The Gorgon

The Gorgon, released in 1964, is something of a hidden gem amongst Hammer’s gothic oeuvre. When it is mentioned it is usually in dismissive terms, deriding the appearance of the titular monster as being a bathetic let down, and criticising the ponderous pace of the film. This seems an unduly harsh appraisal. It’s a fine mood piece, with Terence Fisher’s expressionistic use of vivid colour reaching new, Douglas Sirk-like heights. It also gives a central role to Barbara Shelley, possibly the finest of Hammer’s female actors, who delivers an excellent performance, full of subtle restraint. It’s a film rich in implication and metaphor, with as much suggested as directly revealed, which is perhaps one reason why its reception has always been a little muted. The poster can’t have helped, either, with its garish promise of a new and terrifying monster which is only ever peripherally present. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are both on top form, the latter relishing the opportunity to play the bluff, scholarly hero turned man of action, who strides in towards the end of the film to sort the whole sorry mess out. John Gilling’s collaboratively produced script is also a brave attempt to introduce a new element to the Hammer formula, drawing from sources beyond the usual 19th and 20th century literary perennials. The disparity between the creature from classical mythology and the gothic trappings into which it is set is in itself striking, and implies a connection with ancient civilisations whose gods have yet wholly to have passed out of the world.

Romantic landscapes - cottage in the valley

The action takes place in the customary Hammer mittel-European setting, this time a woodland village which goes by the name of Vandorf. It’s an insular, unfriendly village, its inhabitants paralysed by fear and quick to fall into an aggressive defensiveness. Outsiders are left in no doubt as to how unwelcome they are, in the official capacity of Patrick Troughton’s steely Inspector Kanof if need be. One such outsider is Bruno Heitz, a bohemian artist living in a small cottage beyond the village boundary in cheerful, carefree poverty (although he does appear to have a Renoir painting hanging on the wall which might later serve to alleviate and lingering impecuniousness). Upon learning that Sascha, his coy model and casual mistress, is bearing his child, his playfully teasing manner instantly evaporates, leaving only an admonitory sternness which places the blame firmly upon her person – even though it was he who we have just witnessed attempting to persuade her to disrobe for ‘artistic purposes’. They both go their separate, unhappy ways. He to do the right thing and request permission to marry from her father, the splendidly named Janus Kass, she to hurry back to the village through the moonlit woodlands, the Berkshire beeches of Black Park familiar from so many Hammer films. Neither reaches their destination. Sascha meets with something that causes her to rend the night with a terminal scream of terror. Bruno is found hanging from a tree, his bruised and beaten features making it all too clear that his death was not self-administered, but meted out via the summary justice of the lynch mob.

Accusing finger

Sascha’s body is brought to the Vandorf Medical Institute, which is presided over by Doctor Namaroff (Peter Cushing), with the aid of his assistant Carla Hoffmann (Barbara Shelley). Carla has a quiet air of self-containment about her, infused with a hint of resigned and downcast disappointment. When the sheet is removed from the body, its petrified state is revealed. It has been transmuted into grey stone, a grim funerary sculpture. Carla looks on with an expression of fear and pity, but doesn’t utter a sound. She will later display a similar air of unruffled calm during a classic Peter Cushing brain removal. The scream, horror film’s emphatic punctuation mark and amplifier of the moment of terror, is provided by Martha, the wild-haired madwoman who has just broken out of Namarof’s lunatic ward. She is restrained by the hospital guard Ratoff, played by the ever-reliable Jack Watson, whose granite features (speaking figuratively in this case) are here set into their brutish thug mode, although Watson was equally capable of conveying stoic nobility and other qualities. The stony finger of Sascha’s corpse is snapped off and drops to the floor, where it points in disembodied accusation.

One of the grey men

Bruno’s father, Professor Heitz (Michael Goodliffe), travels to Vandorf to attend the hearing which will determine the cause of his son’s death. Namaroff withholds the truth about Sascha, and the verdict of suicide is clearly arrived at with the aim of concluding matters as swiftly as possible, obviating the need to delve further into the affairs of the village. The professor is volubly dissatisfied, and pursues his own investigations. His continued presence disrupts the villagers’ customary low-level disgruntlement, and they are soon forming a torch-wielding, stone-lobbing mob which descends on the professor (who is staying in Bruno’s cottage) to make it clear to him just how strongly they don’t like his sort around here. As tends to be the case with Hammer’s European peasantry, this angry, muttering rabble sounds more like a bunch of cockneys bruising for a scrap, with no trace of Prussian or Slavic accents to match the costumes and set dressing. All of which matters not a jot, of course. The professor is undeterred by the intimidation of the mob – indeed, it spurs him on all the more, intimating as it does that the entire village has a shameful secret it wishes to conceal. His area of expertise is literature, and it is in knowledge gleaned form the crackling, antique pages of age-old books that he begins to understand the nature of the curse which casts its shadow over the locals. One night he is drawn out into the moonlit woods and on towards the ruins of Castle Borski beyond by an eerie siren song. Climbing up and entering the castle through the open gate, he glimpses the terrible visage of the gorgon, scored with the lines of age and hatred, its hair a writhing corona of serpents’ heads. He manages to stagger back to the cottage and write out his last testament, his account of what he has discovered in his studies, and what he has just witnessed. He sits at his desk until all motion becomes impossible and he settles into his final statuesque pose.

Reflections from autumn leaves

His son, Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco), a student in a local city, is sent by his teacher Professor Meister to find out what has happened to both his father and his brother. He too receives a cool if not openly hostile reception and an evasive fog of stubborn ignorance surrounds his every inquiry. Only Carla treats him with any consideration, and he begins to fall for her enigmatic, sad-eyed charms. He intuits that there is something very wrong with the village, an aura of suppression which seeps into every exchange. But before he is able to uncover its source, he is glanced with a reflective glimpse of the gorgon’s stare in a pool of water and plunged into a deathly fever. From hereon, his vitality and mastery of events is greatly diminished. He becomes a weak and enfeebled man, old before his time.

Savant in tweed

The story is punctuated by the appearance of authoritative male figures, each with varying degrees of whiskery facial hair, who attempt to take control of the narrative and penetrate its secrets. These men have professional titles rather than first names, honorifics which also serve to mark out their elevated social standing. Doctor Namaroff, whom we meet first, possesses the secret knowledge of the gorgon’s nature and is intent on keeping it his alone, suppressing the monster’s terrible power as much as he is able, but failing to use what he knows to end the horror which is recurrently visited upon the village. Professor Heitz and Christopher Lee’s Karl Meister, who travels to Vandorf after learning of Paul’s sickness, are typical of the paternalistic elder characters in Hammer films whom Kim Newman identifies in his book Nightmare Movies as savants: those who possess or have access to the esoteric learning which gives them insight into the nature of the monsters they confront. The knowledge of these savants, often professors or scholars of one kind or another, gives them a natural air of authority, and is the key to determining how to destroy the unnatural creatures with which they and those who fall under their protection are confronted. Newman sketches the savant (in the chapter on ‘The Indian Summer of the British Horror Film’) as ‘an elderly mystic, steeped in arcane knowledge, apparently rational, but with an Old Testament streak of ‘vengeance is mine’ fundamentalism’. Professor Heitz, who is an intermediary John the Baptist of a savant, paving the way for Christopher Lee’s bluff, betweeded saviour, Professor Meister (or Master), falls foul of the gorgon’s fatal gaze, but has time to impart a considerable number of last words. These are not a series of emotive and breathless gasps with which he expresses feelings unarticulated in life. He departs with the written word, a swiftly penned resume of his research, findings and conclusions, before dying at his desk. He leaves life with one final scholarly paper.

Carla amongst the monochrome men

Carla takes her place amongst these men and seems meekly subservient to their authority. In court, she sits between two men in black, her pale yellow outfit contrasting markedly with their monochromatic conservatism. It’s never really any mystery as to the provenance of the gorgon’s periodic apparitions. It turns out that the spirit of the last of these three cursed sisters from classical antiquity has taken possession of Carla’s soul at some time in the past, probably before she arrived at the village and was left in the care of Doctor Namaroff at the Institute. Some degree of mental distress is hinted at, with blackouts and a general sense of unease. Whilst Carla remains consciously unaware of the monster which inhabits her, her troubled mind and bearing indicate that she intuits its malign presence at a deeper level. The gorgon emerges under certain circumstances which are only vaguely alluded to. It is certainly sporadic and irregular in its manifestations. The full moon acts as a catalyst for any such transformations. This variant of the werewolf mythos suggests that the creature has made certain accommodations to the legends of the north lands. The migration of the last of these terrible monsters of Greek antiquity from the mediterraenean to the European heartlands suggests the intriguing notion of mythological evolution; gods and monsters moving on from lands in which the currency of belief becomes devalued to places where they can adapt to new and still unfolding cultural patterns. Here they can give form to the hopes and fears (particularly the fears) of those who do not yet feel in control of the world, and who need stories to make sense of it. It’s an idea which has been used by many writers, notably Neil Gaiman, whose American Gods is an exemplary example of relocating a pantheon in a new environment and having them find there a renewal of their identities.

