Conan The Barbarian (1982)

Crom Night

Conan The Barbarian (1982)
USA/Spain/Mexico 1982 
Directed by John Milius
20th Century Fox 
Australian Blu Ray All Zones 

“They told him to thrown down his sword in the earth. 
Ha! Time enough for earth in the grave.”
The Wizard, Conan The Barbarian (1982)

A quick note about the Blu Ray version of the classic film which I used for this review. It’s the Australian edition which my cousin, who lives there now, got to me fairly cheaply. The reason I chose this one is because it contains two different versions of the movie, dependent on what zone your Blu Ray is set to. If you watch this on the British setting, Zone B, it will only play the censored version of the film, falling in line with the BBFC categorisation. However, if you have a multizone machine and play it in another country’s zone, such as Zone A (US zone), then it will play the full length, uncensored version of the film.

I was fourteen years old when I first saw the AA rated (14 years and over... if you can remember that ratings system) Conan The Barbarian on its original cinema release back in 1982. However, I was quite familiar with the long series of short stories published in the UK at the time, which included the original 1930s stories by Robert E. Howard and intermingled with additional stories either expanded from unfinished Howard manuscripts or, more notoriously, rewriting other Howard tales and transforming them into Conan stories. I had read a few of the Marvel comic books and magazines too, of course but, not many of them compared to the amount of novelised collections of the character I read. 

So I knew what to expect from the character and, although I remember being slightly disappointed when the skeleton from whom Conan stole his sword didn’t rise up and attack him as the mummified remains did in the L. Sprague De Camp story that sequence was based on (although, there is a very slight suggestion that he almost does), I still felt that John Milius and his cast/crew had done an amazing job of, not only making an entertaining movie but, really staying to the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s original works. I’ve always thought of this as the last great studio ‘heroic fantasy’ genre film and, despite the number of knock offs (and even a genuine sequel), not to mention some not so great adaptations of Tolkien in recent years, I still stand by that. A few have come close but this one... this is the last great one I think, after all those films by the likes of Ray Harryhausen... where everything comes together to make things work and create the perfect ‘sword and sorcery’ film.

John Milius’ script, which trashed a lot of Oliver Stone’s previous draft and reset it in the original mythical timeline of Robert E. Howard’s fictional Hyborian Age (the film was originally to have been set in the far future like some kind of post-apocalyptic tale), is a pretty good creation and one of its strengths is that it gives a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had a very strong Austrian accent at that time, very minimal dialogue to work with. He was a relative newcomer on the acting scene but two things really help this very capable and interesting actor out near the start of his career. Number one is that he was surrounded with truly great co-stars like James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader) who played the film’s lead villain, Thulsa Doom and, of course, the great Max Von Sydow (who plays a cameo as King Osric) and this was a good training ground for him, I reckon. 

Secondly, the minimal dialogue, while serving the actual character of Conan fairly well and helping make the character more convincing (he’s perhaps a little less wordy than his literary counterpart, if memory serves), allowing Schwarzenegger’s physical presence and attitude to define the role, is actually both very well written and, except in a few notable instances, is the pattern for the majority of the other characters in the movie too. Including Schwarzenegger’s brilliant co-stars Sandahl Bergman as Valeria and Gerry Lopez as Subotai (although they also get a few scenes to let their dialogue go beyond the few words variety here and there). Epic and poetic streaks of minimal dialogue like, for example... “The blood became as snow.” from the wizard, played by Mako, who is also the film’s narrator. 

A lot of the time the movie is almost silent acting but, that’s okay because the richness of the visual images, the fluid editing and the tremendous achievement of the musical score written by the late Basil Poledouris, means that the film really doesn’t need to lean on the crutch of dialogue and, in fact, cinema was born without it anyway, to an extent. 

Thinking about my favourite sequence in the film... after Conan has been crucified and bites the throat out of a vulture (which is a scene from one of the many Howard stories rubbed together and fashioned into a completely new story for the film), after he is brought back to life again... Conan, Subotai and Valeria penetrate Thulsa Doom’s lair in a sequence where they rescue King Osric’s daughter while taking on a fairly heavy loss. The whole sequence lasts maybe 12 or 14 minutes but, during the whole thing until the three thieves have escaped, just before one of them gets shot with a snake (yeah, you read that right), there are only four lines of minimal dialogue, comprising nine words. I noted them down as I watched this time...

Subotai: So this is paradise?
When he catches a glimpse of an enthusiastic orgy of cannibals.
Valeria: The princess!
Valeria: Come on.
Big, heavy looking villain: You!

The movie is pure cinema whichever way you look at it and, though I’m not all that happy with some of the satire on show... it takes a serious side swipe at hippies although, to be fair, it also bashes suicide cults at the same time (so it can’t all be bad), I’d have to say that the film certainly holds up to repeated viewings over the decades (I’m not sure if I’m into double figures on this movie yet but, getting there). It’s also probably one of the first films (at least released into cinemas in this country) to mix the bloody violence and gore which, even when the 1930s Weird Tales pulps the stories were first published in, are part and parcel of many of the literary yarns published in this genre. It actually felt, for a brief amount of time, that fantasy cinema was actually, finally growing up. Alas, the kiddies would win out in the end... and I’ll discuss what happened with the sequel when I rewatch that one very soon.

