It's been up there for two weeks and no one told me! However, now I know I'm telling everyone. If you want to see what a thesis given an unconditional pass looks like (I'm showing off I know, but indulge me), you can see it on the Sussex Library Database.
If you would rather wait, in another year or so I'll have turned it into a book. Hopefully. But for now at least it's somewhere, and I'm a doctor.
Like the legendary peplum heroes of old, I bravely embarked on a noble six-year quest to become a Doctor in Film History. Some scoffed at the thought. Some said it couldn't be done. Some said that I should do something more useful with my time. Actually, I'm not sure if anyone did any of those things. Generally people have been quite supportive. Anyway, to continue... I battled my way through libraries, archives, film fairs, seminars, conferences, and above all my own laziness, to eventually submit a completed thesis, which following a viva last week, has netted me a Doctorate. I was given an unconditional pass, which came as something of a shock after the two hours of suggested changes. It turned out the feedback was so that I could turn it into a book to submit to the BFI. They thought it was a major piece of scholarship which makes an important contribution to film history. Which is nice. I am trying to celebrate this week by relaxing and catching up with TV shows on the Sky box, but I also have 50 essays waiting to be marked, so there's that to bring me back down to Earth. So there you have it. You too could be a doctor in just six years. Easy.
I wrote my first PhD proposal in 2011. It was about live TV drama of the 1950s and 1960s. I didn't get anywhere with that one, and I started to look at my collection of Bonditis ephemera and wonder what I was going to do with it. Some time in 2012 I visited the Cinema Museum for the first time, and looking around at all the fantastic posters and collectibles I began to think that maybe there was a PhD in all of that. Having spoken at Cine Excess a couple of times, and given a guest lecture on British cult film in 2011 at Brunel, I applied for their fee waiver with a proposal that looked at film promotion in the 1960s. it was very vague, but knowing some of the academics there through Cine Excess, I got in.
I started with Brunel in September 2012, and my supervisor was the brilliant Leon Hunt. He helped me begin to shape my idea into something which might actually work. his own passion for Italian cult cinema in particular began to interest me. My own historical interests were very Brit-focused, and he helped me to see that there was a whole continent of fascinating European film that might be worth exploring. Coupled with my collection of Bonditis material, a 1960s spy film from Germany distributed by Compton, a British company, ideas began to coalesce. The notion that one could study the distribution of European cult film in the UK in the 1960s took hold, and that was it. I loved studying, and the fee waiver was a massive help, but I still had to work as a college lecturer for three days a week. This was a real struggle, and after a year I knew that I was never going to get anywhere without more financial backing.
Jobs.ac.uk told me that Sussex were offering full scholarships through the AHRC-sponsored CHASE programme. This was worth a shot, and I applied. This was late 2013, and the fact that by this point I had already written a literature review and knew what I wanted my project to be really helped shape a decent application. I was offered a place, but after a long wait I was turned down for the scholarship. This was a massive disappointment, particularly as 2014 was already shaping up to be quite a difficult year, and I was so desperate to get out of my current employment. About two months after that, as I was still working slowly on my research, I received an email out of the blue from the head of Music, Film and Media at Sussex to tell me that the department wanted to offer me a scholarship anyway. My application had been the strongest film one they had and they were very keen to have me. That was the single greatest email I have ever received, even better than the time Barbara Steele asked to friend me on Linkedin. I should probably frame it. From that point on my life took an upward turn, and my Doctorate would live after all!
Three years and four months later I have just submitted my finished thesis, all 85,000 words (plus a 50,000 word appendix) and am now waiting for a viva. My supervisors have been brilliant, particularly comedy legend Andy Medhurst, who for the last year has shepherded me through more or less single-handedly. This research has opened up so many great opportunities for me, and I hope that it will lead to an actual career. A decent full-time job somewhere would be a good start at least. There have also been exciting media moments along the way, such as my appearance on The One Show a couple of years ago, and yesterday I spoke down the line to Patrick Cox, a BBC journalist based in Boston, about the development of the 'X' certificate in the UK and the US. He contacted me having found my chapter in the Routledge British Cinema History book which was published a year or so ago. I consider myself very lucky!
