SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

 

SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

Dir. Michael Schultz

Written by Henry Edwards

Starring Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, George Burns, Steve Martin, Donald Pleasance, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Earth Wind and Fire, Carel Struycken

There should be a law.

Once upon a time, some rich asshole bought the rights to 29 Beatles songs from Sgt. Pepper and Abby Road for an off-Broadway jukebox musical, which apparently was a thing people did back then (in fact, this particular asshole, one Robert Stigwood by name, had already done something similar with 1977's SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER). And of course, when he discovered that the docile US population was unwisely willing to tolerate this kind of chicanery, he decided that while he had the rights, he might as well grind out a movie, too. It would tell the classic story of Sgt [sic] Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a four-piece brass band who became beloved during their stint in World War I, and who returned to their hometown of Heartland, USA, to remain popular through the decades until they died in 1958. Then, although the movie is not explicit on this point, it appears their bodies were stuffed and displayed in the local museum along with their magical instruments(?), which is where the story picks up with the grandson of the band's leader, Peter Frampton (The Simpson Season 7 Episode 24), who dresses like the Lawnmower man and has the Bee Gees as a backing band.

If it seems weird to you that a filmmaker would start a movie called SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND by introducing a WWI-era band of that name, only to immediately kill them and skip ahead to 1978, strap in, kid, because that will seem like airtight narrative efficiency by the time we get to a British comedian who lives in a van with two robot gimps and obeys the commands of a psychedelic video screen which will ultimately task him with stealing the beloved magical instruments of the original Sgt [sic] Pepper's band, as part of a dastardly plan by a mysterious secret society to utilize the instruments' magical powers to transform the world's youth into mind-controlled automatons in boy-scout uniforms. Meanwhile, the Peter Frampton ensemble must experience a meteoric rise to fame and be tempted by rock and roll excess before the movie forgets about that entirely and they have to go and recover the magical instruments from the secret society's various colorful henchmen.

Or, at least, I'm pretty sure that's the gist of what happens; parts of this story are directly explained via the narration of George Burns (!), (playing a "Mr. Kite," and yes, they will literally play a Benefit For Mr. Kite before the credits roll) but when he's not explicitly describing what's happening on-screen, good luck figuring out what the fuck any of this is supposed to mean. You see, Burns speaks the only actual dialogue in the film; everything else in the story is communicated entirely via the medium of Beatles covers. Which could, in theory, be made to make some sense, I suppose; I don't recall Julie Taymor's 2007 all-Beatles musical ACROSS THE UNIVERSE struggling with basic comprehensibility. But the problem here is that these particular Beatles songs are, by and large, a selection of the band's most specific and direct storytelling, and they are absolutely and unequivocally not telling this particular story. Not one of these songs is, even in the most vague, elliptical way, about battling the evil henchmen of a brainwashing robot cult to regain a suite of magical brass instruments, and yet they are our only means of trying to discern the basic plot of a movie which is, to the extent which it can be meaningfully said to be about anything, about battling the evil henchmen of a brainwashing robot cult to regain a suite of magical brass instruments. 

We are often faced, then, with songs in which only the title or a few tossed-off lines have anything at all to do with what we're actually seeing; witness the bizarre dissociative fugue that occurs as Steve Martin (!) speak-sings his way through "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." It is true that he is playing a character named "Maxwell Edison," and he does appear to incidentally own a silver hammer, but otherwise not a single word from the rest of the song --and everyone in the movie always sings the whole song-- has a single goddamn thing to do with what we're actually watching. The lyrics are our only window into what the story is supposed to be --remember, there's no dialogue whatsover outside of the very occasional Burns narration-- so there's no way to just ignore them, and yet he's singing "Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine / Calls her on the phone / Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?" despite the fact that there is no Joan, no phone, and not one goddamn thing he's talking about has anything to do with the movie we're watching.

There is a character called "Strawberry Fields," and never mind what a fucking insane name that is for a human, the real problem is that she sings the song "Strawberry Fields Forever". You know, the one which begins, "Let me take you down, 'Cause I'm going to / strawberry fields." I'm, I'm! As in, “I am!” First person singular! Never mind that the rest of the song is meaningless gibberish in this context anyway, you know what character would make more sense singing "I'm going to strawberry fields"? LITERALLY ANYONE NOT ACTUALLY NAMED "STRAWBERRY FIELDS." Good Lord, people, just fucking think about this for just two goddamn seconds before you start shooting it!*

And then, above and beyond all that, there's the crippling issue that the production is set, for no reason in particular, in America, despite the soundtrack of what might be the most aggressively British pop songs in the history of music. The lyrics are constantly talking about Lancashire, "ten-bob" notes, lorrys, getting sacked, and what have you --hell, both Frampton and the Bee Gees are British!**-- and yet the movie absolutely insists that this is a home-grown American affair. It's madness! The movie offers absolutely no explanation about why this at-a-minimum third-generation American band is suddenly singing about Lancashire, and doesn't even appear to notice that it's odd. 