Romantic landscapes - the castle at night

The gorgon has moved on from the architecture of Doric columns and classical entablature and takes up residence in the gothic surrounds of Castle Borski. The castle is the locus of evil in the area, creating a negatively charged spirit of place which discourages visitors. It’s no wonder that this is where the gorgon is drawn to make its new home. The castle’s abandoned and ruined state, filled with the windblown debris of autumn, perhaps also denotes an admission on Hammer’s part that its gothic locales are now ready to be inhabited by a new breed. John Gilling’s Plague of Zombies and The Reptile would follow such an impetus, even moving from the mittel-Europe of Karlsbad and other such Teutonic-sounding place names to the wilds of Cornwall (whilst never straying from Bray studios, of course). The gorgon, we discover, is called Megaira. Greek scholars will immediately point out that this was the name of one of the three Erinyes, or Furies rather than that of one of the gorgons. Megaira is the Fury which embodies envious anger. The nature of the Erinyes, or ‘angry ones’, was inverted by Neil Gaiman in the last of his Sandman series, ‘The Kindly Ones’, in which they deliver a merciful ending for the dream lord, who is unable to bring it about himself. Classical mythology is mixed up and misquoted in the film, Megaira becoming partnered with Medusa and Tisiphone in the gorgon’s triad. She was in fact one of the three Furies, alongside Tisiphone and Alecto. The gorgons were three sisters, Medusa, Euryale and Stheno, of whom only Medusa was mortal. She was slain by Perseus, as Ray Harryhausen fans familiar with Greek mythology through Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans (certainly my primary sources when I was younger) will be aware. Euryale makes an appearance as the last of the gorgons in Harry Kumel’s film of Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis, in which she is brought, along with other remnants of the much diminished gods and creatures of Greek myth (including the Fates), to a rambling mansion on the outskirts of a Belgian port city.

Perhaps such confusion was intentional, since the idea of one of the Furies emerging to unleash its pitiless power upon all who cross its path or stir it into life is wholly in keeping with the submerged themes of the film. The Fury is like an archetypal projection of Carla’s unstoppered rage and fury, all the more terrible for having been so long suppressed. Her life with Doctor Namaroff is essentially that of an unacknowledged wife, as well as implicitly still a potential patient – both mate and inmate. Namaroff’s feelings are kept firmly in check, but Peter Cushing’s beautifully nuanced performance makes it evident that he does love Carla in his own way. It’s a possessive love, however, and his secret knowledge of the nature of her affliction enables him further to extend his control over her. When Carla hesitantly recites the tale of the three gorgons which she has memorised from Professor Heitz’s final letter, it as if Namaroff is forcing her to confront the presence of her inner demon, and so to concede her dependence upon him, her need for his protection. When she is finished, he embraces and declares his love for her, the only open display of affection and desire he offers in the film.

Munch pose

Carla is a character who is both vulnerable and strong. Convinced by Namaroff that some inherent mental weakness means that she must remain in his care, she nevertheless feels the frustration at the limitations imposed upon her life. Her cool strength is demonstrated in her unflinching observation of a Peter Cushing brain removal, and her impulse towards independence in the way that she goes to meet the outsiders (Heitz, father and son) who come to the village. It is Paul who makes her begin to believe that she might indeed still have a chance of beginning life again beyond the limits of the village, although the tragic element evident in her character (as indeed it is in most of the characters Barbara Shelley played in Hammer films, from Dracula: Prince of Darkness to Rasputin: The Mad Monk, and even Quatermass and the Pit, in which she is once more possessed by an evil force) makes us aware that this will never happen. In the latter stage of the film, with Megaira having manifested herself several times, we find Carla in Namaroff’s laboratory. With her hair pinned up, shirt buttoned to the neck and hands held anxiously before her she looks like one of the sorrowful women in Munch’s Frieze of Life paintings. Behind her, on the wall, is a large diagram of the cross-section of a brain. It’s a visual representation of the manner in which Dr Namaroff has dissected and clinically analysed her psyche and attempted thereby to dominate her will. Like Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she pushes against her domestic confinement and finally, encouraged by the increased sense of self-worth engendered by her meetings with Paul, confronts Namaroff. She tells him ‘I’m sick of your jealousy, sick of you’.

Classic Cushing brain removal technique

His reaction is restrained and placatory, a response which refuses to take her anger seriously. Her outburst takes place in his laboratory, amongst the powders and tinctures, and below the dissection table where he has just removed a brain (for no immediately apparent reason) and plopped it indelicately into a specimen jar. Incidentally, Cushing is, as ever, superb in conveying the sheer effort required to saw through cranial bone matter (particularly when you're only using a scalpel) in what is effectively a mimed performance, since the operation thankfully takes place below the edge of the frame. Carla is as much a fixture of this laboratory as she is a part of the doctor’s home, an object of his study as much as his affection. Every reaction and behavioural anomaly is to be noted and added to the case history. Finding a cure is not necessaritly Namaroff’s priority. While she is under the spell of the gorgon, or prey to her own self-negating neuroses (the one being a metaphorical mirror of the other) she is also under his spell. He is prepared to go as far as sending Ratoff after Paul with a knife in order to prevent him from meeting his rendezvous with her and possibly taking her away from the village. Anything to maintain Carla’s state of passive acceptance and self-denial. The villagers also militantly attempt to sustain a state of stasis throughout their surroundings. There is a sense of aggressive secrecy rooted in a fear of change. The petrification suffered by the gorgon’s victims is a highly symbolic fate and a deathly metaphor for such stultifying intransigence.

Brown and grey - the aged hero

The mood of the film is autumnal. It is in part a meditation on encroaching age, and of the disappointments associated with a life reflected upon and led less fully than once hoped for. Carla and Namaroff have settled into a listless, drifting partnership in which they barely acknowledge one another’s presence. Carla’s wistful melancholia and Namaroff’s permanent air of vagueness and distraction are signs that they have become disconnected, from one another and from the world, and have turned broodingly inward, in harmony with the spirit of the season. The sense of changelessness, of a permanent stasis which it no longer feels possible to disrupt further encourages the contemplation of aging; of involuntary change and declining fall. The gorgon is partly a harbinger of old age, taking the form of an aged woman. It lurks in a castle whose windows are broken and whose doors are permanently lodged open to cold and comfortless winds. Perhaps Megaira, as the Fury of envious anger, turns her terminal gaze on Sascha at the start of the film in impotent rage at the youth and vitality which she no longer possesses. Paul’s peripheral glimpse of the gorgon leaves him prematurely aged, his hair turned grey and lines of weariness scored around his eyes. This appearance can also be seen as a foretaste of the long-term effects of the village’s enervating atmosphere, of the dessication of spirit resulting from its wilfully narrow horizons. Paul attempts to persuade Carla to leave with him whilst they stand in the graveyard, a cold wind moaning in the background to complement the cold promise of the tombstones around them. Carla is framed by an ornamental row of classical columns, a hint of the world from which her demon has travelled. Autumnal colours are prevalent throughout the film. In this scene and others, Carla wears a long, sweeping cloak of brown, the shade of the fallen leaves. The beeches of Black Park have all turned a burnished copper, which also happens to echo the colour of Carla’s hair beneath the cloak’s hood. It all makes her seem of a part with this turning season – beyond summer’s end, awaiting the first icy touch of winter.

Technicolor test tubes

Terence Fisher makes wonderful and subtle use of bright colour in The Gorgon, as in his other Hammer films. Here, this is often displayed in small but significant details, which stand out against the otherwise restrained palette. As we’ve noted, the male characters in the film are generally notable for their lack of colour. The grey faces of those who are turned to stone are an extreme extension of this monochromatic appearance. Barbara Shelley’s Carla stands out all the more clearly as a result, with her yellow, peach and sky-blue blouses, muted though their tones are in accordance with her own subdued bearing. Christopher Lee’s Professor Meister proves a slight exception to the general trend of conservative male attire, arriving in caramel brown tweeds enlivened by the bright red splash of a protruding handkerchief. His lively and no-nonsense personality matches his mildly non-conformist outfit. Doctor Namaroff’s laboratory has plentiful elements of carefully contained colour in the contents of test tubes and the powders and tinctures stored in jars and on the shelves. We also see him with a bright red pen later on. These colours suggest that his passion lies chiefly in his work. He does also have a bright yellow cigarette holder (perhaps one of Cushing’s own), which visually rhymes with the yellow of the outfit Carla wears at the court hearing, and hints at pleasures quietly enjoyed beyond the lab.