I'm not sure how much more I will use this blog now that my research has finished, at least for the time being. I'm sure eventually I will be encouraged to turn my thesis into a book. I'm considering a book just on the Fancey family at least. However, as well as catching up on some of my other writing commitments for magazines, I really need to get on and finish my Norman J. Warren book which has been in the background for about nine years now. He's been very patient, but it has to be done this year! Still, this is the life I have created for myself, and I'm happy with it.
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!
Pit of Darkness opens on a bomb site somewhere in London, still a common thing in the early 1960s. A young boy spots what appears to be a body down amongst the rubble, but when he investigates he discovers the man is still alive. Richard Logan (William Franklyn) slowly comes round and realises that he has been "coshed" by some ruffians. He thanks the boy for his help and makes his way home. When he walks in his wife Julie (Moira Redmond) is shocked: Richard thinks he is only three hours late, but he has actually been missing for three weeks. He has no memory of his whereabouts and spends the next eighty minutes piecing together the mystery: the fact that he works for a company who specialise in making burglar-proof safes might have something to do with it.
Pit of Darkness came late in the career of Lance Comfort, a solid British director who specialised in supporting features, more commonly known as 'B' films. To Hammer fans he will be best known as the director of the now lost comedy The Ugly Duckling (1959) with Bernard Bresslaw, or at least if it is not lost it is a film which no one wants to let out of the Hammer vault. Pit of Darkness forms part of a sort of "Darkness" trilogy in Comfort's career, which was most likely unintentional. He previously directed Daughter of Darkness (1948), as well as the horror classic Devils of Darkness (1965) shortly before he died. Darkness is a good, go-to word to use in a film title, as it can mean different things depending on the theme of the film. In this particular case the pit of darkness in question is purely metaphorical. Admittedly Logan does wake up in a bomb site, a pit of darkness of a sort, but it is the darkness of amnesia which is he trying to claw out.
The film was released with a 'U' certificate from the British Board of Film Censors following some brief cuts. It seems to have been well received. In the December 1961 issue of Monthly Film BulletinPit of Darkness was summarised as having a "Complex, fanciful plot made plausible by effective writing and direction. The pace is brisk, there are some spirited fisticuffs, and there is the personality of William Franklyn - unbeatable in suggesting solid virtues behind a rakish, smooth exterior." In the excellent The British 'B' Film by Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane Pit of Darkness is compared to other Lance Comfort films, who despite the low budgets and quick turnaround generally managed to raise them above being merely formulaic: "All Comfort's films are persuasive narratives, marked by absence of sentimentality and the whiff of human reality, by a feeling for melodramatic tension and for thematic contrasts underlined by a visual style which can move into the expressive and the metaphoric." (p. 142-143)
Butcher's Film Distributors were the typical independent distribution company. It appears they were in business as distributors and occasional producers from the early 1930s, mainly with factual short films such as Strictly Vegetarian (1932, unknown) and the occasional western or thriller like Gorilla Ship (1932, Frank Strayer, US: International Film Studios).
A vital point in the plot pivots on Logan's recollection of the song "My Heart is the Lover," which we hear over and over throughout the film, so it is interesting to see that the song was released in sheet music form. This is most likely the only product tie-in for Pit of Darkness. It is an enjoyable thriller featuring safe-cracking, explosions and a blonde femme fatale, played by Jacqueline Jones. When she first appeared on screen I was convinced it was Caron Gardner. The film also features performances from Anthony Booth, later to be Robin Askwith's best mate and Tony Blair's father-in-law, and a young and very beautiful Nanette Newman.
I saw this when it was broadcast by Talking Pictures TV, the freeview channel which is connected to distributor Renown Pictures. If you are a fan of obscure British 'B' movies this is one of the best channels out there. They don't always have the best picture quality, or even the correct aspect ratio, but it is the only place you are likely to see this sort of stuff.