(For the record, though, the funniest mismatch between screen and lyrics is when Barry Gibb, singing "A Day In The Life," looks at the camera and solemnly narrates that he "Woke up / got out of bed/ dragged a comb across my head." He looked like this at the time: 

Yeah, uh, Barry, I think there was probably a little more to it than that.)

Very occasionally, the movie's baseline idiocy bleeds into outright psychosis in a way which is at least visually interesting; a scene where devilish (?) Label boss Donald Pleasence (!!) speak-sings his way through "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" while seducing our boys into signing a record contract*** gradually degenerates into a opulent nightmare Nicolas Roeg would be proud of (the film was shot by five-time Academy-Award nominee Owen Roizman, of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST fame!). The gaudy, tasteless overkill of it all sporadically brushes up against some kind of giddy camp, although it can also seem weirdly chintzy and small-scale for something so obviously hoping to overwhelm with excess. Still, a few sequences feel frisky and odd enough to entertain; Martin's rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" at least has the benefit of some energetic choreography which the film almost entirely lacks (Patricia Birch, of GREASE [but also GREASE 2] is credited, but the songs are mostly performed by rockers who don't dance). And I guess I'm incapable of not being charmed by seeing Alice Cooper (!) as the head of some kind of mustachio'd brainwashing cult, however little actually comes of it.

Mostly, though, this is a literally unbelievable trainwreck of incomprehensible madness, and rarely even eccentric enough at that to be fun. Mostly it's just exhausting. Even the covers are so strikingly similar to the originals as to hardly feel exotic; every now and then they get a little bold, as when the band gradually twists "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" into some kind of weirdo disco workout, but mostly the result of Frampton and the Bee Gees covering this material is simply faithful reconstructions of the originals**** with distinctly wussier vocals. And the Beatles weren't exactly Pig Destroyer to begin with, so when I say these covers are wussier, you can believe me that you're going to notice. After a while, suffering through George Burns, Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, and Donald Pleasence speak-singing actually becomes a bit of a relief. 

Before the film's release, Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees announced: "There is no such thing as the Beatles now. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt Pepper live in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed." Fortunately that did not turn out to be the case; if anything, the opposite is true. Still, despite its relatively low profile in modern times, there's no getting around it: SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND THE MOVIE does exist, and we just have to reckon with that fact. And it is a sobering one. This must surely be the most sobering film to ever be made by people who were most emphatically not sober. 

But lest you start to pity the film for its dizzying ineptitude, remember: it made that Aerosmith cover of "Come Together" a hit. So however much it suffered, it deserved much worse. 

* Also, Earth Wind and Fire are on hand to perform "Got to Get You into My Life." But here's the thing: they're not actually a part of the plot or anything. At one point, our heroes just go to an Earth Wind and Fire show, and hear that one song. I'm not complaining though; at least Earth Wind and Fire get to walk away with their dignity marginally intact, and besides, stopping everything to go to an Earth Wind and Fire show is the only action Frampton and Co. take in the entire film that makes these jokers seem in any way relatable or sympathetic.

**The Bee Gees were all born in Manchester, although they rose to fame after moving to Australia in their teens.

*** Which, uh, they want to sign, and in fact came here to sign, and never regret signing, so I don't know what's up with the sinister tone here.

**** Original Beatles producer George Martin is on board here in the same capacity, presumably just for the opportunity to spite his old band by exactly recreating the lush production they were so hostile to.

Alone In The Dark (1982)

Alone In The Dark (1982)

Dir Jack Sholder

Written by Jack Sholder, Robert Shaye, Michael Harrpster

Starring Dwight Shultz, Jack Palance, Donald Pleasance, Martin Landau

  

            ALONE IN THE DARK opens with a strange man (Academy-award-winner Martin Landau, THE BEING, WITHOUT WARNING) walking into a very strange, very empty diner. It’s called MOM’s, and he greets the waitress at the counter as “Mom,” in a strange, stilted, dreamlike way. And that sense of dreamlike strangeness is, ah, heightened by the fact that his order of “the usual” results in a plate with a single whole raw fish on it, which is quickly joined by a frog that hops into view from off-frame. And then to make matters worse, the cook (Donald Pleasance, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS) starts shouting at him that he is supposed to cleanse the Earth with fire and blood, and it starts raining indoors, and then he gets chained up by his feet and sliced in half. “Service good, but food underdone and ambiance terrible, two stars.” –Yelp reviewer DinerGuy6969. Alas, this kind of greatness is impossible to sustain; it turns out to be a dream. But it’s a damn great opening sequence, far and away the best thing in the movie. It’s hella crazy, but it turns out to be a smart way to open this particular film, which is very much about crazy people. This will be our sole direct glimpse into the crazy mind of the weirdos with whom we expect to eventually be ALONE IN THE DARK.* We’ll never see things from their perspective again, but this gives us a good hint of just how frighteningly far from reality it is.

