MERRY XMAS EVERYONE

 

ROCK AROUND THAT CHRISTMAS TREE!

 

‘And so I’m offering this simple phrase 

to kids from one to ninety-two 

although it’s been said many times, 

many ways Merry Christmas To You…’ 

BE EXCELLENT TO ONE ANOTHER! 

Adieus Till Later 

-Andy-

Movie: Roger Corman's 'TEENAGE CAVEMAN'

 

ROCK WITH THE CAVEMAN…! 

Review of: 

‘TEENAGE CAVEMAN’ 

(1958) With Robert Vaughn, Darah Marshall, 

Leslie Bradley Director: Roger Corman. 

DVD: 2012, The Arkoff Film Library

 

‘In the beginning there was chaos and eternal night’ runs the portentous pseudo-Biblical voice-over, with credits superimposed over cave-paintings set to Albert Glassner’s epic soaring score. Roger Corman can conjure something worth watching out of zero-budget and nil-resources. It looks easy. But watch the films of Ed Wood to see how vaguely similar ingredients will end up when handled with more enthusiasm than competency. Of course this movie is Drive-In trash. Even the title is a trifle of irresistibly playful mischief. Yet you have to admit that, even though Corman himself irritably protested ‘I never directed a film called ‘Teenage Caveman’’, it’s a marked improvement on his original ‘Prehistoric World’ title, or the critic’s suggestion ‘Rubble Without A Cause’! 

The tribesmen, wearing loincloths and brandishing ‘throwing stick’ spears, carry the body of a freshly-killed deer into ‘the clan’ cave village. They’re remarkably well-fed healthy primitives. Only the lone ‘Son of the Symbol-Maker’ stands apart, staring wistfully over the forbidden river. He sports a stylish cross-the-shoulder tunic, neat dark hair, and a knife thrust under his belt. He questions and demands to know answers. His discontent mirrors teenage rebellion. In ‘The Wild Ones’ (1953) Mildred asks Marlon Brando ‘Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ He shrugs back ‘whadda you got?’ That’s the Symbol-Maker’s Son’s attitude. He’s warned off questioning ‘the signs and gifts and mysteries’. Why can’t the Clan cross the forbidden river? Because the law says so. Because there’s superstitious fear that beyond the river there are shadows ‘deep and cold’ where men ‘sicken and die, red and dried out’. Because of the burning plain with ‘dirt that eats men’, and ‘the god that gives death with its touch’. These warnings come dramatised with insert-clips of savage jungle and dinosaurian lizardoids. His grey-bearded father (Leslie Bradley) advises him ‘wonder no more.’ ‘I wonder still’ he muses. 

The young rebel is Robert Vaughn, decidedly no teenager. He’d already done TV parts in hardboiled cop-drama ‘Dragnet’ (with its much-imitated intro ‘the story you are about to see is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent’) and gritty Western ‘Gunsmoke’ – with James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon, as well as popular sitcom ‘Father Knows Best’. He had successes, but it wasn’t until he was cast as ‘Napoleon Solo’ – a name suggested by Ian Fleming, in the hugely tongue-in-cheek ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E’ from September 1964, that he ascended to household name status. Intended to be the suave James Bond in the agents’ fight against the evil ‘T.H.R.U.S.H’, he was ironically overtaken in the sexy pin-up stakes by enigmatic sidekick David McCallum as ‘Illya Kuryakin’, who had the advantage of a comb-forward Beatles fringe. 

‘Teenage Caveman’ may well be trash, but they play it admirably straight-faced. They may have no names beyond Blonde Maiden (Darah Marshall), the Black-Bearded one (Frank DeKova), or the Curly-Haired boy, but they yield nothing of R Wright Campbell’s dialogue to dramatic theatricality. When Vaughn challenges ‘The law is old, but age is not always truth’ he might as well be adding ‘whadda you got?’ in stirring up generational confrontation. The following day the clan hunts again, and although they kill a ‘fur-beast’ bear, his father is wounded. As he recuperates, four prehistoric rebels – ‘The Young And The Brave’ according to the trailer, set out in defiance of the law, wade through waist-high swamp, and swim a jungle-river to reach the forbidden far shore of ‘A Wonderful And Strange World!’. Once there one of them admits ‘there’s meat here, we kill and go back.’ Vaughn is not so easily satisfied, ‘no, I came to find the truth or lie of the old stories, the ancient Law.’ He’s not about to go back, yet. 

Filmed on a tight two-week schedule in Griffin Park, Arcadia, the Californian landscape is suitably primeval. The Symbol Maker’s Son blows into a hollow-twig flute, which attracts two dueling dino-lizards. As usual in this kind of movie the monsters attack each other, allowing the tribesmen time to flee. As they penetrate deeper, one of them drowns in the ‘sinking earth’. Two get scared and head for home. Only the Symbol Maker’s Son goes on. When he builds a campfire for the night it attracts a monster-mutation, unafraid of his flames. In a matter of moments he invents, and masters the bow-and-arrow. Only to be attacked by a pack of wild dogs. 

Meanwhile, his father recovers, follows his son and intervenes. Once they’re safely back in the village Vaughn is sentenced to die. He fights back, and his punishment is commuted to isolation. No-one talks to him. Even his Blonde Maiden girlfriend shuns him, at first. Until he plays his flute as she coyly skinny-dips. He’s now reached the age of ‘Manhood’, and takes an oath to renounce his questioning. Will he settle down with the blonde girl in their ‘sleeping place’? ‘Wonder no more’ she urges him. ‘I will always wonder’ he affirms. Yet he bides his time, for now. 

Corman’s tyro producer/director quickies – ‘Highway Dragnet’ and ‘Monster From The Ocean Floor’, had come in January and May 1954. He made five rapid turn-around films the following year, three in 1956, and no less than nine in 1957, running the gamut of titillating exploitation from tacky horror, westerns, Beatnik and noir-crime as well as opportunistically settling on what could loosely be termed SF. Of course, the movies are Drive-In trash that look laughably easy. ‘Teenage Caveman’ is one of five movies directed in 1958, with cheapo effects patched together from archive stock-footage. The dinosaur sequences were originally contrived by Roy Seawright for Hal Roach’s ‘One Million BC’ (1940), while a clip from Edward L Cahn’s ‘The She Creature’ (1956) is also filched and inserted to illustrate radiation mutation. But this seamless zero-budget nil-resources collage technique catches something of the jittery angst of its time. Something a 2002 ‘Teenage Caveman’ remake, directed by Larry Clark, fails to do, despite its gore and nudity. 

The film’s final section opens with a horse-riding stranger approaching the cave village. Fearfully they hurl spears. Only Vaughn tries to stop them. The stranger manages to utter the single word ‘Peace’, before they spear him to death. In a Clan debate his Symbol-Maker father now argues for seeking out other tribes. His scheming black-bearded rival seizes on this blasphemy as an opportunity to strip him of his symbol-making powers. ‘There is no more to say’ declares Vaughn defiantly, ‘it is time to act.’ He has his bow, and a quiver for his arrows. His blonde woman watches him set out alone. But first his father follows him. Then the vengeful tribe pursue them both intent on killing them – only to be attacked by the wild dog-pack. 

