HAMMER FILM NOIR: HELL IS A CITY: STANLEY BAKER : BILLIE WHITELAW STILLS GALLERY AND REVIEW

Director: Val Guest. Writers: Val Guest (screenplay), Maurice Procter (novel)
Stars: Stanley Baker, John Crawford and Donald Pleasence

Based upon the 1954 novel by crime novelist Maurice Procter, a former policeman who served for 19 years with the Halifax police force, Hell Is A City is a highly effective and punchy 1960 British Film Noir/police procedural drama, mostly set on the mean streets of Manchester. 

Made by the famous Hammer film studio and directed and written by one of its star directors, Val Guest (The Quatermass Xperiment, Expresso Bongo, The Day The Earth Caught Fire), Hell Is A City is most notable for a driving, Elmer Bernstein style Crime Jazz score by Stanley Black, Arthur Grant’s (The Curse Of The Werewolf, The Devil Rides Out) lush black and white cinematography depicting a forbidding and mostly vanished post war Manchester and by a fine cast, lead by the irreplaceable Stanley Baker.

The opening titles of the movie set the tone: shot from the back seat of speeding police car, the silhouettes of the driver and his partner face the icky blackness of the night, illuminated by their car headlights, ominous speckles of neon and the street lights of central Manchester, while Stanley Black’s (in the early 1950s he habitually topped the Melody Maker chart of the most-heard musicians on radio) blaring big band soundtrack blasts a suitably portentous accompaniment. Guest transforms Manchester into a twilight vision of urban inferno Manhattan, as it was envisioned by fellow Brit Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 classic Sweet Smell Of Success. 

Harry Martineau (Stanley Baker: The Cruel Sea, Zulu, Accident) is a tough, dedicated police inspector on the trail of Don Starling (John Crawford: The Enforcer), who escaped from prison after serving 5 years of his 14-year prison sentence for a jewelry robbery, and killed a warden in the process. Inspector Martineau was the arresting officer and knew the troubled Starling from his youth. He suspects Starling will be traveling to Manchester to recover the stolen jewels he hid away before being convicted.

 As Martineau deduces, Starling returns undetected to Manchester and goes to see Laurie Lovett (Charles Morgan: Sergeant Cork), who was in on the jewelry heist. Grateful Starling never turned him in Lovett finds him a place to hide at night. He reveals his plans to get a phony passport and flee the country, but not until he gets all the money he needs to implement his escape. He plans the next day to rob the bookmaker Gus Hawkins (Donald Pleasence: Halloween) of his gambling take with the help of Lovett’s gang.

The robbery expectedly does not go as planned and the gang is forced to disappear in different directions. Starling contacts Gus’ wife Chloe (Billie Whitelaw: The Omen, Frenzy) with whom he previously had an affair. She hides him in the attic located in the bedroom but when Gus takes a peek thinking he heard a noise, he is hit on the head and hospitalized with a concussion as the police take note that Starling has been spotted for the first time in Manchester and thereby connect him to the robbery. As inspector Martineau tracks Starling down, the gang fall one by one, until only the murderer is left.

Upon its release in 1960 Hell Is A City was acclaimed for its realism, bold depiction of violence and gritty Manchester locations, while nominated for two British Academy Awards for Best Screenplay and Most Promising Newcomer for Billie Whitelaw. More than half a century later, the films faults are glaringly obvious ”“ the portrayal of the troubled domestic life of Martineau and his wife is unconvincing (all would be well if she would just submit to his desire to bear him children), American actor John Crawford’s complete inability to muster a halfway convincing English, let alone Mancunian, accent, a somewhat cliched illustration of working class life and the sanitized depiction of the Manchester police force, which is without any single taint of corruption lurking in the shadows.

Yet the fantastic Stanley Baker’s intensely committed performance, which highlights the fact that the obsessed Martineau has really no life outside police work and that he will freely use any degree of emotional blackmail upon those he questions, regardless of the consequences, in order to catch Starling, endures. Coupled with Grant’s striking location photography (very well served by this digitally re-mastered DVD) of vintage Greater Manchester locations (including Piccadilly Gardens, Moss Side, Oldham, Levenshulme and Strangeways prison) and Black’s propulsive score, Hell Is A City remains an exciting proposition.