            Indeed, it is in this break from reality that we locate the horror. The diner sequence is more surreal than out-and-out terrifying in its specifics –and it is a dream in any case. But the implications for the dreamer are more sinister: what kind of twisted mind, we wonder, would produce this bizarre fantasy? No healthy, rational one. The villains in this movie are not supernatural beings, not particularly stronger or faster or smarter than the average person. What makes them frightening is that they’re driven by thoughts and motivations which are unknown and unknowable to us, motivations we can’t predict, can’t reason with. We have no power whatsoever over a reality which is closed to our influence. They will be impervious to our attempts to convince, threaten, cajole, bargain. In fact, what we do will only matter to them through the warped filter of their madness; we are less real to them than whatever demoniac forces from unknown subconscious depths have constructed the fractured mental world they inhabit. And that makes the anxiety they provoke metaphysical, even beyond the very real material threat of bodily harm.  

This is why what we now call mental illness remains an unsettling topic to explore, even if we (hopefully) know by now that people who suffer from mental illness are far, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. (We do know that by now, right? Right?) Although ALONE IN THE DARK will, as a slasher film, eventually hinge on our (unrealistic) fear that mentally ill people will enact violence on us, there’s a little more to it than that. We fear the mad not so much because of their capacity for violence, but because it frightens us that we don’t share their world. So much of our comforting assumptions about life are nested in our sense of solid, fixed, and broadly shared reality. Severing that link to a consensus reality results in a deeply unsettling sense of uncertainty. So much classic horror --first and foremost the work of Poe-- locates its fear in the loss of reality which comes from a slipping mind. If we can’t know reality, we’re as good as dead, just senseless dreamers stumbling randomly through a meaningless void, impotent to control a world which we cannot understand. And if someone else doesn’t share our reality… who knows what they’ll do?               

            And, for better or worse, that’s what ALONE IN THE DARK is interested in. Even though the premise is not exactly enlightened, the movie is surprisingly nuanced in its portrayal of mental illness and the treatment thereof. (At least as far as 1980s slashers go). One might fairly ask if “thematically incoherent” might be a better description, but I’m feeling generous enough to think it’s trying to genuinely explore the topic. At the very least, it takes the question of treatment seriously, and spends a surprising amount of time addressing different professional approaches to it. After having seen what the inside of Byron 'Preacher' Sutcliff’s (Landau) mind looks like in the opening, we will spend the remainder of the movie looking in from the outside, through the efforts of Dr. Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz, The A-Team, Star Trek: The Next Generation, FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY) a psychiatrist who has just been transferred to the psychiatric hospital run by Dr. Leo Bain (Pleasance). Potter seems skeptical of Bain’s permissive, hippy-dippy attitude towards his patients, but also rejects ignorant stereotypes casting the mentally ill as dangerous boogeymen. In fact, his sister, Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan, woah, STARGATE!) has recently been released from a similar institution after recovering from a stress-related mental breakdown, and he neatly diffuses the social stigma that background might impart: “She’s probably better off now than before the whole thing happened… breakdowns can sometimes be very cleansing. Why don’t you give her a chance, she’s a great girl now.” Still, he has some anxiety about the lax security afforded to so-called “third floor patients” at the hospital, four men with violent criminal psychoses. That would be paranoid former POW Frank Hawkes (Academy-Award-Winner Jack Palance, SHANE, but also Joe D’Amato’s BLACK COBRA WOMAN), pyromaniac preacher Sutcliff, obese child molester Ronald Elster (Erland Van Lidth, THE RUNNING MAN), and homicidal maniac John "The Bleeder" Skagg, who refuses to let anyone see his face.