In the forbidden zone the duo are menaced by a crawling slithering mutation. A curious Vaughn approaches it in a gesture of conciliation, just as Black-Beard hurls a rock at the monster. The Symbol Maker’s Son turns and shoots him with a well-aimed arrow, but it’s too late. Beneath the mask is a wizened old man, the last of the long-lived ancients. ‘A man, another kind of man.’ They find a book within his corroded radiation-suit covering, turning the pages in uncomprehending awe. Cities. Skyscrapers. The UN building. ‘The Atomic Era’. 

‘What symbols are these?’ they wonder. We know. This is the shock revelation. The punchline. Theirs is not some long ago sometime in the distant past. The Clan are not only the remote survivors of atomic war, but of a historical eternal recurrence. Will the tribe now be wiser? ‘Perhaps man will dare to try again?’ The stern voice-over resumes to ram home the warning message, ‘this happened a long time ago. How many times will it happen again? And if it does, will any at all survive the next time?’ A sobering closing question in a time of Cold War brinkmanship, ‘or will it be… THE END?’

 

‘TEENAGE CAVEMAN: PREHISTORIC REBELS 

AGAINST PREHISTORIC MONSTERS!’ 

‘TEENAGE CAVEMAN’ (American International Pictures, July 1958, black-&-white) Producer & Director: Roger Corman. Executive Producers: Samuel Z Arkoff & James H Nicholson. Screenplay: R Wright Campbell. With Robert Vaughn (Teenage Caveman), Darah Marshall (Blonde Woman), Leslie Bradley (The Symbol Maker), Frank DeKova (Black-Bearded Usurper), June Jocelyn (Symbol-Maker’s wife), Beach Dickerson (Bear, Man from the Burning Plains) and tribe-members Charles P Thompson, Ed Nelson Robert Shayne, Marshall Bradford, Joseph H Hamilton. Music: Albert Glassner. Cinematography: Floyd Crosby. Film Editor: Irene Morra. 65-minutes. DVD April 2012, The Arkoff Film Library. DVD extras include trailers and Samuel Z Arkoff NFT audio interview.

 

Originally featured on website: 

‘VIDEOVISTA’ (April 2014)

New Book: 'ON TRACK... THE HUMAN LEAGUE & THE SHEFFIELD ELECTRO SCENE'

 

Sci-Fi Horror Movie: 'DOOMSDAY'

 

‘DOOMSDAY’:

 

ANATOMY OF CATASTROPHE 

Review of: 

‘DOOMSDAY’ (2008), Universal Pictures 

Produced by Benedict Carver & Steven Paul 

Directed and written by Neil Marshall. 

With Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Adrian Lester, 

David O’Hara, Malcolm McDowell

It begins ‘like so many epidemics before…’ with cells dividing. ‘It doesn’t hate or even care, it just happens.’ 

In the future Glasgow of 3 April 2008. ‘The Scotland’ newspaper headlines blare ‘Mystery Virus Kills Hundreds In Days’. 

We’ve been here before. SF has inflicted exterminating plagues on humans since its very earliest manifestations. There’s a convincing argument that Mary Shelley invented the genre with her ‘Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus’ (1818), she followed it with ‘The Last Man’ (1826) in which, first late-twenty-first century Europe, then the world is ravaged to near-extinction by a mysterious plague. Movies have dealt with contagions and epidemics more frequently than you’d imagine. ‘World War Z’ (2013) uses the zombie metaphor in which Jerusalem is quarantined within its walls, and yet is overrun. Just as the jaded aristocrats of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe-derived ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’ (1964) cavort within the illusory safety of their stronghold amid a plague-stricken countryside. Then the mid-credits graphic sequence in ‘The Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes’ (2011) shows how the ‘Simian Flu’ pandemic travels and branches around the globe in a matter of hours. On an increasingly integrated planet with mass migrations happening on a daily basis this is less a probability simulation as it is a real-life projection. 

This is more real than you’d think. In living memory society has withstood the assault of HIV (Aids), Ebola, the SARS virus, Influenza A H1N1-2009, as well as the Corona virus Covid-19. In some ways, terrible as they have been, governments have managed them through persuasion, consensus and information rather than imposed repressions. There have been voluntary, rather that totalitarian Lockdowns, despite whatever the Conspiracy Theorists might claim. Although critically mauled as derivative and commercially underperforming at the box-office, ‘Doomsday’ effectively captures the madness and skin-crawling desperation of Britain collapsing into chaotic disorder as the horrifically grim ‘Reaper virus’ rips unchecked through the populace. 

The writer-director Neil Marshall had already made his big-screen directorial debut in a spectacular fashion with ‘Dog Soldiers’ (2002), a highly visceral nerve-scraping group-jeopardy movie in which a squad of soldiers led by Sergeant Harry G Wells (HG Wells!, played by Sean Pertwee) are under constant attack in the Scottish Highlands from a werewolf pack. Pertwee, with Emma Cleasby, Chris Robson, Craig Conway and Darren Morfitt will all transition into the ‘Doomsday’ cast. Another unorthodox horror venture – ‘The Descent’ (2005) takes a group of six women into a cave system where they struggle to survive against troglodyte flesh-eating Crawlers. Craig Conway and MyAnna Buring (who is Sam) will be carried over into the next project, which is ‘Doomsday’.

The England-Scotland border is closed soon after the outbreak begins, 9:17pm 20 June. The national separation the SNP agitate for is achieved overnight, although hardly in a way Nicola Sturgeon would have wanted. The 1707 Act of Union is severed, with Scotland placed under quarantine. Trump’s Shining Wall is erected along the contours defined by Roman Emperor Hadrian two thousand years earlier, but this is a thirty-foot high armour-plated monolithic structure with lethal automated defences, stretching from sea to shining sea. During the film’s opening sequence, fleeing victims are machine-gunned, a soldier is mob-attacked in a retaliatory riot. A mother (Emma Cleasby) shields her wounded daughter (Christine Tomlinson) behind their abandoned car, then forces the child onto a military helicopter as it lifts off towards England, as the gates close – on someone’s hand!, and primal savagery consumes north of the wall. 

The second sequence leaps forward to London, 2035, which is NOW! 

The girl has become Eden Sinclair of the Department of Domestic Security, who uses the pop-out electronic-eye implant that is the legacy of her escape from Scotland, in a bloody shoot-out to bust a people-trafficking gang. But she also has the buff envelope her mother gave her, bearing her distant home address. She’s convincingly played by Rhona Mitra with all the female-centric resourcefulness shown by the cast of ‘The Descent’. Rhona had already played support parts in movies such as ‘Hollow Man’ (2000), a spin on ‘The Invisible Man’ theme in which she’s raped by an invisible Kevin Bacon. And she’s Rachel Talbot in ‘Skinwalkers’ (2006), a widowed mother in the midst of a werewolf community. She easily and confidently assumes the action role of the team-leader with an electric eye, all of which naturally leads to her role in ‘Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans’ (2009) as vampiric Sonja. Eden’s movie mentor is Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins very much playing Bob Hoskins), who is summoned to a National Emergency briefing with a ‘bloody hell, George, what’s got your knickers in a twist?’