The film has some outstanding set pieces and moments, many inspired from the original short stories, plus some nice cinematic ideas... such as the sweat from Conan’s head as he steals a dazzling jewel dripping onto the eye of a giant snake which then awakes and attacks him. There are also some of Milius’ movie influences on quite vivid display too. The setting up of the encampment for the final battle sequence is like a miniature homage to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and the writing that covers Conan’s body to help protect it from demons, when the wizard is trying to stop his almost dead body from being taken by them, is reminiscent of the writing used to try and stop other supernatural creatures in one of the segments of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan.

And then there’s that beautiful score by Basil Poledouris. I don’t think I’ve seen many ‘greatest film score’ lists over the last few decades that haven’t included this in their top ten. Certainly, I think it’s one of the most astounding achievements in the art of film music and one piece of music, The Orgy, co-composed by Poledouris with his daughter Zoe, which uses a repeat structure similar in style to Ravel’s Bolero, it seems to me, is easily my favourite piece of film music ever written. 

The score serves both as something supporting the movie’s emotional moments but also has its own ways of giving to the story. For instance, in a wonderful montage where we see Conan grow from a child into Arnold Schwarzenegger, pushing a giant Wheel Of Pain for a decade, Poledouris writes in screeching iron to the track, something which starts, timed to the rhythm of the score, as soon as the wheel first comes into the left of the shot, like a sound effect but, in this case, a musical punctuation. And, of course, as a stand alone listen, this is a fantastic work of art. I own various incarnations of this score on vinyl and then CD over the years, including one which is transcribed for solo church organ as an album. 

And that’s me done with the absolutely brilliant, first cinematic incarnation of Conan The Barbarian. I could never recommend this movie enough to anybody and this hopefully won’t be the last time I watch it. I’ll be jumping onto the slightly less satisfying sequel, which I’ve not seen more than a few times and don’t remember all that well, sometime very soon. Also, if you’re into this kind of thing, I’ll hopefully be reading a thick doorstop of a reprint of all the original Robert E. Howard Conan stories as they appeared in Weird Tales, in an absolutely beautiful hardback edition (double columned like those original magazines, no less), so look out for a review of that at some point too... 

No, wait, I ended up reading that and posting the review long before I got around to putting this review up so, yeah, you can read that review right here. 

Sleepless

Dummy Hand

Sleepless
aka Nonhosonno
Directed by Dario Argento
Italy 2001 Medusa
BFI Screening NFT 3
Saturday 27th May 2023

Warning: Very slight spoilers

So, of all the films playing in the Dario Argento season at the NFT in May 2023, I just picked two movies (finances allowing) to revisit in the season... ones which I knew I’d not seen at a cinema before. So I got to see The Stendhal Syndrome (reviewed here) on a big screen and also this one, Sleepless (aka Nonhossono). Both of these I’d only seen via my old DVD copies and I have to say that, though I enjoyed both back in the day, I really liked seeing them as part of a proper cinema experience so much more.

I seem to remember (perhaps my memory is poor but, if it is, remind me in the comments below) that the film wasn’t particularly well received when it got a video release over here in the UK (I don’t think it got to our cinemas or I would have been straight on it but, the internet wasn’t as pervasive as it is these days). I couldn’t see what the problem was myself... I loved it then and, now I’ve revisited it in a more appropriate venue, I love it now.

The film follows the return to Italy of a killer, thought to have perished in a string of murders against women in the late 1980s. The Dwarf Killer, as he came to be known, was foiled by homicide detective Morretti, played by this movie’s big star, the always incredible Max von Sydow. We see Moretti back then, after a woman has been brutally murdered with an oboe, as he makes a promise to the son, Giacomo, who half witnessed the crime, that he would bring the killer to justice even if it takes him a lifetime. 17 years later, the boy grows up to be actor Stefano Dionisi and he gravitates back to Turin when a series of similar murders take place. 

But, back in the 80s, the dwarf seemingly responsible for the killings was found murdered by an unknown assailant and the crimes came to an end. The police ask the now retired Moretti to help them with his memories of the case and, somehow, he and Giacomo start working the case privately, without official police sanction, to try and figure out why the seemingly dead killer has now returned. Is it a ghost? A copy cat? What’s going on?

And it’s a great movie with Argento absolutely at the top of his game here. There’s the usual great cinematography and the murder set pieces he’s known for and it’s full of visual gems. For example, when a prostitute, who soon becomes a victim in an intense night train stalk and slash sequence, answers the telephone to a client, Argento does some incredible work in the choice of shots and editing. As she talks we get exaggerated close ups of parts of her face isolated and cut together... eye, mouths, ear and back and forth and so on. It’s almost like looking at a cubist painting but only focussing on just one of the fragments of a person’s face at any given moment. It’s a really interesting visual approach and it creates a shorthand summation of the emotional state of the character. Honestly, it would have been nice to see more of this idea explored throughout the film but, I was only conscious of the director employing this technique in this one scene here.

Another interesting moment is of a strip of red carpet in a long corridor in a ballet venue, which the camera tracks in close up, looking down but parallel with the carpet so we just see things like people’s feet walking along and vacuum cleaner heads etc. A long journey through a long section, culminating in, eventually, leaving the carpet to join a killing in progress... the decapitated head falling into the frame from above. It’s all good stuff and in many ways the film almost feels like a compilation or ‘greatest hits’ tape of early Argento signature moments.

