Sword Of Sherwood Forest

Baldry Tales

Sword Of Sherwood Forest
UK 1960 Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Sword of Sherwood Forest is the first of two films presented in beautiful new transfers (and all the usual, hefty trimmings the Indicator label tends to provide for such handsome releases) making up their recent two film boxed edition Robin Hood At Hammer - Two Tales From Sherwood Forest, along with A Challenge For Robin Hood. Actually, Hammer Studios made three films based on the famous English outlaw but, for some reason, their first go round, The Men Of Sherwood Forest from 1954, isn’t included. I can only assume a particular other label (who shall remain nameless here because I’ve no idea if this is the case or not), are clinging onto the rights to the first film and sitting on them, not bothering to do anything with the property themselves. Well, I wish said label would get up and actually sort themselves out with these kinds of titles or, you know, let the rights go to much more deserving labels such as Indicator, Arrow or Eureka Master Of Cinema to do something much better with.

This one, though, surprised me as I absolutely loved it. It’s not particularly dynamic or that great but, it has nice pacing and has Hammer über director Terence Fisher helming the thing. And, of course, this has Richard Greene playing Robin Hood, fresh off of the 144 episodes of the popular British TV show The Adventures Of Robin Hood, in which he also played the title character (Fisher also directed a fair few episodes of this, between films). Since he was already popular in the role, it must have seemed a good bet to put him in a colour film continuing the character’s adventures and it also allows the audience the respite, mostly, of telling the origins of the guy through the classic tale, once again. With the exception of Maid Marian, played here by Sarah Branch, who is introduced to Robin for the first time again here.

The film starts off with some interesting music (more on that in a while) with some titles comprising sketches of various characters and scenarios with strips of colour appearing and overlaying them, in which the credits then appear. It’s a nice enough effect and the imagery, supported by an uncial style typeface, further pushes the sense of period.

This tale sees Robin trying to thwart the Sheriff of Nottingham (played wonderfully well by Peter Cushing, looking way different to usual to the point where I didn’t recognise him for about a minute) who is trying to lay legal claim to a village called Baldry, to turn it into a castle as it is in a good strategic position, in direct contrast to what the wishes of the absent King Richard would be. A squire is shot by the Sheriff’s men because he carries a specific seal to gain audience with the
rather dynamic personification of the Archbishop Of Canterbury (played solidly by Jack Gwillim), to warn him so he can stop this madness. So it’s up to Robin, aided by his merry men (not to mention Marion) to throw a spanner in the works, protect the archbishop and make sure the evil sheriff doesn’t get his way.

And it’s a nicely put together movie with, not too much action but it certainly cracks on at a pace and Greene is certainly confident in the role, carrying Robin likeably through the film. And it’s got an excellent cast too, including Niall MacGinnis as Friar Tuck and, no less than the great Nigel Green as Little John. I’ve never understood why the tragically short-lived actor was given big muscular characters like Little John and Hercules (in Jason And The Argonauts, review coming at some point this year, fingers crossed) but, he’s always so likeable and has such a larger than life presence that he manages to get away with roles like this. Incidentally, both Greene and Green went on to play versions of Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu series of movies made in the 1960s (check my main index to access the relevant reviews)... as did Douglas WIlmer, who was in the first Hammer Robin Hood movie, not presented on this set.

And the uncredited cast of the movie I discovered as I watched are just as good. We have Desmond Llewellyn, better known as Q in the majority of the Bond movies, as the squire who is shot at the start of the picture. He doesn’t have more than a couple of lines to speak before dying but it was nice to see him in something other than Bond. Also uncredited is Derren Nesbitt in another short lived role and, as one of the many villains dotted about the movie, regular Hammer actor Oliver Reed.

The film is pretty formulaic and, even though it’s not a faithful iteration of the more well known story, it still has a shooting contest where Robin has to prove how well he can shoot to gain dubious employment by another main villain in the film. This contest includes shooting arrows through the spokes of a fast spinning wheel to hit pumpkins, despite the wheel being stationary in one of the long shots before being shown spinning again in the next close up. It’s all good fun. Where the story certainly breaks tradition, though, is when Oliver Reed’s villain stabs Peter Cushing’s Sheriff Of Nottingham in the back several times, killing him before he gets any kind of chance to properly face off against Robin in the film’s finale battle, which takes place in a Nunnery. No sexy, lesbian nuns are in attendance, however... more’s the pity.