An isolated pariah state, England teeters on the brink of economic and social collapse, and when diseased derelicts are discovered in the Whitechapel ‘Urban Containment Facility’, vacillating Prime Minister John Hatcher (Alexander Siddig, ‘Dr Julian Bashir’ of ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’) is forced to consider the contingency plan of diverting a Climate Change canal-system to flood inner London. The conniving manipulating Michael Canaris (David O’Hara) prompts him, ‘we are at war, Prime Minister.’ It’s similar terrain to Danny Boyle’s ‘28 Days Later’ (2002) in which the ‘Rage’ virus is unleashed when an infected chimpanzee is liberated from a Cambridge laboratory by Animal Rights activists. But even more resembling its sequel – ‘28 Weeks Later’ (2007) in which NATO forces set up an Isle of Dogs ‘Safe Zone’ with a defensive exclusion perimeter guarded by lethal force. But it’s not difficult to draw parallels with the found-footage movie ‘Quarantine’ (2008), with mutated rabies – and its sequels, or ‘Contagion’ (2011) with its ‘Mev-1’ virus. All play on the jittery flesh-horror fear of infection. 

Hatcher is offered a lifeline when satellite pictures show people on the streets of Glasgow. If there are survivors, there must be a degree of immunity, and a possible cure? The Bob Hoskins character tasks Eden with heading a secret mission into Scotland, to seek out researcher Dr Marcus Kane (Malcolm McDowell), who was working to devise a cure before the north-south divide quarantine was imposed. ‘If it’s there, I’ll find it’ she says. She’s helicoptered to the security wall where two armoured cars are ready equipped for the trip, she’s told that ‘they move like shit off a shovel!’ The gates are unsealed, then soldered shut again once they’ve passed through into the desolation of wrecked cars beyond, with skeletal passengers. Glasgow is darkly overgrown, and St Andrew’s Hospital is littered with skulls.

They emerge from the car wearing biohazard suits, and she uses her detachable eye to look inside, hunting ‘evidence of Kane’s work.’ Meanwhile an ailing girl is given sanctuary in the second armoured car, but as the car is attacked by a hail of Molotov cocktails the girl ‘recovers’ and slits the driver’s throat. And Eden’s team come under sustained attack from hordes of Scots barbarians – a cross between Punk Braveheart and Mad Max, answering with bursts of machinegun fire as they retreat. Escaping in the second car the girl driver is hit in the throat by a crossbow bolt and the car overturns. Under relentless attack Eden escapes on foot, but is surrounded. 

She’s tortured in a cell, suspended from the ceiling while brutally pummelled by the Punk-Mohican’d Sol (Craig Conway) and tormented by the tattooed Viper (Lee-Anne Liebenberg). A gimp is chained in the corner. A hideous array of torture devices are wheeled into the cell. He bites her face. ‘If Kane is alive, I need to find him’ she tells him by way of explanation. He has other plans, ‘you are our passport to the Promised Land’ he gloats, seeing her as an escape route into forbidden England. Dr Talbot (Sean Pertwee), the team’s medical scientist, has also been captured. Only Sergeant Norton (Adrian Lester) and Dr Stirling (Darren Morfitt) are still at liberty.

 

The movie centrepiece is the grotesque cannibalistic orgy, off-the-scale ultraviolence, a flame-thrower Rock show Disco spectacular, a pole-dancing motorcycle Hieronymus Bosch vision of hell. ‘The wind of change is blowing a hurricane’ Sol yells through the amp-system to a soundtrack of Adam & The Ants (“Dog Eat Dog”), Fine Young Cannibals (sic), and a grotesque tartan can-can Bad Manners. ‘This is OUR city’ he rabble-rouses as the unfortunate Dr Talbot is suspended over a vat labelled ‘RARE, MED, KRISPY’ and lowered into the sea of flames that Viper ignites as dishes are thrown out to the mob and Sol crown-surfs. Viper beheads Talbot’s crisped corpse and carves it into edible portions. 

While Eden contrives to escape, pausing at the next cell where a woman pleads that she is Kane’s daughter, ‘I can help you find him.’ Sol, it turns out, is also Kane’s insurgent son. Viper blocks their way out, Eden fights with a calculated desperation, and beheads her. Together the two fugitives head through the streets towards the rail-station, while Sol leads a Mad Max techno-savagery pursuit, riding motorcycles with skeletons strapped to the front, and a coach graffitied ‘Out Of Fucking Service’. Norton and Stirling have a steam-locomotive readied on Platform Four where it says ‘Welcome To Glasgow. 

The next sequence takes the fugitive group out across wild Scottish countryside, leaving the train and walking strung-out beneath broken powerlines. They reach, and pass through the ‘Ben Crannich Archive’, which is a subterranean Fall-Out shelter stronghold, and out the other side into an idyllic glen, only to be confronted by the bizarre visitation of a medieval knight on horseback. This is Kane’s executioner. Eden demands ‘we want to see Kane,’ and allows the party to be rounded up and taken cross-country roped behind horses, past a row of impaled corpses to an ancient castle – once a tourist attraction complete with ‘Gift Shop’, now the seat of Kane’s own private fiefdom, ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Kane is the brooding Malcolm McDowell at his most malignant, the beautifully insolent ‘Michael Travis’ of ‘If’ (1968), and the evil Droog antihero of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971). When he returned as the more adult ‘Tolian Soran’ in ‘Star Trek Generations’ (1994) he carries over the same charismatic malevolence that he invests in the Kane character. He tells them ‘there is no cure. There never was.’ That the survivors prevailed not through science, but by natural selection. ‘In the land of the infected, the immune is king.’ And he has no sympathy for what is happening south of the wall, ‘they started this fire. They can burn in it!’ 

‘Same shit. Different era’ Eden tells Kane defiantly, as they are imprisoned.

A flashback to London shows the worsening ‘Hot Zone’ crisis, as barbarism breaks out live from Dean Street, and Tower Bridge is barricaded. When an infected victim breaks into the Prime Minister’s compound, Hoskins shoots him, but Siddig’s PM John Hatcher, spattered by tainted blood, retires to his office and shoots himself in the head before the symptoms have time to erupt. 

Meanwhile, Eden is released into an arena combat zone against the knight. As, drowned by the sound of cheering jeering crowds, the others escape. After prolonged uneven combat she seizes an axe from a guard and kills the knight by bloodily stoving his head in. They reach the horses and make good their escape as a disconsolate Shakespearian McDowell watches from the battlements. Heading back through the archive Eden finds a radio to alert London, and they also – testing the limits of credulity, locate a fully-functional Bentley Continental GT sealed into a packing case. But Norton (Adrian Lester) is peppered with arrows by Kane’s vengeful pursuers as he fights a rear-guard action. 

In London, Hoskins picks up her mobile call. ‘Trace the source’ says Michael Canaris, assuming the powers of the conveniently deceased Prime Minister. 

Again, there are Mad Max overtones as the Bentley is pursued by the full Glasgow wrecking crew in a Police Car labelled ‘Bastard’ and Venom’s severed head impaled beside Sol, all choreographed to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Two Tribes (Carnage Mix)”. There are hair-raising chase sequences, and ferocious eye-gauging combat as Sol leaps into the high-speed fleeing car. The gimp crashes and burns. Sol is killed as they smash through the coach… and the rescue helicopter touches down to retrieve them.

