TERENCE FISHER'S 'STOLEN FACE' (1952) HAMMER FILMS NOIR GALLERY AND REVIEW

PRODUCTION:
Director: Terence Fisher Producer: Anthony Hinds Screenplay: Martin Berkeley & Richard H. Landau (story: Alexander Paal & Steven Vas) Cinematography: Walter J. Harvey Art Direction: Wilfred Arnold Music: Malcolm Arnold (played by London Philharmonic Orchestra; solo pianist Bronwyn Jones)

 

CAST:
Lizabeth Scott, Paul Henreid, André Morell, Mary Mackenzie, Arnold Ridley

THE STOLEN FACE:

Hammer Films came to prominence thanks to the series of bold horror films they made in colour from the late 1950s and throughout the next decade, the best of which were directed by Terence Fisher. But they both got their start making dozens of modest black and white B-movie thrillers often featuring emerging , or waning, Hollywood actors. Stolen Face is one of these lower berth productions, though it does stand out from the mix for the way that it seems to presage many of the elements in the company, and Fisher’s, more celebrated later output. In fact, this is a real gallimaufry of a movie, combining as it does a slew of (then) popular genre elements, including classical music, a romantic triangle, plastic surgery,  psychiatry and a wild finish on a train …

From 1951 to 1955 Hammer Studios, through an arrangement with Robert Lippert Pictures in Hollywood (and bankrolled by 20th Century Fox through a backdoor for quota purposes), became one of the most industrious of UK film companies, cranking out tightly budgeted features at a prodigious rate. These were mostly thrillers and melodramas that helped establish the studio and the production team that would largely be responsible for its greater successes later on. But first things first. Once upon a time in postwar London, a leading plastic surgeon is very successful but is clearly in need of a rest …

Paul Henreid plays Philip Ritter, a surgeon who seems imminently due for sainthood. When we first meet him he is checking the results on the latest of a series of free surgeries he has been conducting to restore hand movement to a young boy from a deprived background. He then meets another potential patient, an aging but very wealthy woman. Recognising that she has already been put under the knife by less expert hands, he tells her that he cannot in good conscience make much of a difference anymore, flatly turning down her offer of £1,000, much to her fury. He then heads over to the local prison for the latest in a series of operations that have helped many of its inmates become rehabilitated though his medical treatment, all of which of course is provided pro bono. It is here that the kindly warden (a nice cameo from playwright and future Dad’s Army co-star, Arnold Ridley) asks Ritter to talk Lily (played Mary Mackenzie though voiced by Lizabeth Scott in a nice touch), a persistent recidivist who seems to have taken up a life of crime following her severe facial disfigurement during a wartime raid. While the scars on her face are severe (and put well on display in what would become Hammer’s best manner), Ritter thinks he may be able to help her. On the way home he nearly crashes his car – burning the candle at both ends has really taken its toll and his partner succeeds in making the doctor take a well-earned holiday.

Stopping at a country inn, the romantic part of the narrative takes over. Ritter’s sleep keeps being interrupted by the sneezes emanating from the woman in the room next door and in the end he puts a note under their connecting door, suggesting she take some aspirin and a little brandy. She pops a note back to say she only has the aspirin … he takes his bottle over and meets concert pianist Alice Brent (Scott). The two, having ‘met cute’ in the time-honoured movie tradition, start a whirlwind romance in the warm embrace of the local folk, all of whom seem to have been won over by the obvious rapport of the couple. Ritter declares his love, but the next morning she is gone. Despondent, he goes back to work more obsessively than ever, and decides to put all his energy into giving Lily a new shot at life with a beautiful new face, one that he first sculpts into a statue with all his love and skill. In an act of what can only be described as romantic folly, he uses it as a guide to give the woman a new face – or rather, one that looks exactly like Alice’s, finally giving reason to the title of the movie. Lily proves to have a very different personality, no matter whose face she is sporting.