It's been far too long since I last wrote in this blog. As 2017 hit, so did the realisation that I need to finish my PhD this year and find a full-time job, given that my scholarship runs out this summer. So it is fair to say that a certain amount of panic has gripped me for the past four months. I have applied for several jobs so far both around the UK and abroad, currently to no avail. It's difficult not to feel a certain amount of despondency, but I am still remaining optimistic. There is a Film Studies lecturer job out there somewhere with my name on the office door.
Whilst applying for jobs I am also attempting to finish my PhD. I totalled up my word count so far and realised that what I really needed was another chapter. I have gone against the advice of my supervisors, who when I first suggested the idea shot it down, and decided to write about the peplum. Amongst other factors, the knowledge that Hercules Unchained was the most popular film in Britain in 1960 (according to box-office receipts) was one of the pieces of information that piqued my interest in the distribution of international popular cinema in Britain in the first place.
I have been collecting promotional material to do with the peplum film since I started this research, given that people like Compton handled many of these Italian sword-and-sandal films in the early 1960s. It seemed like a shame not to use them, so armed with a handful of original press books and a collection of downloads from rarelust.com and YouTube I began writing a new chapter. I have also picked up a few books including a recent title from Robert Rushing so had plenty of information and research to draw on. It was the easiest, quickest piece of writing I had ever done. In five days I had written 5000 words, which for me is highly productive.
At the end of another successful day of writing I was also trying to multi-task. I have been making DVDs of my Dad's old home videos, and one of them needed compiling and exporting into a new file before I could burn it to DVD. I assembled it on a Premiere Pro timeline and hit export, thinking my Mac could handle working on this in the background whilst I continued writing. When I went to return to my Word file it would not open. It had disappeared. My heart raced and I panicked. What quickly transpired was that Premiere was trying to export this video to the folder I had selected, but as bonus was also writing it to the folder with this chapter in (which was on the same external hard drive) and was writing video metadata information over my chapter. I stopped Premiere exporting, but it was too late. I spent the next two hours trying every type of file recovery possible, including an hour's pointless chat with a Microsoft helpdesk, all to no avail: The file wasn't deleted. It could not be recovered. It had been written over. My chapter so far was gone.
Maciste, aka Goliath (Gordon Scott) in Goliath and the Vampires
I felt like Goliath here, only instead of an uprooted tree I wanted to hurl my Mac out of the window. I had enjoyed a week of unbridled productivity, and it was lost. I had not backed it up anywhere, or emailed a copy to my wife to show off. I learned a painful lesson, scribbled as much down on a piece of paper that I could remember, and immediately backed up all my other writing on Dropbox, where I now save everything.
Goliath's fiance Guja (Leonora Ruffo) in Goliath and the Vampires
I have started again, but I am not enjoying it half as much this time. What I have written is possibly better, but I will never know. Occasionally I remember that something I am trying to write now was worded in a much better way last time, but I don't know what it was. It's frustrating. However, I've had other ideas as I'm writing that I had not put in last time, so overall it will probably be okay. I had a good research trip to London just the day after I lost it all, where I visited the Cinema Museum and the BBFC archives, so I have tons of material. What I have struggled with since is finding the time to sit and write. It has just been the Easter holidays and I also have lots of coursework to mark, so that perfect week where I could just write and write and write has been hard to replicate. However, now the teaching and marking are almost done it will get better. It has to! My goal is to submit a first completed draft of the thesis by the beginning of June. So learn the lesson from me and make sure your work is backed up. Please!
Last weekend I gave a paper on the censorship and legal problems around two Swedish sex education films which were released here in the mid-1970s. I came across this story as it involved Jacey cinemas and the Fancey family, both of whom I had been researching.
The paper was part of the Sex and the Cinema conference at the University of Kent. It was an excellent conference and I met some interesting people. I also had very positive feedback, which is always nice. It's also reassuring to see other people's papers and realise that the areas in which I'm researching are also of interest to other academics, and that I'm not misjudging this whole thing.
