THOSE SUPERNATURAL SEVENTIES Part One

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973: Dir. John Hough)

Western society has always been fascinated by the paranormal, particularly as a reflection of the powerlessness felt during certain times of war and civil unrest. In cinema, as with the rest of the culture, the late Sixties and Seventies were a very fertile period of fascination with the supernatural. Horror cinema in particular entered a new maturity with the release of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), a rare mainstream horror hit, purposefully conceived for contemporary adult audiences. Still recovering from the twin tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and fearing an escalation of the war in Vietnam, North American cinema-goers flocked to escapist entertainment, making blockbusters out of such ground-breaking genre classics as The Planet of the Apes (1968) and 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968). Most horror films however, were still trapped in a gothic style fostered by filmmakers such as Roger Corman, and Britain's Hammer Films. Unlike those traditionalists, Polanski dared to tell a hip urban story of the supernatural that would ultimately sow the sensational seeds of a Seventies sci-fi and horror boom shrouded by Watergate paranoia and Middle-East conflict. Under the growing influence of a youth culture obsessed by free love and the occult, movies had finally started to relax their parochial self-censorship, thus allowing a film such as The Exorcist (1973) to be made, despite explicit content which would have prevented it from even being considered for production only a few years before. Veteran fantasy author and screenwriter Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man) witnessed these changing winds, so when he came to write his sexually provocative horror novel Hell House in 1971, he took advantage of this new-found freedom. As with most authors, Matheson had experienced both good and bad times adapting his literary works for Hollywood, but he was well aware that controversial material sometimes had to be excised or toned-down for mass consumption. With box-office in mind, he turned out a PG-rated screenplay of his own R-rated novel, re-titled The Legend of Hell House, the story of the Belasco estate in Maine, with the reputation of being "the Mount Everest of haunted houses". For more traditional cinematic purposes, Matheson moved the novel's stately mansion to England, but the book's four ghost-hunting protagonists, a renowned para-psychologist (Clive Revill), his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt), and two spiritual mediums (Roddy McDowall & Pamela Franklin) remain largely unchanged. British director John Hough, who had cut his cinematic horror teeth on Hammer's last great vampire film Twins of Evil (1971), brings an appropriately sober eye to the potentially baroque paranormal atmosphere. The story unfolds in a visual and editing style that approximates realistic rhythms and lighting, without sacrificing any of the screenplay's carefully constructed sequences of suspense and terror. Hough even eschews a conventional film score, choosing instead to use sound effects and aural environments to convey the manor's macabre mileu. Although the novel featured a more graphically debauched incubus, Matheson's adaptation possesses a sufficient number of genuinely disturbing scenes, enough to convince audiences at the time that a perverted evil was manifesting itself amongst the vulnerable cast of characters. Although a modest success in America, it was unfortunately preceded in the U.K. by The Stone Tape (1972), a memorably harrowing television film with a spookily similar premise. Hough would later re-visit the haunted house genre with the disastrous Walt Disney production The Watcher In The Woods (1980), a film compromised by a re-shot vague ending intended to make it more palatable for family audiences. With The Legend of Hell House Hough and Matheson experienced no such pressures, for they knew what it takes to frighten a willing audience, and the result is a small marvel of tasteful terror. DVD & BLU-RAY

AUSTRALIAN ACTION MAN Part Two

THE THIRTY NINE STEPS (1978: Dir. Don Sharp)