There is no cure to the ‘Reaper virus’, but Michael Canaris indicates Cally, Kane’s fugitive daughter, and says ‘we can use her blood to make a vaccine,’ with all manner of implications of unpleasant medical procedures. Eden opts to stay in Scotland, and accelerates the Bentley back to use the address on the buff envelope to locate her family home, and photos of her mother. 

Hoskins is there too, ‘I used to be a policeman, once.’ She gives him a disc of evidence to incriminate Canaris, recorded from her pop-out electronic-eye implant during their meeting. Later, the disc is shown being screened on TV, presumably destroying his fascistic leadership. 

‘Drive careful. Be lucky’ Hoskins tells Eden as he leaves her in Glasgow. 

The movie closes as she confronts the mob, and provocatively tosses Sol’s head at them. ‘If you’re hungry, try a piece of your friend.’ In the combative struggle, this is her gambit as their next leader 

Yes, it’s a flawed and derivative movie, but its’ insane ride does exert a grotesque fascination that captures something of the madness and skin-crawling panic of civilisation collapsing into chaotic disorder as lethal virus rips unchecked through the populace. And yes, we wore our Covid-masks and observed social distancing, and yes, people died and we feel their loss, but it could be said that – as a global society, we’ve been fortunate… so far! 

 

SURVIVE THIS! 

‘DOOMSDAY’ (2008), Universal Pictures through Rogue Pictures, Crystal Sky Pictures, Intrepid Pictures, Scion Films. Produced by Benedict Carver & Steven Paul. Directed and written by Neil Marshall. With Rhona Mitra (as Eden Sinclair), Bob Hoskins (as Bill Nelson), David O’Hara (as Michael Canaris), Malcolm McDowell (as Marcus Kane), Alexander Siddig (as PM John Hatcher), Adrian Lester (as Sergeant Norton), Craig Conway (as Sol), Lee-Anne Liebenberg (as Viper), Chris Robson (as Miller, part of Eden’s team), Leslie Simpson (as ‘Les Simpson’, Carpenter, part of Eden’s team), Sean Pertwee (Dr Talbot, the team’s medical scientist), Darren Morfitt (as Dr Stirling, the team’s medical scientist), MyAnna Buring (as Cally, Kane’s daughter), Emma Cleasby (Eden’s mother in the opening sequence), Christine Tomlinson (young Eden in the opening sequence). 108-minutes. 

Universal DVD 825-403-2-11, with bonus features ‘Anatomy Of Catastrophe: Civilization On The Brink’ (127:24), ‘The Visual Effects & Wizardry Of Doomsday’ (8:26), ‘Devices Of Death: Guns, Gargets & Vehicle’s Of Destruction’ (20:24), Feature commentaries with Neil Marshall, Sean Pertwee, Darren Morfitt, Rick Warden (who plays Chandler), and Les Simpson.

DVD Movie: Mario Bava's 'BLACK SABBATH'

 

THE FIRST BLACK SABBATH! 

Review of: 

‘BLACK SABBATH’ 

With Boris Karloff, Michèle Mercier and Mark Damon. 

Director: Mario Bava. Producer: Salvatore Billitteri. 

Original Release: AIP, May 1964, 92-minutes, 

DVD, Arrow Films 2-DVD set, 2013

 

‘Come closer, please’ cajoles a poorly-dubbed Boris Karloff, speaking directly to you, sitting in the cinema fleapit audience, ‘spectres and vampires are everywhere… they go to the movies too, I assure you!’ You flinch nervously, and glance sideways at the person sat next to you. And let’s leave Ozzie Osborne out of this, OK? 

Among my favourite Italian directors there’s Tinto Brass (‘Caligula’), Michelangelo Antonioni (‘Blow Up’), Federico Fellini (‘Satyricon’)… and Mario Bava. Even before the invention of the ‘Spaghetti Western’, Bava was already defining a unique strand of Italian Horror. Following tyro film-work in sword-&-sandals epics with Steve Reeves and Gina Lollobrigida – plus the proto-‘Deep Impact’ Sci-Fi extravaganza ‘The Day The Sky Exploded’ (1958), his solo directorial debut was ‘Black Sunday’ (1960). It became an unlikely international hit, a gothic effort that also elevated Barbara Steele into cult stardom. Requiring a follow-up, Bava devised this portmanteau-film of nasty tales, three brief slices of terror and the supernatural, named as closely as possible to its predecessor – for identification purposes. There was some considerable tampering with Bava’s original footage before it was deemed suitable for the more tender sensibilities of American Drive-In audiences, but contained within this useful DVD package are both original and re-cut re-ordered versions, to compare and contrast. Although both are highly watchable, the Italian original has the undeniable edge. 

‘The Telephone’ starts out as almost a one-woman chamber-piece, more psychological thriller than it is horror. In a luxurious apartment that could be Paris, with suitably low atmospheric soft-jazz, Rosy (Michèle Mercier) is alone in her ‘La Dolce Vita’-stylish little black dress, with a red telephone that keeps ringing. At first, no-one is there, just silence. Then a voice, ‘a body like yours can drive a man to madness.’ She undresses decoratively, unrolling stockings down her long shapely arched legs. While someone is watching her, the persistent troll-stalker on the other end of the line who is now threatening ‘I want to kill you, I want revenge.’ But who it? Who owns those eyes glimpsed through the venetian blinds? There are clues provided by the newspaper cutting pushed beneath her door that informs her ‘Frank Rainer Has Escaped’. 

This is where versions diverge. In the U.S. version it’s a ghost-letter. She phones Mary (Lidia ‘Lydia’ Alfonsi) who responds ‘Hi Honey’. In the U.S. version they’re just good friends. In Italian they are something much more Sapphic. It seems Rosy dumped Mary for this threatening jailbird ‘Frank’, their eternal-triangle adding nuanced depth to the plot contours. They’ve broken up, and sure, there are the bitchy put-downs of an ex-lover, but Mary doesn’t bear a grudge, she’ll come around in her vivid green dress and black gloves and be supportive. Yet it soon becomes apparent that it is Mary who is contriving the crisis in an attempt to effect a reconciliation, she is the mystery caller on the phone, her voice muffled by an amber cloth. But her scheme goes awry when the real Frank arrives and strangles her with a discarded stocking. Then Rosy draws the knife she’d stashed earlier, and stabs him. Rosy is alone again. Both her lovers are dead. It’s the deleted bisexual element that gives this drama its three-way power. Without it, it’s just a conventional, if more effective Slasher. 

The second segment – ‘The Wurdalak’, cleaves to more traditional 1960s Horror expectations, with a lone rider discovering a headless corpse beside a river on a wild Carpathian mountainside. When the rider, Count Vladimire d’Urfe (Mark Damon), arrives at the inevitably mist-shrouded Inn, he finds the knife responsible for the beheading fits a vacant space on the weaponry wall-display. Again, as usual in such situations, attractive wench Sdenka (Mondo soft-core starlet Susy Andersen) warns him to leave. But the dog howls as a hooded figure crosses the wooden bridge moments after the midnight bell tolls. It’s Old Father Gorca (a looming tomblike Boris Karloff). He acts with mysterious menace. Yes, he killed the Turkish bandit, and brandishes the severed head as proof, but he was wounded in the heart during the struggle. Fatally wounded? Is he dead too? Things get progressively creepier, in a Hammer Horror kind of way, albeit with a novel twist. ‘The Wurdalak are bloodthirsty corpses’ explains Sdenka, but ‘the more they’ve loved someone, the more they long to kill them, to seek their blood.’ 

