The Saint’s Return (aka The Saint's Girl Friday)

Saint Louis' Blues

The Saint’s Return
(aka The Saint's Girl Friday)
Hammer/RKO UK 1953
Directed by Seymour Friedman

I’ve remarked more than once that my favourite actor to embody the famous Leslie Charteris character The Saint has always been Louis Hayward. Now that’s alway been on the strength of his performance in the RKO entry The Saint In New York (reviewed by me here). He stopped after one movie and George Sanders took over for a while before Hugh Sinclair pretty much finished the series off (although he was starting to grow into the role I think).  Hayward did, however, return to the character 15 years later in a movie made in England by Hammer Studios, who would soon become quite famous for their horror movie output. Now I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen The Saint’s Return before, which does try to be a continuation of that original film series and, indeed, the film was briefly distributed by RKO for Hammer in the US, under the title The Saint’s Girl Friday.

The film starts off with a high speed car chase as a woman is killed when her car is forced of the road by nefarious bad guys. And when I say high speed car chase I mean a ‘not that fast’ car chase with some obviously sped up footage, in this case. We then find The Saint flying back from the US and Inspector Teal, played here by Charles Victor, receiving a telegram from his American counterpart Inspector Fernack (sadly unseen in this film) to warn him of that fact. When we catch up with Louis Hayward’s soft spoken version of The Saint, he has his valet Hoppy with him (played by Thomas Gallagher) and from him hears the news that his old lady friend who had contacted him to come to England to help her has died, courtesy of the car chase at the opening of the picture.

This news obviously fires up Simon Templar but the brilliance, still, of Hayward’s performance is that this anger at the death of a friend is conveyed mostly by body language only. Hayward remains soft spoken throughout the picture and his rage is a smouldering undercurrent, punctuating the actions of his adventures while he offers opinions and advice to his enemies. This adventure is a pretty standard plot involving gambling IOUs and revenge against the people who killed the lady who brought him to London in the first place. I’ll say no more of the plot here other than it has a kind of neat twist reveal on the secret identity of the ringleader of the mob of gamblers which I actually didn’t see coming. So I should be happy about this, right?

Alas, I wish I could say this is a good movie but it’s actually quite a bad one. And it really shouldn’t be. Hayward seems to just stroll through his performance because, frankly, the script just isn’t as clever or witty as those earlier Saint movies and the action choreography on the few fist fights there are is quite lethargic and neither looks, nor feels, like anyone here is in any danger. Now there are a lot of great British actors and actresses who turn up in minor roles here including such notables as Sydney Tafler, Sam Kydd and the glamourous (as she was then) Diana Dors and this should all be enough to save the day as far as this film is concerned but... it just doesn’t. Doctor Who fans might like to note that there’s even a smallish role for William Russell in the film, going by his real name of Russell Enoch, ten years before his famous role as Ian Chesterton, the first Doctor’s companion, made him a household name for a short while.

Ivor Slaney’s score does it’s best to feel like it’s a ‘proper’ Saint movie and he incorporates the much disputed Webb/Charteris melody which was still in use for Ian Ogilvey’s run on the character in the 1970s but... yeah, the music really doesn’t lift the picture as much as one might like. The film is as short as the more recent of The Saint films prior to this but it still somehow feels somewhat padded and, in some ways, just like watching a TV episode. Indeed, the director of this would go on to work with Hayward again the following year on a TV incarnation of the US Lone Wolf character... I’ve never had the opportunity to see any of the Lone Wolf films or TV shows over here in the UK (no, not the Japanese manga character) but, from what I understand, he’s pretty much another variation on Simon Templar anyway (much like The Falcon was, if memory serves).

