Poem: I WENT TO THE SEA, BUT THERE WERE NO GULLS

 

I WENT TO THE SEA, 
BUT THERE WERE NO GULLS/ 
FROM A LINE BY KEITH ROBERTS 

I will be the magic that has gone away, 

I will be the shapes that swim in oceans 

where all the fish have vanished, 

the shrub on the common land 

that is a charcoal sketch at dawning, 

the night bird that screeches when 

all owls are driven from their hollows, 

the leafy branch that scratches the window 

when they’ve cut down all the forests, 

I will be the whisper of the bees 

on the sunshine breeze, the eye of newt, 

the dream of ladybirds on sunflowers 

the fire of toxic particles to light the sky 

the ghost of wolves to howl at dark moons 

the lost voice of worms, beetles and spiders 

the echo of the fox in the phantom farmyard 

the long silence of a world 

where magic has gone away

 

Featured online at: 

‘IT: INTERNATIONAL TIMES’ (19 December 2020) 

http://internationaltimes.it/i-went-to-the-sea-but-there-were-no-gulls/

Gerald Nicosia's 'MEMORY BABE: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF JACK KEROUAC'

 

LONESOME TRAVELLER 

Book Review of: 

‘MEMORY BABE: A CRITICAL 

BIOGRAPHY OF JACK KEROUAC’ 

by GERALD NICOSIA 

($22.50, Grove Press, ISBN 0-394-52270-2, 

Grove Press, 196 W Houston St, New York NY 10014, USA)

 

On the road, accelerating into overdrive, destination board set to FURTHER, trailing necrophile clouds of glory from its stylishly-rusted exhaust, the Dead Beats industry has seldom been so hyperactive. It’s accumulated renewed momentum since the 1974 publication of Ann Charters’ tentative biography ‘Kerouac’ (Warner Paperback Library). That monumental tome carved out a four-hundred-plus-page archaeological-sleaze survey that succeeded in achieving energy levels sufficient to pass massive voltage through temporarily dormant hipster Beatnik memories, and shove them from subsurface into kitsch collectability. Novelist Jack Kerouac, who died 21 October 1969, was the thinking eye of the Beat Generation, slouching rootlessly into Frisco from New York, from Lowell to Mexico City, travelling cross-continent high on visionary jazz and Buddhist bohemia. His was the gift of complex simplicity. His roaring Bop prose illuminated his ragged milieu and embryo subculture in an adrenalin rush of emotionally-charged verbals. He was both technically innovative, and – through boozily emotive imprecision – relentlessly accessible to the non-schooled non-technical reader.

 

Everyone from Bob Dylan to Tom Waits theft their best affectations from ‘Old Angel Midnight’ Kerouac. Yet his appeal is not, strictly, rational – but intuitive. He lived his language too closely for detachment, while simultaneously his personal weirdnesses and unresolved ambiguities cut it loose from strict reportage. The contradictions in his work are the same contradictions that drove and destroyed him. Let me count the ways. As a human being he was a mess, primed to self-destruct, a wino, poet, bum, intellectual, an American doomed anti-hero of romantic melancholy darkness – and a slob. Personally charismatic, unkempt and moodily handsome, his ‘Beat’ was abbreviation for ‘beatific’, fiercely at odds with Normal Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ manifesto of existential hoodlum. Imprinted by early Catholic guilt he had a yen for Zen that he lacked the application to ever consummate. 

But there’s more. Too many cross-references attest to his shyness for it to be pose, to his edgy moral Puritanism and macho traditional values for them to have been insincere. But just as legion are the legends of his multi-sexual promiscuity. Gore Vidal brags of being recipient of a Kerouac blowjob, while claustrophobically close associations with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady – incestuously sharing women, narcotics, and intimacies – backs up such brags. And if, as Ginsberg claims, Kerouac was never able to resolve the conundrums of his own sexuality, there’s a nagging back-up diversity of support inconsistencies. Kerouac idolised jazz master Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker to the extent of attempting to breath the black musician’s Bop spontaneity into his writing. Yet there’s a tale Nicosia here relates of the late-period Kerouac burning a racist cross outside the Black ghetto of Orlando. If true the act would be obscene if it weren’t so pathetically inept. 

