Antonio Margheriti and The Waiting Game

It's been a while since my last post. This is mainly because I was in the final sprint of trying to finish the first full draft of my PhD thesis. I finally submitted it a month ago, and now I am waiting for my supervisors to tell me what's wrong with it.

In the meantime I started a new blog, which feels a bit like I'm cheating on this one. It's purely about the films of Antonio Margheriti, who I think has been critically ignored, and is written off as "not as good as Mario Bava." I hope to redress this through the blog, and eventually I hope to get a book out of it. Or maybe a DVD extra or two. You can find this blog here, or on the blog roll on the right. I'm really enjoying writing about his films so far, with Danza macabra, aka Castle of Blood being a particular revelation.

As soon as I get feedback from my supervisors I can make the final corrections and get the thing sent off to the external and internal examiners. I'm just desperate at this point to get it all finished so I can move on with my life and get a job!

Conference Papers, and The Tyranny of Choice

I have submitted a proposal for a conference being held in Rome this June. The whole conference is devoted to the giallo, a film genre I have to admit to only now becoming acquainted with. But my desire to expand my academic reach, coupled with the idea of spending some time in Rome again, has prompted me to get on board. I had previously seen The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, and my interest in Mario Bava has been developing for a couple of years now, so it is not impossible that I can find something to say on it! Indeed, I think I have found an angle that fits well with my own research interests, and hopefully will be fairly original for the conference. If I get accepted I'll start presenting some of the research here.

I also found out last week about a three-day conference in Paris on Hammer films. This sounds like my sort of thing too, but writing academically about Hammer is out of my current comfort zone. I wrote about some Hammer films during my degree, but that was a long time ago and I have felt, somewhat arrogantly, that I have "moved on" from Hammer.But it still has a hold over me. By a rough count today I have over eighty Hammer films on DVD and blu ray, and I have written extensively about them for Cinema Retro. I have interviewed stars and directors, and been to loads of Hammer events and conventions. I have had my photo taken with many a Hammer Glamour girl, as well as many of the ageing male stars too. I feel like my problem is that I'm in too deep with Hammer. It is such a vast subject area, that to choose just one small part to present a paper on seems virtually impossible.

Surrounding myself with DVDs today, and looking through the list of suggested topic areas by the conference organisers, I think I have come up with an idea. It has nothing to do with my PhD, but I feel I can justify it by saying I am stretching myself as an academic. If I can speak on a wider variety of subjects, I'm going to get more exposure in the global academic community. This, like I said, is how I justify it to myself anyway. Spending a few hours of a day staring at Hammer DVDs has to be justified one way or another.

So I think I've narrowed it down to The Stranglers of Bombay and The Terror of the Tongs.

I've also submitted a proposal for a conference on exploitation cinema being held in London this May. So I've gone from doing one paper in the past two years to potentially writing and presenting three within a couple of weeks of each other. Fun times ahead.

1961

Today I've been through the Monthly Film Bulletin index for 1961 to catalogue all the international films reviewed in that year. This is the most complete record I have found to work out what was distributed. The MFB were very thorough and reviewed virtually every film released every month, and they also include production and (most importantly for me) the distributor.

In 1961 there were one hundred and forty-eight international films distributed and seen by British audiences. Sixty-two of these are some form of co-production, the most common being France and Italy. The variety of countries that had films shown here is quite astonishing. It is no surprise to find Italy and France, but also in cinemas were films from Pakistan, Kenya, East Germany, Brazil and many more. Twenty-two different countries in total.

There are some hilarious titles in there, such as The Cow and I (La Vache et le prisonnier), a France/ W. Germany co-production, or the exciting Death Comes From Outer Space (La Morte viene dallo spazio), an Italian/ French co-production, and possibly Italy's first science fiction film.

Amongst the films of 1961 are a few that were distributed by Compton Films, including Assassins in the Sun (Assassinos), from Brazil, and The Captive (Vacances en enfer) from France.

There are no prizes for guessing why the Italian I Piaceri del sabato notte, which translates as "the pleasures of Saturday night", was retitled Call Girls of Rome by Gala Film Distributors. This kind of import was something of a speciality for Gala, and I expect to see their name crop up frequently amongst the sexploitation titles.

These are scans of press books that I found amongst the vast collection at the Cinema Museum. I need to go back there some time soon.

Rule Britalia

Today I've been reading a fascinating paper by Steve Chibnall, Hammer Lover and Professor in Residence at The Cinema Museum. He's custodian of the Hammer archive at De Montfort University and wrote that brilliant Pete Walker book, amongst other things. This paper, published by the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television in Volume 33, Issue 2, 2013, is fascinating, and provides an interesting historical context for my studies. In "Rome, Open for British Production: The lost world of 'Britalian' films, 1946-1954", Steve details the relationship the British film industry had with war-torn Italy, and essentially posits that it was the British who kicked their industry back into shape, ready to become the incredible film-making machine they were in the 1960s.

You can download the paper here.

I went to Steve's amazing Hammer festival in Leicester last summer, which you can read about in my report over at Cinema Retro.

As Steve covers her first film, and quotes from Picturegoer extensively, it seemed like a good excuse to post this cover of Gina Lollabrigida from my own collection.