Gorgon in green

When we see the gorgon, it rises from a throne upholstered in red and wears a bright green dress. Its eyes are rimmed with red. These are the colours of anger and jealousy, those qualities ascribed to Megaira the Fury. Touches of red and purple tinting the castle’s shadows add a further expressive element, and are very much akin to similar effects used by Mario Bava in films such as Black Sabbath and Kill Baby Kill. The glowing red of the fire behind the grate at the back of the cottage draws the eye and acts as a visual expression of the containment of passion and repression of feeling and hope which is such a major theme of the film. There are also a couple of impressive matte backdrops used at sparing intervals. One depicts the castle, looming above the treeline; the other Bruno’s cottage nestled in a valley with a river winding through it, as viewed from the rough, muddy bend of a road which passes precipitously above. Both serve to set the scene and create an atmospheric sense of place.

Castle interior - open to nature

Nature also plays an important part in the film, often abutting and intruding upon the man-made edifices of civilisation. The gorgon could be seen as nature’s agent in addition to being an emanation of Carla’s suppressed hopes and desires. The castle in which she manifests herself has been invaded by branch and vine, which crawl through the shattered windows. The floor is carpeted by leaves which have blown in the autumn winds through the doorway which is now permanently open to the elements which it once served to shut out. The castle is archetypally romantic, still largely intact but increasingly moulded by nature. As characters approach, it is framed by bare branches, with fallen trees to be negotiated in order to gain entrance. It’s location in the middle of the woods inevitably brings Caspar David Friedrich to mind (well, to my mind at any rate), particularly when a small, lopsided shrine is passed along the way. Megaira is dressed in bright green, like a woodland nymph fading and wrinkling in sympathy with the trees and bracken beyond the walls. Her final decapitation is accompanied by a further influx of dead leaves blown by the storm outside and skittering across the frame. It’s all very pagan – the death of the summer queen carried in on the warm breezes from the Mediterranean.

Courtyard oasis

The scene in which Paul encounters the gorgon is a marvellously evocative sequence, reminiscent of the composed scenes Michael Powell included in Black Narcissus and Gone to Earth. These attempted a marriage of sound, movement and editing, a kind of cinematic dance, and were full of nature mysticism. The courtyard outside Bruno’s cottage is filled with the resonant sounds of birdsong and trickling water, giving it the feel of a pocket Eden. The green of the trees and plants contrasts with the grey of the stone. A shadow passes over the pool of water, with its obscuring skein of coppery leaves. It’s Carla, dressed in peach (the promise of spring’s returning blossom?) and her autumn brown cloak. Paul, dressed in black, is terse and unfriendly. Shortly thereafter (and subsequent to Carla’s reiteration of the story of the three gorgons), when darkness has fallen, Paul returns to this oasis. The sounds of water and of rain falling on the pool, and the susurration of windblown leaves create a mysterious and premonitory atmosphere of suspended anticipation. The siren song music is introduced over the top. The gorgon’s visage appears momentarily in the reflected waters of the pool before it is dispersed by the splash of Paul’s hand, which bats the image away with reflexive terror. It seems almost to have emerged from and then faded back into the natural environment. In its own small way, the scene is very much like the Powell and Pressburger sequences in Black Narcissus and Gone To Earth in which Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) glides with terrible purpose through the empty corridors of the nunnery in Black Narcissus, and in which country girl Hazel (Jennifer Jones) hurries over the moorland on a stormy night in Gone to Earth, filled with ancient superstitions and primal fears. Both were ‘composed’ scenes, accompanied by the urgent cries and whispers of Brian Easdale’s romantic scores. The film as a whole has something of a Powell and Pressburger feel, in fact.

Mention should also be made of James Bernard’s music, which does much to enhance the mood of the above scene and many others. Bernard was Hammer’s in-house composer, and produced many memorable themes for the Dracula and Frankenstein films. He eschews his usual thunderously exclamatory register to create a dreamlike and impressionistic sound. It’s as if he has shifted from the violent, strident music of Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin or the first piano concerto to one of his passages of mysterious ‘night music’. Bernard also introduces a tender romantic theme, shot through with intimations of tragedy, which has echoes of Bernard Herrmann. Such romanticism is given further flowering in Frankenstein Created Woman, another of Terence Fisher’s tragic fairy tales.

Barbara imperious - Carla assumes her throne

Towards the end, Carla becomes increasingly aware of the dark spirit which possesses her, and when Paul comes to the castle to meet a rendezvous with her, she sits imperiously on the throne from which we have first seen the gorgon arise. The hood of her cloak is up, covering her hair and partially obscuring her face, as it had when she made her silent, shadowy descent past the classical columns into the graveyard where Paul was conducting his night-time disinterment. The juxtaposition in that scene of earth and stone, with Carla set against them in brown, is very elemental. Her covering serves to represent the burial of Carla’s true nature, her essential self. It also suggests that Paul has fallen in love with her superficial surface appearance, the Carla of meek manners moulded by Namaroff, and has no conception of what lies beneath. Her voice as she rises from the throne has lost all of its former tentative uncertainty and she now speaks in commanding, reverberant tones, seemingly pitched to resonate with the stones. As she descends the stairs to Paul, the hood falls down to reveal her face, and her voice becomes pleading, begging him to take her away immediately. There is a sense that if she leaves the village and the castle, escaping the malevolent spirit of place, the curse will be lifted from her. Unfortunately, Paul is a rather stolid individual, lacking the requisite romantic impulsiveness, and prevaricates to fatal effect.

Paul and Namaroff engage in their deathly duel at the climax of the film, allowing Peter Cushing to show off his athletic side, and fail to notice the gorgon’s emergence and slow approach to the head of the stairs above them. So what of the make-up effects which have drawn such derision? Well, they’re perhaps not Roy Ashton’s finest hour. Barbara Shelley, who wanted to play the part of her gorgon emanation herself, was apparently up for wearing a headpiece comprising live grass snakes, which shows considerable pluck. But perhaps wisely, her idea wasn’t taken up. In truth, the make-up serves functionally enough, with a little adjustment in focus from the inner eye of the imagination. The gorgon is really only designed to be glimpsed in mirrors and pools, and in the periphery of vision. Even if such subliminal appearances resulted from an awareness of the shortcomings of the make-up, they ultimately fit in perfectly with the tenor of the picture. The severed head which we are left contemplating as the credits roll is less satisfactory, and ends the film on a slightly discordant note. But these are really minor matters.

Veiled apparition - Carla amongst classical columns

What is more important is the atmospheric direction of Terence Fisher, who always preferred to think of his films as adult fairy tales rather than horror movies, and who here produces the perfect example to match that description. And then there are the great performances by Barbara Shelley and Peter Cushing, who bring the complexities of their characters to life in an undemonstrative yet quietly intense manner. It’s a difficult task to convey feeling which remain largely hidden, but they succeed in doing so through small looks and gestures. Christopher Lee also puts in a performance of great brio, creating a savant figure who breaks the mould somewhat. He seems like he might have a zest for fun as well as learning – a man who might share a few biers in the keller with his students. Bernard Robinson’s sets are also marvellous, particularly his transformation of the customary castle interior into a temple reclaimed by nature, complete with statue and plinth in the centre of the hall. It was a film which was always going to be a one-off. There was never any likelihood of the gorgon returning time and again in the manner of an indestructible Dracula or Frankenstein. Perhaps other mythical monsters, such as the Cyclops or minotaur, could have beaten a trail to the northern lands. But in her one appearance, the gorgon allowed for the creation of a melancholic, minor-key classic.