            The hospital prides itself on its humane, unrestrictive treatment. “We don’t lock people up here and fry their brains with electricity,” Dr. Bain proudly tells Potter, and frankly that sounds like a pretty good idea to me. He isn’t in denial about his patients’ need for care and treatment, he just doesn’t think it necessitates that they’re treated as objects of fear and suspicion when they can get by with just a little understanding. He considers their mental illness to be a “journey to the inmost psyche,” and huffs, “I’m running a haven here, not a jailhouse.” In a startling depiction of the faith he has in his patients, he happily lends pyromaniac Sutcliff a matchbook; when minutes later Sutcliff has set own coat on fire, Bain just hurries over to him and calmly talks him down, and then asks somebody to get him a new coat.** He seems like a real caring, progressive guy, and even the skeptical Potter has to admit “he gets results.” In fact, when the “third floor patients” are convinced by the ultra-paranoid Hawkes that Potter has murdered and replaced their former doctor, Potter takes a page from Bain’s empathetic approach and points out that this is a perfectly natural, and even common, coping mechanism for mentally fragile men used to consistency. Their floor monitor, Ray (Brent Jennings, RED HEAT, MONEYBALL), is not comforted by Potter’s measured, calm appraisal of the situation, though. And his point of view is somewhat backed up when a days-long blackout shuts down the hospital’s security system, releasing all four psychopaths, who promptly murder him and escape. Why yes, he is a black guy, why do you ask?

            Now on the lam, the deranged foursome stalk Dr. Potter, swinging by his house to menace his infuriatingly precocious daughter (Elizabeth Ward, two ABC Afterschool Specials)*** and surreptitiously hack up the babysitter (Carol Levy, an episode of Tales From The Darkside), who has unwisely taken this opportunity to have an extended hot naked sex scene with her boyfriend (Keith Reddin, THE DOORS, TO WONG FOO THANKS FOR EVERYTHING JULIE NEWMAR).**** The remainder of the film, then, is essentially a home-invasion/siege thriller, with the Potter family trapped in their house, cut off from the outside world by the blackout, and surrounded by a quartet of deranged maniacs. It takes itself pretty seriously, with Schultz and his wife (Deborah Hedwall, Jessica Jones, unnecessarily authentic in a typically unrewarding “threatened wife” role) feeling natural and grounded enough to make the home-invasion angle tense and weighty, with the extreme genre elements pushed right up to the point of ridiculousness but not quite across the line.

Unfortunately, this part, which would usually be known as “the good part” in a genre movie, is the least interesting thing here. It’s perfectly functional as far as home-invasion thrillers go, but without much to distinguish itself from a million other similar movies. Credit where it’s due: the final ten minutes get pretty intense, and include a brazen twist which actually managed to catch me off guard. But mostly the climax is disappointingly boilerplate, which is kind of a shame given the unusual premise, and the movie’s interest in the specifics of the “third floor patients” and their treatment beforehand. These villains mostly behave like any generic home-invasion gang, and the fact that they’re acting on these bizarre paranoid fantasies doesn’t really come into play. You could see that as a missed opportunity, with a potentially interesting backstory petering out into a routine slasher. But I prefer the glass-half-full approach: it’s a predictably average slasher, but with a surprisingly rich backstory. Obviously you don’t need Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and that big fat guy from THE RUNNING MAN to play murderous psychotic goons (and more or less generic ones at that; their individual delusions don’t even play a particularly pivotal role in their mayhem, which mostly just involves them attacking the family with edged weapons of various sorts), but since they got ‘em here for some reason, they add a little extra spice.

            Still, you do kinda need actors like these to create complex portraits of delusional, mentally ill people, and at least Landau and Palance actually do that, kinda. Their psychiatric issues, if not their slasher predilections, are treated more realistically and seriously than you might expect. These are not Hannibal-Lecter-style insane geniuses. As that opening scene very evocatively tells us, these are genuinely troubled guys living very much in their own heads. They’re not necessarily evil or sadistic, though their conditions sometimes make them do things which are both. But they really can’t help themselves. Co-writer/director Jack Sholder (THE HIDDEN, and, of course, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREE 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE a.k.a THE GAY ONE) says he was partially inspired by Fritz Lang’s M(!) in writing the script. ALONE IN THE DARK is arguably not as good as M, but it does have a similar sense of conflicted sympathy for the villains’ compulsions. They’re bad, but it’s not their fault, exactly. It all makes sense in their heads. Landau does a great job of depicting Sutcliff as a guy only barely aware of the world around him, shuffling through much of the movie in an inward-facing haze until he suddenly bursts out with tantrums of rage which seem to boil up from nowhere to anyone who can’t see the inevitable, internally logical train of thoughts which led there. He doesn’t want to be evil. But, I mean, what would you do if you got served a raw fish and then bisected by your psychiatrist at your Mom’s diner? Could you honestly say you wouldn’t want to stalk and murder Dwight Schultz and his family if you were in his shoes?