This plot development, in which a scientist creates in effect a dangerous new person through his surgical skills, certainly looks forward to Fisher’s Frankenstein films for the studio, but the movie also deserves some kudos for preempting many of the themes and motifs that Alfred Hitchcock would use several years later in his classic plunge into morbid romance, Vertigo (1958). In scene after scene, moments that we remember from the classic Hitchcock movie all get their first airing here – first there is the romantic obsession with a beautiful but unobtainable blonde who vanishes from a man’s life. He then makes another woman over in her image – dying her dark hair blonde, than buying her a new wardrobe, obsessing as he tries to recreate his lost love. We even get a scene centered on a broach that indicates the woman’s criminality, much as we would in the later film. Here though it indicates that Lily is in fact slipping back into her old habits – just having Alice Brent’s face and marrying her surgeon-cum-saviour seems not to have been enough to curb her darker impulses, the story switching course again into what would seem to be a crime plot crossed with a psychiatric case history about a woman suffering from kleptomania.

But what happened to Alice? We discover that she fled her romantic idyll as she has long been engaged to David, an older man (André Morell) to whom she feels a great sense of obligation. She travels through Europe successfully playing variations on the highly attractive piano concerto that Malcolm Arnold wrote especially for the film. As the concert tours extends, David realises that Alice is not really in love with him and so nobly bows out. All seems set for a reconciliation with Philip – except of course he is now married, very unhappily, to a woman that he has surgically altered to maker her look exactly like Alice … Scott has a great time playing both roles, a traditional good-vs-bad girl triangle rendered truly delirious by the movie’s bizarre plot twists. The story then contrives to lurch again into another genre as Alice becomes convinced that Philip is being driven to murder by the cruel antics of his wife, whose behaviour has become ever-more erratic after taking to alcohol. The scene is set for a race to the rescue and a climax aboard a speeding train.

This being a low-budget movie, there are few scenes in which Scott has to appear in both roles at the same time and all of them are handled through the use of a double, avoiding the use of time-consuming opticals. The results are actually pretty successful in the circumstances and the climax builds up some fair suspense as we wonder just who will try to kill who. The finale is a little bit too pat and, like Vertigo, doesn’t really solve things satisfactorily at a plot level, though one could argue that emotionally it is the only way the story could go in what is a variant on the story of beauty and the beast. Henreid makes for an appealing if rather stiff protagonist and it’s a shame that Mary Mackenzie i by necessity only seen int he early stages of the film before her surgery as she gives a fiery performance that contrasts well with Scott’s smoother style.

Along with two nice performances from the top-billed Scott (who does a fair in not completely convincing imitation of a cockney accent), Malcolm Arnold deserves a lot of credit for providing the film with an extra patina of gloss with his fine orchestra score – those wishing to hear a suite can listen to an arrangement for piano and orchestra, the ‘Ballade’ arranged by Philip Lane and included in the album, The Film Music of Malcolm Arnold Volume 2 released by Naxos.

DVD Availability: The film is available in no frills but perfectly acceptable versions in the US and the UK. The former is technically the better of the two and is available as part of the Hammer Noir box sets released by VCI.

SOURCE:HERE
Images: Marcus Brooks 

VINCENT PRICE: PATRICIA OWENS: THE FLY : STIILS GALLEY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Patricia Owens (Helene Delambre), Vincent Price (Francois Delambre), Al Hedison (Andre Delambre), Herbert Marshall (Inspector Charas), Charles Herbert (Philippe Delambre) 

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Kurt Neumann, Screenplay – James Clavell, Based on the Short Story by George Langelaan, Photography – Karl Struss, Music – Paul Sawtell, Photographic Effects – L.B. Abbott, Makeup – Ben Nye, Production Design – Theobold Holsopple & Lyle R. Wheeler. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.  USA. 1958. 