Black Jack

Black Jack is a novel by Leon Garfield, published in 1968 and one of a series of excellent books published in Puffin paperbacks in the 60s and 70s with fine covers and illustrations by Antony Maitland. His cover for Black Jack also adorns the bfi release of Ken Loach’s 1979 film adaptation of the story. Garfield’s novels and stories are generally set in an atmospherically realised eighteenth century world, although he did write a couple of books in the 70s in collaboration with the illustrator Edward Blishen which retold the Greek myths in the form of concise and powerful short stories. He also recast Shakespeare’s plays as stories, accompanied by the watercolours and line drawings of Michael Foreman. Black Jack takes place in the year of 1749, progressing into the early days of 1750, in a London full of the shadowy, decaying backdrops and sudden reversals of fortune and fate found in the more gothically-tinted passages of Dickens’ novels. It is, indeed, a very Dickensian novel, in all but its brevity, but shifted back a century. This is also the London of Hogarth (or indeed of Thomas Bewick, whose etchings are used on the title cards at the beginning of Loach’s film), full of humanity in all its teeming and frequently grimy and grotesque variety. The crowds in the street can coalesce into a mob at the slightest provocation, and all levels of society intermingle in a chaotic, rumbustious parade.

Black Jack tells the story of the young, orphaned apprentice Bartholomew Dorking, who is tricked into keeping watch over the corpse of the notorious criminal Black Jack, who has just been cut down from the Tyburn tree. He is locked into the room with Jack in his coffin by the ‘Tyburn widow’ Mrs Gorgandy. She pretends to be married or related to those taken out for public hanging at Tyburn so that she can claim the corpse and subsequently sell it on to medical practitioners for dissection. On this occasion, however, her source of income proves to be less deceased then appearances would have suggested. Bartholomew helps him back to convulsive and choking life by reaching down into his throat and pulling out the iron bar which has reinforced his neck vertebrae and prevented them from snapping with the tightening of the noose. It’s an instinctive act of pity and compassion for the most wretched in society which changes the course of his life and curses him with the responsibility for this big brute’s existence and his subsequent actions. For Black Jack is soon looking to restore himself to his ‘full ‘ealth an’ strength’ so that he can return to his customary murderous and thieving ways.

Black Jack is a force of nature, filled with elemental feelings of hatred, fear and a fierce delight in his own physical power and ability to inspire terror. He lives by his strength and is guided by his native cunning. He aspires to a life of complete self-containment, reliant on and beholden to no-one – a human monade. He forces Bartholomew to accompany him partly out of an initial practical need to have someone who can find him medical help, as well as to prevent him from revealing that the hangman has inadequately performed his duties. But he also wants to demonstrate, to himself as much as anyone, that although the boy has saved his life he remains entirely disconnected from the attachments and obligations of human society. He wishes to disprove, or perhaps reverse the old belief that if you save someone’s life you thereby become responsible for their subsequent fate. He is certainly not about to shower him with an outpouring of undying gratitude. Black Jack absorbs Bartholomew’s self for a while, and he becomes an extension of his will, his ‘familiar spirit’ as Garfield describes him, sent out into the world to do his bidding. He displays a sharp awareness of the boy’s hope that he might prove a tempering influence on his murderous tendencies, and responds with withering contempt and sarcasm. ‘Oh, mister – I needs you by me’, he mocks, ‘to save me from sin, y’know. To save me from my murderous nature. It ain’t every hanged felon what can travel with a whey-faced weasel of a saint’.

Bartholomew’s relationship with Black Jack is a complex one. It’s not dissimilar to that between Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Jack gives the boy a reductive rechristening, and he accepts his newly given name of Tolly, referring to himself as such from now on. It’s the kind of name a father might give a child, and betokens a growing, unspoken intimacy which neither is able to admit to. Tolly’s feelings towards Jack are a confused admixture of revulsion, fear and admiration. There is something about his power and single-minded strength, his sheer vital presence, which leads Tolly to long for his approval, perhaps even his respect. Garfield writes that ‘the very hugeness, strength and wildness of the giant awed the boy like a phenomenon in Nature. And in due proportion, his contempt was crushing and unendurable. More than anything else in the world, Bartholomew longed to change that contempt into respect. Wit all his heart and soul he craved for Black Jack’s admiration’. Tolly’s sea captain uncle, his guardian and absentee father figure, proves to be a small and physically compact man, a shrunken and diminished figure in comparison with Black Jack’s looming, massive frame. His unexpected petiteness prompts an outburst of barely stifled giggling.

Springtime pastorale - a Yorkshire posy

If Black Jack is a brutally commanding father figure for Tolly, granting him a new familiar name and inculcating in him a need to seek his approval, then he is himself a child-like figure, for all his size. Tolly has been the midwife at his painful re-emergence into the world from the wide-hipped, narrow-headed birth canal of his coffin. Garfield describes this rebirth with the declamatory assertion that ‘more dreadful than violent death itself was this reviving from it’. He is like a big, violent baby, a creature of uninhibited id, wholly preoccupied with the realisation of his own immediate needs. Both he and Tolly have been orphaned at an early age (Jack from birth), and they somehow reversibly interconnect in a way which fills the void this has created in them. The gravitational attraction of their mutual need is weakened by the appearance of Belle Carter. She provides a third, further complicating element in their relationship. Her passage to the asylum in which she is to be disposed of for the sake of the maintenance of the family reputation and the furtherance of social advancement, to both of which she is an embarrassing obstacle, is inadvertently interrupted by Black Jack’s crude attempt at highway robbery. Belle becomes Tolly’s inseparable companion, an innocent who is attuned to natural forces in a manner wholly different from Jack. Jack is wary of her lunacy, avoiding her as if he fears she might awaken a similar storm in his own mind. Belle and Tolly stumble upon a travelling fair, into whose extended family they are welcomed. As, in due course, is Black Jack, who stalks them like an unshakeable shadow, ‘vast and dark as fate’.

The warmth of community

The fair is an exemplar of community, a small, mobile oasis of co-operation and mutual aid. It offers another way of life for Jack, presenting him with the possibility of bringing an end to his brutish, self-contained existence and finding companionship and common purpose. But it is not a choice he initially chooses to make. The fair also houses Tolly’s dark half. This shadow self is the apprentice of Doctor Carmody, the inventor and purveyor of a miraculous wonder potion whose astounding effects are demonstrated to the gullible through clumsy theatrical contrivance. Garfield has a Dickensian way with colourful and self-descriptive character names. This weaselly, deceitful boy, whose self-serving actions create many of the complicating knots in the rest of the story, is named Hatch. It’s a name which serves to convey his physical appearance, sharp and hatchet-faced. It also suggests the tendency of his mind, which matches his features in its sharpness, to constantly hatch plots and schemes. He is also like a hatchling version of Black Jack, possessed of an utterly self-serving nature which is couple with an instinctive viciousness. Appropriately, his name also portends his fate which is delivered via the sharp edge of a hatchet (in his mind at least, and literally so in the film). Tolly and Hatch present Black Jack with divergent choices as to which direction his reborn life might tend. He chooses the familiarity of the latter, allying with Hatch in a plot to deliver Belle to the asylum to which she was originally being conveyed and to collect the reward money offered. He is, of course, immediately betrayed by this youthful personification of his predatory individualistic philosophy. His individualistic approach to life condemns him to be eventually displaced by the younger and fitter generation who share his way of thinking. He is cast out of the warm, companionable circle of the fair having betrayed their trust and attempted to rob the troupe of dwarf performers. It’s a cowardly act made all the more contemptible by the huge gulf in size between them, which makes him seem for the first time like nothing more than a nasty bully. Tolly feels a burning shame on his behalf. He is truly forced to rely on his strength and self-sufficiency, and it is no longer enough. He returns full of broken humility and pleas for mercy. It is granted him by Tolly, who is ready to forgive him, and also by a previously unnoticed member of the wagon caravan, a quiet and unprepossessing man named Jed. He turns out to have qualities of strength, loyalty and tolerance which have gone unremarked until called upon.

Black Jack takes advantage of events to convince Belle that she should voluntarily admit herself to the asylum. In getting rid of her, he seeks to renew the close connection which he and Tolly had shared. He tells her, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy stemming from emotions never before touched upon, that ‘he and I have – unfinished business. Tolly and me…’. In convincing her that her love is insufficient for him, that she will only bring him misery, he confesses his own need for his companionship and balancing presence, the desire to no longer be alone. It’s a turning point for him, and when he realises that he can’t simply resurrect his relationship with Tolly by sending her away, he undergoes what amounts to a revelation, a conversion experience. This will be his last act of destructive self-interest. His earlier sarcastic references to Tolly as his saint and saviour are inverted and become imbued with a new sincerity. He decides to devote his considerable strength and renewed will to righting the wrong which he has committed. His declaration of intent is full evangelical fire. ‘I’m in me full health and strength, Tolly!…what I done, I can undo. There ain’t no living soul to stand against me. Keep your distance, boy! I’m out of your reaching, I’m face to face with my Maker, Tolly’. He also now admits to a past, rather than existing in a permanent present, unanchored and free-floating. He talks of his parentage in a way which further humanises him, making him less of a preternatural monstrosity. He tells Tolly that he was indeed born of ‘a man and a woman – just like you, boy. Only they was cast-offs. He went on the rope, and she was quick with me…for which she was spared. But not for long. I did for her when I was born. No escape for the cast-offs. Till now, Tolly. For I’m rising up in me health and strength. I’m presenting me account, Tolly. I ain’t no chapel bankrupt. I’m rising up – and God help him what tries to keep me down!’