             Palance does even better with Hawkes, a Jack-Palance-style tough guy for whom the vulnerability inherent in his mental illness is intolerable. He doesn’t say as much, but there’s a wounded pride in his performance; this was a solider, a guy who obviously prided himself on his macho toughness and self-reliant individualism, and now he’s humiliated and emasculated by his confinement and the embarrassing focus on his disturbed emotional state. Real men don’t have to talk about their feelings, and here he’s being forced by the state to do just that. This is an intolerable insult, a suggestion that he is incapable of controlling himself and his emotions. No wonder he prefers a persecutorial fantasy to reality; looking inward threatens to shatter his entire sense of himself, but shifting the problem outside himself feels infinitely more comfortable. Strategy, aggression, and conflict are areas where he can feel capable, confident. It’s a rather neat, and understated, little parable about the temptation to see the world in a way which is convenient, rather than allow painful reality to change us. Which is a point especially driven home in (SPOILERS SPOILERS) the end, where he is forced into a sudden realization that he’s been wrong. Rather than a vigilante avenger, he’s just been a delusional psychopath all alone, and suddenly he can see that, and it just breaks him. He stumbles out into the night, a wreck of a man, his fury now turned inward. But the very end of the movie curiously offers him some flicker of hope; he winds up with the punk rockers Potter and his family had encountered earlier (at a show by a band called The Sick F*cks, who absolutely slay and seem to have been unfairly ignored by history*****). They seem crazy, half aggressive, half suicidal, and suddenly there’s a moment of strange, half-understood simpatico between them. All right, they’re crazy. Isn’t everybody? Bemoans Dr. Bains. We all go a little mad sometimes. And maybe we don’t need to be completely sane, or even completely understood, to get by in life. Maybe that old hippie Bains was onto something after all. (END SPOILERS)

            Anyway, I’m probably making this movie sound more interesting than it actually is, because when it comes down to it as a genre film it ain’t any great shakes and as a dense psychological portrait it probably leaves a little to be desired in the ol’ realism department. Still, it’s watchable enough, has two lengthy scenes at a rockin’ punk show, a (hallucinated) zombie by Tom Savini, a funny bit part for Lin Shaye, and some solid meat-and-potatoes siege thriller crap. I can’t say it’s some forgotten gem, but I enjoyed it, and I think it has some unique merits, even if they’re not necessarily merits which much benefit its adequate but undistinguished genre cred. It is historically important for one reason, though: it was the first film ever produced by Robert Shaye and New Line Cinemas, which had previously been exclusively a distribution company. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it got their feet wet, and then it was on to XTRO, POLYSTER, and, of course, Freddy. So without ALONE IN THE DARK, there is no NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2. And we’d never have this:

            And that’s a sobering enough thought to make anyone crazy.

                *Spoiler: No one is ever alone in the dark at any point during movie. I don’t know what that title means but it’s obviously not meant to be taken literally.

                ** Jack Sholder has said in interviews (for example, in Twisted Visions: Interviews with Cult Horror Filmmakers by Matthew Edwards) that Bain is a parody of Scottish philosopher and psychiatrist R.D. Liang, and it’s pretty on-the-nose; Bain’s explicit rejection of retainment and forced electroshock therapy, and his description of psychosis as being a reasonable and valid reaction to a violent and chaotic world, are almost verbatim Liang. Though Liang is hardly above criticism, I’m not sure I care to hear any parody of psychotherapy from the guy who directed NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2 without realizing he had made the single gayest film not personally directed by Kenneth Anger.

                *** With the threat of child rape, since Elster is a child molester! Yikes! Fortunately for some reason he’s just not feeling it this time (possibly because the kid is so intolerable) and just contents himself with murdering the babysitter.

                **** IMDB offers an unsourced bit of trivia that “Matthew Broderick was auditioned for the role of [the boyfriend], however Jack Sholder thought Broderick was too talented for the small part.” Probably true, although I bet Broderick wouldn’t have minded being insufficiently artistically challenged considering the whole role consists of making out with a topless blonde nymphomaniac. I guess things worked out OK for him in the end, but imagine a world where both Broderick and Tom Hanks had early roles as pointless boyfriend characters in early 80’s slashers?

                ***** According to IMDB, they were originally called Nicky Nothing And The Hives, but liked their ALONE IN THE DARK moniker so much that they kept it. Apparently they put out and EP in 1982 under the name Sic F*cks but other than this single fanzine article I can find nothing else about them. Anyway, the song they play in the movie “Chop Up Your Mother” is a big sloppy freight train of punk rock, and I’m in fucking favor of it.