You can read the paper on my Academia.edu profile here.
Alan Yates (Carl Yorke) and Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi) in the green inferno
I was recently invited to participate in The Bloody Pit podcast with Rod Barnett. The subject of our discussion was Cannibal Holocaust. I feel a bit of a personal connection with this film because I interviewed the director, Ruggero Deodato, at Cine Excess in 2011 when he received a lifetime achievement award. This interview went well and was published in the magazine Diabolique. As I explain in the podcast, that was the first time I had ever seen the film, and it made a very strong impression on me.
Ruggero Deodato (right) with Italian actor Giovano Lombardo Radice, who was providing translation.
This photo was used (without my permission) on the back of a Shameless Entertainment box set of Ruggero Deodato films. They sent me some free stuff by way of apology, so we're all cool now. In the summer of 2015 I attended a film conference in Rome and was lucky enough to meet up with Deodato again, where he was pleased that I was asking to sign a DVD of his personal favourite, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man.
Also, when I was a fresh-faced innocent at Cine Excess 2010 I had the opportunity to meet Cannibal Holocaust star Francesca Ciardi, the ill-fated Faye Daniels.
So as I said, I feel like I know Cannibal Holocaust and it's participants personally. I'm even friends with Carl Yorke on Facebook, who played Alan Yates. I wished him happy birthday last week.
If you would like to hear our in-depth discussion, where we cover the highs and lows of this powerful and provocative film, you can find it on iTunes or click below to visit the Bloody Pit blog.
It does not seem to matter how many times I say I'm going to move away from studying sexploitation films, I still seem to end up back here. I was approached a few months ago and asked to contribute a chapter proposal for a journal, or book (I'm not sure) on "X" rated 1960s British cinema, which is of course right up my street. I quickly wrote something, submitted it and promptly forgot all about it, to the point where three months later when I was contacted to say my proposal had been accepted I had no memory whatsoever of submitting one.
So here I am now, attempting to gather my thoughts on Secrets of a Windmill Girl, another "classic" of the 1960s sexploitation scene. Luckily the film has been released on DVD by Screenbound, formerly Odeon Entertainment, on a double-bill with Naked as Nature Intended (1961, George Harrison Marks), a film I have absolutely no intention of writing about (beyond the brief mention it already has in my thesis). It was made for Compton Films by the directing team of Arnold Louis Miller and Stanley Long. Long was the cinematographer on all their projects, and together they had already made the "Mondo" films London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) for Compton. It was when shooting sequences for the latter that Stanley Long attended rehearsals for the final revue at the Windmill Theatre. This footage was not used in Primitive London, but would go on to become central to Secrets of a Windmill Girl.
Since the death of producer Vivian Van Damme in 1960, who had been putting on Follies Bergère-style shows since the 1930s, the Windmill had been in decline and closed its doors in 1964. Under the watchful eye of the Lord Chamberlain, theatre censorship meant that nudity was allowed on a public stage, as long as there was no movement, the logic being that we had naked statues in public and they were fine. The Windmill, being a theatre rather than a strip club, had to follow these rules very strictly, but the 1960s saw the rise of the striptease show, as well as "stag" films on 8mm film, which meant that the Windmill's 'Revuedeville' was becoming increasingly old-fashioned in modern-day Soho. The theatre was sold to the men behind Compton, Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser, who converted it into a cinema, which it had originally been until Mrs Henderson turned it into a theatre in 1931. The Windmill had gone full circle.
Klinger and Tenser decided to immortalise the theatre and the Windmill girls and commissioned Miller and Long to make what was in effect their first full-length feature film (they had made the nudist odyssey Take Off Your Clothes and Live three years earlier, but that was basically an hour-length travelogue with no sync sound). It is an odd, cheap-looking film in which the inexperience of the director is matched only by the inexperience of the cast.