And that’s me just about done on the film but, if it’s a not particularly challenging but light weight and entertaining Robin Hood adventure you are after, then Sword Of Sherwood Forest certainly fits the bill. The boxed edition of this and the other film come with an 80 page booklet containing essays about the films, a double sided poster highlighting the original poster art for each and swathes of extras. One good one which I watched is David Huckvale’s appreciation and musical summary of the key parts of the score, written by a composer I’ve not encountered before called Alun Hoddinott. Apparently this guy was an extremely famous concert hall composer in Wales and Sword Of Sherwood Forest was one if his very rare dalliances with feature film scoring. So, yeah, it’s a great set to be sure and another valuable release from Indicator.

The Playbirds

Softcore Giallography

The Playbirds
UK 1978 Directed by Willy Roe
Odeon Region 2 DVD

Warning: Yeah, this is going to have spoilers for those
of you who care about such things in these kinds of films.

Okay. So you may remember I reviewed the Mary Millington sex comedy Come Play With Me on here a little while ago (click here for my review). I remember being rather surprised by the lack of actual soft core pornography in it and amazed about the general tone of it which is, pretty much, the same as a Carry On movie. So... populated by loads of British character actors of the time but with sex and nudity inserted into the story. If you can call it a story.

Well, I thought that experience would have at least prepared me a little bit for watching Mary’s second big breakthrough movie, The Playbirds, which takes its name from The Playbirds magazines which were one of the cornerstones of producer David Sullivan’s porn empire, and which featured Mary as the regular figurehead/mascot. However, although the movie does have some sex and nudity scattered at intervals throughout the picture, this one is a complete sea change from the previous picture and it’s a much more sombre affair. In fact, given the small part that nudity and sex play in the finished product and it’s preoccupation with a police procedural plot as a serial killer murders centre spread girls from the magazine, I’m going to go right ahead and call it right here...

The Playbirds is, pretty much, the British equivalent of a giallo movie.

It really isn’t about sex... although that is the currency which it uses to forward the story. Instead, it follows a police investigation which becomes a giallo style whodunnit in exactly the same way that the Italian movies would fix it so it’s almost impossible to guess the identity of the killer... implausible jumps in logic included. Like The Playbirds, though, it stars a wealth of British characters who you wouldn’t expect to see playing in a movie of this... um... calibre.

The film follows the exploits of Chief Superintendent Holborne and his partner, Inspector Harry Morgan. Holborne is played by Glynn Edwards and, if that name is not familiar with you, he played the pub landlord on the TV show Minder for many years, as well as starring as one of the title roles in Burke and Hare (reviewed here) along with Derren Nesbitt (who also has a small role in this movie as one of the pornographers responsible for printing the titular magazine). And if you think that piece of casting is extraordinary, his partner Morgan in this is played by none other than Gavin Campbell and, for anyone who used to watch the TV show That’s Life with Esther Rantzen... oh yeah, that Gavin!

The two go around trying to patiently solve the murder of various girls who have all been strangled (mostly with no clothes on... it’s a Mary Millington movie, after all) by a man in a Sherlock Holmes style Deerstalker... and then numbered with lipstick on their foreheads by someone who presumably doesn’t like their involvement with The Playbirds magazine. The magazine, of course, is highlighted constantly in the movie and I’m sure Mary Millington can be seen in some posters in the background of the printworks in some shots, even though the character she is playing is not in any way associated with the magazine until the end of the movie. I’m not sure how early metatextual references like this started appearing in what are considered, technically, British softcore movies but I’m guessing this was one of the first.