               

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	They’re Out… For Blood! Don’t Let Them Find You… ALONE IN THE DARK.
TITLE ACCURACY	Inaccurate, even after the power goes out, no one is ever alone in the dark.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, siege-movie, home invasion thriller
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Jack Palance, Martin Landau. Shultz would go on to a leading role in The A-Team the following year.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Martin Landau, Lin Shaye
NUDITY?	Yes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Two teens get murdered while having sex, and there is the lingering threat of “child molester” Elster, but nothing comes of it.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Yes
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	The psychos stalk their victims for several days, though not much is made of this..
MORAL OF THE STORY	We should all be more accepting and empathetic of people with mental illness but at the same time you should probably never keep a gang of homicidal psychopaths in a locked room which will automatically open in the event of a power outage. But JURASSIC PARK hadn’t come out yet so there was no way they could have known that.

Burke and Hare-athon Part IV: The Flesh And The Fiends

The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)

Dir. John Gilling

Written by John Gilling, Leon Griffiths

Starring Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence, George Rose

TO SEE THE WHOLE SERIES, START HERE AND LEARN THE TERRIFYING TRUE STORY:

We’re making progress here. THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS is the first Burke and Hare movie to look and feel like an actual movie, not an indifferently staged and awkwardly truncated stage play. It begins with a succinct and perfect little bit of pure cinema: in the galling quiet of the night, two miscreants wordlessly stride into a graveyard. Their dread purpose is made clear by the instruments they bring with them: kart, chains and shovels. The camera furtively follows them as they choose a grave and begin digging, the second shovel of dirt flying directly into the camera (too bad this wasn’t 3-D!), SMASH CUT TO TITLE.

The ANATOMIST also began with an image of graverobbers, but there’s something distinctly cinematic about this version, a realization --for the first time in two decades of films on this subject-- that along with impassioned soliloquies on the subject of science, there’s probably an advantage to pursuing some visual possibilities as well. How the fuck it took them so long to realize that, I cannot say, but there you have it. It’s understandable that this is an improvement, though, since it’s co-writer/director John Gilling’s second pass on the subject. He also wrote (but did not direct) the 1948 THE GREED OF WILLIAM HART, and here he is again, adapting the same source material, but more than ten years later, in a very different era of filmmaking.

It had not been so very long since the 1956 U.K. premier of THE ANATOMIST, but in British horror cinema, everything had changed. Just a year after the British public had gotten Alastair Sim pontificating endlessly about science in peoples’ living rooms, Hammer Studios released THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, which pushed the boundaries of what the strict British censors would allow and became a mammoth, runaway hit that established Hammer as the premier horror studio in the world and launched what would become a run of 20+ years and dozens of horror movies. Three years later, Gilling was working for early Hammer imitator Triad Productions (he would graduate to Hammer itself the next year and go on to a venerable career with the studio including THE REPTILE, PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, and SHADOW OF THE CAT), and setting himself the task of re-creating his earlier adaptation in an era more welcoming of atmospheric, grisly tales of murder. In a possible “fuck you” to the censors of the 40’s who had banned him from using the actual names of the killers, the first image of the film is a title card emphatically asserting: “[this] is a story of vice and murder. We make no apologies to the dead. It is all true.”

One of the biggest changes from THE GREED OF WILLIAM HART is immediately evident: After the wordless graverobbing introduction, the action shifts immediately to a lecture by Dr. Knox. Knox is barely present in the earlier film, appearing only in a single scene near the middle and coming off as a cold, amoral villain absolutely complicit in the coverup of murder. Here, though, he gets a rousing introduction where he inspires dozens of young pupils to a standing ovation with the power of his words (he quotes Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man: “know then, thyself, presume not God to scan / the proper study of mankind is man” and urges them to see death as not just an enemy, but also as one more means by which to learn. That seems a little morbid for what appears to be a graduation ceremony, but hey, I guess he knows his crowd because they eat it up). Next thing we know, he’s also kind-heartedly helping out well-meaning but ne’er-do-well pupil Jackson (John Cairney, Hylas in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS) by offering him a job. Quite a far cry from Arnold Bell’s icy schemer in WILLIAM HART and Alastair Sim’s grandstanding bully in THE ANATOMIST. But there are hints of problems on the horizon: he gently berates the young student for being “too emotional” over medicine, and assures him he’ll be ready to graduate only once he can think of a patient “in the abstract.” Man, if I ever say anything that obviously foreshadowing of my own downfall, go ahead and let me know, huh?