This film made me think of Timothy Dalton a bit and the two James Bond films he made. I think Hayward is in the same position as him. Timothy Dalton made only two James Bond films... The Living Daylights (reviewed here) and Licence To Kill (reviewed here). The first of these two was absolutely spectacular and got me back into appreciating the Bond character again... the second of these two was a terrible, terrible movie which actually put me off watching the Bond films for a long time until the wonderful Goldeneye. The point is, although Licence To Kill was an awful film and hard to watch, Dalton was still giving an absolutely solid performance as Bond, he just had a useless script to work with. I think the same thing could be said of Louis Hayward and his two movies for The Saint series. He jump started the franchise with an absolutely brilliant film, The Saint In New York but when he finally came back and did a second one, well, the script and direction just seems to have let him down. I can kinda see why Hammer or RKO have never made this one available on DVD or Blu Ray but, as awful as it is, one of those companies really should have a think about doing a commercial release of this one. It needs to be out there for people to see.

As for me and The Saint... well, I don’t plan on revisiting any of the TV shows anytime soon but I am curious to see what Val Kilmer did with the role in the most recent cinematic version of the character. Before that, though, I’d really like to see the two French movies made in the 1960s so, if anyone knows where I can track down copies of these with English subtitles, please let me know. As for The Saint’s Return... there are much better places to start on in the series than to try and sit through this one.

Hammer House Of Horror

Blood And Circuses

Hammer House Of Horror
UK Airdate 1980
Carlton Blu Ray Zone B
Hammer House of Horror and its sequel series, Hammer House Of Mystery and Suspense, were pretty much the last hurrah for the once popular Hammer Studios up until they returned ‘under new management’, so to speak, in the 21st Century. I would have been 12 when I first saw these and am delighted to finally be able to catch up with them again now as, even at that young age, by the time I was half way through the series I pretty much gave up on it as a kid. Even then I recognised that the show was much more miss than hit but, rewatching it all these decades later, it kind of makes up in nostalgic value what it still lacks in quality. That being said, there are a few episodes which are actually not bad, towards the last third of the series but, alas, the majority are just... well, they’re okay.

The series has some nice direction from some of the many directors here and some pretty good performances but, I’ll go through it on an episode by episode basis here to give you just a quick taste of what they are like, rather than do a big overview of the show as a whole. The series is a portmanteau format of stand alone horror tales (although some do kind of go more into thriller territory rather than actual horror, it has to be said) and I had just two strong memories from the show which I was hoping I hadn’t imagined but... I’ll make those clear as I come to them.

So the first episode is called Witching Time and, although I didn’t realise it until I was quite a way through rewatching these, it’s actually one of the stronger episodes of the show. Now, there’s a lot of camera movement in this one and, out of all of them, this is one of the more stylistically pleasing of the bunch, with some nice framing showing different layers of rooms through various doorways (which was an old Roger Corman trick to try and add depth and production values to his shots on those old Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he used to work on), with the camera picking up various characters on different planes, or sections, of the shot. The episode stars Jon Finch, who played Jerry Cornelius in the movie adaptation of The Final Programme (reviewed here). Here he is playing a film score composer (not too many films or TV shows who choose that as a career option for their characters... I can only think of a couple off hand) who is haunted both by the concern that his wife is having an affair and, also, by a witch who has come forward to his time from the point where she was almost burned at the stake. The episode includes some nudity which was probably fairly bold for its time on television and this was presumably done because, frankly, the studio probably thought they could get away with these sort of shenanigans easier in the alloted time slot and they may help increase the ratings for the show.

Next comes the episode The Thirteenth Reunion, which has a journalist going undercover at a health farm and eventually uncovering a dark secret which, frankly, becomes very obvious from a very early stage in the proceedings (like 99.9% of these episodes, it has to be said). One of the things it gives us from a nostalgia point of view is a young James Cosmo (billed as James Cosmos on the end credits, for some reason) in a role which primarily has him hurling horrendous insults at a fat woman... which is kind of interesting and I can’t imagine the same actor as he is when I last saw him in The Hole In The Ground (reviewed here) being able to get away with this kind of behaviour today, within the current climate of political correctness. Another thing I thought was nice, considering that a number Hammer films had already started being shown on television at this point, was a sort of cross-promotion in that the episode contains dialogue saying... “I’ll bring some garlic. Dracula might try to turn us into the undead.”