Images: Marcus Brooks

Review: HERE

VICTORIA VETRI AND VAL GUEST: PART TWO: WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH 1970

VICTORIA VETRI 'WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH' HAMMER FILMS 1970

VICTORIA VETRI AND VAL GUEST : RARE BEHIND THE SCENES: ON THE SET OF WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH: HAMMER FILMS 1970 : PART ONE.

STILLS TAKEN FROM CONTACT PRINTS OF VICTORIA VETRI AND DIRECTOR VAL GUEST DURING THE MAKING OF 'WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH' 1970

THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE: EDWARD JUDD JANET MUNRO REVIEW AND LOBBY CARDS

CAST:

Edward Judd (Peter Stenning), Janet Munro (Jeannie Craig), Leo McKern (Bill Maguire), Arthur Christiansen (Editor)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Val Guest, Screenplay – Val Guest & Wolf Mankowitz, Photography (b&w) – Harry Waxman, Music – Stanley Black, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Art Direction – Anthony Masters. Production Company – British Lion/Melina-Pax. UK. 1961. 

SYNOPSIS:

Coincidentally, both the Americans and the Russians detonate hydrogen bombs at the North and South Poles at the same time. Soon after, Britain begins to experience a freak heatwave. Peter Stenning, a journalist at The Daily Express, receives a tip-off from his girlfriend Jeannie Craig, a switchboard operator in government offices, and uncovers the fact that the explosions have caused an eleven-degree tilt of the Earth’s axis. He prints an article, which results in her arrest. Then comes the even more disturbing announcement that the explosions have knocked the Earth out of its orbit and sent it on a course towards the sun. As the heat rises, The Thames dries up and water rationing and communal showers are instituted. There is panic and rioting all over England. The only hope lies for scientists to detonate further nuclear weapons in the hope that this might jolt the Earth back into its correct position.

COMMENTARY:

The Day the Earth Caught Fire was one of a host of films that came out in the early 1960s confronting the possibilities of nuclear war full on. This grimly real genre had been started by On the Beach (1959) and still ahead would be the likes of Panic in Year Zero! (1962), Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965). The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a personal project mounted by director Val Guest, best known within the genre for the first two Quatermass films. (See below for Val Guest’s other films). Guest found some difficulty mounting the project and eventually ended up financing it in part with his own money. 

The film is made on a slim budget, nevertheless Val Guest manages extraordinary things with it. He depicts the scale of the disaster with a remarkable economy. Special effects artist Les Bowie creates some striking matte shots of a dried-up Thames and the cracked, parched earth outside the Kremlin, the Taj Mahal and other world landmarks. Particularly good is Guest’s ability to incorporate stock footage of desiccated desert, of forest and building fires and of emergency services rushing into operation – in one scene, he even manages to insert Edward Judd into the middle of a CND demonstration. Even more striking is when he pans away from the disaster scenes to reveal the names of English landmarks to the extent where you are never sure what is real and what is not. 

Guest also scored the coup of being able to shoot the film in and around the offices of the real Daily Express newspaper – he even obtains an appearance from then-editor Arthur Christiansen as himself. It is something that, along with Guest’s soberly documentary-like depiction of such an environment, more than credibly grounds The Day the Earth Caught Fire. It is, for example, at least half-an-hour in, observing the life of the newspaper office and Edward Judd’s self-destructive habits, before we arrive at the heatwave. These scenes are crafted with some surprisingly good characterisations, particularly as we follow Edward Judd’s hero going from down-and-out alcoholic to gaining his feet again. The dialogue is sharp and well written – the scenes between Edward Judd and Janet Munro have a surprisingly adult level of banter for the time. The show is stolen in large part by a wryly cynical performance from Leo McKern. 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is much more of a science-fiction film than any of the abovementioned nuclear war films are. Their concerns with the nuclear situation fell well within the possibilities of contemporary technology, whereas The Day the Earth Caught Fire concerns itself with the sweeping climactic changes of an entirely hypothetical (and scientifically ludicrous) scenario. Certainly, there are few films that manage to convey a basically scientifically nonsensical premise with such an absolute and thorough conviction – in truth, the detonation of the entire modern nuclear arsenal would barely even cause an earthquake that would be felt across the other side of the American continent, let alone move the Earth from orbit. Whatever The Day the Earth Caught Fire lacks as science, it more than makes up for with its entirely credible social portrait of the situation – images of water-riots, queues for communal showers in Hyde Park, people buying water on the black-market just to tend their garden. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of The Day the Earth Caught Fire is the way it ends on a deliberate note of ambiguity rather than resolution. People sit about waiting for the outcome of the attempts to correct the Earth’s orbit but instead of offering an ending, in the last shot Guest pans away to reveal two different copies of the next day’s newspaper headline – one saying ‘Earth Doomed’, the other saying ‘Earth Saved’. The film then fades out, leaving the world’s fate uncertain.