Knox is played by Peter Cushing, of course, in what is for my money is one of his best and most unfairly ignored performances. Having already portrayed the amoral, obsessed scientist Victor Frankenstein twice (in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and a year later its sequel, REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN) Cushing was obvious typecasting for the role of Knox, but as always the actor proves willing to go the extra mile, crafting a subtly different character here from many of the same parts. His Knox is arrogant, but not in the blustery, bullying way Sim’s Knox was. Oh, he can be just as witheringly caustic, as we see in a magnificent scene where he efficiently administers an eloquent but remorseless verbal thrashing to a gaggle of obsequious rich guys at a party. But he also has a softer side, as we see in his kindly relationship with his niece (June Laverick) and his tough-love coaching of Jackson. And unlike Sim, whose boundless contempt seemed to be a function of egomania as much as genuine conviction, Cushing’s Knox seems both sincere and fundamentally altruistic. His frustration with the backwards attitude of the establishment is perfectly reasonable; if he has no choice but to be complicit in bodysnatching in order to save lives, he’s willing to do it. This will be his downfall, obviously, but for the first time so far, his attitude seems somewhat more understandable. Cushing’s subtle but noticeable inclusion of the detail of Knox’s drooping left eye --ruined by smallpox during his youth-- is a nice visual illustration of his moral myopia; he sees the big picture more clearly than almost anyone, but at the expense of the personal, the immediate. These nuances make this Dr. Knox by far the most complex and interesting version of the character anywhere in the annals of the Burke and Hare-athon.

The movie begins with Knox, but unlike THE ANATOMIST, it’s not exclusively focused on him. Soon enough, we’re introduced to our Burke and Hare, in this case played by George Rose (PIRATES OF PENZANCE, but today best know for his own real-life murder mystery) and Donald Pleasance (RAW MEAT, every single movie released between 1956 and 1990) respectively. And just as with Dr. Knox, it’s immediately obvious that this is a very different Burke and Hare then we've encountered in previous incarnations. First off, they’re introduced as loutish drunks before they’ve ever entered the corpse procurement profession. It’s the first movie to depict their first sale to the medical establishment --a tenant of the Hare’s boarding house who had died of natural causes (the movie makes Burke the proprietor instead of Hare, for whatever reason)-- to a certain extent offering some explanation for their long slide into serial murder. We also spend significantly more time with them than any prior version, taking in their homelife, discovering what they’re doing with the money (squandering it on ostentatious clothes and gallons of whiskey) and even meeting a significant other; Mrs. Burke (Renee Houston, REPULSON) appears as an accomplish to our murderous duo here, though Mrs. Hare is curiously absent. The result of these new details are a pair of miscreants initially less one-dimensionally murderous than their previous incarnations; they’re vain, petty louts who turn to murder for money, but they’re also pathetic in a way which Slaughter/Moore and Ripper/Kelly were not. Murder isn’t exactly their natural inclination, but they’re heartless enough that when it turns out to be a lucrative profession, they eagerly embrace it.

Rose plays Burke as more or less an idiot, a violent brute with no qualms about murder if there’s a payday in it. That in itself isn’t especially different from the previous versions of the character (though historically Burke was thought to be the more intelligent of the two), but Pleasance makes Hare a little bit more interesting. He’s wittier, more calculating; what Burke does remorselessly without much thought, Hare guilds with self-serving rationalizations, egging his accomplice on. Burke begins the actual killing, but Pleasance’s reaction is the more intriguing: he covers his mouth with his hands in shock, but his wide eyes seem to suggest excitement more than than horror. It’s never explicitly stated, but his new career path seems to wake something in him even more disturbing than murder for money. Of all the incarnations of the two killers, Pleasance’s silver-tongued sadist is probably the most unsettling and memorable.

Besides Knox, Burke and Hare, we also follow the relationship between Knox’s niece and his dishwater-dull HGMS assistant Dr. Mitchell (Dermot Walsh, 1960’s THE CHALLENGE), and the burgeoning relationship between our ne’er-do-well HGMS assistant Jackson and a bawdy local prostitute named… Mary Paterson (Billie Whitelaw, FRENZY, THE OMEN, THE DARK CRYSTAL). This is the first film adaptation that gets some mileage out of the idea that Paterson is recognized by a student after her death, and likewise the first to imagine a romantic relationship between them. Obviously, the sex-and-violence angle is catnip for film writers, and so it’s little wonder that once Gilling had put it out in the world, it would find its way into virtually every subsequent version. It’s a good idea on paper, a way to link the victims of Burke and Hare’s crimes to the medical school where our heroes will eventually unravel the mystery of where these bodies are coming from (never mind that in real life, the murders were detected by a poor family staying at the Hares’ boarding house). 

On paper that sounds good. In practice, though, this structure would become the achilles heel of the entire enterprise of making Burke and Hare adaptations. Let’s count our characters now: Knox, Burke, Hare, Mrs. Burke, HGMS #1, Knox’s Niece, HGMS #2, Mary Paterson, and also I should mention we again get to spend some time with Daft Jamie (Melvyn Hayes, who had played young Victor Frankenstein in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN a few years prior). What is this, a prequel to NASHVILLE? The essential problem with this and almost every subsequent variation of this story is that there are just too god damn many characters, and most of them have absolutely nothing to do until near the very end. It seems like a good idea to involve our obligatory HGMS’s with the victims in order to give them a more personal stake in the mystery, but any benefit gained from this plot contrivance is more than offset by the tedium of having to deal with their pointless lives and relationships which do not in any meaningful way intersect with the actual story of Burke and Hare until the very end of the movie.