SYNOPSIS:

The dead body of scientist Andre Delambre is found at his factory, his arm and head having been crushed by a hydraulic press. His wife Helene admits to having killed him. Andre’s brother Francois presses her and finally gets the incredible story. Andre was experimenting, trying to create a matter teleportation device. After initial failures, he was able to teleport inanimate objects and then lab animals. Next, Andre insisted on locking himself in the lab, saying something had gone wrong and keeping his head covered by a cloth. Communicating with Helene only by written notes, Andre told her it was vitally important that she find a white-headed fly. She eventually discovered the horrible truth – how Andre had decided to transmit himself through the device, not realising that a fly was caught in the booth with him. The two bodies emerging fused, meaning that Andre ended up with the fly’s head and one of its claws attached to his body, and the fly with Andre’s head and one of his arms attached to it.

COMMENTARY:

The Fly is one of the most memorable of all fifties sf/horror crossovers.The film has become a classic of the era, one that is often unjustly laughed at and held up to ridicule. It is however a classic and a fine monster movie.

The film features a script from James Clavell. Up until his death in 1994, Clavell was better known as the author of best-selling Asian themed novels like Tai-Pan (1966) and Shogun (1976). Not many seem to know that James Clavell spent his earlier pre-novelistic career as a film screenwriter – writing films such as Watusi (1959), The Great Escape (1963), 633 Squadron (1964) and The Satan Bug (1965) and even director, most notably of To Sir, With Love (1967). The Fly, adapted from George Langelaan’s short story, which first appeared in Playboy in 1957, was James Clavell’s first screen credit.

Clavell certainly makes some basic errors in reason. The physiological problems that might be presented by a fly with a human’s head on its body and in particular a human with a fly’s head on its’ body are never addressed. You keep wondering how Andre is able to think and clearly draw on his own memories and scientific expertise while he has a fly’s head attached to his shoulders. There are also the practical, scientific problems – a fly ingests air through its legs via a pressure system but these only work at microscopic levels and would need the force of a hurricane to be able to absorb air in order to breathe with a head at human size. 

Major suspension of disbelief is something critical to enjoying The Fly. That said and done, one finds an excellent little film. What James Clavell may lack as an entomologist or logician, he certainly does not in the ability to construct a strong and suspenseful story. The story is narrated as a flashback from the point-of-view of the wife. The lead up to the introduction of the titular mishap – using the flashback framework, with notes left outside the forebodingly closed laboratory door and Al Hedison only communicating with his face hidden under a cloth suggesting something has gone seriously wrong inside – is suspensefully sustained. In fact, James Clavell is so successful in building a sense of foreboding that the actual introduction of a not-too-frightening fly’s head is anticlimactic. The only misstep the script makes is in stopping for a momentarily heavy-winded dialogue on the ethics of science.

The film was directed by Kurt Neumann who made a number of other genre films in the 1950s. (See below for Kurt Neumann’s other titles). The Fly is the best of Kurt Neumann’s films. Neumann’s direction has that pedestrianness of all 50s science-fiction films but there remain scenes that hold a particularly unnerving eerieness – the disembodied meow of the teleported cat that fails to re-materialise; the desperate chase around the sitting room to catch the white-headed fly; the always remembered, often-laughed at ending where Herbert Marshall and Vincent Price sit not hearing Al Hedison’s pathetic cries of “help me”, trapped in a web before an oncoming spider. 

There were two ho-hum sequels Return of the Fly (1959) and Curse of the Fly (1965). The remake was The Fly (1986), directed/written by David Cronenberg who reworked the story to make it a much more logically feasible study of a man mutating into a fly hybrid. This produced a mediocre sequel The Fly II (1989). The Fly was also spoofed in Monsters vs Aliens (2009) and Hotel Transylvania (2012).  