His identification with the cast-offs, amongst whose number he includes himself, lends a social dimension to his violent self-interest; a base instinct for survival borne out of necessity and developed through the means of his strength and size. Through his new awareness of this cast-off level of society, his sense of being rooted within it, he becomes able to identify with his fellow outsiders. The supportive community of the fair and Jed’s patient, unassertive friendship also slowly teach him by example the value of society, as opposed to aggressive and predatory individualism. The sense of religious revelation, of a soul suddenly filled with righteous spirit, is outwardly reflected in the apocalyptic tone which suffuses the story as it builds to its thunderous climax. The northern lights appear in the winter sky like luminous portents of the final days, and the city’s foundations are shaken by a series of rumbling tremors. The recurring vision which Belle has now seems part of the general spirit of consensus madness overwhelming the London populace. Her description of her vision is always visually specific and expressed in exactly the same terms. She sees ‘a tall black tower with a gold top – higher than the sky. There are white angels flying with white wings…and all the world’s singing a lullaby, for the sun’s gone to bed in a blanket’. It appears to be a glimpse into the post-apocalyptic world to come, but turns out to be a very accurate augury of a particular moment. Belle’s fever-fused period of madness appears to have left her with a genuinely visionary sense. Perhaps the physical realisation of her long-held vision (the black tower a mast, the angel’s wings sails and the lullaby a sailor’s song) marks its dissolution, and the final fading of her madness. Her glimpse into her and Tolly’s future is in keeping with the sense of the play of fate manifest throughout the story.

Garfield’s novel is full of rich incident and character, with profound psychological insight mixing with hints of mysticism and the underlying pattern of fate, which erupts into life from time to time. It has a dark, gothic streak running throughout. Corpses shudder back into life in shadowy, candlelit rooms; There are murders and furtive graveyard disinterments; a grim asylum oubliette which threatens a lifetime’s incarceration for the innocent, insane and simply inconvenient alike, forgotten to all outside; And a fearful anticipation of the end of the world, the fiery furnace cracking open beneath the streets of London. So how did Ken Loach manage to turn it into such a lifeless and dull film.

Witnessing the resurrection

Loach’s adaptation of Black Jack is full of blank and affectless performances which fail to convey a flicker of emotion or psychological depth. The dialogue is delivered with the hesitancy and lack of emotional inflection which is far from the naturalism which is perhaps intended. At times it almost has the feel of a play read out in a classroom by a bunch of bored English students. Loach’s failure to direct his younger actors or the other non-professional members of the cast results in the story being drained of all drama. This is evident from the very beginning. The scene in which Tolly witnesses Black Jack’s resurrection is one which is full of heightened drama and terror. A young boy locked into a room in which the evening shadows are spreading seeing a dead man opening his eyes and stir in his coffin! Garfield describes how ‘Bartholomew Dorking…stood almost dead of terror’. In Loach’s version of the scene, there is no sense of shock, terror or even mild alarm. The expression on Tolly’s face remains completely unchanged, without even a widening of the eyes or gasped intake of breath, either of which would presumably have been within the capabilities of Stephen Hirst, the young actor playing the role. Even Loach, on the commentary track, is forced to concede that this is a little underwhelming. And yet it sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Jean Franval as Black Jack

Black Jack in the film has become a Frenchman (Jacques Noir?). This is explained by the origins of the funding on the other side of the Channel, but it is a somewhat uneasy transformation. This central and all-important role is taken by Jean Franval, who had played small roles in some highly distinguished films: Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid from 1963; Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge in 1970; and the hit comedy L’Emmerdeur in 1973, in which Jacques Brel plays the mournful schmuck who steadily brings the meticulously laid plans of the fastidious assassin ‘Monsieur Milan’ to utter ruin. Here, he seems infected by the same sense of anomie as the rest of the cast, however. His Black Jack is not the force of nature filled with fierce rage and newly emergent feelings that he is in Garfield’s book. He seems lost in a daze of stunned puzzlement throughout, a lost figure, lumbering and lugubrious. Andrew Bennett is good as Hatch, and it’s unsurprising to discover that of the younger members of the cast, he has been the only one to continue acting, appearing in Angela’s Ashes and John Boorman’s film The General, two Irish-set films which presumably required him to drop the Yorkshire accent.

Loach also holds back from any real involvement with the story, leaving his camera to passively observe from a distance. He seems reluctant to employ any of the cinematic devices which involve the audience and help to tell a story by enhancing feelings of emotion and excitement. Close-ups, a variety of camera movements, engaging performances, cross-cutting to create rhythm and a sense of connection between events or characters and choreographed action. It’s as if he has a purist distaste for such artificial techniques. As a result, the film has the feel of a documentary rather than a story, and I can only imagine that young audiences at the time must have found it a tedious experience. It’s not that Loach lacks engagement with the material. The choice of the novel was his own. He had discovered Leon Garfield’s work having given some of his books to his children, and is full of praise for his writing. Perhaps he simply didn’t have the feel for producing a children’s adventure story. It certainly stands out as an anomaly within his filmography, and has largely been neglected until the recent bfi reissue.

Framing the landscape

There are compensatory aspects, however. The period details are very well realised, with the fashions of the eighteenth century, the frock coats, wigs and tricorne hats reproduced in a convincingly worn and fraid state. The story has been relocated from London to South Yorkshire (although filming was actually carried out in North Yorkshire), and writer and director display a good ear for period speech and regional dialects. The filming in the North Yorkshire countryside brings out Loach’s bucolic side, as displayed in Kes and The Gamekeeper. Loach chose some wonderful rural locations, and they are framed by Chris Menges’ camera as if they are landscape compositions. Menges’ used a 16mm camera for the exterior shooting, which gives everything a soft-grained haze, blurring edges and enhancing the pastoral feel. Menges is a distinguished British cinematographer who worked The War Games, Peter Watkins’ banned BBC drama-documentary, early in his career and progressed to prestigious major studio pictures such as The Killing Fields and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Loach’s concern for realism in his recreation of the period also led him to search out buildings from the era in Yorkshire. The asylum is particularly well-served by a house which he discovered in Whitby, whose dilapidated state helped to convey the squalor and neglect suffered by the inmates.

Packie plays the whistle

The music was also chosen to fit in with the eighteenth century setting, and was provided by two prominent figures from the 60s and 70s folk revival. Packie Byrne was a singer and teller of tales from County Donegal in Ireland, where he was born in a crofter’s cottage in 1917. He was much valued by the new generation of folk singers and musicians who perceived him as being a conduit feeding directly from the source of the common stream of the tradition. He plays Dr Carmody in the film, and his stilted delivery of his lines suggests that he is not a natural actor. He is certainly entirely inappropriate for representing a man who is supposed to be able to mesmerise a crowd into the belief that he really could have produced an elixir to cure all ills. He does get to beguile his fellow travellers (and the viewer) with an air on his penny whistle, as they sit around an open fire to ward off the chill of the night in the centre of their John Ford-style circle of wagons.

Fairground balladeer

The film’s music soundtrack was provided by Bob Pegg, once half, alongside his ex-wife Carole, of the creative core of the early 70s folk-rock group Mr Fox, who produced two fine LPs (Mr Fox and The Gipsy) before falling apart. They showed their Yorkshire roots in the lengthy title song from The Gipsy. The narrator of this modern, multi-part ballad epic races across hill and dale to catch up with the gipsy for whom he has fallen in an breathless dash which displays a native feel for the Yorkshire landscape. Pegg was clearly an ideal choice to create the music for Loach’s Yorkshire-set Black Jack. He often uses folk instruments in a solo context for the film, creating a slightly wistful, impressionistic atmosphere. We get to hear the hurdy-gurdy, the fiddle and the whistle. These are sometimes incorporated into the narrative, as with Packie Byrne’s whistle playing. A figure is seen wandering through the fair, singing one of the sheaf of ballads clutched in his hand. Could this be Pegg himself (he certainly sports a similar moustache in a picture in the booklet of the CD re-release of the Mr Fox albums)? Or perhaps he is the sailor who sings his lulling shanty at the end of the film.