For instance, there are a few sequences where he pitches bright Bava-like lighting styles against each other. A single flash of blink and you’ll miss it red in the chase through the train near the start of the picture, for instance. Or a dance club where the large double level floorspace is clearly delineated in the frame by green, red and purple lit sections like it’s almost riffing on Suspiria (reviewed here) or Inferno (reviewed here).

The killings themselves seem almost reminiscent of Argento's early screen kills too... some of them definitely reminded my of those in Deep Red (reviewed here) for example. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision or not but one of the story mechanics used to mask the identity of the killer, using a ventriloquist’s dummy, is almost like a rationalisation to one of the more notoriously non-sequitur moments of that earlier film, invoking the ‘mad puppet’, it seems to me. Also, the idea of an old timer coming out of retirement to help catch the killer seems to me like a riff on the Karl Malden character in Argento’s Cat O’ Nine Tails (reviewed here), just a little.

The film even includes a few scenes with famous giallo damsel Rosella Falk, who many readers may remember in such gialli as The Fifth Cord, Black Belly Of The Tarantula, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and The Killer Is On The Phone. You may also remember her from Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Modesty Blaise (reviewed here). So it’s nice to see an actress associated with the genre popping up in a move by the king of giallo.

To further infuse the film with a ‘the gangs all here and making classic Argento’ feel is the return of the group Goblin on musical chores. My understanding is that, after splitting up under bad circumstances years before, the band reformed to score this movie and... promptly split up again for good (in this incarnation) due to their differences once the score was complete. Our loss because, honestly, it’s a classic Goblin score, one of their best as far as I’m concerned. So yeah, this film ‘sounds’ like an Argento classic as well as just looking like it.

Other points of interest are Max von Sydow insisting his parrot in the movie be named Marcello, after his friend Marcello Mastroianni and the fact that the poem about farm yard animal killings which the murderer uses as a playbook, was written by Argento’s daughter, Asia.

If I had any grumbles about the movie it would be the slightly clunky animatronic heads used in two of the murders (but that’s still preferable to using CGI effects, for sure) and the completely ‘out of nowhere’ moment when the killer is shot in such a way that the person shooting him from a different location would be completely unjustified in doing so and it just feels like a bizarrely miraculous way to get the surviving protagonists out of harms way. But these are minor complaints for such a well made giallo as this, it has to be said.

Just like the planned sequel to Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome was transformed into non-sequel The Card Player, so too was the original planned sequel to this film, dropped due to financing issues,  rewritten and then recycled into Argento’s latest movie, which retained the original proposed title Occhiali Neri (aka Dark Sunglasses)... you can find my review of that one here.

All in all, I really enjoyed seeing Sleepless again and it needs a full bells and whistles Blu Ray release as far as I’m concerned (along with other, later Argento opuses). It’s easily the best of Argento’s 21st Century made movies, to date... and needs to be seen more. An absolute belter.

Flash Gordon (1980)

Flash In The Can

Flash Gordon (1980)
UK/Italy/Netherlands/USA 1980
Directed by Mike Hodges
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

When I was a kid, from the first omnibus TV screening of the original 1936 Flash Gordon serial by the BBC in 1975... which was shown as two long ‘compiled’ episodes with a Hoppalong Cassidy movie playing between the two, I was absolutely hooked on Flash Gordon and that theatrical serial and its two sequels, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars and Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, were... and still are... three of my favourite things within the world of film.

Now I’m not going to talk about the serials much here because... well, I intend to watch them again sometime over the course of the next year and write about them for this blog... but I will say that many decades later, when I read some of Alex Raymond’s original Flash Gordon newspaper strips, I was shocked to find that, as far as the first serial goes at any rate, the 1936 Hollywood version with Buster Crabbe, with all its episodic twists and turns and globe-trotting travels on the planet Mongo, was remarkably close to the original source material.

Now, around about the same time as I first saw that original serial, a young director called George Lucas was trying to buy the rights to make a modern, Flash Gordon movie (the rights were optioned with Fellini at the time, I believe, who gets name checked as a character in the 1980 version). He couldn’t afford the asking price so, in the end, he put all his ideas into making his own space opera which borrowed quite a lot from the feel of the original... that film turned out to be Star Wars and, as you undoubtedly know, the rest was movie history, as far as that story goes.

However, the Flash Gordon film then being made by Dino DeLaurentis was floundering and creative differences forced one of the original directors for this movie to part company... so, yeah, we missed out on the great Nicholas Roeg’s vision for Flash (which, given the direction he was going, I’m not sure wasn’t a blessing in disguise) and eventually Mike Hodges went on to direct the new movie.

Ironically, of course, it was the success of the first Star Wars film itself that paved the way for the atmosphere in which a film like Flash Gordon could be taken seriously by studio executives. The bandwagon machine for post Star Wars clones was an immediate rush for anything science fiction to be given a green light and the next ten years saw a lot of films, some bad and others good, coming out to greet the viewing public. Stuff like Star Crash, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek The Motion Picture, The Black Hole, Battle Beyond The Stars, The Humanoid... things that might not have made it to the cinema in exactly the same way they might have, if at all, without Lucas’ film hugely changing the cinema going map. Even the popular James Bond franchise was retooled and the next intended film for the series was replaced with a ‘name only but not the original story’ version of Moonraker, to keep up with the general public’s voracious demand for science fiction.