So, they’re zombie-vampires, but with the added psychological bite that their deceased appetites are directed by love. As illustrated when the child Ivan is abducted away into the cold windswept night, to rise from its grave and appear outside the door pleading ‘Mama, Mama, let me in.’ Although mother Maria (Rika Dialina) realises the truth, her maternal love overwhelms reason, and she opens the door. As the undead corpses pile up Vlad urges the lovely Sdenka to escape with him, declaring his love and warning her ‘these are days of terror’. Driven to escape, the lovers seek overnight refuge in a suitably Gothic ruined convent as darkly atmospheric as a doomy oil-painting, where the dead Gorca appears to tell his daughter ‘no-one can love you more than we do.’ Her family is dead. Love has torn them apart. A love colder than death. When Vlad wakes, she’s gone. Knowing her fate, he follows her to the Inn anyway. Willingly damned by his love for her. They kiss. She bites his neck. From a story by Aleksei Tolstoy (second cousin of the more famous Leo), again it’s the bonus emotional pull that adds gravity to the plot. 

The third segment – ‘The Drop Of Water’, takes Mario Bava’s dark trilogy off on yet another tangent, this time resembling Victorian London. Making it three neat nasty tales, with no obvious theme or underlying unity, beyond Karloff’s linking narrative and a kind of ‘Tales Of The Unexpected’ tension. Unless it’s the phone? This time there’s a huge red phonogram playing jaunty Neapolitan music. And thunder. Then the telephone rings, maybe arcing the cycle full-circle back to the first female-centric story? Maybe not. Reluctantly, as the record winds down, Nurse Helen Chester (Jaqueline Pierreux) goes out into night, to a big house crawling with feral cats. The Countess who lived there is dead. She died of a heart attack while in a séance trance… or maybe it was the otherworldly presence she was contacting that killed her?

As she dresses the corpse Helen steals a ring from its dead finger, shoving it down the front of her bra as a malevolent fly buzzes. There’s atmospheric jazzy double-bass, and dolls, and the unrealistic puppet-face corpse opens its eyes after she’s closed them. All conspiring towards a general spookiness. Back in her eerily-lit room she tries the ring on. The same fly is there a-buzzing, the door creaks, and water drips tick-tick-tick sounds no matter how many times she screws the taps down tight. Then she glimpses the dead Countess in her rocking chair. The corpse gets up and seizes her around the neck with dead hands… The following morning she’s found dead of self-suffocation. She’s apparently strangled herself. And the Landlady has stolen the ring, wrenching it from her dead finger. So the cycle begins again. 

Mario Bava, who died in 1980 aged sixty-five, went on to direct ‘The Whip And The Body’ (1963), adding S&M overtones to its Gothic template, and a voice-dubbed Christopher Lee to its otherwise-Italian cast. And although distribution problems limited his access to international markets, his ‘Planet Of The Vampires’ (‘Terrore Nello Spazio’, 1965) is often cited as an influence on Ridley Scott’s first ‘Alien’ (1979), and his explicitly gruesome ‘Twitch Of The Death Nerve’ (‘Ecologia Del Delitto’, 1971) is seen as an early ‘Giallo’ precursor of the disreputable ‘Slasher’ sub-genre. While Ozzy Osborne was taking notes towards forming his own Heavy Metal band. But meanwhile Bava closes the Italian version of ‘Black Sabbath’ with a deliberate unmasking of the artifice of Horror. Boris Karloff rides furiously off into the night, until the camera draws slowly back to reveal that the horse he’s riding is a prop, with Extra dashing past with effects-foliage. The camera pulls further back, to show the studio and the camera itself. 

‘BLACK SABBATH’ 

‘BLACK SABBATH’ (Italy as ‘I Tre Volti Della Paura’, November 1963, MGM/AIP version ‘presented by James H Nicholson & Samuel Z Arkoff’, May 1964) Director: Mario Bava, plus additional US footage by Salvatore Billitteri. Producer: Salvatore Billitteri. Screenplay by Mario Bava and Alberto Bevilacqua. With ‘The Telephone (Il Telefono)’ from a story by FG Snyder (Maupassant), with Michèle Mercier (as Rosy), Lidia Alfonsi (as Mary). ‘I Wurdulak’ from a novelette by Aleksei Tolstoy, with Boris Karloff (as Gorca), Mark Damon (as Vladimire d’Urfe), Susy Andersen (as Sdenka), Massimo Righi (as Pietro), Rika Dialina (as Maria), Glauco Onorato (as Giogio). ‘The Drop Of Water (‘La Goccia de’Acqua’)’ from a story by Ivan (not Anton!) Chekhov, with Jacqueline Pierreux (as Helen Chester), Milly Monti (as the maid), Harriet Medin (as neighbour), Gustavo De Nardo (Police Inspector). 92-minutes. DVD/Blu-Ray, Arrow Films 2013 with original Italian version with Roberto Nicolosi score, plus dubbed re-edited AIP version with Les Baxter score, plus ‘Twice The Fear’ detailed feature comparing the different versions, US and Italian trailers, interview with star Mark Damon, introduction by critic Alan Jones and audio commentary by Bava biographer Tim Lucas http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk 

Featured on website: 

‘VIDEOVISTA’ (September 2013)

 

Classic Movie: Spike Milligan's 'The Bed Sitting Room'

 

THE EARTH:

 

SPIKE’S PART

 

IN ITS DOWNFALL 

Review of: 

‘THE BED SITTING ROOM’ 

with Ralph Richardson, Rita Tushingham, Marty Feldman, 

Arthur Low, Michael Hordern, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore 

(DVD-Blu-Ray, April 2019, BFI Flipside)

 

‘Well, things were going swimmingly until that… 

until they dropped the ol’, well now, you know. I slept 

 through it alright. Yes, in fact, I was in England, still 

 a-bed, albeit in a club chair, the Third World War took place. 

 I didn’t get a chance to join the regiment’ – Lord Fortnum

 

Nuclear war is no laughing matter. Yet the world of 1969 was consumed by the Cold War Doomsday threat, suspended on the precarious “Eve Of Destruction” – ‘if the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away, there’ll be no-one to save with the world in a grave.’ How does the rational mind, growing up in the Atomic Age, contemplate that prospect of imminent thermonuclear obliteration? The existential Beat Generation celebrate the moment. Live for now, because there will be no tomorrow, while listening for that Crack Of Doom On The Hydrogen Jukebox! Jeff Nuttall writes in his luminous overview of the sixties counterculture, ‘Bomb Culture’ (1968), that ‘people who had not yet reached puberty at the time of the bomb were incapable of conceiving of life with a future,’ the only certainty is what he calls ‘the crackling certainty of Now.’ The CND oppose the Superpower End Of The World stand-off with Protest Marches and Trad Jazz. While Science Fiction runs a number of fictional simulations as a terrible warning, from John Wyndham’s ‘The Chrysalids’ (1955) to Walter M Miller’s ‘A Canticle For Leibowitz’ (1960). So is Spike Milligan’s film SF? Is it speculative fiction? Perhaps surreal absurdity is the only logical reaction to an illogical ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’ megaton impasse? Duck… and Cover. 