But Kerouac is cult. And following Ann Charters came the deluge – Dennis McNally’s ‘Desolate Angel’ (1979, Random House), autobiographical data from daughter Jan Kerouac (‘Baby Driver’, 1981, St Martin’s Press), ex-lover Carolyn Cassady (‘Heart Beat’, 1976, Creative Arts Books – which became a 1980 Sissy Spacek-Nick Nolte movie!), and fan acquaintance Joyce Johnson (‘Minor Characters’, 1983, Houghton Mifflin), then there’s Beat archivist journal ‘Moody Street Irregulars’, the ‘Beat Brotherhood’ cassette-label from Birmingham, and an ongoing small-press multiverse of Xerox and offset typescripts intent on preserving each minutiae of the mythos. Nicosia’s massive and obsessively-researched book (ten years in the compiling) is the culmination of the tsunami – so far. Critical – but to a degree, it’s the definitive primer for potential Kerouac converts, a crash-course taster in Beat-ology, as well as an essential purchase for those already Beatphiles, documenting life, work, and the tangled inter-relationship between the several.

 

The problem with cults – whether dedicated to Duran Duran or James Dean, Elvis Presley or James Joyce – is that they invariably obscure with overkill the real value of the sacred object of their deification. Cults polarise opinion and create critical backlash by myopically overstating their case with unqualified fervour. Viewed objectively, the later Kerouac could be maudlin, over-sentimental and reactionary, but at his best he has few equals. ‘On The Road’ (written 1947-1951, published 1957), ‘Desolation Angels’ (written autumn 1956 to summer 1961, published 1965), ‘Dharma Bums’ (written November 1957, published 1958), ‘The Subterraneans’ (written 1953, published 1958), and ‘Big Sur’ (written October 1961, published 1962, which Nicosia inexplicably relegates to minor novel status) still speak in tongues. Written by feeding Telex-rolls into his typewriter, feeding his head on Speed and Bennies, and working furiously on solid red-eyed sleepless eight-ten jags, he wrote with the fluency and breath-punctuation of immaculately stoned rap, introducing the use of paragraph-long sentences studded with multiple adjectives to each noun. Technically such strategies unravel all wrong, but poetically and evocatively they come so right they’re stunning. He lifts prose from flat two-dimensional passivity and MAKES IT DANCE. For a new writer – that’s a method that can’t be ignored. For a new reader – that’s an addictive strategy that’ll terminally suck in the unwary. 

‘Memory Babe’ is contagious. It’s a milestone on the Beat Route. It should not be missed.

The WHO & Pete Townshend

 

‘THE KIDS WERE ALRIGHT…’ 

DVD Review of: 

‘THE WHO’ 

(DVD, Bio. Go-Entertain goentertain.tv 44-minutes)

 

“Pictures Of Lily” is about masturbation. And in case you failed to pick up on that, Keith Moon decorated his drum-kit with saucy pin-ups. “Pinball Wizard” is about a deaf-dumb-&-blind kid who smell-tracks the ricochet-dance of the pinball with his nostrils. Right. But what the hell is “Happy Jack” about? A seaside donkey on the sands of the Isle of Man… and, kids drop things on his head… right, so far, and… what the hell was Pete Townshend on? Well, later he did all the usual Rock & Roll chemical stimulants, it’s part of the job description, but back then it was strictly purple hearts and maybe the occasional puff of dope. The mind-altering content of those lyrics was strictly his own. Apparently he had a serious grudge against the world, because he was self-conscious about his big nose. But Townshend was just one corner of the four-sided construct that was the Who. 

Seldom in Rock history have each member of a band been so integral. Roger Daltrey gives voice to the lyrics Townshend lacked the confidence, or the vocal range to sing. And as a front-man he’s got few equals. While it’s impossible to imagine, say, “My Generation” without John Entwistle’s muscle – he plays bass like it’s a lead instrument, or indeed, the Who without his sinister “Boris The Spider”. And Keith Moon? well – nuff said. He ensured the drum-riser was as much the focal point, and more, as any other element of the band. ‘A Destructive Tour De Force’ yells the DVD cover, ‘On Stage They Personified Rock & Roll’ it asserts. And just for once the hype is justified. Extracted from the History/Biography Channel, this painfully-abbreviated DVD hurtles you through the story at breakneck speed, crammed with shrapnels of explosive visuals, guided by the group’s biographers Richard Barnes (‘The Who: Maximum R&B’, 1999), Dave Marsh (‘Before I Get Old: The Story Of The Who’, 2003), Andrew Neill and Matthew Kent (‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicles Of The Who 1958-1978’, revised 2005), plus Keith’s personal assistant Pete Butler, John’s personal assistant Mike Bratby, and John’s wife and mother. Lenny Kaye too.