The third episode is called Rude Awakening and the story of this one is very vivid in my head because it contains one of two memories of the show I’ve not forgotten over the years, which is a shot of the star Denholm Elliot being approached by a naked woman and making love to him in a phone box. I remember thinking the scene was fairly raunchy at the time but, alas, the years have not been kind to the scene and it looks fairly unexciting now. The story deals with a man who can’t wake up from a series of dreams which usually end with his dying in some way. Even as a lad I could see how this one would end but it’s nice to see Mr. Elliot in the role (just before his first involvement in the Indiana Jones movies). It also has him using expressions like “Up the apples, darling.” and one has to wonder what a younger audience who are unfamiliar with cockney rhyming slang would make of this these days (I’m pretty sure they would have had no problems back at the time this show was aired).

After a strange episode called Growing Pains, in which a family adopts a weird, ‘you just want to smack him’ kid after the accidental death of their own son, who is quite happy to be influenced by the ghostly instructions of said offspring, we have what is perhaps the most famous episode of the show and the one from which my other strongest memory of Hammer House of Horror comes from... The House That Bled To Death. For some reason I remembered a scene where a children’s birthday party is interrupted by bursting pipes which cover the whole room in Hammer’s trademark Kensington gore. The episode stars Nicholas Ball, who some of my readers may best remember from his turn in the title role of the TV show Hazel and, although I didn’t remember the so-called twist ending from when I was a young ‘un... I have to say it gets quite easy to figure it out fairly quickly and the episode was a bit of a disappointment, it has to be said. As was the sixth episode Charlie Boy, about a cursed voodoo fetish doll in which, pretty much the most creative moment was when the death of an antagonist early on in the proceedings as he is knifed, is crosscut with a lady having an orgasm.

Episode seven, Silent Scream, stars Hammer stalwart Peter Cushing as an ex-Nazi Prisoner of War Camp Officer and tells of his experiments with locking up and training captive animals... an experiment which he takes up a notch when a character played by a relatively young, curly headed Brian Cox is released from prison and ends up under the unwanted care of Mr. Cushing. This episode also demonstrates the relative cheapness of the production when a stray dog follows a character on screen when she is trying to sneak into a building and said dog has nothing obvious to do with the plot and is never seen from again.

The next story, Children Of The Full Moon, stars a husband and wife who end up stranded and stay at a large house which seems to be just populated with kids and a kind of ‘caretaker’ lady who is played by Diana Dors. Unfortunately, despite not being a badly made episode, the title totally gives away where they are going with this one and... yeah... well, with a title like that there’s really no surprise, is there?

Episode nine, Carpathian Eagle is probably my favourite of the episodes of the show... despite both making the similar mistake of revealing just what is going on from very early on in the episode as regards to being the identity of the killer and, also, not actually having a horror element to the episode. This one deals with the descendant of an Elisabeth Bathory type countess who, it is said, can also change into an eagle and who cuts her victims hearts out. Her modern day biographer played by Susanne Danielle is a pretty good character though and I was not used to Danielle being able to play a role as understated as she does it in many of the scenes here. It will come as no surprise to many that the character she plays may be said to be a... well... a method writer but it really didn’t spoil my appreciation of the story. We also have Valentine Dyall (remember him in shows like Callan and Raffles) playing a policeman and there’s even a young, pre-Remington Steele Pierce Brosnan playing one of the briefly seen victims. Another fleeting cameo is made by W. Morgan Sheppard, who would later play the principle villain in Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark (reviewed here). 