I remember seeing Flash Gordon back in 1980 at my local cinema in Enfield and thinking to myself that, although it was obviously nowhere near as good as those original theatrical serials (nothing to do with Flash Gordon since has ever touched those... but I’m sure there’s a great film series to be realised from these stories yet), this film was still a huge amount of fun and, if it wasn’t anywhere near as close to the original story, it did have some anchor points and some of the spirit of the template was certainly there. So I liked it a lot, in other words... and ended up seeing it three times at the cinema, if memory serves.

The wonderful Arrow films has released a nice new Blu Ray restoration of the movie overseas but, alas, due to rights issues, the new UK version has been released by Studio Canal. I was going to go for the big £50 boxed edition but I thought that was a bit of an expensive option and I had most of the stuff in it anyway... so I saved some money by buying the new, slimmed down 2 disc 40th Anniversary Edition and then augmenting it with the third of the discs in the deluxe edition set, the documentary film Life After Flash, as a separate Blu Ray purchase (I got a nice little handwritten note from the director thanking me when that film came through in the post and I am looking forward to watching and reviewing Life After Flash for this blog at some point in the very near future).

The film is, mostly, nicely presented and the production values are, for the most part, excellent. I hate the first couple of spaceship designs used in this but the final one, War Rocket Ajax, is a nice, spectacular design worthy of the original strip and the whole film is like a bizarre fusion of 1930s eye candy reimagined for the 1980s. It’s so colourful too... like somebody had hired Mario Bava and Dario Argento to do the lighting and then just let them run riot with the thing.

The cast is wonderful... Sam J. Jones as Flash is a lot more of a presence than I believe people gave him credit for. Melody Anderson’s Dale Arden is, perhaps, a little stronger as a character than she was in the 1930s but that’s no bad thing either. Now I always loved the original 1930s cast and especially Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov. Here, Zarkov is played by Chaim Topol and he’s absolutely amazing in the role, if a little over the top. That being said, most of the cast are a little over the top because the movie does almost demand a larger than life delivery of the lines. I mean, Brian Blessed as Vultan, King of the Hawkmen, is a completely brilliant bit of casting and Timothy Dalton as Prince Baron is... as written, a little more intimidating and complicated than the original... but still great. And Ornella Muti as Princess Aura, daughter of Ming The Merciless, is who every teenage boy was thinking of at the time. And of course, there’s the great Max Von Sydow as Emperor Ming, playing it to the hilt just as Charles Middleton had done in the 1930s. Plus a load of great character actors in the piece too, of course, such as Richard O’Brien and the late, great William Hootkins. Nothing much can go wrong there.

The films is exciting, fairly pacey, very humorous and has some exciting laser battles towards the end of the picture. There’s maybe too many “that characters dead, they’ve had it now, oh no they’re not... “Gordon’s Alive!” moments in the film but this just, generally, reflects the cliffhanger nature of both the original serials and the newspaper strips so... I’ve got no complaints. It’s also a very sexy film and as far as the costumes and certain comments go, it certainly reflects the first of the three 1930s serials in this respect (the costumes... or lack of them... had to be completely toned down for the second and third serials, is my remembrance).

And then there’s the music. Queen’s hit song is fantastic and some of the other action sequences are exciting too. Alas, they didn’t really do their job is my understanding and, though they got a hit record album out of it, a fair amount of extra music had to be hastily written by Howard Blake using their themes, from what I've read over the years and there’s some nice stuff from him here too (I have a ‘promo’ CD of his parts of the score and it’s a real eye... err... ear opener). Still, the main Queen song, Flash, is great and the pulse which starts it and goes through some of the action scenes certainly makes the hairs on your arms stand up at times. The opening credit sequence accompanying this song, utilising fast montages of the original Alex Raymond newspaper strip, is probably one of the best title sequences in cinema history, as far as I’m concerned.

I have two slight problems with this new Blu Ray restoration. Once is that the highly visible strings on the Hawkmen have been digitally removed and I think I noticed  few other little special effects ‘enhancements’ as I watched this new version. Nobody needs this kind of Lucas-like tinkering. We want to see the strings and the wobbly sets please... they’re part of the history of the film. The other thing I wasn’t too sure about was the scene where the Ming punches through the windscreen of the plane near the start. The saturation seems hugely overblown here and you really can’t see that it’s a facsimile of Ming punching through anymore... just a big red blur. I think that was a bit overdone and another unwelcome bit of ‘restoration’. However, the majority of the film is still beautifully lurid in its design (contradictory as that may sound to some) and hugely entertaining.

And there you have it. Flash Gordon (1980) is a fun film which lovers of cinema should definitely take a look at if they like a good night in with a good movie. A feel good film which doesn’t, alas, live up to the 1930s serials but certainly makes a much more successful go of it than any other versions since then (don’t talk to me about the 1950s German/US TV show starring Bantam paperback Doc Savage cover model Steve Holland as Flash... it was a bad attempt at best). This film is easily one I’ll watch again and again and it’s loaded with extras including a half hour look at the unfilmed Nicholas Roeg version and... and this is a real good one... a commentary track by Brian Blessed. I haven’t listened to that yet but I already know that’s going to be worth the price of purchase alone and it will be going on sometime soon.