Rehearsing for Time Bandits - Tom Thumb's Army

The bustling entertainments and diversions of the fair also provide us with a preview of Terry Gilliam’s extravagant fantasy Time Bandits, which would come out a couple of years later. Here we see ‘Tom Thumb’s Army’ capering about to the grinding accompaniment of the hurdy-gurdy on the makeshift stage set up in their wagon for the amusement of the gathered locals. The army is comprised of David Rappaport, Tiny Ross, Mike Edmonds and Malcolm Dixon, who perform the same tumbling, barely competent acrobatics that they put on to bamboozle the likes of Napoleon and Agamemnon in Gilliam’s film, before robbing them blind.

Friedrich in England

The apocalyptic tone of the end of Garfield’s book is absent from the film. Budgeting restraints obviously played their part, alongside Loach’s doctrinaire adherence to realism, of the sort which allows of no element of magic. The final scene does build an atypical mood of poetry and romanticism, however. Belle’s vision is affirmed, and she and Tolly sail slowly down the river on his uncle’s ship. Mist hangs over the fields and the trees fade into a hazy, indeterminate distance. It is a shot which draws on the mystical landscape tradition, which imbues the land with symbolic richness and strange resonances. It seeks to see beyond the surface of things, or to bring out the true radiant (or corrupt) nature of that surface appearance. The masts and sails of the ship are etched against the fading light of the early evening as it glides away from us towards the indefinite horizon. It could be an English version of a Caspar David Friedrich painting. Bob Pegg’s gorgeous music, which now brings together all the instruments in sublime, soaring harmony, adds a strong emotional charge to the scene. At the very end, we get a glimpse of how powerfully the tale might have been told.

Scenes to Remember John Barry By

The title sequence of The Ipcress File is the perfect marriage of music and action. Barry is keenly attuned to the small details observed in the banal and seemingly inconsequential morning routines which Michael Caine’s character Harry Palmer goes through with mechanical reflexivity. The very ordinariness of these actions, and the unconscious way in which they are carried out, gives us our first glimpse into the nature of our protagonist: the fastidious manner in which he measures out his coffee; the way he automatically turns to the racing pages in his paper, circling several possible horses to back, as if he needs the extra money; the fumbling around in the bedroom for clothes, amongst which a bracelet and gun are the final accessories, both swept up and donned without pause. Barry’s music does so much to capture the everyday nature of this batchelor pad morning. His scoring picks up on the rhythm of the scene. It is cued by the drilling ring of the alarm clock (an old fashioned bell and clapper job), and goes on to make space for and include extraneous sounds such as the grinding of coffee beans and the rustling of the newspaper. Barry uses twinned vibraphone and flute, with loping bass and short hints of melody resonating with metallic thickness on the cimbalom, to evoke the first shuffling steps out of bed in the morning.

Choreographed breakfast

The cimbalom was a signature Barry sound, and became almost a spy movie cliché. It’s a Hungarian instrument, a form of hammered dulcimer, and was prominently used by Zoltan Kodaly in his Harry Janos Suite, as well as bringing added local colouring to the orchestra in the original scoring of Stravinsky’s evocation of a Russian peasant wedding, Les Noces, and in Bartok’s first rhapsody for violin and orchestra, in which the composer included the folk tunes of his native land. In the context of the cold war 60s, the slightly blunted ring of its strings created an atmosphere of melancholy menace, suggestive of betrayal, subterfuge and exile. Here, it also hints that there is more to Harry Palmer than originally meets the eye. A trumpet, muted, of course (it’s early yet) joins in on top of the other instruments, suggesting a mind beginning to buzz and flow with coherent thought. As his morning coffee has its effect (he doesn’t seem to bother with any other breakfast) and he begins to fully wake up to face the day ahead, the music also begins to cohere, its disparate elements drawn together by the chords of a brass arrangement, whose mass seems to push the airier elements towards a greater sense of urgency. Finally, it reaches a jazzy swing as he strides down the street to confront the first business of the day.

Hitching a Lift - The Knack

The bed ride through London in The Knack is a summation of the youthful joie de vivre of swinging sixties London, at least as represented on screen. It is a characteristic Richard Lester scene, allowing him to take his camera out on to the streets and film set ups which have a feeling of playful spontaneity. The city is ours, it seems to say, even if we haven’t got a brass farthing between us and are reduced to pushing an old bed frame scavenged from a scrap yard through the streets back to our shared house. The haphazard and larky progress of the youthful trio of characters across the Smoke is accompanied by an audio collage of grumbling and grudgeful comments from representatives of the elder generation. Given that Michael Crawford, whose character is a teacher, wears a tweed jacket and tie, Rita Tushingham sports a check cap and drab woollen coat, and Donal Donnelly a white arran sweater, they hardly seem like the mods and rockers who these onlookers seem to believe herald the twilight of British civilisation. Ray Brooks’ (the voice of Mr Benn, no less) Tolen fits the profile rather better, but is depicted as a rather joyless and empty character, caught in the trap of his own studied cool. Barry’s scoring of the mobile bed scene, which is effectively silent, starts with twinned xylophone and plucked strings, the rusty vehicle setting off slowly at the start of its journey. A jazz trumpet is added, and then strummed guitar and funky organ as the bed builds up momentum. The trip also finds the three characters getting to know each other, having a lot of fun and a few mishaps along the way. This is also suggested by the music’s growing confidence after its initial hesitancy. Brass chordal arrangements are added beneath once more, and then the John Barry strings weave their spell. Barry’s string arrangements are lush and seductive, but never descend into easy listening insipidity or muzak valium. They are always instantly recognisable, and add a radiant corona to whatever they accompany.

Barry’s theme for Midnight Cowboy, with its tremulous, emotive harmonica, is simply gorgeous, uplifting and with the buoyancy of the most memorable and natural melodies, and yet at the same time achingly sad. It sounds like the kind of tune one might whistle in order to summon up good cheer in the midst of a bleak mood, or to ward off loneliness, but which ends up subtly permeated with such feelings anyway. It’s one of Barry’s characteristic descending melodies, a series of falling sighs which can express the polarities of autumnal melancholia and woozy, sun-drenched contentment. Here, it grants humanity and gutter romance to characters who might otherwise be seen as just a couple of low-life deadbeats. We first hear the theme as Jon Voight’s dim-witted country cowboy, Joe Buck, wearily walks the midnight streets of New York, his transistor radio perched on his shoulder like a jabbering metallic parrot. Barry’s theme has a strummed guitar backing which carries echoes of the bright and upbeat wanderer’s anthem Everyone’s Talkin’, written by Fred Neil and sung in the film by Harry Nilsson, which had lent a sunny serenade to Joe’s departure from the South and excited arrival in New York.

Lonesome cowboy

The plangent fall of harmonica notes and the steady, settling descent of the string harmonies in Barry’s theme lend Joe a tragic aura, a pathos which results from his loss of innocence, and the decay of his dream of the city. It’s a fall into self-knowledge which is loaded with symbolic weight; the dissipation of his proud self-image and the simple verities upon which it was built represent, in a wider sense, the loss of the self-image and self-belief of an older and seemingly less complex America. His is the widespread longing for an ideal of an American past which has become saturated in its own self-created mythologies. In New York, Joe finds out (with his perched radio demon permanently placed to drive the point home with incessantly intruding ads) that everyone is hustling and trying to sell something, be it novelty distractions, diverting entertainments, religious salvations, the instant solutions of politics or simply their own selves. He is lost in the bewildering cacophony of competing messages, unable to comprehend the rapidly transformations of once-stable cultural iconographies. An immaculately tailored cowboy with polite Southern manners no longer sends out the same signals of old-fashioned, manly values. The decency at the heart of this simple, uncomplicated lunk shines through at the last, however. Joe tenderly shields his friend Rizzo (not Ratso, now) from the disapproving clucks and stares of his fellow travellers on the Greyhound as the bleached white of the beachside apartments of Florida are reflected in the bus windows. Barry’s theme provides an unbearably poignant accompaniment to the ride South towards warmth and sun (and untold wealth) which is Rizzo’s dream destination, never to be arrived at.

You Only Live Twice is perhaps the most beguiling of Barry’s Bond themes (it’s certainly my favourite), and perhaps the ultimate example of his signature string sound. Its use whilst the camera circles down like an executive’s helicopter towards the luxurious Hong Kong hotel where we will find Bond and his latest disposable conquest (and there’s that descending melody line again) sums up all the alluring glamour and poolside glimmer of the jet set worlds in which the films are set. Also, with its hints of disillusioned resignation in its minor key shifts, it alludes to the corrupt power and casually murderous violence (qualities shared by ‘hero’ and supervillain alike) upon which such worlds are founded. There is the occasional upward sweep of a harp chord in the background, subliminally audible behind the shimmering surface of the strings, which suggests the distant, gentle susurration of ocean waves seen and heard from a balcony in the upper reaches of a plush hotel. The plucked strings of an exotic-sounding lute (a pipa?) give a touch of far eastern shading.