Director Kurt Neumann made a number of other genre films, along with light comedies and Westerns. He made several of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films – Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), Tarzan and the Leopard Man (1946) and Tarzan and the Huntress (1947) and one with Lex Barker Tarzan and the She-Devil (1953). In the 1950s, Neumann made Rocketship X-M (1950), one of the earliest films of the 50s science-fiction boom; the Arabian Nights fantasy Son of Ali Baba (1952); the mad scientist cheapie She Devil (1957); and Kronos (1957) about an alien energy-devouring machine. Neumann died the same year that The Fly came out.

Review:HERE
Images: Marcus Brooks

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 TROLLENBERG TERROR : THE CRAWLING EYE : GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Forrest Tucker (Alan Brooks), Janet Munro (Anne Pilgrim), Jennifer Jayne (Sarah Pilgrim), Warren Mitchell (Professor Crevett), Laurence Payne (Philip Truscott), Andrew Faulds (Brett), Stuart Sanders (Dewhurst), Frederick Schiller (Klein)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Quentin Lawrence, Screenplay – Jimmy Sangster, Based on the TV Serial Written by Peter Key, Producers – Robert S. Baker & Monty Berman, Photography (b&w) – Monty Berman, Music – Stanley Black, Special Effects – Arnold Scottish Pictures Ltd, Art Direction – Duncan Sutherland. Production Company – Tempean Films.

SYNOPSIS:

In the Swiss mountain village of Trollenberg, climbers are mysteriously disappearing on the mountainside. A nearby observatory detects a cloud on the mountainside that gives off radioactive readings and never moves. Anne Pilgrim, one of two English sisters who form a psychic stage act, receives a premonition of great danger associated with the mountain. As the cloud starts to move down the mountain, killing people along the way, the astronomers realise that they are dealing with an alien invasion. The aliens have come from a dying world and selected the mountainside’s cold as the environment that most resembles their home planet.

COMMENTARY:

The Trollenberg Terror was part of Britain’s small but nevertheless effective contribution to the 1950s alien invader genre. Perhaps reflecting Britain’s much more isolationist policy, or merely only the fact that British science-fiction was made on much tighter budgets, the British alien invasions films of the 1950s and 1960s – the most notable examples being The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955) and Village of the Damned (1960) – were much more insidious, more psychologically orientated than their American peers. They contained threats that seemed to cut villages off from the rest of the world and seemed to come from within the ordered social fabric, as opposed to their American counterparts where the alien invasion was aimed at the whole of society. 

The Trollenberg Terror, more well known under its crasser American retitling The Crawling Eye, was originally based on a tv serial The Trollenberg Terror (1956) that aired in six half-hour episodes. The film version was also directed by Quentin Lawrence and retains several members of the original cast. The film version was clearly hoping to copy the Quatermass films, which had been similarly adapted from tv serials into films with some success by Hammer Films.  

The Trollenberg Terror is not an astoundingly great film – its story and the ground it covers is standard for the genre and all the rest, including the acting and effects is no more, no less than the average science-fiction film of the period. It is however well directed with Quentin Lawrence adding a tense psychological dimension that is enough to make it a good film. In scenes like the one where Janet Munro picks up visions of the men on the mountain during an ordinary parlour trick or where the undead Andrew Faulds returns and attacks Janet Munro with a knife, Quentin Lawrence makes striking contrasts between fore– and back-ground and light and shadow. Lawrence also adds horror effects that were daring for the time – of decapitated bodies and dismembered heads turning up in bloodied knapsacks.

However, when The Trollenberg Terror moves from the realm of psychological to outright horror – when it confronts its aliens – it becomes less effective. The image of a giant pulsating blob with a single eye sitting outside the hotel’s double-doors is compelling but the blob proves severely limited when required to do more than that. Forrest Tucker’s venture back down to the hotel to rescue the little girl is a slightly unheroic affair thanks to an unconvincing fight with a set of telephone-cable thin tentacles. The climactic fight with the aliens on the mountainside is a little let down by poor effects. The locations are also betrayed by obvious cuts between second unit location pick-ups, back projection and painted cyclorama – but if it's an evening of light early Brit sci fi entertainment you are after, Trollenberg is a lot of fun.  