The Quiller Memorandum

Quiller Instinct

The Quiller Memorandum
UK/USA 1966
Directed by 
Michael Anderson
Network BluRay Zone B

The Quiller Memorandum is, along with The IPCRESS File (reviewed here) and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, one of my three favourite spy movies. It’s also, quite probably, the most intelligent movie ever made... and there are lots of contributing factors as to why this is so... which I’ll explore here. However, the alignment of all these things to produce one of the most devastating, and mostly ignored (at least in its day) spy movies of all time is almost miraculous.

The first contributing factor is that it’s based on the 1965 novel The Berlin Memorandum by Adam Hall, one of many pen names used by writer Elleston Trevor. It’s the first of 19 books written between 1965 and 1996 to feature Quiller and, since the movie was released in 1966, the first novel has gone out with the title The Quiller Memorandum on all subsequent reprints.

The thing about the Quiller books is that they are the full on, tough underbelly of spy fiction. Now Le Carre can be coolly intellectual with his books, no doubt about it, but the Quiller series is quite a bit more chilling than that and, though the various novels are probably a tad more visceral than Le Carre’s novels, they are as smart as a whip and the main title character doesn’t mess around. He’s no nonsense and you know his every thought and reaction, except for when Hall needs to surprise the reader with a smartly revealed twist, because the events that take place are all told from the first person narrative viewpoint. The reader is transported directly into Quiller’s internal monologue, right in his brain and body (or perhaps “the organism” as he likes to refer to himself) and you know from this that Quiller is an efficient, possibly blunt, instrument in the battle against the enemies of his country. He is never off the job and, although you admire the character’s cooly objectified feats, you really would never want to be this guy... and you certainly can’t imagine someone as warm as George Segal playing him (and I’ll get on to that in a little while because Segal turns in a ‘career best’ in his performance at bringing Quiller to life, here).

I started reading the Quiller books when I was a teenager and have them all tucked away somewhere. All read cover to cover and I can only recommend them above and beyond any other spy fiction out there (with the possible exception of the original Modesty Blaise novels, which are also unbelievably good). If you’re going to do Adam Hall’s Quiller books right then you need a writer who can turn the stories and, more importantly, the personality of the central character and the way he interacts with the dangerous world about him (a world where a misplaced half-word can mean death) into something that is going to carry in a more visually oriented medium.

Enter Harold Pinter...

Oh yeah. Nobel Prize-winning English playwright and one of the most famous theatre writers of all time.

That Harold Pinter.

He wrote the screenplay for The Quiller Memorandum and, frankly, it really shows. He perfectly renders the world of the central protagonist and the various other characters in a way which is pitched at the two levels this kind of story needs to be perceived by the audience. Secret agents or spies, or whatever you want to call them, live in a world of deep undercover. They are operating at a shadow level where what they say and do is just a tool to get the information they require. In the books, as in the film, Quiller is run by a different ‘director in the field’ in each novel, with the occasional repeat show. Quiller and any of the other operatives can refuse a director, as long as a replacement can be found. This isn’t made implicit in the movie version but it is obliquely referred to, coming under the catch all of “allowed to use any methods I like to get the results” line that George Segal gives his director in the field, played in the movie by Alec Guiness. Seriously a great cast in this one.

Anyway, my point is, the agents are working at two levels and anything and everything which is seen on the surface is purely there as a front to hide, and sometimes to reveal, the job at hand. Pinter manages to pick up on this very nicely, as you would expect, and writes the movie on two totally separate levels. It’s extremely subtle and, from what I’ve heard from people talking about the movie in the past, it’s not always as easy to “get” on your first viewing. I was lucky in that I’d actually read one or two of the books first, so I already knew that when somebody says something in this film, you don’t necessarily take it at face value... least of all if it’s coming from the mouth of Quiller.

I’ll explore this idea a little more in a minute but so far we have two very big elements to make the wind blow right - Adam Hall and Harold Pinter. And you also have a load of great actors including George Segal, Alec Guiness and Senta Berger. Berger, I guess, could be easily mistaken for the romantic interest, if you really are going to be watching it on that level (she really isn’t, as I’ll demonstrate later).

So you have Hall, Pinter plus Segal and co... and then you have the director and cinematographer and the guy doing the editing etc. And it’s all good. Now, granted, it’s not as technically brilliant and awe inspiring as Sidney J. Fury and Peter Hunt’s work on The IPCRESS File, but it’s still very good and, coupled with.... I’m saying it right out now... probably the most intelligent screenplay ever written, certainly for a mid-sixties spy movie... you have a really potent cocktail. Quiller’s world is a world of hard ice and, if you were in any doubt as to that, you add the final ingredient into the mix... John Barry.

John Barry’s score, based on the Wednesday’s Child melody written for the film and sung by Matt Monro in a radio in Quiller’s hotel, is even chillier than his score for The IPCRESS File. It’s stunning, filled with menace and is nicely understated in certain areas, showing it a strong match for a film which specialises in understated dialogue and incredibly subtle acting throughout the running time. It’s another thing that helps transport the movie into a realm of high art that most things never quite reach, in comparison. This film really is an amazing phenomenon.