The next story, Guardians Of The Abyss is also very good and it’s very much in the same vein as a typical Dennis Wheatley supernatural thriller (not that many of Wheatley’s thrillers were of a supernatural bent but the few he did write in that style became very famous and, in terms of Hammer Studios, the source novels for two of their films). The tale features Paul Darrow in the cast (Avon from Blake’s Seven) and one of the actresses who I’ve missed seeing on the screen since I had a crush on her in the 1980s from the first series of C.A.T.S Eyes... Rosalyn Landor.

Visitor From The Grave, the next in the series, also stars a Blake’s Seven actor, this time Blake himself Gareth Thomas. It also stars Manimal actor Simon MacCorkindale in what is so obviously a ‘gaslighting’ tale with an equally obvious ending. 

Next up we have The Two Faces Of Evil which is, again, obvious in what its doing but is, I have to say, an exceptionally well shot and designed episode including some very cool compositions and some nicely chilling, paranoid POV shots... it’s easily the most sinister and creepy of all the episodes, despite having yet another end game you can see coming a mile off.

The very last story, The Mark Of Satan, was interesting to me because it includes a man who is being slowly driven insane by sinister events at a hospital and with his unhealthy worry about the number nine. I had a similar revelation about certain properties of factors of the number nine on a bus some years back so, yeah, I can sympathise. It’s really not a great episode, however and it’s not the best way to end the series, in all honesty.

One of the common things about this particular series is in the endings of all the episodes, before the reprise of the distinctive title music. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hammer went through a stage where their moves ended in a certain, similar way. Although good was usually seen to be triumphing over evil, the endings were still quite bleak and suggested that the battle ground of the struggle between good and evil took a heavy toll on the side of the angels. Well, this series does it one better and, it has to be said, not one episode ends up well for any of the main protagonists. Either evil wins outright or both sides of the coin lose out equally... there are no bright rays of hope at the end of any of the episodes in this one. So, if you watch these all in close proximity to each other it is... I would say... a bit of a downer.

Nevertheless, if you want to see some charmingly told chillers with a whole host of easily recognisable, ‘can’t put a name to the face’ British character actors then Hammer House Of Horror is definitely one to watch and, I have to say, I was astonished by just how good this new Blu Ray transfer looks. It’s pretty obvious from this release that the episodes must have been shot on film stock as opposed to video because they look like they were just filmed yesterday. The crisp quality of the images and the deep colours are an absolute joy to look at and, I have to say, I really didn’t expect these things to have survived in such pristine shape. Network have done a really good job here (there are even a number of extras... the intentions of one of which is a little more questionable than the others) and they really deserve a lot of applause for the quality of this release. Definitely one to have for followers of Hammer Studios and lovers of British television in general. This is a very welcome addition to the TV shelf.

Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington

Bird Of Play

Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington
by Simon Sheridan
Fab Press 
ISBN: 978-0952926078 

You know... I’m not exactly familiar with the work of model, porn star, sex entrepeuner, prostitute and Playbirds mascot Mary Millington... other than from her almost hushed but legendary stories from around the time I was growing up in the 1970s. I’ve never seen any of her movies, asides from a few minutes of some of her ‘early’ artistic (aka hardcore) work which can be found randomly streamed on sites of a dubious but easy nature... although I acquired two of her commercial features earlier in the year to watch at some point for a review on this site. I did remember two things though, which brought me to the point of considering reading this book.

One was the amount of British Sex movie posters I’d seen her featured in or mentioned on when I was a young lad of about 10 years of age. Posters for a lot of British sexploitation films such as Come Play With Me and The Playbirds, along with tonnes of non-Millington movies (usually sex comedies) were regular fixtures outside my local cinema as I used to admire the prominently painted assets of a number of talented young ladies on my journeys to and from various destinations. Also, there were many raunchy and related adverts pushing the same movies in the pages of Film Review magazine (anyone remember that?) and Time Out. Thus my awareness of the fairer sex, albeit a relatively skewed view, grew in leaps and bounds as the memories of the imagery haunted me in my sleep, taking up residence in my libido next to the likes of Caroline Munro, Valerie Perrine and Carrie Fisher.

