Arrow Video and Mario Bava

I have once again been invited to contribute to a blu ray release from those great people at Arrow Video. As I have been discovering the world of Mario Bava over the last two or three years it is perfect timing. I have been able to draw on the research I conducted for my paper on the Fancey family back in May AND my giallo paper in Italy in June. Also over the summer I wrote a chapter for Routledge on the Jacey cinema chain, which turned out to be directly relevant to my PhD after all. Part of that research involved interviewing the last surviving member of the Jacey family, John N. Cohen, who had personal dealings with the Fancey family, so this has all neatly dovetailed together. 

I am trying where possible to use things I am writing towards my PhD, which as far as I can tell is fine, but it does mean that by the time the thing is finished most of it will already have been published elsewhere, and I can kiss that offer of publishing it as a book goodbye. Still, I can't worry about that now. I just need a finished PhD, and then I can write books about anything I want.

Speaking of which, I am still working on Norman J. Warren's book. He is now shooting a new movie, which is exciting but does give me another chapter to write. I have interviewed several more people for it in the last couple of months, so I really hope I can get it finished within the next twelve months. It's driving me slightly insane.

Anyway, to be involved with Arrow is exciting again. I have written an essay on the Fancey family who were behind the distribution of Five Dolls For an August Moon. They also attempted, fairly unsuccessfully, to distribute Bay of Blood too. There is some overlap here with my essay for the Mark of the Devil blu ray, as that was also handled unsuccessfully by the Fanceys. As far as I can tell, despite Five Dolls For an August Moon receiving an X-certificate, with no cuts required, it looks like they just let it sit on a shelf. Seeing that the Fancey family archive appears to have gone up in smoke, it's likely that I will never know.

The new Arrow blu ray is due out on the 1st February 2016, and marks the third time now that I have been involved with them, and it is the fifth time I have contributed to a blu ray release (the other two being the BFI and Shameless). I hope there will be plenty more in the future...

Blood Baths and Bloody Brides

The conference in Lincoln went really well. It was good to present some new research, but even better to meet other academics in the same field. One particular stroke of luck was meeting Emma Petts who presented on some research she has been doing into British cinema audiences. This is exactly the kind of research I have been looking for, and hopefully when her own project is finished I may be able to use some of it.

However, another week, another conference. This week I have been writing about the UK reception and marketing of the giallo, ready to fly off to Rome in a few days. I'm very excited to be going to my first overseas conference.

The organisation behind this conference looks amazing. There will be 35mm film screenings, plenty of directors and cast members available for panels, plus two full days of papers being presented by far more knowledgable people than myself. I'm hoping my relative lack of experience in the giallo does not become too noticeable. I'm not writing about the genre or its most famous stars as such, so I ought to get away with it. I'm on the much safer territory of discussing who was distributing these films in the UK and what happened with the BBFC. I'm a little worried that I'm becoming a one-trick pony with all this distribution and censorship stuff. I will probably take a year off conferences after this, so next time I will be have some different (to a point) stuff to present.

This was the first UK release of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood in 1980, eleven years after it was first released in Italy. It is one of the examples I will be discussing in this paper. It was distributed by my old friends New Realm.

Dario Argento's seminal The Bird With the Crystal Plumage on the other hand got away with no BBFC-imposed cuts at all in 1970, but did suffer from this somewhat lacklustre new title.


I will no doubt come back from Rome with an even bigger enthusiasm for all things Italian. Before I first started my PhD back in 2012 I knew or cared very little for Italian horror, and even less for the giallo. It was all about Hammer and Roger Corman as far as I was concerned. Regular meetings with Dr. Leon Hunt changed all that for me, as I began to realise just how significant the Italian film industry was when considering the presence of international film in British cinemas. Even though I am no longer at Brunel University, I am continuing to expand my Italian film experience, enjoying giallos, gothic horrors and Eurospy thrillers. I finally appreciate the great work of Mario Bava, Antonio Marghereti, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, and I'm even listening to Goblin.

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.

Fragile archives

A colleague of mine has let me borrow his personal collection of 1960s Monthly Film Bulletin issues.  As the only other place I have found these is in the BFI library, having access to them at home is quite an advantage. However, when I'm handling them I feel very nervous. At some point, probably around fifty years ago, he decided to tape each year together to make them into annual volumes. This means that when I'm trying to scan reviews I have all these fragile, yellowing pages flapping around desperately trying to tear themselves away from each other.

 

I have managed to scan several original reviews for some of the movies I have come across in the course of my research, and thought I would post a couple of them here. Dolls of Vice was a German prostitution drama, a surprisingly popular topic back then. This was probably for the exploitation potential, as highlighted here; "Beauty contests, striptease and undressing scenes."

More intriguing is the mention of a "sympathetic dwarf". And yes, several "climaxes" were censored. I have seen the original BBFC documentation, which included:

Reel 2: Remove all shots of girls wrestling

Reel 3: In strip-tease act remove shots of girls stroking their breasts

I have also come across Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, an early giallo that established Bava's style and influenced a whole rash of Italian and German crime movies, all seemingly obsessed with killers in black gloves and rain coats.

Blood and Black Lace is given a fairly complimentary review for a dubbed Italian horror film, with particular attention paid to the look of the film. Hardly surprising for Bava, although the reviewer is critical of other elements, describing the film as "derivative, for the most part poorly acted and written, and risible in its several descents into pathos." I must confess that I haven't seen this film yet, despite its classic status. I keep hoping that Arrow Video will eventually pick it up, as they have done such brilliant work with many other Bava titles. (edit - within a month of my writing this, Arrow did indeed announce a blu ray release of Blood and Black Lace)

I intend to continue my way carefully through these copies of Monthly Film Bulletin. Ideally I would love to talk to people who remember going to the flicks and saw some of these films, but I have come to realise that is an almost impossible task. The opinions of reviewers like those in MFB at least give me some idea of the contemporary reception of most of the movies my research is digging up.