The Quiller Memorandum starts off quite grim and low key and rarely gets above that pitch throughout the movie... unless you’re listening to the words the characters speak as opposed to the words behind what the characters say. There is a subdued instrumental Opening Title arrangement of John Barry’s Wednesday’s Child theme... not the more famous,  full blown, barrel organ version of the theme you will hear later in the movie. And one single, 2.35:1 shot of a street in Berlin at night with a phone box taking up the extreme left of the screen. The credits appear superimposed on the rest of the screen next to the phone box and, apart form the credits changing, the shot is entirely static, with the low key music playing over the top. As the final director credit goes up, the shot cuts to higher up and a little further closer to the other end of the street, excluding the phone box... as we see a nameless secret agent (we later learn his name is Jones) walking down the street in various edited shots and distances to the camera. We switch to a point of view shot of the character at one point, as he desperately scans the darkened windows of an old house as he makes his way to the phone box. What is he worried about? We’ll find out soon enough.

As he enters the phone box and lifts the receiver a snipers bullet is shot through his spine. We linger a while on his dead face before cutting to one of two scenes between George Sanders and Robert Helpmann, who play the lofty, aloof, upper class Whitehall warriors in charge of the government agency Quiller works for. These two scenes in the movie with these characters are almost superfluous other than to be used as a way of showing the difference between the men in control, playing their petty power games, and the foot soldiers in the field, like Quiller. When we first see Quiller it’s a shot of his back as he walks away from camera and straight on, centred between the two towers of the gates of a stadium where he first meets Alec Guiness, expertly playing Quiller’s director Pol.

Now here’s the thing about that opening sequence. The director makes you wait a long time for something to happen in the hopes that when the camera starts doing things like cutting away to shots of the windows, it’ll all stick later. I’m assuming this is because he hopes you will remember it near the end of the film, when George Segal goes through exactly the same thing and the same shots are used but with Quiller potentially in harm’s way. This is done to elicit a certain amount of suspense right at the start of a very interesting, ‘open tail’ sequence near the end of the movie... which is another thing you don’t usually see in these kinds of spy stories.

As the film goes one, various clever things are introduced such as the famous series of code phrases agents in the field can use to recognise each other. The ones in Quiller are based on cigarettes but it’s not the most efficient set of codes because, once the phrases are given, if you don’t smoke then the cigarette just gets thrown away... very curious to an onlooker and an easy way to blow one’s cover, I would have thought... but it’s also an effective way of getting the message across to the audience that this is a set of recognition codes, of course. The script cleverly uses this towards the end of the movie when Quiller loses three men who are tailing him but picks up another bunch. Uncertain as to whether they are his own people or the new Fourth Reich Nazis he has been instructed to find, Quiller uses the codes on one of them and, when the person refuses to respond or take his cigarette, his comment of “Non smokers” quickly tells the audience that he isn’t out of trouble yet.

Now this film is incredibly subtle and one of those subtleties is sometimes screwed up, or rather is inadvertently hidden, with the use of subtitles on some prints. I’ve seen two versions of this film, one with subtitles and one without and, thankfully for new comers to the movie, this new Blu Ray is the one where the few passages of German are left without subtitles. Why is that important? Well I’ll get to that in a couple of paragraphs... keep reading.

So Quiller asks his unwanted cover shadow, who he spots immediately and wants to get rid of because it hampers his style, if the opposition know he’s here yet. Hengel, his cover (played by Peter Carsten), replies that they don’t know he’s here yet... to which Quiller replies something along the lines that he’d better let them know he’s here. Now you don’t see this done that often in spy movies but it’s one of Quiller’s trademark M.Os in the books and he does it a fair few times. What better way of getting to meet up and identify your enemy than by making yourself stand out and walking into a trap? So Quiller starts going around various places where the last agent, the second killed on this mission and the one from the post opening title sequence, has been known to be hanging around. And at each of the venues, Quiller gives a slightly different cover story as to why he’s there... working for different firms etc. So anybody checking up on his movements enough to find the lack of synchronicity of those covers will raise the alarm. Quiller’s initial ‘research’ culminates in his meeting the leading lady of the picture, a school teacher called Inga, again played incredibly subtly by Senta Berger.

And right here is where I give you a spoiler warning... if you want to go in cold, skip past the next four paragraphs...

As Inga and Quiller get to know each other, it’s clear that she knows all about what he really is. If you listen to the early dialogue between the two, what may come across as a playful exploration leading to possible romance, is actually Inga trying to get a handle on Quiller and find out just what he knows about the underground network of Nazis she belongs to. What she doesn’t realise is... Quiller pretty much knows she knows and is leading her on with non-specific answers to the questions she asks him to arouse her interest in his ‘investigation’... leaving himself out like bait again. When Quiller leaves her apartment the first time, he realises he has at least one tail waiting for him out there, presumably the Nazis he is investigating...

Now keep in mind that, as part of all his cover stories, he has feigned being a ‘dumb foreigner’ who doesn’t speak the German language... so he goes right up to one of his suspected tails and starts questioning him in perfect German. Now, if you’re watching a subtitled print of this especially, you might be concentrating on what he’s actually saying to the member of the opposition but... that’s really not the point. The thing to get here is... he’s told all the people he’s met that he doesn’t speak German... and here he is speaking it fluently. This is how he reveals quite clearly to the opposition that he is the one sent to investigate them. As soon as he starts questioning the guy, two more of his tails leap to his rescue and enter into the argument... and so, already, Quiller has flushed out three guys who he’s pretty sure are working for the enemy and also let them know they need to do something about him... but a  lot of people seem to miss this the first time they see this movie, from what I have heard from people talking about it.