A then-unknown Pauline Collins plays Pat, who with her childhood friend Linda (April Wilding, daughter of Lord Harry Pilkington) audition successfully for the Windmill, having ambitions to make it big in the West End. Stage manager Mike (played by Martin Jarvis!) has a soft spot for Linda, who is portrayed as the sensible, shy one, whereas Pat is gregarious and up for anything, which ultimately leads to affairs, psychedelic parties and gang rape. This goes by without a second glance, as her ultimate fate is to become a stripper performing in clubs and stag parties in front of horribly sleazy men who should be at home with their wives. The film actually starts with Pat getting into a sports car carrying balloons with an unknown man, both of whom are clearly drunk. They race around town before crashing headlong into a wall, killing them instantly. Linda, who is now a successful singer, is visited by Inspector Thomas (veteran film and TV actor Derek Bond) in her dressing room, where he breaks the news and asks her to identify the body.
The next day he visits her at home and she begins to tell him the whole sorry story about Pat. The bulk of the film is then made up of scenes from their lives with Linda's well-spoken voiceover. If she is really supposed to be telling all this to the Inspector, she is giving him detail which is totally irrelevant to his investigation. Indeed it is never made clear exactly why he needs to know the story of Pat's life, when surely he needs to spend more time working out why the driver was drunk and how they crashed. Nevertheless we are supposed to believe that he is sitting in Linda's flat listening to her entire life story. This is the source of much unintentional hilarity, such as when we see them as young schoolgirls and Pat, always trouble, encourages Linda to skip school. It is some of the funniest child acting I have seen in a long time, and the little girl playing Pat actually looks towards the camera at the end of her lines as if seeking approval from the director before she walks away. Later in the film Linda seems to think it is necessary to tell Inspector Thomas all about the other Windmill Girls, beginning with how they get up in the morning and travel to work. She even at one point says "Some travelled long distances every day, like Eileen here, who lived way out in Rochester, Kent." That use of the word "here" makes it sound as if she is sitting with the Inspector in her flat showing him all this on her home projector. Or perhaps Arnold Louis Miller is deliberately creating some Brechtian alienation, drawing attention to the artificial construction of the film, mirroring the artificiality of the Windmill shows themselves. Perhaps.
The bulk of the film is made up of dance and cabaret performances on the Windmill stage itself. What is odd is that we frequently see Pat and Linda in the dressing room, getting ready to go on, or standing in the wings, but they never come out on to the stage itself. They never once perform in any of the dances, and often the costumes they are getting into are totally different to those the actual women are wearing once we see the dance sequences. This is because Stanley Long had shot those sequences more than a year earlier, but no attempt is made to match them together, and surely it would not have been too difficult to shoot some extra dance scenes. There are also several scenes featuring the several of the girls going through a new dance routine with their male choreographer, but this dance is never performed on stage in the film. The Windmill is famous for its comedians as well as the girls. Many well-known comics such as Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers got their first breaks by telling jokes between dance routines, but the comedy acts that Stanley Long shot for this are dreary. It is no wonder that when looking back on their time there comedians often comment that the men in the audience would just look at their newspapers instead of listening to the jokes.
The first time we finally see Pat on stage is when she has given up on her West End dreams and become a stripper. She stands in front of a baying crowd who eventually start booing and slow-clapping because she loses her nerve and begins telling them that she's really an actress. In her final scene she is standing on top of a table in a pub in her underwear, and she berates the men, asking them if they would like it if it was their wives up there, before finally screaming and collapsing to her knees as if having a breakdown. And suddenly the closing credits roll, over footage of the fan dance, which by this point we have seen about six times.
So there are many threads and plot points that are left unfulfilled at the end. One would reasonably expect the film to end where it began, with the crash, except this time we would know how Pat ended up in that car. After all, wasn't that why Inspector Thomas had sat through this extended trip down memory lane? But no, we do not even return to the flat at the end for Linda or the Inspector to get a final moralistic word about the dangers of drugs, partying and stripping. And did Linda ever get together with Mike, who has spent most of the film staring at her longingly? We will never know. The film just ends, like they ran out of film or money, either of which is possible I suppose.