The film opens with the sound of wind. The sun blurred through a hazy sky. Flowing magma. A burning plastic doll. A JG Ballard flooded landscape. A pylon. Survivors wander amidst a ‘Mad Max’ dereliction of debris. Caught in a kind of post-traumatic state of derangement they attempt to continue elements of their former lives in bizarre replications, trying to pretend nothing has happened, while never mentioning the ‘bomb’, preferring allusion… ‘since the thing dropped – this rude thing.’

An underground tube station on the Circle Line. The train slows to a stop. No-one gets off. It accelerates away as litter blows across the deserted platform. Arthur Lowe is ‘Father’ to a dysfunctional family unit who travel endlessly around the loop. He leaps from the train onto the platform to retrieve a chocky-bar from a slot-machine. Mona Washbourne – a serious actor with a movie career going back to 1934, is Mother. She attempts to recreate normal married life, with the wonderful Rita Tushingham as their very pregnant daughter, Penelope. ‘I wish there were more people her own age on the Circle Line’ coos Mother. ‘There are no friends left’ says Lowe firmly. Armed with a red hatchet and leather patches on the sleeves of his jacket Arthur Lowe steps out of the carriage looking for missing Penelope – only to be stranded on the platform. When he fights his way back aboard he discovers his daughter writhing in a sleeping bag with naked fiancée Alan (Richard Warwick, who had been rebellious ‘Wallace’ in Lindsay Anderson’s classic 1968 film ‘If’). 

As a smart Mod commuter, Alan is then grudgingly accepted into their party. Mother smiles approvingly. Father is suspicious. ‘Actually, sir, I’m a commuter chap. You know, backwards and forwards’ Alan explains. ‘That’s nice’ says Mother. ‘Forwards and backwards’ he emphasises. ‘How dare you!’ protests Father, sensing innuendo. ‘Does it get boring?’ she enquires innocently. ‘How really dare you say such things’ says Father, on full Captain Mainwaring mode, he glances at his pregnant daughter, adding ‘And do them.’ Penelope sniggers. When Alan suggests ‘I’d be interested in joining your party. I’m sure you could use another pair of hands,’ Father chastises ‘You keep your filthy commuter hands to yourself!’ This is straight ‘Carry On’-era double entendre. 

Two man carry an unexploded bomb suspended from the pole they shoulder, through a desolation of wrecked cars on a former motorway. 

Frank Thornton is the actor known for playing Captain Peacock in the department-store sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’, and as ‘Truly’ Truelove in ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’. Before either of those roles he was the BBC announcer who squats behind an empty TV-set frame. ‘On this the third – or is it the fourth?, anniversary of the nuclear misunderstanding which lead to the Third World War, here is the last recorded statement of the Prime Minister, as he then was, who had just succeeded his illustrious father into office, ‘I feel I am not boasting when I remind you that this was, without a shadow of a doubt, the very shortest war in living memory. Two minutes twenty-eight seconds, up to and including the grave process of signing the peace treaty, fully blotted. The great task of burying our forty-million dead was also carried out in great expediency and good will.’ The Prime Minister in the flashback clip is intended to resemble Harold Wilson, even down to using his ‘without fear of contradiction’ soundbite. He meets Chinese Premier Mao Tse Tung (Chairman Mao Zedong) on the steps of no.10 Downing Street, to announce ‘peace in our time’, in a conscious echo of PM Neville Chamberlain’s claim concerning the Munich Agreement directly before the outbreak of World War II. 

The movie dialogue catches the full alternate logic of madness. Captain Bules Martin – played by a dishevelled Michael Hordern, holds a ‘Defeat of England’ medal, as he was unable to save Buckingham Palace from total devastation. ‘Your Majesty, I’m sorry that I’ve failed you. I tried to catch the thing before it hit the Palace, but one of your corgis bit me!’ As he explains ‘I was standing by, ready to face the enemy, whoever they might be, and I couldn’t find them’ he blusters. ‘Tell me, do you know, who was the enemy?’ 

‘I haven’t the least idea’ responds Lord Fortnum of Alamein (Ralph Richardson) who wore a Top Hat with a miniature revolving radar on top, ‘I tell you, it’s the latest early-warning hat. It gives you that extra four minutes in bed.’ He refers to Bules Martin as ‘Doctor’ – ‘are you a doctor, Doctor?’ and asks for a prescription for malnourishment. ‘I’ve not been eating anything’ he explains. ‘Why is that?’ asks Martin. ‘I can’t get the stuff.’ ‘I thought, Doctor, I thought you might give me breakfast as a prescription against malnutrition.’ ‘Aw, yes, well, take, um, thirty-milligrams of egg on toast.’ But Fortnum confides he also has ‘a terrible morbid feeling’ that he’s turning into a Bed Sitting Room. When Martin confirms it, ‘eh, eh, that’s probably atomic mutations. There’s a lot of it about,’ he suggests ‘my advice, charge twenty quid rent, be mindful of drafts...’

Lord Fortnum decides he needs a second opinion, first demanding ‘what class of person are you? I am top-drawer, to put it mildly,’ but then he insists ‘I want it privately, on the National Health Service.’ The male nurse is a manic Marty Feldman wearing a short dress uniform and a bandolier of ammunition. He tells Fortnum ‘you’re not well enough to have a condition.’ Then, with trowel in hand, ‘in my opinion you need re-pointing. A full-scale conversion to a maisonette.’ ‘My god’ protests Fortnum ‘I’ve dropped a brick!’ He tries to find what is left of Belgravia, a more suitable address for his eventual transfiguration. 

He studies a bottle of green milk. ‘The radiation’s rising. Still, one shouldn’t grumble too much.’ 

Writing the ground-breaking scripts for ‘The Goons’ radio series had driven Spike to the brink of nervous breakdowns, while bending the medium of sound into mental images of magnificently epic silliness. His comic-satiric novel ‘Puckoon’ (1963) preceded his semi-autobiographical series of war memoirs beginning with ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall’ (1971), while his absurdist poetry, in the tradition of Edward Lear was always a ludicrous delight. But it was while Spike was appearing as a tatterdemalion ‘Ben Gunn’ on a stage presentation of ‘Treasure Island’ during winter 1961 into 1962, produced by Bernard Miles, that they began talking around the idea of a one-act post-nuclear play to be called ‘The Bed Sitting Room’. 

Co-written with John Antrobus it premiered at Canterbury’s ‘Marlow Theatre’ 12 February 1962, only to be expanded and staged by Bernard Miles at London’s ‘Mermaid Theatre’ (from 31 January 1963). Revived in 1967 it toured successfully and played the prestigious ‘Saville Theatre’. Critic John Brosnan observes that ‘the play on which the film was based was a much-improvised piece of slapstick, and what remains of the original material clashes awkwardly with chillingly bleak settings showing the realistic aftermath of an atomic war – the shattered dome of St Paul’s Cathedral protruding from a swamp, a line of wrecked cars along a disembodied length of motorway, a grim landscape dominated by great mounds of sludge and piles of discarded boots, broken plates and false teeth’ (in ‘The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction’ edited by Peter Nicholls, 1981 edition). To me, the two elements – the comedic and the chillingly bleak, not only elide together perfectly but reinforce each other. 