So who is Mary actually playing in this movie? Well, the film starts off with a model in a naked photo shoot and then, after a brief scene highlighting a racehorse which Holborne keeps betting against and which serves absolutely no purpose as a subplot of any relevance at all, although its referred to all the way through the movie, we first meet Mary walking the beat on the streets of London as Sgt. Lucy Sheridan. Yep, she’s a copper although, given her attitude and opinion of her majesty’s constabulary in real life, it seems a bit of an ironic role for her to have taken on. She’s also accompanied by a truly terrible theme song which is a shame since the movie was scored by David Whittaker, who worked on a couple of Hammer films and who also provided a pretty good score for The Sword And The Sorcerer. Mary keeps cropping up throughout the movie and even has an attempt at a foot chase at one point in the film but, for the first three quarters of the movie, she has more of a peripheral role until her unique talents are required to further the plot, such as it is, by the end of the movie.

And what we have is a movie set on the streets of 1970s London (which is always lovely to see, as I best remember it, back in the day) with character actors like the aforementioned cropping up. Also on the police force are Kenny Lynch (remember him?) and Holborne’s boss is played by none other than Windsor Davies (who you may remember as the Sergeant in the TV show It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). We also have Dudley Sutton in here, looking exactly the same age as he has for decades, playing some kind of bizarre and religious fanatic.

In between the police procedural scenes we have various Playbirds photo shoots going on as, presumably, an essential part of the plot. For instance, an occult theme is brought into the spreads and a shoot based, quite loosely I suspect, on shenanigans at The Hellfire Club is shown as one big orgy including a lady having sex with the underside of a rocking horse... surprised the BBFC let that through, actually. There’s also a witch being burned at the cross naked in a photo shoot scene too, which goes horribly wrong when the killer somehow manages to turn it into a real burning... although the way the special effects, such as they are, have been shot here may well mean you take a while to realise that this is actually what’s happened, it has to be said.

And we also have another nice tie in to the Italian giallo movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s in that one of the victims is found, by Gavin, in a room lit with both red and green lights. The effect of this, of course, is like a poor man’s Mario Bava has been on set so, yeah, I’m still sticking with this giallo parallel because it makes me wonder what kind of movies the director and cinematographer had been watching at the time. It does kind of compliment that style of shooting very well, especially in this scene.

And then we have Mary herself. The police get the idea to plant a girl working for Playbirds who will start at the massage parlours and then work her way into being the cover girl of the month so she can be bait for the killer. What this means for the audience, of course, is that we have Holborne and Morgan ‘interviewing’ hitherto unseen lady members of the police force by having them do a sexy strip routine so they can give the job to the most likeliest person to succeed. It’s almost like the film suddenly stops for a while so the director can showcase various ladies stripping for the audience... well... um... yeah. And, of course, Mary’s character wins hands down and it’s not long before she’s the magazine owners girlfriend... which I understand she more or less was in real life for a while, despite being married to someone else.

The really hilarious thing about this movie, bearing in mind the age of the film, is the police relying constantly on getting their leads by punching in information to be analysed in the ‘computer room’. And, yes, it’s a room full of cheap computers where nobody really looks like they know what they’re doing and with a printer which gives our heroes leads when the correct information is, somehow, or other, fed in. Let me tell you, though, those computers back in those days must have been absolutely miraculous. The police learn the identity of the killer thusly: They see a head looking out of a window on a photo and they get the computer to enhance and blow this up (not that you see any of this, of course). Once the shape is blown up they get the computer to take ‘x-rays’ of the face on the photo so they will reveal the bone structure of the person and then they compare it to the bone structures of x-rays of suspects in their computer records. What the f***? Quick, someone alert Microsoft and Apple now that someone has managed to figure out a way to take ‘x rays’ of a person from a still photograph. They need to get that patented fast.

The ending of the movie is almost as equally astonishing and certainly way more downbeat than you would expect from this kind of sub-genre. The killer is unmasked by the police and taken into custody. In the last scene of the movie we see Mary Millington answer a phone call from her police colleagues and receive the news that he’s just been locked up. How then, can he suddenly crash into her apartment and strangle her in a really downbeat ending, leaving her naked body floating in the bath. Does he have some kind of supernatural powers that we’ve previously not been made aware of over the course of the film? Seriously, this is just the kind of twisted, deranged anti-logic that lets a lot of gialli down and, sadly, this film does exactly the same thing. I have no idea how this ending can even work within the context of everything else we’ve been told but... well, there you have it.