 

There’s a sense in which, because the Who felt they’d arrived late at the sixties banquet, they had time to make up. Subsequently, everything about them was writ large, larger and largest. From Pete and John meeting at Acton County Grammar School, to Pete at Ealing Art College to their techno-destruction at ‘The Railway Hotel’ they were a seriously out-of-kilter proposition. They’d already cut a sharp Mod single as the High Numbers (“I’m The Face”) when producer Shel Talmy got them into the Brunswick studios. He saw them as a viable variant on his previous wards, the Kinks, but was so uncertain of their abilities he got Jimmy Page, Nicky Hopkins and the Ivy League in to dub the more technically demanding bits onto the session. It could be argued their “My Generation” single is a more clumsily phrased spin on teen-anthem “The Young Ones”, and – although early stutter-free takes exist, Daltrey’s speed-damaged stammer gives its eloquent inarticulacy a kind of instant juve-speak relevance. While ‘why don’t they all f-f-f-f…’ invites an obvious missing word other than ‘fade away’ at a time when you couldn’t say ‘fuck’ on record, with or without ‘Parentally Advised’ sticker. Even on the sleeve-photo of their debut album – ‘My Generation’ (December 1965), they look malevolently deranged, not even in the Rolling Stones’ sense of stylish danger, more a damaged dysfunction that was nevertheless the alchemy that powered them, a spluttering popping Pop-Art dislocation of pure envinylised anger. The album is made up of direct Mod narratives, fattened out with some regulation Soul-covers. When Pete outraged the ‘Daily Mail’ demographic by claiming the only time he ever felt patriotism was watching Mods wrecking Margate, we knew exactly what he meant. This was extreme tribalism. Yet their subsequent albums surfed a precipitously steep learning-curve.

 

There were hits, and tours, but a financially-disastrous record-deal, complicated by their expensive instrument-trashing, ensured they were permanently bankrupt through groundbreaking LP’s ‘A Quick One’ (December 1966) and ‘The Who Sell Out’ (January 1968). The relative chart-failure – only no.10, of the magnificent “I Can See For Miles” provoked Pete, ever handy with a pertinent quote, to ‘spit in the eye of the British record-buyer’. Until ‘Tommy’ (May 1969) rescued them into the global Rock-aristocracy – magnified wide-screen through high-energy shock-appearances at the ‘Monterey’ and ‘Woodstock’ festivals, then through Ken Russell’s inspired intervention, into cinemas too. Yet behind the blue eyes their teenage wasteland left a trail of devastation. Keith inadvertently ran over and killed his chauffeur. Eleven audience-members at a Cincinnati stadium were trampled to death. Original drummer Pete Meaden committed suicide, and Keith overdosed to death within months of each other. ‘Keith couldn’t survive Keith’ observes David Wild of ‘Rolling Stone’. Then Entwistle, despite his ‘the Ox’ nickname, succumbed to a cocaine-induced heart-attack in a Las Vegas hotel. Although Daltrey and Pete Townshend continue – as they have the creative momentum, and every moral right to, with stand-in drummers Kenney Jones and then Zak Starkey, they are only two corners of what was essentially a four-sided construct. This DVD omits their ‘Live8’ vindication, but ends on a positive high with the release of ‘Endless Wire’ (October 2002), their first album of original material for twenty-four years. They’re now battered, heritage Rock. But still angry.

 

Featured on website: 

‘SOUNDCHECKS’ 

(UK – October 2010)

 

PETE TOWNSHEND: 

HE CAN SEE FOR MILES

 

DVD/ CD Review of: 