There’s a lot of subtlety in the acting all through the film. George Segal might not be anybody’s perfect choice to play Quiller, if you’ve read the books, because he smiles a couple of times and comes across as a fairly warm character in a couple of scenes... which is not what Quiller is about. Quiller is ice. He doesn’t do smiling and emotional warmth... at least not on his employer’s time. However, if you study Segal closely in this, you’ll notice the incredible subtlety of his performance and you will see the warmth is actually a mask which the character is using as a means to an end. It’s all there in the performance, as indicated by the way he sometimes snaps from friendly into “ice-Quiller” mode with a quick change of expression. It’s all done very well.

In fact, all the actors and actresses in this movie are great, including, drum roll here please, the 37 year old Max Von Sydow, here playing the chief villain of the piece, Oktober. His two scenes with Quiller are excellent... one where he uses two kinds of truth serums to try and interrogate Quiller in an amazing question and answer session, each man trying to get their own result from the exchange... and a scene where Oktober uses Inga as a hostage to offer Quiller an ultimatum, not realising, as perhaps some of the audience still hasn’t twigged, that Quiller is fairly sure that she is part of his organisation. Actually, the fact that she is part of Oktober’s underground network is another thing that some audience members seem to be blissfully unaware of even after the film has finished because, being that it’s a Pinter script, it’s not all spelled out in the dialogue and it’s what’s said behind the words that are conveying the meaning in this movie.

End of spoiler zone one.

And all through this, John Barry’s incredible score is hitting all the right notes, chilling when it needs to be, which is most of the time, but not above providing an instrumental arrangement of the Petula Clark hit song Downtown and a really great vocal version of Wednesday’s Child written for The Quiller Memorandum and sung by Matt Monro, who had previously sung the famous end title song on Barry’s score to From Russia With Love. The use of the Wednesday’s Child theme with barrel organ instrumentation is a show stopper but it’s the subtle, taut underscore versions of the theme and the appropriate, low key stingers which keep you involved and which punctuate the incredible acting in this movie.

When it comes in at the end scene, the music spells out the final confirmation and recognition by Quiller about Inga and Oktober. It’s a great scene and again, Pinter does it in such a way that if you really are blissfully unaware of the subtext and want to take it at face value, it might seem like an “end of romance” farewell... but the scene is not about that at all.

Actually, before I go into this final scene of the movie, I’ll just put another Spoiler Warning here.... if you don’t want to know the end of the movie, go away and don’t read anymore... come back and read this when you’re done watching it already.

So Quiller has managed to lose all the people who are quite blatantly tailing him by tricking them into thinking their plan to kill him has worked. This enables him to return to base and report the whereabouts of the new Nazi headquarters to his people, who promptly round up all the Nazis there. Then, the next day, Quiller returns to the school. Now earlier in the film, before Inga was ‘captured’, Quiller gave her a phone number to call in case of emergency, if he didn’t come out of the headquarters after he left her. When he confronts her at the school, it is a farewell scene on the surface, but it’s clear both Quiller and Inga have a full measure of each other. Quiller asks how she got out from Oktober’s lair and she says, quite blatantly, that she was let go after he left her with Oktober. An obvious truth revealing the deceit behind it and one which Quiller lets slide... as he does all the revelations in this final coda of a scene.

Then it’s Inga’s turn to confirm her suspicions about how long Quiller knew she was the enemy. She questions him on the phone number he gave her and mentions that she tried it and it didn’t work. Quiller already knows this, of course, since he didn’t trust her with the real one and it was all part of the charade all along, so he makes up a shallow excuse to her now, which clearly doesn’t hold water... confirming her suspicions that he knew all along, after all. After this Quiller makes some rather pointed remarks about whether his organisation got all the Nazis and leaves her with a not too veiled threat which, although it is still written on the surface as two lovers parting, some people unbelievably still don’t get even though the expressions the two actors are giving in this scene tell the story loud and clear. He basically tells her that if he ever comes back to Berlin he’ll “look her up”. I think that says a lot right there... if he comes back he’ll start looking for neo-Nazis all over again. And then, he asks one more question, about his predecessor on the job, the one who was shot at the start of the film. “Have you ever heard of a man named Jones?” he asks. Inga is quick to respond with a negative, telling Quiller everything about her involvement, before she deliberately slows herself down and tries to embellish the lie with a more believable reaction. It’s too late, though... Quiller knows it was she who caught Jones in a honey trap and sent him to his death in exactly the same way she tried to set up Quiller. As she answers with that first no, John Barry’s score comes in, underlying the sting of the lie and continues as Quiller says goodbye and walks off, the score swelling into a full blown version of Wednesday's Child while Inga and her accomplice at the school are looking very concerned about the way things have gone. Will Quiller’s people be back very soon to pick them up?

End of spoiler zone two.