So, yeah, the movie is mostly a load of old cobblers, to be honest, but it’s certainly also entertaining to be watching all these distinguished character actors prop up a soft core porn film which, in itself, seems to be less about porn and more about being a thriller. Certainly a curio in both cinema in general and also, I suspect, in the soft porn genre. As such, I would kind of tentatively recommend it to film goers who have seen just about every kind of movie and want to see something just a little bit different to what they would comfortably expect a producer and director to be able to get away with. Certainly, it’s not a rerun, by any means, of Come Play With Me... the two are like chalk and cheese. So whatever you say about The Playbirds, it certainly isn’t cashing in on the success of the former film.  One to... possibly... look out for.

The Flesh And The Fiends/Burke And Hare Double

Snatch Of The Day

The Flesh And The Fiends
1960 UK
Directed by John Gilling

Burke And Hare
1972 UK
Directed by Vernon Sewell

Both movies shown as part of the Classic Horror Campaign 
to bring horror double bills back to BBC2 television.

Warning: Very slight spoilers snatched from their last resting 
place and scattered throughout the following paragraphs.

Now this was an interesting proposition. I’d already seen an “inspired by” version of the real life tale of body snatchers Burke and Hare in Val Lewton’s classic production The Body Snatcher, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, which changed the names and played even harder and looser with the established facts than either The Flesh And The Fiends or Burke And Hare did, to be honest. Here, however, the current Classic Horror Campaign team of @cyberschizoid and @DrKarenOughton gave us all the chance to see two movies inspired by these events in one sitting and the contrast between the two productions couldn’t have been more telling about the times in which they were made.

To be honest, though, it wasn’t this that got me to brave the very depths of darkest London on a Saturday afternoon. The main pull for me was the fact that one of the stars of Burke And Hare, the lovely Francoise Pascale (@Fpascal) would be in attendance to talk a bit about the movie and to sign copies of her new autobiography, which can be found at her website here.  Now I’d accidentally met Francoise at a signing session at the Westminster Film Fair earlier in the year and had been bowled over by the lady’s charm and enthusiasm, so to be honest it was more in mind with the thought of buying a copy of her book and seeing one of her more prominent film roles that I attended the said event than for anything else.

That being said, the Classic Horror Campaign’s screening was another corker of a double bill and I shall certainly be going back for more of those when I can claw back some time to attend. The two films I saw this time are both items I actually hadn’t seen before, and I have to say the presentation was both fascinating and entertaining... especially in light of the second of the two, Burke And Hare.

The Flesh And The Fiends was shot in black and white by director John Gilling, a man who would go on to direct some classic Hammer Horror movies but, it has to be said, I was not particularly impressed with the majority of the look and feel of the movie, if truth be told. The design of the shots and the way in which they were edited left me pretty uninspired on this one, to be honest but the one thing you really couldn’t fault it for were the performances.

Peter Cushing plays Doctor Knox crisply, without emotion for the most part... and with an eyelid that hangs down over one of his eyes... giving him a slightly creepy look, to be sure. Burke and Hare themselves are played in this one by George Rose and Donald Pleasance and they do it so well that you really wouldn’t want to fall afoul of either of these gentlemen on a dark night. Between them they emit a potent blend of brutish force and calculated ruthlessness, which certainly gives the characters the kind of gravitas they needed to live up to the real life villains the actors were trying to portray.

The second movie of this double feature, Burke And Hare, is a big, multicoloured confection of a film which could only have come out of that late 1960s/early 1970s period, I reckon. Derren Nesbitt, who I knew primarily for his portrayal of Number Two in The Prisoner episode It’s Your Funeral, plays Burke and Minder regular Glynn Edwards does the honours for Hare. The way that they are played is dictated very much by the tone of the film which seems to me to have been a direct attempt to turn the story into a light and fluffy comedy and sex it up for a cinema-going audience who were more interested in laughs and thrills than any serious attempt at portraying the facts of the case... which is okay by me, I love this kind of stuff.