Val Guest’s other films are:– the comedy Mr Drake’s Duck (1951) about a duck that lays radioactive eggs; various of Hammer’s Nigel Kneale adaptations The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955), Quatermass 2/The Enemy from Space (1957) and The Abominable Snowman (1957); as co-director of the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967); the prehistoric drama When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970); and the sf pop music film Toomorrow (1970). 

Copyright Richard Scheib 

Images : Marcus Brooks  

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT : HAMMER FILMS REVIEW AND GALLERY

Director – Val Guest. Screenplay by Richard Landau & Val Guest, from the TV series scripted by Nigel Kneale. Producers: Anthony Hinds, Robert Lippert. Original Music by James Bernard. Cinematography by Walter Harvey. Edited by James Needs. Art Direction by J. Elder Wills. Makeup by Philip Leakey. Special Effects by Les Bowie and team.

With: Brian Donlevy, Jack Warner, Margie Dean, Richard Wordsworth

(MGM Archives) (1955) 82 mins. B&W. AR: 1.66:1.

 

Out in the middle of the English countryside, and a young couple are laughing and enjoying each other's company. They lie down next to a haystack and fall into each other's arms, but what's that noise? It sounds at first like a jet engine, but as it gets louder they begin to panic and head for the shelter of the woman's cottage. As they reach the building, an almighty crash is heard and the woman's father goes out to investigate brandishing a shotgun, only to find a huge space rocket with its nose plunged deep into the ground. An hour later, and a crowd has gathered, and so have the fire brigade, the police and an ambulance. There's one man on the way who has a better idea of what's going on than anyone else, however: a certain Professor Quatermass, Brian Donlevy... 

Before Doctor Who arrived on the scene, Nigel Kneale's creation Professor Bernard Quatermass was the main man in British television science fiction thanks to three sensationally popular serials on the BBC, all of which were adapted into films by Hammer studios. However, Kneale didn't write the script for this, the first of the films in the short series (spelled "Xperiment" to emphasise the then-new X certificate), that honour went to director Val Guest and Richard Landau, and so there were a few changes made, not only to cut the story down to feature length, but also in the incarnation of the main character.

No longer was Quatermass a British boffin, nope, he was now a harsh-talking American who inexplicably is heading the United Kingdom space exploration team, and with that alteration, and thanks to Donlevy's abrasiveness, the film has a more severe, blatant feeling than the more thoughtful television version. Not that it harms the story any, as Quatermass's blind devotion to science no matter what the cost conjures a panicky, out of control tone to the proceedings. In fact, the Professor is often sidelined by the other characters such as the police Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner sharing top billing) who has a determination of his own.

As it is his pet project, Quatermass is not happy about bringing in anyone into the investigation apart from, well, apart from himself really. The night of the rocket's "landing" the hatch was opened and only one man, Victor Caroon (Richard Wordsworth), emerged - not so much emerged as tumbled out, to be honest. So what happened to the other two astronauts? The mystery is well sustained, as various clues crop up; Caroon is in no shape to tell anyone what went on up there, and his only word in the whole film is a whispered "help" which we, the audience, never hear.

Wordsworth gives the best performance, a haunted, pathetic study in unease as he goes from lying in his hospital bed to wandering the streets on the lookout for food. But he's not going to snack in the conventional manner, whatever occurred up there has altered his metabolism and the only way he can gain sustenance is by draining life from other living things, leaving a trail of shrivelled corpses in his path (as well a trail of slime). There are still effective scenes of creepiness, such as Quatermass and his crew viewing the footage taken by the rocket's camera, or Caroon, his arm turned into a cactus, being approached by an innocent little girl (a young Jane Asher) at the river side. And of course, if it wasn't for this film, Hammer wouldn't have set out on its lucrative domination of the British horror film. Music by James Bernard. 

Review Graeme Clark