‘FACE THE FACE’ 

by PETE TOWNSHEND’S DEEP END 

(EAGLE VISION) www.eagle-rock.com 

Pete Townshend was a man with a grudge against the world. With his anger ventriloquised by Roger Daltrey and targeted by the Who it exploded into some of the most lyrically-distinctive high-energy singles of the 1960s. But for each Who album he took at least one lead vocal, and during the group’s gradual wind-down, issued a series of solo albums more critically respected than commercially successful, including ‘Empty Glass’ (1980) and ‘All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes’ (1982). But in this live set, the Ace Face is centre-stage with vocal authority and assurance, filmed in Cannes for German TVs ‘Rockpalast’ on 29 January 1986 – now issued in a CD/DVD pack. In white buttoned-up shirt and black jacket – with grimaces, gurning and trademark jump-kicks, it might be a more matured anger, but it’s still as spring-loaded. He does a bruising take on Daltrey’s album track “After The Fire”, makes the mistake of using wrong guitar for “The Sea Refuses No River”, and does what for anyone else would be considered Dad-dancing for the title-song. But beneath the tight dynamics, he retains that same ambition, as if there’s something yet to prove. The set is built around his concept album ‘White City: A Novel’ (1985), with all-star big-band back-up including a ‘very interesting guitar part’ on “Give Blood” by ‘special guest’ Dave Gilmour – who adds a long loose “Blue Light” from his own catalogue, plus Rabbit Bundrick from Free and Medicine Head’s Peter Hope-Evans on wailing harmonica. Pete’s spidery “I Put A Spell On You” is included on the DVD only, while naturally he throws in a fat-free solo “Pinball Wizard” and ‘another old Who song for you’ “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. He wrote them. He sings them.

 

Published in: 

‘R2: ROCK ‘N’ REEL Vol.2 Issue 62’ 

(March/April 2017)

ROGER DALTREY: SOLO CAREER

 

BEHIND BLUE EYES: 

ROGER DALTREY 

CD review of 

‘MOONLIGHTING: 

THE ANTHOLOGY’ 

 by ROGER DALTREY 

(Sanctuary Records Double-CD SMEDD013)

 

Mick Jagger’s done solo stuff. Including collaborations with Bowie and Dave Stewart. But – “Memo From Turner” excepted, outside the Stones’ canon, it loses meaning. Keef too. Pete Townshend’s done solo albums. Some of them pretty great. But outside the Who-context they lose, something. They’re career add-ons, footnotes to the authentic text. Daltrey more so. As an exact quarter of one of the previous century’s finest bands he’s up there forever. And there’s seldom a band in which all four corners were as equally vital. But cut loose from Townshend’s unique lyric-skills, particularly as his own writing is so slight, he’s at the mercy of other creative inputs. And considered apart, as a freelance singer, he has limitations.

 

Moonlighting from his Day-Job as a useful unemployed vocalist-for-hire, he has a powerful voice, sure – we all know that, and it’s integral to so much classic vinyl, yet he lacks both the Blues rawness or melodic range of – say, a Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, or a Stevie Winwood, to enable him to create new relevancies. So he picks up early on young Leo Sayer to chart with his “Giving It All Away” (from ‘Daltrey’, his 1973 debut solo album). Through to Elton’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down”, taking in stabs at Gerry Rafferty’s “Stuck In The Middle”, Springsteen’s “Born To Run” (blustering ‘what’s the bloody first line?’), and even “Rock ‘n’ Roll” (with what sounds suspiciously like the original Led Zep backing track). Elsewhere – as a ‘one-man band’, he drifts from liquid funk – using some of the best session players around, to the plaintively attractive acoustic “Say It Ain’t So Joe”, from Gospel choir, to the big-band orchestration of “Free Me”, plus original-cast show-songs (“Mack The Knife”). With no direction, cohesion, or unifying elements. Sure, “Get Your Love” is a vibrant shouter with girl-group back-up, there’s a massive voice-roar on “Proud” (both from his second solo, 1975’s ‘Ride A Rock Horse’), but there are also passages veering dangerously close to Meatloaf bombast. 

The title-track from his 1976 third LP, ‘One Of The Boys’, traces the evolution of a stammerer-on-the-dole into a Blues-player, and it’s tempting to pick over the lyrics for autobiographical references. Is ‘he knows his generation, like he knows his A-B-C’, or ‘the face in the mirror’ chock-full of clues? or what about ‘they were rebels in their day’ (“Martyrs And Madmen”)? and isn’t that the “Baba O’Reilly” synth-figure underpinning the Rock Operatic “Under a Raging Moon” (his tribute to Keith)? Predictably, the biggest cheers go to his live takes on Who songs, bringing on ‘one of my oldest friends John Entwistle – The Ox’, for “The Real Me”. Like his movies (“Without Your Love” comes from the 1980 ‘McVicar’ soundtrack), or his fish-farming, these are all entertaining distractions, away-days from the firm. Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps the image-associations of the Who are so indelible they skew his separateness out of frame? But it’s inescapable, we all know that his real contribution has been made elsewhere. It doesn’t need more. Nothing here convinces you of a viable alternative career. 