At the beginning of the same film, we find ourselves in the black abyss of space. Barry’s ‘Space March’ theme creates a sense of impending menace as we watch an astronaut take a space-walk outside an orbiting capsule. A snare drum rattles quietly but insistently behind a rising melody played on piano and flute. These are joined by strings and harp in another example of the way in which Barry slowly built up his instrumental forces. The rippling arpeggios of the harp evoke the cold glimmer of the starfield. Bernard Herrmann used harps to similar effect in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Indeed, he also used them to conjure the glittering luminescence of the subterranean world in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and the sun dappled coral colours of the subaqueous environment in Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (for which he amassed a 9 harp force). As a technological leviathan with a gaping (though toothless) crocodile maw approaches the capsule, causing much incredulous panic, Barry introduces his underlying brass harmonies again. They rise in power and force, accumulating rising pitches, the snare drum also growing louder and more dominant. The music creates the sense of a relentless and unstoppable force looming ever nearer. Finally, the monstrous space machine reaches its helpless prey and scoops it up. The tether of the space-walking astronaut is clipped off, sending him spinning into the cold embrace of oblivion. It’s the moment which, as a child, disturbed me more than any other in a Bond film – except perhaps for the crushing of a hapless henchman behind the massive bank vault door in Goldfinger. Barry’s music reaches a crescendo and then explodes in a chord of crashing chaos as the devouring collision occurs. There is a pause, and then a concluding, low afterchord as the beaky maw snaps shut on the minnow capsule. The original theme, with its rippling starlight harp, then reasserts itself as the predatory craft continues its slow and steady orbit against the backdrop of an indifferent cosmos.

Moved along outside Alvaro's

There are many more scenes in which Barry’s music plays an integral part, of course. These include later scores using more conventional orchestral forces in music of sweeping, romantic grandeur designed for big-budget Hollywood epics such as Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves. Music for wide-open landscapes. I’ll include one final scene in which Barry’s music doesn’t feature at all, however, from a film which he played no part in scoring. In Jack Bond’s Separation, from 1968, Jane Arden’s character is having an awkward meeting with her ex-husband in a restaurant in Chelsea. It’s a place called Alvaro’s, an exclusive and forbiddingly fashionable hang-out in which the select coteries of the swinging sixties in-crowd gather. We see them here in all their youthful and prosperous vitality. A car pulls up outside and a passing policeman leans in to consult with its driver and tell him that he’ll have to move on. As Bond tells us in his commentary, this marks the near-appearance of John Barry and his then-wife Jane Birkin in his film (although if you look closely you can see Barry lean across from the driver’s seat, so I suppose technically he does appear). Watching this scene again, this absence now has additional resonance. John Barry has driven on to destinations elsewhere.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is another of director Guy Maddin’s delirium dreams, a fevered piece of personal myth-making which has no place for the dull reproductions of realism. Maddin’s cinematic reference points tend to hearken back to the silent era and the films of the 30s which followed on from it. It was a period in which Hollywood and other national cinema cultures created extravagant, self-contained fantasies which showed no interest in directly reflecting the reality of the world beyond the soundstage doors. In films such as Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg, Maddin creates his own pastiche of the visual surfaces of silent cinema. Black and white cinematography, with the occasional blush of washed-out tinting; fogged lenses cast a hazy halo around the edges of the frame; Montage and superimposition of images, which combine to heightened expressionistic effect; exaggerated performance styles and camera placements and angles which emphasize their broad gestures; and intertitles carrying exclamatory dialogue and emphatic interjected comments.

Reflective moments in a purple haze

Having said all of that, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs displays none of the above. Like its predecessor, and Maddin’s prior collaboration with regular screenwriting partner Gorge Toles, Careful, it is bathed in vivid, hyperreal colours, rich combinations far gone along the spectral path from their simple primary origins. Everything here is rich and artificial, and accompanied by the ceaseless chatter of the arch and theatrical dialogue. Maddin’s primary filmic influence, as he mentions in the commentary, is Josef von Sternberg, in particular his extraordinary historical fantasia The Scarlett Empress. There is also the feel of a dubbed middle-European film from a slightly later era (the mid 50s through to the early 70s), maybe from somewhere like Czechoslovakia or Austria. The dialogue was all post-synched. Indeed, in the case of Ross McMillan, who plays the protagonist, Matthew, this post-recording was parcelled out to another actor entirely (Peter Glahn), which Ross was none too happy about. The post-recording results in a disjuncture between word and gesture, a distancing effect which further enhances the sense of unreality, of a world set apart. It’s an effect which Maddin presumably deliberately sought to create, as it is certainly in perfect conjunction with the mood of the film. The accents are also wildly and emphatically disparate. Maddin refers to a ‘choir of accents’, and points to the example of The Scarlett Empress, a film whose voices of the Russian heartland range from unadulterated New Jersey to Marlene’s travel-inflected German. He points out that his cast have their origins all over the map. Ross McMillan comes from Edinburgh (granted, we don’t actually hear his voice, but nevertheless…); Shelley Duvall is from Texas; Frank Gorshin from Pittsburgh; Pascale Bussieres is French Canadian; RH Thomas Lithuanian; and Alice Krige has perfect received stage English, although she was born in South Africa. They are all encouraged to play up their idiomatic idiosyncracies. Shelley Duvall drops her g’s, enunciating her final n’s in words such as huntin’ and farmin’; Gorshin growls and barks out steel town vowels; Bussieres and Krige use their accents to accentuate the fey, unworldly glamour of their characters; And Thomson declaims imperiously in clipped, Teutonic tones, every inch the cruel von Sternberg dominant male in his black, quasi-military outfit.

Pierre Louys - lost in fin-de-siecle dreams

The primary influences on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs are literary and artistic rather than cinematic, however. Maddin talks about how he was immersed in the literature of the Decadants at the time, and in particular the fin de siecle writing of Pierre Louys. Louys was a good friend of Claude Debussy, who composed two pieces at the turn of the century around his work. The first was the Trois Chansons de Bilitis in 1899, three songs for soprano with piano accompaniment, taken from Louys’ poetry. The Chansons de Bilitis were Louys’ sensual reveries of Sapphic love set in an idealised, sun-drenched ancient Greece which was more a reflection of contemporary fantasies of sexual liberty than a depiction based in any real historical location or custom. A classical dream of the French fin de siecle mind. Debussy returned to the collection for Les Chansons de Bilitis in 1901 (known separately as Six Epigraphs Antiques), providing musical interludes to 12 spoken passages. These are gorgeous pastoral pieces, scored for two flutes, two harps and a celeste; an ensemble purpose built for hazy reveries. In the recording which I have, Louys’ verses are read in an understated murmur by Delphine Seyrig, the French actress who was one of the anonymous figures placed artistically in the frame for L’Anee Derniere a Marienbad, the object of Antoine Doinel’s youthful adoration in Truffaut’s Baisers Volees, and the decadant aristocratic vampire in Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness. She’s an absolutely ideal narrator for the piece, and her voice casts a mesmeric spell even if you don’t understand a word of French (which might even prove an advantage). The narcotised and drowsy atmosphere of Louys’ verse suffuses the world of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. This world is also given an almost constant underscoring by composer John McCulloch, which is very much in the style of Debussy (La Mer in particular), and of the lush moods of the late romantics.

Moreau interiors

Maddin also mentions a pilgrimage which he made to the Musee Gustav Moreau in Paris shortly before shooting began. The lighting and colour of the film betray the influence of Moreau’s palette, what the director calls his ‘jewelled tones’, as well as of his fantastic subject matter, rendered in shimmering and radiant visionary form. The preternatural clarity of the colour-drenched skies also bring to mind the magic hour landscapes of Maxfield Parrish, or the blurred horizons of Turner’s sunsets blossoming over reflective water. Knut Hamson’s Pan is cited as a further literary influence, particularly in the context of the dream hunting sequences, and the rather obvious phallic play with cocked rifles. The casual removal of a lobster from the tidal bed in which Matthew lies with Alice Krige’s wood nymph prompts Maddin to claims that he emulated Gerard de Nerval’s proto-surrealist and immaculately camp gesture of taking his pet crustacean for a walk on a blue silk lead, although he only exercised it around the set, rather than through the Palais Royal gardens in Paris. The deliberately artificial interiors and tastes favoured by Des Esseintes, the solitary protagonist of JK Huysmans’ A Rebours, are also mentioned as being germaine to the world of the ice nymphs.