VINCENT PRICE: RETURN OF THE FLY: GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Vincent Price (Francoise Delambre), David Frankham (Alan Hinds), Brett Halsey (Philippe Delambre), Danielle De Metz (Cecile Bonnard), John Sutton (Inspector Beauchamp), Dan Seymour (Max Berthold)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Screenplay – Edward L. Bernds, Producer – Bernard Glasser, Photography (b&w) – Brydon Baker, Music – Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter, Makeup – Hal Lierly, Art Direction – John B. Mansbridge & Lyle R. Wheeler. Production Company – Associated Producers.  

 

SYNOPSIS:

After the funeral of his mother, Philippe Delambre demands that his Uncle Francois tell him about the experiments his father was involved in. Francois shows him but Philippe then disregards Francois’s warnings and starts his own experiments in matter transmission with the aid of his good friend Alan Hinds. However, Alan is in fact a wanted criminal on the run from international police and is intending to sell off plans of the matter transmitter. When police start closing in on him, Alan uses the transmitter to dispose of them. When Philippe finds out the truth, Alan throws him into the transmitter too, placing a fly, one of Philippe’s greatest fears, in as well. Philippe is rematerialized with a fly’s head and claw, while the fly comes out with Philippe’s head and arm.

COMMENTARY:

The original The Fly (1958) was one of the monster classics of the 1950s. It produced two sequels – this and Curse of the Fly (1965). While the original film was lavishly mounted for a 1950s sf/horror film, Return of the Fly has been made much more as a B support feature – where the original was in colour, for instance, this is made in black-and-white. Direction this time was handed over to Edward L. Bernds, a B-budget director who had made various Three Stooges and Bowery Boys efforts, as well as several B science-fiction films (see below). 

As sequels go, Return of the Fly is a fair effort on its own undemanding grounds. It is necessarily trapped by the very act of being a sequel. It lacks the same suspenseful structure and surprise element that James Clavell’s script had – we know where it is going to end up from the outset and as a result the pitiful screams of “help me” lose their impact a second time around. Still, the story has a degree of originality in the way it reintroduces the same themes, offering a plausible reason for Philippe to start his own experiments in matter transmission and an equally believable means whereby he gets to become a human-fly. There are some odd moments that achieve a nice ‘yechh’ effect – like the hamster that emerges from the transmitter with human hands and the really gross scene where David Frankham crushes the hamster under his foot. The fly has a head about three times larger this time but is not a whole lot more convincing. 

Director Edward L. Bernds made a number of genre films, including The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1955), Bowery to Bagdad (1955), Jungle Gents (1956), World Without End (1956), Queen of Outer Space (1958), Spacemaster X-7 (1958), Valley of the Dragons (1961), The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962) and The Three Stooges in Orbit (1962).    

SOURCE:HERE
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks 

DANA GILLESPIE DOUGH MC CLURE: THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT: GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Patrick Wayne (Ben MacBride), Sarah Douglas (Charly), Thorley Walters (Professor Edmund Norfolk), Dana Gillespie (Ajor), Doug McClure (Bowen Tyler), Shane Rimmer (Hogan) 

PRODUCTION:

Director – Kevin Connor, Screenplay – Patrick Tilley, Based on the Novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Producer – John Dark, Photography – Alan Hume, Aerial Photography – Peter Allwork & John Harris, Music – John Scott, Process Photography – Charles Staffell, Special Effects – John Richardson & Ian Wingrove, Makeup – Robin Grantham, Production Design – Maurice Carter. Production Company – AIP.  

SYNOPSIS:

The log of Bowen Tyler’s discovery of the continent of Caprona, a land that still exists in the Cretaceous, has been found. An expedition to rescue Tyler has been mounted aboard the Polar Queen by Tyler’s old friend Ben MacBride. The rescue team fly over the wall of Antarctic ice and into the humid interior of the continent in a biplane. After crash-landing, they must brave dinosaurs, hostile tribes and an exploding volcano in order to rescue Tyler.