Secrets of a Windmill Girl, DVD frame, Screenbound 2011
Another drawn-out sequence of the film discusses the extra activities that were required of the Windmill girls, who were by this point world famous. They would often be used for promotional stunts such as this one above, where they are dressed as sexy cowboys as they ride atop a stagecoach through suburban London. This is just the kind of promotional stunt that could have been cooked up by Klinger and Tenser themselves, who would often use dancing girls at their film premieres or to drum up free publicity.
Secrets of a Windmill Girl, DVD frame, Screenbound 2011
A particularly low point for Pat comes when she visits an agent to get work as as a dancer. He tells her that what he really needs are strippers and encourages her to take her clothes off so he can "check your figure." She's a little on the thin side but he approves nonetheless and gets her work. Whilst this is going on his wife bursts in, straight from a Carry On film. This is one of the few deliberate moments of comedy in Secrets of a Windmill Girl, but is somewhat jarring given that we are supposed to be sympathising with Pat's declining fortunes. As an aside here, I am convinced that they dressed this set with photos from the Compton office. I think that the girl on the wall on the top right of this image is actually Annette Whitely, who had starred in The Yellow Teddybears and The Black Torment for Compton by this point, and who I'm sure would have been mortified to know that she was used in this scene. I can't be sure, but it is an interesting detail if it's true.
Press cutting, Scottish Daily Express, 18 March 1966
When Pat arrives at her first stripping job she finds she is sharing a dressing room with a former rival from The Windmill. This soon descends into a full-on catfight, images of which were used to promote the film. When I purchased most of what remained of the Compton office archive a few years ago amongst the ephemera were a collection of press clippings collected by General Press Cutting Association Ltd of Chancery Lane. It was this collection that prompted me to offer a chapter on the film, and I intend to write at length on the use of clippings by film distributors, and the insight it gives now on the promotion of the film.
Press cutting, Daily Express, 13 April 1966
This image features former Windmill girl Deirdre O'Dea alongside Rey Anton on a platform high up at the top of the theatre. Deirdre had appeared in the film, and Rey wrote and performs the song "Hold It, Babe" with his band The Pro Form during a party scene in a venue that looks like a cave. Given the fickle nature of the pop world, and according to the clipping, Rey is also a scaffolder and he is working on the conversion currently underway.
Press cutting, Evening Standard, 21 Dec 1965
This image was advance publicity for Secrets of a Windmill Girl, and features (left to right): Janet Hall, Wendy Cotellee, Jill Rose, Frances Pidgeon, Aimi MacDonald and Nita Howard, who are described as actresses who will be playing Windmill Girls in a new film titled "The Windmill Girls Story." I have the feeling that even by the time it came out, Secrets of a Windmill Girl must have seemed dated. It feels like it would have been more contemporary with films like Beat Girl (1959, Edmond T. Greville, UK: Renown Pictures), Expresso Bongo (1960, Val Guest, UK: Val Guest Productions) or even Compton's other 'fallen woman' film That Kind of Girl (1963, Gerry O'Hara, UK: Tekli Film Productions). The 1960s was changing rapidly, and it was only one year away from the 'Summer of Love.' Secrets of a Windmill Girl, brief flashes of nudity aside,is naive and quaint, depicting the lives of young people in the mid-sixties as filtered through the contradictory viewpoint of middle-aged men, who both gaze with desire at these sexualised women whilst simultaneously comdemning them for choosing that lifestyle. The Windmill has had mixed fortunes over the fifty years since this film was released. Currently covered in scaffolding, it can be seen here in images I took a month ago on a visit to Soho. It is now a "gentlemen's club" with table dancing, a far cry from the classier entertainment depicted in Secrets of a Windmill Girl, where audiences of both men and women enjoyed the highly stylised and choreographed performances of the "Revuedeville," even if they were not aware of the secrets those Windmill girls kept hidden.