You know, that has got to be one of the most satisfying endings to a film ever. Like most of the scenes in this movie, it says one thing on the surface while actually meaning something completely different if you take the step to not take a hell of a lot at face value... and that might be a Pinterism for all I know, I’ve not experienced much of his work, to be honest. The film is not as technically brilliant in terms of mise-en-scene and editing as The IPCRESS File from the year before, but it certainly does have its moments in that department too and it more than makes up for it in other ways. If you go into The Quiller Memorandum without the attitude that you are there for a passive watch, it will pull you in and weave a magical spell of cold war, cat and mouse for you. You may even find that it’s possibly the greatest spy movie ever made and, certainly, I am upset but none too surprised that none of the other books made it to the screen as sequels to this one... the film was apparently nominated for three BAFTAs at the time but failed to win any of them. All I can say to that is that it must have faced some pretty awesome competition that year (not hard to believe from 1960s cinema) or it was very much misunderstood and underappreciated at the time... and that’s a real shame.

However, the new Blu Ray from Network is available now and, although the print still seems a little fadey in places, it’s certainly the best version of the movie that’s been put out to date and the extras on here of promotional items and interviews with some of the cast at the time the film was being made are worth a look, from a historical perspective. But, wether the extras are worth it to you or not, this is still one of the all time masterpieces of the spy genre, released right at the peak of the Cold War mania of the mid to late 1960s. If you’ve not seen this one, you really need to get on to that as soon as possible.

The Magician

The Sydow House Rules

The Magician (aka Ansiktet) Sweden 1958

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Criterion Collection Region 1

I’ve had a thing for Bergman for a while now... ever since I saw some early 40s films by him on BBC2 a couple of decades ago. That being said, however, I’ve not seen that many of his movies... probably less than 20... but each time I start watching one I am quickly reminded of why I enjoy his films so much. It’s always a combination of blindingly beautiful shot compositions mixed with a quite often stark or bleak attitude emanating from the characters... even when those characters are in a good mood.

Thus, The Magician when I watched it the other day, was an instant turn on as soon as the credits had finished rolling. Picture perfect shots involving dark shapes of horse, cart, tree and lone figures draw the eye in and it’s interesting just how different and magical each subsequent closer shot of the same set up is from a different angle. It may well be a case of moving the camera around and then moving the props, sets and actors slightly to maintain a balanced composition from shot to shot and hope the audience doesn’t notice... but either way it works quite well.

The film follows a travelling magician, played as brilliantly as ever by Bergman stalwart Max Von Sydow, and his entourage who must persuade censorious local government officials that their show can do no harm to anyone... by staging a performance for a select few who are in power. Most of the movie takes place under the confines of a kind of house arrest leading up to the performance and then dealing with it’s aftermath... but it’s not all doom and gloom as there are, as often with Bergman, sharp scenes based on tart humour (some of the verbal tussles such as the shifting who’s seducing who game between the magicians coach driver and a maid in the house reach almost slapstick proportions) and the lighter, or at least lightly perceived, sides of human relationships.

That Bergman is able to take these rather wild shots of humour and pitch them, especially towards the later parts of the movie, against scenes of bleak despair and the crushing weight of humanity such as the darkened workings of the magician’s psyche and his wife (played here by another cornerstone of what was then Bergman’s regular bunch of actors, Ingrid Thulin) without making them jar or feel like the pacing is in any way off... is just another sign of the absolute craftmanship that Bergman demonstrates in his theatrical features.

The Magician is seen in almost three guises in this movie as the character is revealed to us little by little, starting off with a fake bearded cypher of a man who exudes confidence and mystery... the actor is stripped bare later on when we see him with his wife (who is made up as a man as his young ward when travelling the roads) and we see how much he loathes what has become his profession and his lot in life. This image is further confounded right near the end of the movie when, before a moment of triumph which trumps and almost throws away the value of all that leads up to it, he is seen as a pitiable performer begging for his wage so that he and his wife can eat.

The Magician and his show are both a product of illusion and trickery and yet... it also becomes clear that he is able to genuinely mesmerise people which no amount of explaining can do. Further dimension is added to the film in the presence of a genuine witch who brews the various potions which the travellers sell to people and it is clear that she is blessed with magical powers including the power of prophecy. She plays in sharp contrast to the “manager” of the company who regrets her being with them and who insists that he do all the talking on behalf of everybody.

The film is quite stark and powerful and quite even toned throughout it’s running length, in spite of said juxtapositions of light humour and dark despair, but towards the end there is a scene which takes on an almost Bunuelian atmosphere as the film switches to one of the characters having what can only be described as, and attack of surrealism... courtesy of the combination of mesmerisation and chicanery brought to the table by Max Von Sydow. And then the end sequence, just as the motivation and plight of the characters has hit rock bottom, suddenly gets... well I don’t want to spoil the punch line to this little chamber piece but let me allude by mentioning the film’s musical score. What plays throughout the film as a very spare and "even" take on understated gloom suddenly turns into a fully fledged Nina Rota-like carnival score. Seriously, I was almost expecting the ending to be a forerunner of Fellini’s Eight and A Half when it suddenly changed tone.

This film is definitely Bergman on full form with a series of crisp black and white images of simple beauty enriched with the consummate acting talents of Sydow and his contemporaries and a lightness to counter-balance (but not to its detriment) the deft exploration of the depths of the human soul... peppered by the odd surprise which will keep the first time audience on its toes.

As is to be expected, the Criterion edition boasts an excellent transfer of an excellent print and a few extras which will be of some interesting to Bergman’s followers. Another great job by Criterion of another minor masterpiece by Bergman which is well worth your time if you are a lover of film in general.