Dick Lester had begun his directorial feature-film career with the modest Pop-exploitational ‘It’s Trad, Dad’ (1962), enlivening the Helen Shapiro musical with clever sight gags, characters who talk back to the narrator, plus sequences where the action stops, accelerates, then runs backwards. That kind of low-budget innovation made him the perfect catalyst to direct the Beatles ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (1964), but by then he’d already discovered the Goons – another sympathetic four-piece of co-conspirators, with Spike Milligan in particular sharing an affectionate mockery of militarism and lost imperial greatness. They’d worked together on the short eleven-minute sketch-film ‘The Running, Jumping And Standing Still Film’ (1959), providing credentials that fell into place when it came to reuniting them for ‘The Bed Sitting Room’. ‘The really awful thing’ said Lester later, ‘is that we were able to film most of those scenes in England without having to fake it. All that garbage is real. A lot of it was filmed behind the Steel Corporation in Wales… endless piles of acid sludge where every tree is dead. And there’s a place in Stoke where they’ve been throwing reject plates since the war and it has become a vast landscape of broken plates.’ 

Nuclear weapons irradiate sixties Pop culture with the glow of radioactive isotopes. There’d been H-Bomb tests throughout the fifties – weapons with the power of multiple Hiroshima’s – with the world coming within a hair’s-breadth of all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. And what Peter Watkins bleak documentary-style account of a nuclear strike – in ‘The War Game’ (1966), filmed for the BBC, and then banned by them as being too horrifying to broadcast, Spike Milligan achieves through the medium of ridicule and absurdist comedy. I watch both with an equal degree of skin-crawling fascination. They scare and mesmerise in equal measure. Was this all my tomorrows? Is this the world I would one day walk? Or at least, a fractured through-the-looking-glass version of this? 

Ken Thorne’s soundtrack succeeds in delivering the impossible remit of being both jaunty and poignant, but he already had a track record of collaborations going back to Richard Lester’s ‘It’s Trad Dad!’ and the Beatles ‘Help!’ (1965), as well as for Peter Sellers ‘The Magic Christian’ (1969). He had an unexpected hit record of his own with the stately trumpet-led instrumental “Theme From The Legion’s Last Patrol” (HMV POP 1176), a no.4 on the 29 August 1963 chart beneath Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas, Freddie & The Dreamers and the Searchers. 

Ex-Goon Peter Sellers had made his own contribution to satirising Cold War madness with ‘Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb’ (1964), the blackest of black comedies which ends with the start of nuclear Armageddon. It could be argued that Spike Milligan’s movie resumes from the aftermath of that appalling climax. The fulfilment of the promise that we’ll meet again… 

Meanwhile, Arthur Lowe’s family determine to leave the tube-train as Penelope’s seventeen-month pregnancy extends. Alan wears a white suit. There’s a ‘The Sound Of Music’ movie-poster on the tube wall. Breaking into the Left Luggage office the family discover comic-actor ‘Professor’ Jimmy Edwards lying on the shelving. He’s been waiting there for three years ‘to be collected.’ Oddly enough, the up-escalator is still operating, although it deposits them one by one into an endless waste of desolation. The family carry a trunk between them, which they salvaged from Left Luggage, through mounds of smashed ceramics and crockery. ‘He’s not a bad lad’ concedes Arthur Lowe, as he and Alan discuss Penelope’s figure. ‘She’s got big busts, hasn’t she, for a girl her age?’ comments her father approvingly.’ Alan agrees. When Daddy observes that ‘well, this bust, especially, it seems the nipples stand out more on that one’ Mother points out that ‘Father’s very observant. He was in the Corp!’ When Penelope protests that ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about me in front of Alan. He doesn’t want to know about my busts’ Alan protests that ‘I do! I do!’ And Penelope smiles a conspiratorial smile. All the while they’re unaware they’re being stalked by Feldman’s NHS. 

Two policemen – Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, hover overhead in the wrecked shell of a Morris Minor Panda car suspended beneath a makeshift balloon, addressing any survivors they see through a loud-hailer to ‘keep moving.’ Urging ‘you can’t stop anywhere, Sir, as you very well know. We don’t want to stay in one place long enough for the enemy to have another chance at us, do we? Not until our pre-emptive strike is launched. Do we Sir? Do we Sir!’ in the unlikely event of a renewed outbreak of hostilities.

Spike Milligan himself attempts to pedal a pushbike through a fetid lake of tyres and garbage. He delivers a slapstick pie-in-the-face. 

Former fellow-Goon Harry Secombe – who had bizarrely hit no.2 on the ‘NME’ Pop chart as recently as April 1967 with his quasi-operatic rendition of the Charlie Chaplin composition “This Is My Song”, appears with a kind of Speak & Spell toy in a fall-out shelter. He’s listed in the credits as ‘Shelter Man’, and first emerges with rifle and tin hat demanding ‘Have they dropped it yet?’ As a surviving Regional Seat Of Government he spends his time searching through spools of old film he claims carry evidence proving that the military infected the bombs with germs, to inflict measles on the population in order to kill them off. Then he reminisces about the time he shot his wife and his mother as they plead with him to let them into his shelter. His current ‘wife’ Doris is a picture of a topless woman attached to the wall, concealing a food-supply which they share. ‘I was in the Army, actually. I’m a Captain’ he tells Bules Martin. ‘Oh, I say! What regiment?’ ‘Oh, we didn’t know, owing to the Official Secrets Act.’ And later he prefigures Marlon Brando in ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979), with ‘Oh, the horror. Oh, the horror! I can’t look!’ although it could reference back to Joseph Conrad’s novel – ‘Heart Of Darkness’ (1899) on which the movie was based?

Feldman’s crazed NHS Nurse stalks Penelope and her family, in order to present Mother with her death certificate. ‘What I have here, Sir, is your wife’s Death Certificate.’ Father politely thanks him, while Penelope protests ‘but, Mum is alive!’ ‘I’m afraid not, Dear’ he tells her firmly as he hands Mother the certificate. When Penelope insists ‘Mother’s alive’ Mother corrects her, ‘well, I thought I was, Dear. By rights, I should be. But how can you tell if it’s here in black and white?’ When Feldman insists ‘it’s your wife being alive that seems to be all the trouble, Sir,’ they apologise, ‘oh, I’m sorry. We don’t want to cause any trouble’ and Mother chides ‘don't argue with the Nurse, Dear. She’s bound to know best what’s best for us.’ Their blind acceptance and unthinking respect for authority overrides the evidence of their own senses. ‘Do I lie down or something?’ Mother enquires helpfully. 

