We're big Michael Powell fans in our household - I'm particularly partial to Black Narcissus, but the film of his that has been viewed most by far has got to be Thief of Baghdad. At any rate, this one is leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, and it's supposedly the one that killed his career, so I was curious. I can see why it did: it starts with the main character, through whose eyes (or rather, movie camera - although, as it turns out, they are rarely distinct) we are seeing, going up to a woman on a street at night in London, and she turns to him and says that "it'll be two quid," before turning and leading him inside and upstairs and proceeding to start undressing. Pretty risque for the late 50s (at least, outside of France or Sweden), I think we can agree. Of course, she meets a grisly fate swiftly thereafter. This film seems as if it could have been a big influence on the Italian giallo films of Argento, Fulci and the like. It's interesting that it was a dud, and deemed shocking and in poor taste, when Psycho was such a huge hit. I can see why, though, in that Norman Bates is effectively de-humanized and made monstrous at the end, whereas "Mark Lewis"
(who is supposed to be English, although he's played by the German actor Karlheinz Böhm, who sounds very much like Peter Lorre) is portrayed throughout as a damaged and tragic figure. Not only that, but he is loved by the main female character (who is the incredibly English-looking young Anna Massey
(who I see was also in the very similar return-to-England Hitchcock film Frenzy (which is decidedly nasty, and the only Hitchcock to feature nudity that I know of)) and able to resist his murderous impulses around her. As you might know, the basic plot is that Mark is obsessed with filming people (women) as they are being murdered (with one of the tripod legs of his camera that has been adapted with a sword-like blade)
to record the fear in their eyes. But Mark is this way because his father, a famous psychologist, filmed him his entire childhood, all the while constantly traumatizing him (by shining lights in his eyes while he slept and then hurling a live lizard on his bed). (Sidenote: psychology seems to have taken off in a big way in the mid century, at least in the imagination of thriller makers - see Hitchcock's Spellbound and Marnie, along with Psycho, of course. This film simultaneously insults psychologists (besides the sadistic father, there is a humorous example in this film, an older man, called to the film set on which Mark is working, one of whose cast he has dispatched, to help the star try to cope with the trauma she now has as a result of discovering the victim's corpse in a large trunk in the course of filming a scene) while swallowing whole their theories of the formation of character and proclivities.) Anyway, Mark owns the big house he grew up in (which is still wired in every room so that he can record the conversations of every tenant, including the kind Helen (Massey), who takes a shine to him, charging them only the bare minimum to pay for its upkeep, while his real job is working on film sets and taking smutty pictures for a seedy newsagent
(an early scene shows a dirty old man picking through a booklet of them and deciding to buy the whole thing), all the while battling his urges. He is not happy about them, and even consults the comic relief psychologist who says that they can be cured by a few years of therapy. But that isn't quick enough, and you sense that Mark has plotted his own demise, along with filming the documentary of his murders and their investigation.
This is not a boring film, but it's not a thriller, really. You worry for Helen, of course, but she's never really in any danger, unlike the poor lower-class prostitutes, actresses and scantily-clad models who are Mark's victims. Apart from the fact that Mark clearly has feelings for her, Helen is protected by her blind mother, who (in the stereotypical psychic way of many cinematic blind people) can see right through Mark. She listens to him creep about and pace around his apartment (which is huge and includes a screening room, so he can watch and re-watch the death throes of his victims) and senses he's Got Problems.
Mostly in this film there's a feeling of dread, which isn't really a selling point for entertainment, at least not for me. The film doesn't feel like it's the product of someone at their peak - the cast is mostly young or unknown, and (as I said) the star has a very unconvincing accent. However, you can see why he was cast: he is very convincing as a haunted, damaged man, and manages to be creepy and sympathetic at the same time. However, like all Powell's work, it is shot in gorgeously rich technicolor, and in fact it's funny to see fifties London, that you're used to seeing in black and white, pop off the screen like that. Is it a great film? I don't think so, but that may be because I find the whole psychobabble stuff so annoying. I can see that it might have been an influential film. Its depiction of the seedy underbelly of London is radical, and the whole subtext of the voyeurism of filmmaking has been much commented-on. And the whole idea of a tortured serial killer was pretty fresh at the time. Really Hammer films should've taken Powell to his bosom if the mainstream rejected him. There's a cheesy Hammer film called Hands of the Ripper that seems very derivative of a lot of what's going on here.
No comments:
Post a Comment