COMMENTARY:

England’s Amicus Productions had a reasonable success with the prehistoric lost world film The Land That Time Forgot (1974), directed by Kevin Connor, produced by John Dark, starring Doug McClure and adapted from the novel by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. With that success in mind, Amicus and all the abovementioned went onto adapt a further Edgar Rice Burroughs novel with At the Earth’s Core (1976). Amicus, a modest company that had success with a number of horror films during the 1960s and early 70s, particularly their horror anthologies, folded shop shortly after that. However, Connor, Dark and McClure regrouped at the English division of American International Pictures (AIP) to make The People That Time Forgot. They would all subsequently go onto make Warlords of Atlantis (1978) for EMI/British Lion, which was not adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs, but could well have been in that it assembled the same lost world and prehistoric monster elements that were a central element of the other three films. 

The Land That Time Forgot (1918) was the first in a trilogy of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs set on the prehistoric continent of Caprona and so for the sequel Dark, Connor et al turned to the second of the books in the trilogy, The People That Time Forgot (1918). (The third and final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Caprona series, Out of Time’s Abyss (1918), remains unfilmed). This time Dark and Connor did not retain the services of celebrated sf/fantasy Michael Moorcock who had adapted The Land That Time Forgot and turned to Patrick Tilley, a minor British science-fiction writer best known for the post-holocaust Amtrak Wars series. Tilley follows Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book reasonably well, although substantially reduces the number of primitive tribes and much of the running around on Caprona. 

The majority of John Dark and Kevin Connor’s lost world films are better than many genre viewers are often prepared to give them. The main problem that Dark and Connor had was that the imagination on display was often in excess of what the special effects department could deliver. The People That Time Forgot notedly opens with a wonderfully imaginative sequence where the explorers fly up over the wall of Antarctic ice in a biplane, only to face a pterodactyl that starts trying to chew up the wings and they have to shoot it down with a Vickers machine-gun. The sequence teeters between soaring with a genuine imagination and failing through seeing a pterodactyl that only has clunky hinged-jaw movements. The same problem extends elsewhere throughout the film – the stegosaurus that the explorers encounter is painfully clearly only an immobile model with legs that make mechanical back and forth movements as it is winched along behind some rocks. I could not help but break into unintentional titters during the sequence where the party try to traverse a cave passage as snake heads keep popping out, which kept reminding me of the old Frogger arcade game. 

The filmmakers went to shoot in Santa Cruz de la Palma in Spain, which makes for a convincingly primordial and untouched prehistoric landscape. The show moves along colourfully – one particularly liked the journey to a city on a mountainside that has been constructed as a giant skull. However, the adventures concerning dinosaurs, giant snakes, being captured and nearly sacrificed in a volcano by tribes are routine. Everything goes up in the predictable exploding volcano cliche climax where the special effects team set off what would surely have to be a record number of explosions in a film. 

The film has an interesting cast. The lead actor is Patrick Wayne, the son of John Wayne. Patrick Wayne had a minor career as an actor, which hit a peak in 1977 when he appeared as a leading man in both The People That Time Forgot and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). Patrick has the handsome certainty of a classic matinee idol – the great mystery is why he almost entirely vanished off the radar after 1977. Sarah Douglas appears in one of her first performances before she found fame as a super-villainness in Superman (1978) and particularly Superman II (1980) and then went onto uber-bitch roles in Falcon Crest (1981-90) and a good number of B movies. Here she walks through the film, radiating a good deal of confident, sexy, upper-class breeding. There is also the bewitchingly lovely Dana Gillespie, who makes a jaw-dropping appearance as a primitive girl, even if the film promptly provides her with nothing else to do throughout other than show off her undeniably impressive cleavage.

CREDIT:HERE

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

Dana Gillespie Website:HERE