Solti's cluttered lair

That world is the island of Mandragora, to which Matthew is returning after years spent in prison for an unspecified crime. He has a passionate shipboard encounter with a beguiling woman who appears as the embodiment of his romantic ideals, and whom he feels assured he is fated to meet again. Arriving on the island, he goes to visit his sister Amelia (played by Shelley Duvall), who owns an ostrich farm. Her assistant, Cain, is a voluble and rough-mannered farmhand who fears that Matthew’s return will endanger the tacit agreement he has made with Amelia which will see him inherit the farm. Frank Gorshin gives a performance of wild-haired eccentricity which recalls his manic cartoon capering as The Riddler in the 60s TV Batman. Matthew encounters the mysterious forest nymph Zephyr (played by Alice Krige) who leads him, possibly in his dreams, to her sea cave bedroom, where they make love as the tide rises suggestively around them. All the island’s activities are overseen by the arrogantly aloof, wooden-legged Dr Solti from his gothic mansion, which is cluttered with occult paraphernalia and equipment part scientific, part thaumaturgical. His companion is Juliana, the woman who had so bewitched Matthew aboard the ship during his ocean voyage back home. Solti is the magus of this island. He masterminds the ‘god-game’ of the story, to use the term included by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, manipulating the other characters with a cruel and disdainfully indifferent intelligence. Clute quotes R.Rawden Wilson (author of the formidable sounding ‘In Parmenides’ Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game and Narrative Theory’), who writes ‘in a godgame, one character (or several) is made a victim by another character, superior in knowledge and power. Caught in a cunningly constructed web of appearances, the victim, who finds the illusion to be impenetrable, is observed and his behaviour is judged’. It’s a narrative form which has existed at least since the tales of classical mythology, and pretty much sums up the plot structure of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

Tidal bed

The cast is fascinating and deliberately disparate in appearance and acting style. The mixture of accents has already been noted. Alice Krige plays one of her distracted, lamia-like characters, a supernatural femme fatale whose haunted features are both enticing and subtly disconcerting. She looks (as much through acting as appearance) as if she is halfway between worlds, and liable to drag unwary souls with her across the threshold. She has become the actress of choice when it comes to portraying the uncanny , both for arthouse directors such as the Brothers Quay (in Institute Benjamenta) and for more mainstream supernatural fare such as Ghost Story back in the 80s, and the more recent, game-based Silent Hill. Pascale Bussieres as Juliana seems to have been transplanted from an Italian film from the 60s or 70s. She has the look of Monica Vitti in an Antonioni film (or, indeed, in Modesty Blaise), of Marisa Mell in Danger: Diabolik, or even, from a later date, Ornella Muti in Flash Gordon (which is possibly more in keeping with Maddin’s oeuvre). Shelley Duvall reprises the gawky innocence of her Olive Oyl from Robert Altman’s Popeye, although Maddin and George Toles also mention her performance in 3 Women, one of Altman’s ‘dream’ films from the 70s. This is evident in the bright and brittle flow of her chatter, which acts as a shield against the casual cruelties of the world (and its inhabitants), allowing her to harbour her own comforting illusions. Her steep descent into mental dissolution also echoes that of the outwardly dominant (and domineering) character of Millie who she plays in Altman’s film.

Taking tea with ostriches

The tone of the performances, and of the film in general, wavers wildly between sincere and intense romanticism and wickedly cruel camp mockery. This is exemplified in the scene towards the end in which Matthew offers up his dead dog to the parting Juliana. The pathos and emotion of the scene is utterly undermined by the deliberately comical flopping of the mutt’s patently unreal head, which is combined with a whine which sounds more like a weary ‘let’s get this over with’ sigh. Maddin and Toles both chuckle heartily at this moment, so it’s bathetic laughs are clearly intentional. The decorous nature of Amelia’s ostrich herd, each of which has a ribbon neatly bowed around its neck, and the ridiculous fussiness of her picnic outfit also make it clear that writer and director are having a great deal of fun. This balancing of heightened romanticism and mocking absurdity, the sudden shift from the sublime to the ridiculous (and the blending of both in some scenes) is difficult to successfully achieve, and the uncertainty of tone might put many viewers off. At the same time, it would be a shame if the film were seen merely as something at which to snigger and sneer and view with a wholly ironised sensibility. I certainly wouldn’t be writing about it with such enthusiasm if I felt that to be the case.

Mandragora, the land of the ice nymphs, is in fact another name for the mandrake root which emphasises what were once considered to be its magical properties. The mandrake was perceived to be the form of a nascent human figure (due to the bifurcation of its roots into what looked like limbs) and it was said to scream as it was pulled out of the earth. A tiny, mewling mandrake makes an appearance in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. These miniscule root homunculi were said to have been seeded beneath the gallows by the last involuntary ejaculation of the hanged man. Dr Solti claims that Juliana was the offspring of his collected sample of such effluvium inseminated by a notorious local whore. It’s a calculated and outrageous play in his manipulative game, its veracity highly doubtful. The mandragora was said to help greatly in increasing fertility, and also to possess powerful narcotic properties, promoting a deep, waking sleep. It’s certainly an appropriate name for the world of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

Edible titles

The fervid mood of this world is immediately set by the opening titles, which are spelled out against a magenta subsoil in what looks like an artful assemblage of fig roll biscuits. The whole backdrop looks fit to scoff down, in fact, although a sugar rush, e-number mania and nausea would swiftly ensue. The cameras slowly panning descent through this colour saturated substrata, as well as the subsequent plunge from a star speckled sky through layers of air and earth, suggests that Mandragora may be a subterranean world (as Maddin and Toles imply in the commentary), a jewelled Pellucidar or long-subsided Atlantis. Toles had originally set the story against a Nordic background, more in keeping with the setting of Knut Hamson’s Pan from which it took its initial impetus. The self-contained world of the imagination which he eventually created is more in keeping with the decadent sources which he and Maddin cite, however. These writers prized the extravagantly artificial over the directly representative.

Vermillion cliffs

Mandragora is nothing if not artificial. It’s a beautiful stage-set world which, in the tradition of A Company of Wolves and Kwaidan, revels in its artifice. The colours of this world are all vivid purples, lime greens, turquoise blues and buttercup yellows. A lemon drop sun hangs on the horizon between sea and sky, and the cliffs are the deepest vermillion (presumably eroded by wind and water, carried along shore by tidal drift, and deposited to form vermillion sands). The endless midsummer haze is filled with a soft, downy snow of feathered seeds, a sun sparkled drift of dust motes (‘as if Liberace were shedding dandruff’ as Maddin amusingly observes), and the occasional angled hatching of warm shafts of rain. The sense of a drowsy midsummer of suspended time, in which life is like a waking dream, draws comparison with Ingmar Bergman’s summer films. In Summer Interlude, Summer With Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries, the briefness of the northern season of warmth and light makes it all the more precious. At the end of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, the characters remaining on the island do indeed find themselves huddling in an ice-bound cavern, huddled against the long, dark winter. There are obvious parallels with A Midsummer Night’s Dream too, with its meeting of the everyday and the supernatural, and its more benevolent games and deceptions, couplings and lessons taught and learnt.

Obeisance before the goddess

Given the general trajectory of most decadent literature, it’s no surprise that the fate of the characters in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (and indeed in most of Maddin’s films) tends inexorably towards disaster, delirium and death. At the beginning of the film, we learn that Dr Solti has unearthed and re-erected a statue of Venus, which become the tutelary spirit of the island, standing sentinel at its borders. It seems to magically radiate the infectious forces of love and desire, and both Dr Solti and Zephyr make obeisance before it. The intensified romantic yearnings which she embodies and which fill the summer air as thickly as the drifting seed lead to complex and highly charged entanglements, cross currents of feelings which soon devolve into their dark forms of jealousy and hatred. The evolution of need into detestation is illustrated by the magically animated skulls of the twins now stored in Dr Solti’s morbid collection of curios. These inseparable companions had grown to despise each other in life, but couldn’t bring themselves to part from one another. Finally, one drove a spike through the other’s cranium. The power of their hatred has persisted beyond the grave, however, and if their skulls (one with spike still protruding) are placed facing one another, they will slowly rotate to avoid even this cold and bony intimacy. Grand passions create the conditions for tragedy when thwarted or manipulated. It was always going to end in tears – a petty Gotterdamerung: Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

Twilight falls