Further Details from: 

www.sanctuaryrecordsgroup.co.uk 

Published in: 

‘SONGBOOK no.7: Summer 2005’ 

(UK – August 2005)

Festive Horror Classic Movie: 'NIGHT OF THE DEMON'

 

‘RE-CASTING THE RUNES’ 

Review of: 

‘NIGHT OF THE DEMON’ 

Director: Jacques Tourneur. With Dana Andrews, 

Maurice Denham and Niall MacGinnis 

(Columbia Pictures, 1957, 2-DVD edition 2010)

 

The first time I visited Stonehenge there was no visitor’s centre, and no inhibiting wire. You could walk up to the stones and touch them. Indeed, you could climb on them, graffiti your initials, or even carve your name into the stones. Which is why the fence was inevitably necessary. Nevertheless, the way I saw them then, the way you see them here, has a strikingly stark austerity that the tourist paraphernalia reduces to theme-park spectacle. Stonehenge constitutes a real link to ancient mystical experience beyond our understanding. The perfect metaphor for what ‘Night Of The Demon’ does. This is no splatterfest. No gore-porn. Nothing like that. Yet this moody, edgy black-&-white curio has its own way of exerting its grip, while inflicting some genuinely unsettling sequences. It now seems quaintly old-fashioned, indeed – that’s one of its charms, yet it remains a pretty creepy film. Dana Andrews plays John Holden, a smugly confident American psychologist who arrives in England to deliver a symposium lecture debunking the paranormal. Defining the film’s central contradiction, he embodies the rational reductionist tendency to whom science and reason provide the only explanations. He’s set up against Dr Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), an Aleister Crowley-style adept who exploits mystical forces, but is also compromised by them. He understands the awesome power he uses, and fears it. Joanna (Peggy Cummins), is the catalyst between them. Her father, Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) was shocked-to-death by Karswell’s runic curse in the opening sequence, establishing the premise on which the yarn hangs.

 

Holden taunts Devil Cults, explaining witchcraft phenomena away as the power of suggestion. At the conference, held at the Victoria Hall, link-man O’Brien presents Harrington’s experiment in which a comatose called Hobart is brought in an ambulance, his mind retreated into a womb of darkness. Holden uses hypnotism. Hobart wakes. Screams. Runs amok. It is revealed he was another disciple of Karswell – ‘The Order Of The True Believers’, who – like Professor Harrington, was also passed the parchment dealing death to whoever possesses it. To save himself, it is necessary to pass it back. He escapes, but leaps to his death from a window. After a series of strange experiences and an occult death or two Holden learns the hard way to respect the occult forces he’s previously ridiculed. There’s a séance sequence which is largely played as light mocking Elstree comedy. The gullible old ladies, the low-rent charlatan contriving front-room thrills for them with a repartee of cheap parlour tricks. Until the tone abruptly changes, and he becomes host to genuine voices from beyond. As shocking for him as it is for his audience.

Screenwriter Hal E Chester (visiting American director Harold Ribotsky) worked up the script from a short story – “Casting The Runes”, one of seven tales collected into ‘More Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary’ (London, 1911) by MR James. In his day the scholarly Montague Rhodes (MR) James (1 August 1862–12 June 1936), Provost of Eton College, constituted something of an occult moderniser. His ghost stories helped wrench supernatural spectres away from the antiquated Gothic trappings of medieval Transylvanian never-neverlands to transplant them directly into recognisably real then-contemporary settings. He’s aware that beneath the flimsy rationalist tegument of modernity lurks a yawning chasm of millions of years of limbic superstitious animal-fears terrified by the powers of the natural world, and he uses antiquarian relics or mystical runes as links to ‘Old Religion’ weirdness. As such he was reconfiguring the genre for the new – that is, mid-twentieth century. By working through implication and inference. So providing the ideal source material for French-born Jacques Tourneur to transfigure onto celluloid.

