they bring up the subject of Amantes. I haven’t been able to make a film that takes its place.” Any director would be flattered to count such a film among their work.

 

Jorge Sanz and Maribel Verdú

*The real life events occurred involving a couple from working class Madrid in 1949 and in La Canal, a small village near Burgos… watch the film first before finding out how much inspiration Aranda took!

Mirage and muse… Fata Morgana (1965), Teresa Gimpera and Vicente Aranda

“In Fata Morgana, Teresa Gimpera functions as a muse of this whole generation of creators. She’s the muse of Fata Morgana and of 1960s Barcelona. She was the counter-archetype of the Spanish female model of the time…”

Angel Sala, Director of the Sitges Film Festival

 

Film appreciation is like a jigsaw or dominoes or, indeed, both. I first watched The Exquisite Cadaver (Las Crueles) (1969) because it featured Judy Matheson – who I’d seen in The Flesh and Blood Show, Twins of Evil, Blakes Seven and so much more – and it became one of my favourite films given the sophistication and skill with which Spanish director Vicente Aranda, produced this most engaging and enigmatic of stories as well as the performance quality of the four leads. Teresa Gimpera was one of those four and her recent passing led me into rewatching her brilliance in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and from there to Fata Morgana, her first film and collaboration with Aranda.

 

Fata Morgana or Fata/Morgana or Left-Handed Fate, does not disappoint and helps to explain the broader approach of Aranda as a leading light of the Barcelona School – a left of centre cultural “opposition” to the Franco-approved mainstream centred in Madrid. The grouping included many intellectuals, writers, architects and other creators who would meet in the bars and cafes of Tuset Street and later the Bocaccio disco, which happened to be co-owned by successful model, mother and businesswoman, Teresa Gimpera. This was an artistic resistance as, obviously, direct political action was not yet possible and the subtext and symbolism of this film, Exquisite Cadaver and, especially, The Blood-Spattered Bride, enabled Aranda to critique the state in ways that the censors could not grasp.

 

This may have been only the Director’s second film but he knew what he wanted and being a man of means, was able to take chances others might not. Not only was he casting a non-actress, but the film had also been written for Gimpera by Gonzalo Suarez, as she attests in the 2015 interview among the extras of the Mondo Macabro disc. Even in her 80s Teresa had style and charm and this interview is essential viewing to all followers of Spanish and all European cinema culture of this period.

 

Fata Morgana is the Italian translation of Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend and it also refers to an Italian mirage, visible in a narrow band right above the horizon and often seen in the Straits of Messina as what look like castles hanging in the air. This varied meaning reflects the film’s own concerns with reality and subjective experience as it wends an unconventional path from an opening set up showing comic book panels to a story packed full of so many unreliable narrators that it could even be a modern political party.

 

There is a reference to a major event in London – such a swinging influence at the time – which is traumatic but never specified – a nuclear explosion, a social revolution… a city as a murder victim; all are possible. Then the action begins with a group of young men heading on the ridge of a hill overlooking Barcelona to cut the head of a model, Gim (Gimpera!) from an advertising hording which they then take back to their digs (assuming they are students?). This begins the director’s commentary on commodification and commercialism: these lads clearly want to own an image of Gim but maybe they want to protect her too?

 

Cut to a professor (the excellent Antonio Ferrandis) using photographs of murdered women, to illustrate his talk on how some people are natural victims in search of a murderer. One of the images is of Gim and the assumption is that she will be the film’s designated victim and we will explore if her fate can be avoided. But nothing is quite as straightforward as it might seem. Is the Professor the author of this entire cycle or just an observer? And who is JJ (Marcos Martí) the man who starts off the film in cartoon form and being instructed to head off to prevent the designated victim from her fate.

 

Gim wanders the deserted streets of Barcelona and is leered at or otherwise shown interest by the men in the streets all of whom have an opinion on her plans. It reminds me of the moments in L’avventura (1960) when Monica Vitti is stared at and menaced by dozens of men in a village for no other reason than her sex and looks. The influence of the Italians is clear with this and even Fellini with the helicoptered Christ at the start of La Dolce Vita being mirrored by the “kidnapping” of Gim’s graven image. The French New Wave is also an influence from Goddard’s dystopian Alphaville – released earlier in 1965 - to Truffault’s 400 Blows (1959) and Chris Marker’s remarkable short 1962 film La Jetée*.

 

Gim decides to stay in Barcelona and goes to meet her boyfriend, Álvaro (Alberto Dalbés) who has a surprise guest who is behaving rather oddly, Miriam (Marianne Benet, a Spanish-born British actress who had featured in films in both countries) who may or may not be connected with what happened in London and what might happen in Barcelona… she certainly takes an interest in a silver fish which contains a retractable blade.

 

In truth everyone is potentially a murder and many are possible murderees, the Professor is definitely odd, appearing completely covered in bandages like the Invisible Man for a meeting with JJ in the middle of a football ground – perhaps the Nou Camp? Then he has a meeting with Gim in the park, she sells him cola like a pro and the two sit on a children’s roundabout as the meaning flows around them.

 

The film’s a fabulous guide to Barcelona with furtive walks through the Barri Gòtic showing the bullet holes in ancient walls left by the street fighting in the Civil War. In her informed audio commentary, film writer Rachael Nisbet describes the city as a kind of purgatory between reality and dream within the surreal setting an ambiguous space striving to evade the seeming inevitability of the roles assigned at the start of the film. But can we take anyone’s word for what might happen?

 

Dusty Verdict: The film’s a fascinating ride and one that will make you want to rewatch and absorb the commentary as well as the interview with Gimpera. In her first film she is grounded and superbly confident, containing the mystery that her director has set her to convey and putting her previous career to good use in modelling the impossible and the uncertain as casually as she might designer clothes.

 

Mondo have also released The Blood-Spattered Bride on Blu-ray and, it would be a dream, if they would do the same for Las Crueles to complete this trilogy of female fronted mysteries from Aranda. One day!!

 

*Co-incidence is also a feature of film appreciation and I only watched this film recently after reading about it in Christopher Priest’s book, Airside itself about the nature of reality and perception. Everything is coincidence and connection and I’m sure Vincente Aranda would have really enjoyed the works of Mr Priest who frequently made the improbable seem possible.