Now well at home in the genre, director Don Sharp embarked on a third excursion into espionage, this time a loyal adaptation of John Buchan's famous novel previously brought to the screen (in bastardized form) by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935 and Ralph Thomas in 1959. Starring Robert Powell (television's Jesus of Nazareth) as Richard Hannay, and supported by a who's who of British talent including, David Warner, Eric Porter and Karen Dotrice, The Thirty Nine Steps is a model of olde fashioned suspense. Starting in 1914 and detailing the demise of paranoid British secret agent Scudder, played with school-boy enthusiasm by Sir John Mills, the film breathlessly keeps pace with Hannay, Buchan's initially unwilling hero, as he is relentlessly pursued across Great Britain by a pair of devious Prussian assassins. Powell, who possesses some of the gaunt intensity and wiry physicality of a young Peter Cushing, makes for a believably intrepid protagonist and is well-matched by the calculated upper-class villainy of Warner's Lord Appleton. Together with his editor Eric Boyd-Perkins and cinematographer John Coquillon, Sharp forcefully brings to life the threatening days before The Great War, when precarious politics dictated the fate of nations. Ironically, each cinematic version of the novel preceded a corresponding threat to world order : Hitchcock's presaging WWII, Thomas's auguring the tense era of The Cuban Missile Crisis, and Sharp's foreshadowing Reagan/Thatcher's nuclear brinkmanship of the early Eighties. The Thirty Nine Steps was also the first of a production slate of spy thrillers from the dying days of venerable Rank Film Studios, made up of: The Human Factor (1979), The Riddle of the Sands (1979), and The Lady Vanishes (1979), and like its brethren it was a disappointment at the box-office, effectively ending Powell's leading man status in British Cinema. If the film is remembered at all today, it is for one of Sharp's hall of fame action set pieces, a white-knuckle climax that has Hannay dangling from the clock face of Big Ben in order to prevent a bomb from destroying the Palace of Westminster. Sadly, when it is said that they don't make feature films like this anymore, they are regrettably correct and we are all the poorer for it. DVD REGION 2

AUSTRALIAN ACTION MAN Part One

CALLAN (1974: Dir. Don Sharp)

After Errol Flynn, filmmaker Don Sharp is the second most famous person to be born in Hobart, Tasmania, and like his swashbuckling countryman, Sharp was also identified with flamboyant action and stunts, albeit from behind the camera. Beginning his career in Britain as a director of B-movie programmers and early episodic television, Sharp was eventually hired by Hammer Films to oversee a trilogy of quality genre films: Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), and Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966). At the same time maverick producer Harry Alan Towers chose Sharp to direct the first two films of his Fu Manchu series starring Christopher Lee. All of these projects demonstrated Sharp's strong eye for visual composition and pace, whisking the audience along despite plot absurdities and limited production resources. Working in these rip-roaring genres, Sharp rapidly built a reputation as an action specialist, particularly in his role of second unit director on two logistically complicated features, directing both the vehicular mayhem in Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965), and the comedy spy antics in Bang, Bang, You're Dead (1966), as well as the heart-stopping Amsterdam boat chase in the narcotics crime thriller Puppet On A Chain (1971). Assignments like these made him a natural to bring scale and excitement to the cinematic incarnation of creator James Mitchells' popular TV spy series Callan (1967-1972). Starring a magnetically intense Edward Woodward, David Callan is a street smart agent/assassin whose disdain for authority coupled with his sang froid and skill with small arms always draws the most unsavory jobs from his British Intelligence superior, code-named Hunter. The original series although highly acclaimed was hampered by its cost-cutting videotaped mise-en-scene, mostly taking place in cramped, seedy offices or dull flats. Adapted from the original pilot episode, the movie version of Callan re-introduces the character, this time in a more expansive though no less gritty, big-screen format. In an effort to compete with the new realism coming from Hollywood in the early Seventies, Sharp uses atmospheric locations in and around London, where he efficiently stages nerve jangling car chases, forceful fisticuffs, and non-gratuitous gun-play. Essential to the mythos of the series, are the characters of  Lonely (Russell Hunter), "a smelly little man" who is Callan's cringing criminal contact, and fellow agent Toby Meres (Peter Egan), Callan's younger jealous associate, always ready to stick the knife in to get ahead. Both actors are superb in their roles, particularly the utterly believable Hunter, although one pines for actor Anthony Valentine, TV's original oily Meres, more of a coiled cobra than Egan's impetuous toffee-nosed school prefect. Being the off-shoot of the most compelling espionage series ever made for television, director Sharp had much expectation to contend with, but with his steady hand at the wheel, audiences were assured of a smoothly entertaining ride, with all of the suspense and drama of what was, and is Callan. DVD REGION 2