When Feldman attempts to snare her with a net, Mother falls into Secombe’s shelter. She opens a drawer in her chest to take out a handkerchief – perhaps a conscious reference to Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting ‘Lady With Drawers’ (1936)? She can no longer move. Her legs are becoming stiff. Hideous mutation caused by chromosomal damage inflicted as a result of atomic radiation was a symptom gleefully seized upon by both gory SF and Horror comics alike. But transformations had never happened like this before. Mother becomes a cupboard, crying plaintively ‘I’m a cupboard. Will nobody close my drawers?’ and later, as Bules Martin climbs inside her, ‘be gentle with me.’ While Father begins to exhibit birdlike traits. And Lord Fortnum calls Martin to inform him that he is now a Bed Sitting Room, with a 29 Cul de Sac Place address. The lease-terms ‘No Coloureds. No Children. And definitely no coloured children’ seems grossly offensive in the light of twenty-first century sensitivities – as well as the words ‘No Wogs’ smudged into the dirt on the window, but this was another time. As the title of John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon’s autobiography ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’ (1994) indicates, this was regrettably a far from uncommon attitude. 

Bules Martin enters the Bed Sitting Room. Then the Mao Tse Tung figure pushes the cupboard-that-is-Mother into the room. Finding himself alone, Father is measured by Peter Cook & Dudley Moore of the Police, ‘I must say, they seemed rather impressed by my inside leg’ he gloats as he guiltily attempts to conceal the chest taken from the Left Luggage department. After attempts to dispose of the incriminating trunk it is retrieved by the Police flying car. Only to discover the fugitive Jimmy Edwards inside the trunk! 

Penelope hunts for missing Mummy, assisted by Alan who climbs a pylon but only succeeds in short-circuiting the man who cycles to generate the existing electricity supply. Milligan – as ‘Mate’, confronts Ronald Fraser – as ‘The Army, to demand ‘are you the bloke officer what was in charge with the nuclear detergent in the last atomic war?’ ‘I am he’ admits Fraser. ‘Bad news. It has been returned to sender’ says Mate. ‘Sixty-five million pounds it costs to develop that bomb... We could have won, you know. Damnable bad luck!’ In another ludicrous mime with all the comic precision of old silent comedy, Roy Kinnear sets up a barber’s chair in the desert. He holds up a photo in place of a mirror.

Bules Martin asks Father’s permission to court Penelope and she follows him reluctantly along the seashore where he makes a heart for her in the sand. Father agrees, believing it will help him in his ambition to become Prime Minister. There’s a mock-wedding ceremony held using the submerged dome of St Paul’s Cathedral as an appropriate backdrop. An underwater Vicar reads extracts from the DH Lawrence novel ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ as the new Bible. The book had achieved notoriety following its celebrated obscenity trial at the Old Bailey. Once the ceremony is over Milligan places a parking meter beside the marital bed. But as Bules Martin runs off to get his virility test, Penelope is soon writhing around with Alan in a bed on the roof of the Bed Sitting Room itself, where she goes into labour. 

‘What she has need of is medical science’ advises Feldman’s NHS midwife, he recommends that the baby stays inside her womb, ‘we have this new system. Instead of moving the baby out, we move the furniture in.’ And ‘we should have asked ourselves, ‘Is it really necessary for people to leave the womb nowadays? That’s when most of the trouble seems to start in this wicked world.’ She’d already told Alan ‘I can’t go through with this. Having this monster,’ but by now it’s too late, she delivers it. Father, who has moved into the Bed Sitting Room, is selected to become Prime Minister, ‘I always knew my inside leg would lead to power.’ While she pushes the unseen baby in a supermarket shopping trolly, but by the time she goes to show Father the baby, he has been mutated into a green parakeet, only to be cooked and eaten. Lifting the serving dish on the silver salver and carving the tiny bird-body. ‘We’ve never had it so good’ gloats Milligan – quoting Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s optimistic 1957 speech. ‘In the hurly-burly of post-atomic living’ people head back inside the Bed Sitting Room. 

In a sequence that vaguely prefigures the Barry Hines-scripted TV-movie ‘Threads’ (1984) in which atomic war results in a nuclear winter, and Jane (Victoria O’Keefe) gives birth to a presumably disfigured baby which she looks at with an expression of sheer revulsion, Penelope and Alan find their baby dead in its carrying bag.

When Pete & Dud begin to demolish the Bed Sitting Room Fortnum speaks up seemingly as the voice of god, but is promptly disabused by Bules Martin’s ‘here, hold on a second. You don’t sound like god. You sound like Lord Fortnum.’ Who admits, ‘I – eh, I also do impressions.’ Radiation mist swirls around them. ‘Do you think we’ve come to the end of it all?’ queries Penelope. ‘We’ll just have to keep going’ says a stoic Alan, ‘we’re British.’ 

In a seeming fantasy fast-forward Penelope has a normal healthy child and they walk in fields of flowers. Peter Cook delivers a spoof-inspirational Churchillian speech of hope and optimism, ‘the lion shall lie down with the lamb, the goat shall give suck to the tiny bee...,’ while holding out the promise that surgeons have developed a mutation-cure that entails full-body transplant. Finally, a military band pays homage to Mrs Ethel Shroake (Dandy Nichols) of 393A High Street, Leytonstone, who’s been traced as the last survivor in succession to the throne. Nuclear war is no laughing matter. The Cold War thermonuclear stalemate would continue. ‘God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake, Long Live Mrs Ethel Shroake, God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake...’

 

‘That, I’m afraid, was the end of the news. Our next 

 scheduled program will be on August Bank Holiday, 

when Charlton Heston will wrestle his Holiness, the Pope, 

 for the sportsman of the year title. Until then, all walk 

 backwards into long shot while ‘Good Night’ is given’ 

(BBC announcer)

 

‘THE BED SITTING ROOM’ (United Artists, June 1969, Berlin, 25 March 1970, UK) Produced by Oscar Lewenstein & Richard Lester. Directed by Richard Lester. Written by Spike Milligan & John Antrobus, adapted from their play and with additional dialogue by Charles Wood. Ralph Richardson (as Lord Fortnum of Alamein), Rita Tushingham (as Penelope), Michael Hordern (as Bules Martin), Arthur Lowe (as Father), Mona Washbourne (as Mother), Peter Cook (as Police Inspector), Dudley Moore (as Police Sergeant), Spike Milligan (as Mate), Harry Secombe (as Shelter Man), Marty Feldman (as NHS Nurse Arthur), Jimmy Edwards (as Nigel), Roy Kinnear (as Plastic Mac Man), Ronald Fraser (as The Army), Richard Warwick (as Alan), Frank Thornton (as The BBC), Dandy Nichols (as Mrs Ethel Shroake), Jack Shepherd (as Underwater Vicar), Henry Woolf (as Electricity Man), Cecil Cheng (as Chinaman ‘Mao Tse Tung’), Bill Wallis (as The Prime Minister), Ronnie Brody (‘Ronald J Brody’ as The Chauffeur), Gordon Rollings (as Drip-Feed Patient), Edward Malin (‘Eddie Main’ as Club Waiter), Chris Konyils (as Policeman). Music by Ken Thorne. 91-minutes. 

(DVD-Blu-Ray, April 2019, BFI Flipside, presented in both High Definition and Standard Definition, with original trailer, three ‘Bernard Braden Now And Then’ interviews from 1967, Richard Lester (18-mins), Spike Milligan (41-mins) and Peter Cook (31-mins), with fully Illustrated booklet with film notes, contemporary review, original promotional materials and biographies.