British character actor Harry Andrews plays Dr. Knox in this one and plays him with a similar sense of authority as Peter Cushing did in The Flesh And The Fiends, but with a little more emotion. Unlike Cushing, though, he elects to play his role (or someone elected it for him) with a black lens on one of his eye glasses, as opposed to the downturned eyelid of Cushing’s incarnation of the role. It was also good to see James Hayter again for a brief scene. He always gives a good performance. And Yootha Joyce as Hare’s wife was also brilliant and helped give the movie another comical support.

And then, of course, there was the stunningly lovely (and still absolutely gorgeous as she is now, as it happens) Francoise Pascal, playing the romantic interest in the form of a prostitute in this version of the tale... in a role which was very much the equivalent of the one Billie Whitelaw played in The Flesh And The Fiends. Both were good in their respective roles but Pascal really knocks it out of the park in this one. And it wasn’t just because she runs around a lot of the film in various states of undress either... although that was also more than worth the price of admission, to be sure. During her interview session between the two films which made up this double bill, she said that she didn’t think she was all that good in this. Well I have to beg to differ on that verdict I’m afraid. She is definitely the only person you are watching whenever she lights up the screen on this one and really does give the film an enormous lift. Her acting is more than fine! She signed her book at the end of the film for me and I have to say, I look forward to reading this as part of my “holiday reading” in July. A review, I’m sure, will be forthcoming.

An in yer face comedy song called Burke And Hare by the popular band Scaffold (remember their big hits Lilly The Pink and Thank You Very Much... I remember Pinky And Perky singing that one at the end of their show every week) sets the tone to not take this movie too seriously right from the outset. The producers must have really liked this song, actually, because it’s included in the film three times... once at the start, once at the end and also for a “body snatching is fun” kind of montage sequence somewhere in the middle. Strange stuff.

In fact, the musical score by Roger Webb is quite odd all the way through. It’s like they are trying to inject even more fun into it by giving it something which almost sounded like a Carry On film soundtrack but with the added odd moment of B-movie terror stinger at certain points. In fact, one of my bestest friends who I was with at the time, @cultofthecinema, leant over during the film and whispered that the music was making him expect Sid James to pop out from behind a door at any moment. I’d have to agree with him that the scoring was maybe a little too strong at times... perhaps in an attempt to lift parts of the movie that the producers possibly didn’t have confidence in. Still, it’s of its time and I certainly enjoyed it as much as almost any other element in the movie.

In real life, after Hare was released due to turning King’s evidence, there were a lot of stories about what happened to him. Some say “the mob” got him, some say he was thrown into a lime pit and the no less credible accounts say he went to live with an in-law for the rest of his days. Each of the films here take a different ending... with the ending of Burke And Hare being a little rushed and more abrupt than I was expecting, to be honest. Burke And Hare has one of those “this is what happened to the characters next” kind of voice over narratives at the end of the film... before crashing into that Scaffold song again. This second movie goes with the lime pit story while The Flesh And The Fiends shows Donald Pleasance being horribly blinded with a lighted torch. More interesting than the fates of the two victims is the fate of Doctor Knox. He fares pretty well by the end of the first one than the second but in each of the adaptations he’s certainly portrayed as a misguided good guy, paying for questionably supplied corpses in the hopes of pioneering the cause for good, future doctors. In real life, of course, his reputation by association with Burke and Hare was a little less palatable and more than a little tarnished... but, of course, was not the career destroyer one would expect from a similar chain of events if something like this ever went down today.

Of the two films, I found Burke And Hare to be absolute brilliant (and something I ordered the next day on BluRay as it happens) and The Flesh And The Fiends to be more interesting in terms of studying the performances, especially that of Cushing, who was already being associated with and exploited for, certainly with some of the posters, his recurring role of Baron Frankenstein for Hammer.

All in all, this was another sure fire winner from the Classic Horror Campaign team. I’ll definitely be going back for more! Check out their web page here http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com/ and sign their petition!

And for more details about the charming Francoise Pascal, and to grab a copy of her autobiography, go to her website here... http://francoisepascal.co.uk/