The other thing which made me want to read up on her was the memory of a TV Documentary about her shown maybe 15 or more years ago, in which her general naivete and her fondness for checking up how much money she’d made in her sex shop at the end of the day... “Cashing up is better than sex.”... made an impression on me. So I was pretty happy when I found a copy of Simon Sheridan’s cool book, Come Play With Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington, on sale at the Camden Film Fair earlier in the year with a cracking £5 price tag. This was money well spent.

As is expected, the book tells a tale of tragedy and naivete about a young lady who loved her mother, loved her lifestyle and who ultimately committed suicide at the age of 33 due to threats from both the police and the Inland Revenue. It also tells the story of how, through her love of sex and the free giving of it to friends and strangers at the drop of a hat, she became a staunch supporter, as should we all, of free speech and anti-censorship. This in an era of British history where we really did need to have both eyes open at the ludicrous and daily liberties taken by those in some small position of power from our personal rights and freedoms. Of course, as I write this, the irony that this country has flip flopped back again from a brief period of enlightenment to an even more draconian, intrusive, illogical and ultimately sinister brand of abusive censorship is not lost on me.

Sheridan portrays Mary, for the most part, as someone who was an innocent, just caught up in life. He touches on the fact that some of her business partners could perhaps be seen as exploitative of her talent and enthusiasm in the sexual arena but it also points out that she was always absolutely aware of just what it was she was getting into, embracing it fully and certainly, it seems, she never really let herself be exploited in any way... other than in the ways she most wanted to be. Her accumulation of wealth and the acquaintances she made are quite eye opening and, although a severe dent is put in her character towards the end of the book when a trait akin to a compulsive form of kleptomania is highlighted... ultimately she seems to have been a joyous and engaging young lady who cared very much about people and animals and who, perhaps, did not best express herself when she needed help in certain areas of her life... those which took her to her untimely death in 1979.

The book is both frank and playfully cautious in equal measure. For example, Mary’s sexual encounters with prime minister Harold Wilson, actress Diana Dors and several other celebrities are included in the pages of the book. Other people who played a part in her life have been left out or alluded to without actually being named and I’m guessing the potential publication of certain information in the book which is passed over or referred to more enigmatically... such as a ‘leading comedy personality’ who used to visit Mary for sex in disguise so he wouldn’t be recognised... might still be damaging or, at the very least, seen as defamatory, if they were revealed at the time of the publication of this book. Sometimes, if you piece certain information together from other parts of the book, you can kind of guess who some of these ‘friends’ of Mary’s were but, other times, it’s a little more difficult.

The book is really nicely written and it’s an excellent portrayal of Mary’s life. It also has a second, very large section of reviews discussing all of Mary’s non-hardcore feature film appearances. This section has some fascinating anecdotes and stories from the productions of these films, some of which were shot by prominent directors at the time (one of the main Bond film directors springs to mind in this context). It also touches upon films made after her death and which traded on her name and reputation. Come Play With Me was and still is, I believe, Britain’s longest running film showing at the cinema... running non-stop for years and making a tidy profit in the process. So you can understand why some of Mary’s past business partners may have wanted to capitalise on that after her death but, of course, this really is the part of the book where one can justifiably say that Millington, after her tragic suicide, really was being exploited.

This book was an absolute joy to read. Very sad, obviously, but ultimately a celebration of the life of its subject and, from what I can gather, a much more factually correct account than the TV documentary I mentioned above and certain other ‘biopic’ type films which were even farther from the truth. A really great read and a big thumbs up to the writer and to Fab Press for putting this one out. Not just thumbs up... but possibly other parts of the anatomy up too, as it’s fully illustrated throughout with shots of Mary and her colleagues. Certainly a recommended read if you want to find out the fascinating things which were happening in the early 1970s porn trade and how the participants in these things got their start. Really happy I stumbled across this one in my travels and, if you have any interest in the subject, it’s definitely one to pick up while it’s still out there, I would say.