M R James

 

The son of movie director Maurice Tourneur, he’d already worked with Val Lewton on RKO’s understated soft-horror ‘Cat People’ (1942) – part-reprised in the sequence where Holden and Joanna visit Karswell’s Lufford Hall (with Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire standing in), where he half-glimpses things that start eroding his certainty. The sorcerer’s demonic familiar in the house, and the smoking-hole in the night-forest beyond. Tourneur followed it with Lewton’s highly-regarded ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ (1943), before freelancing ‘Night Of The Demon’. Afterwards, he went on to work for American International, directing not only Vincent Price but ‘Your Favourite Creeps Together Again’ – Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone in the Richard Matheson-scripted ‘The Comedy Of Terrors’ (1963). He was also responsible for uniting Vincent Price with sometime Pop Singer Tab Hunter and John LeMesurier in the downright strange ‘The City Under The Sea’ (aka ‘War-Gods Of The Deep’) (1965) supposedly based around an Edgar Allan Poe poem. Tourneur also directed episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ before retiring home to France. But his experience of working on the British-made ‘Night Of The Demon’ was not entirely untroubled.

 

Producer Hal E Chester saw rushes of Tourneur’s vividly imaginative locomotive speeding through the night belching steam with its glowing furnace a ‘basket of light’, saw how it was used as a metaphor for the night-demon itself, and considered it way too subtle for its target audience. Despite Tourneur’s conviction, he knew it needed more explicit content, and so inserted animated images of the demon into the footage, against the objections of both the director, and writer Charles Bennett. But maybe his intervention actually works, the crude horned monster – ineptly transferred from Hieronymus Bosch, is the most frequently reproduced still, and was splashed across foyer-posters where subtlety and suggestion were not exactly what the punters were looking for. The late 1950s was not a great period for classic macabre – the Universal cycle had long since run its course, lapsing into slapstick sequels of sequels, and Hammer had yet to resurrect the genre from its gothic crypt. In its stead was the atomic-paranoia shock-angst of ‘The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms’ (1953), ‘Creature From The Black Lagoon’ (1954), ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ (1956) and ‘The Blob’ (1958). In the meantime, there is Tourneur’s demon…

 

Events converge at Clapham Junction on the Southampton train where ‘all evil must end’. During an encounter in the British Museum Library Karswell slips a runic parchment into Holden’s research files. Holden is finally determined he must return the parchment, and races along the train-corridor to intercept Karswell. It is six minutes to ten. Karswell has Joanna in a hypnotic trance. And refuses to accept the envelope, then refuses a cigarette… just in case. Karswell is edgily afraid. He knows only too well what forces are involved. As cops intervene and Karswell makes to leave the corridor Holden passes him his coat, without thinking he takes it. Realising, at the last moment, that the runes have been passed. The parchment escapes and dances away, Karswell chases it down the corridor, then out along the train tracks. It incinerates to cinders moments before he’s able to retrieve it. And the demon roars towards him, an apparition part steam-engine, part rearing monster. It snatches him up and rakes him with its smoky claws. What’s going on? ‘Maybe it’s better not to know’ says Joanne. It is ten minutes past ten. Rail staff and cops speculate over the mangled corpse, surely it must have been the train that hit him? What other explanation can there be? ‘You’re right. Maybe it’s better not to know’ Holden agrees. They leave together as another dark demonic train hurtles past them into the night… 

‘NIGHT OF THE DEMON: 

WHO WILL BE THE NEXT IN 

LINE TO DEFY THE CURSE…?’

 

Columbia Pictures, 1957. ABPC Studios, Elstree. Producer: Hal E Chester (Harold Ribotsky). Director: Jacques Tourneur. Written by Chester Bennett & Hal E Chester based on the story “Casting The Runes” by MR James. With Dana Andrews (as John Holden), Maurice Denham (as Professor Henry Harrington), Peggy Cummins (as Joanna Harrington), Niall MacGinnis (as Dr Julian Karswell), Athene Seyler (as Mother Karswell), Liam Redmond (as Professor Mark O’Brien), Ewan Roberts (as Lloyd Williamson), Peter Elliott (as Professor KT Kumar), Reginald Beckwith (as Mr Meek), Rosamund Greenwood (as Mrs Meek), Brian Wilds (as Rand Hobart). Music by Clifton Parker. (Columbia Pictures 17 December 1957, US July 1958. Fully restored Mediumrare 2-DVD edition including US edit ‘Curse Of The Demon’, October 2010) 95-minutes