Finally, I recently made a video about what Soho looked like around ten years later. It features a couple of shots of The Windmill, by then a sex cinema. See if you can spot it.
One of the first distributors I began researching for my PhD was Kenneth Rive, who for a number of years ran a company called Gala. He became known as a specialist in French New Wave and European art house cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, but every so often he also produced films under the Galaworldfilm Productions banner. I have finally caught up with possibly one of his best, The Boys from 1962.
(L - R) Rita Webb, Betty Marsden, Patrick Magee, David Lodge
The Boys begins in a court room with very little exposition. We are thrown into a court case as four teenage boys are in the dock on a charge of murder; the stabbing to death of a garage nightwatchman during a bungled robbery. Various witnesses for the prosecution give evidence as to the yobbish, loutish behaviour these boys indulged in around the west end of London on the night in question, whilst their concerned parents look on in horror. This is 1962 after all, when the penalty for a murder conviction was still death.
What is particularly enjoyable about this film is the way in which it deconstructs the narrative, offering a commentary on the unreliable nature of storytelling. Each of these witnesses offers circumstantial evidence that on the surface points to the guilt of these four boys, but it based purely on assumptions that these boys are up to no good, purely because they look like teddy-boys and one of them carries a flick-knife. Even the audience believes they must be guilty, before we hear testimony from each boy in turn, who fills out the details and gives a wider context for each of the stories told by these so-called eye witnesses. Yes, they may have seemed like louts, but really they were just teenage boys out for a good time. Suddenly you begin to believe they must be innocent, and that this film is a critique of the attitudes adults have towards a youth culture they mistrust and don't understand. The drama, with the present taking place in the courtroom and the flashbacks taking us to the night in question, really creates tension and never lets on which way the verdict will go right until the last minute. Like all good courtroom dramas, you feel invested in the outcome. Sidney J. Furie does not pass judgment on these young boys, and creates realistic, likeable characters who are as much the victims of poverty and circumstance as the trouble-makers of a Charles Dickens novel.
One thing that really makes this film stand out is its tremendous cast. Familiar faces follow each other onto the witness stand, such as Roy Kinnear and Wilfrid Brambell, and Felix Aylmer, recently seen as a predatory paedophile in Hammer's Never Take Sweets From a Stranger (1960, Cyril Frankel, UK), is now on the right side of the law as the judge, listening to questioning from both Richard Todd and Robert Morley. One of the boys, Stan Coulter, is played by that irascible raconteur Dudley Sutton, in one of his very first starring roles, and he is brilliant. He goes from menacing thug to wide-eyed innocent, remaining completely believable the whole time. Popular singer and heart-throb Jess Conrad plays one of his friends.
Richard Todd for the prosecution on the left, Robert Morley defending on the right
My desire to watch this film was prompted by an interview I conducted with Aisha Ahmed (now Wills) last summer for a book chapter I was writing on Jacey cinemas. As a teenager in Birmingham she started working for the chain at their offices there before being selected to become the glamorous face of the company. As "Miss Jacey" she was required to attend glittering premieres in London, attend public events and even model for advertising materials. In 1961 she was encouraged to get into the film industry and was offered a small uncredited part in The Boys, as a kiosk girl. Being a Kenneth Rive production, her scene was shot in the Jacey on Piccadilly, which was currently screening the Italian neo-realist drama Adue e le compagne (1960, Antonio Pietrangeli, Italy: Zebra Film), which Rive had retitled Hungry for Love. Also on offer was the creaky striptease spectacular Femmes de Paris (1953, Jean Boyer, France: Hoche Productions), and the advertising for both can be clearly seen in the film.
The boys are causing trouble outside the Jacey
Aisha "Miss Jacey" Ahmed in her cameo role
Her film career was stymied when she refused to appear in horror films, and she continued to work for the Jacey company for the remainder of the 1960s. She kindly sent me a photo taken during the shooting of her scenes.
Aisha discussing her scene between takes with Sidney J. Furie whilst operator Chick Waterson readies the camera. Photo courtesy of Aisha Wills.
The Boys is a great example of Britain in transition. This is a pre-Beatles, pre-sexual revolution 1960s where boys still wear smart suits and go to dance halls for a good time. Jess Conrad may have been a pop star, but his style was soon going to become very unfashionable indeed. The location photography around London reveals bomb sites and Victorian tenements alongside new high-rise blocks under construction (in fact one of the boys works as an apprentice carpenter on one such block). With Furie having apparently told the boys to "rip up the script," their scenes have a freshness and improvised quality which helps accentuate the contrast between their poor working-class lives and the more stilted, formal atmosphere of the court room. These boys could have easily stepped out of a John Osborne play, or one of the "Angry Young Men" films that were still in production during this period. Perhaps the court room nature of the film, or the fact that Sidney J. Furie was not considered part of that British New Wave, means that The Boys is neglected when talking about depictions of youth in British cinema of the early 1960s. It is certainly as much of a 'message' picture as one of Tony Richardson's or Lindsay Anderson's, and these boys feel like Karel Reisz found them when shooting his Free Cinema documentary We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959, UK: Graphic Films). Like that film, here Furie, with Stuart Douglass' script, is challenging audience perceptions and asking for tolerance and understanding towards young people.
Sadly, for aspect ratio fans, the version of The Boys currently available from Talking Pictures TV and Renown DVD has been cropped from it's widescreen in order to fill 16:9 TVs. This is a pity as the photography is excellent, and there are times when information is missing from the edge of the frame because they cut it off, including a crucial final shot in the court room. In these times of restoration and preservation of lost and long-missing films, this is particularly disappointing. Despite this it is still well worth tracking down and deciding for yourself whether these boys did it, or if they are just victims of circumstance.
I've been working on a chapter about the Eurospy film since well before Christmas, and it sometimes feels like I will never finish it. I recently spoke to the Dorado Films podcast about the genre. It was them who very kindly sent me an Agent 077 boxset last year which has formed the basis of this chapter. They are American but appear to have a massive catalogue of European popular cinema. Apparently this includes at least twenty Jess Franco movies, and tons of Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurospy movies. Cool stuff, and they seem to be kicking up a gear in terms of releasing some of these gems on DVD and blu ray.
The podcast can be found here, and apparently I talked so much they are cutting it into two episodes.
Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966)
Seeing as how my PhD is built on my Bonditis collection, it is perhaps inevitable that the Eurospy would play such a large part in it, but it's forcing me out of my comfort zone and into areas of colonialism and imperialism that I have very little academic experience in. Which I suppose is a good thing. I just wish I could finish it! It is my aim to have this done by the end of the week, which is probably why I'm writing a blog about it instead of just writing it. I only update this when I'm putting off doing the real writing.
I'm a real convert to the Eurospy now, and was grateful for the opportunity to talk about it with someone else who is interested. I hope Dorado are able to get some of the other films in their collection out there.
In related news, I've been talking to Screenbound (who used to be Odeon Entertainment) and they are planning to release Bonditis on DVD and blu ray next year! With any luck I will be involved in creating some bonus materials, which is very exciting.
Examples of Agent 077's casual violence and misogyny. What a guy.
Pit of Darkness came late in the career of Lance Comfort, a solid British director who specialised in supporting features, more commonly known as 'B' films. To Hammer fans he will be best known as the director of the now lost comedy The Ugly Duckling (1959) with Bernard Bresslaw, or at least if it is not lost it is a film which no one wants to let out of the Hammer vault. Pit of Darkness forms part of a sort of "Darkness" trilogy in Comfort's career, which was most likely unintentional. He previously directed Daughter of Darkness (1948), as well as the horror classic Devils of Darkness (1965) shortly before he died. Darkness is a good, go-to word to use in a film title, as it can mean different things depending on the theme of the film. In this particular case the pit of darkness in question is purely metaphorical. Admittedly Logan does wake up in a bomb site, a pit of darkness of a sort, but it is the darkness of amnesia which is he trying to claw out.