This leaves the whole enterprise feeling weirdly rudderless. Who, exactly, is the main character here? Nobody! Not a single person in this script would qualify as a character who encounters conflict and is ultimately changed by his or her experience. They’re all almost completely passive until the final reveal, and the only person who is active in the climax (the HGMS who ultimately discovers Burke and Hare’s secret) is the one with the least involvement in any other part of the plot. GREED OF WILLIAM HART and THE ANATOMIST are inferior films in almost every way, but they at least had their own clear sense of who the protagonist was, and how the basic story mechanics served that protagonist. THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS really struggles on this front. Burke and Hare themselves probably have the most screen time, but they don’t really have anything resembling an arc. One of the HGMS’s solves the mystery, but is basically a nonentity otherwise. And the person the film begins and ends with --Dr. Knox-- is only peripherally involved in any of the actual drama.

Oddly, this film, like THE ANATOMIST, ends with an inexplicably sympathetic scene of support for Dr. Knox. Cushing’s Knox is admittedly a little more likeable than Sim’s was, but even he admits, at the end, that he knew Burke and Hare were murderers. He does a little more soul-searching than his predecessors, but jeez, does it really count as character growth just that he feels a little bad about it and then everyone forgives him? I mean, I kind of appreciate that the film doesn’t go the usual horror movie route and condemn the scientists for meddling in God’s domain or whatever, but does this guy really deserve a happy ending (especially an ahistorical one)? Cushing’s performance is nuanced enough to make it kind of work; though his rhetoric remains robust, you can see the fight drain out of him, see his eyes grow suddenly tired. There’s a moment when a chance remark by a child makes him realize just how infamous he is, and he suddenly seems to really get it for the first time. The look of quiet devastation on his face is a truly gut-wrenching thing to behold, maybe one of Cushing’s very strongest scenes in his entire venerable career. But I don’t know. The whole point of telling this story is to remind us that it’s wrong to abet murder, even if it’s in the service of the greater good? No shit. At the very least, the majority of the story has nothing to do with that point, so it seems an odd note to end on.

The iffy narrative structure is a major flaw, but at least the movie has plenty of strengths to balance it. Pretty much every scene with Burke and Hare is gold, Cushing is terrific as Knox, and the script is peppered with darkly hilarious wit, most of it delivered by Cushing or Pleasance in the drollest possible manner.* Moreover, aside from being by far the most cinematic adaptation of this material so far, it is also the first unambiguous horror film; the murder scenes are sumptuously layered with eerie hard lighting that makes them feel exaggerated and nightmarish, and the gothic, expressionist sets heighten that sense. Even beyond that, though, this is a surprisingly gritty experience. For 1960, there’s quite a bit of sex, gore, and grotesquery on display. While there’s some broad hints that Paterson is a prostitute in THE ANATOMIST, here there’s no doubt. She lives in some kind of bawdy house where the downstairs living room has been retrofitted into some kind of weird orgy pad. As our heroes walk by we can see all manner of sexual chicanery happening within, including, humorously, a bare-ass naked lady just sort of ambling around in circles with no clear objective. The pub where Burke and Hare find their victims is equally raucous and lewd, topless women drunkenly pawing at their would-be paramours and sloppy fights breaking out at random. Producers Robert Baker and Monty Berman were known for inserting incongruous nudity into their productions, but here it works well to establish the debased world these characters inhabit. Likewise, the surprising (for 1960) gore adds some much-needed spice. We see a long-decayed body pulled from the ground, watch two brutal (though bloodless) murders, an ugly attempted rape (which thankfully the movie does not try to play as sexy), and even watch Hare get his eyes burned out (presumably a reference to the folk legend that he was blinded by a mob following his release). This ain’t your grandpappy’s Burke and Hare; these guys inhabit a world of drunken, desperate poverty and hopeless, disease-ridden mindless sex. I mean, it ain’t exactly CALIGULA or nothin’ but it’s a far cry from the chatty, sanitized visions of this story we got in 1948 and 1956.

THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS contains a whole slew of “firsts,” and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that it would dominate the way the story was told for the rest of the century. It’s the first movie to suggest a relationship between a HGMS and Peterson, the first to clutter up the story with way too many characters, the first to include a significant emphasis on sexuality, gore, and drunken debauchery, the first to actually show Burke and Hare’s fate, and the first to fall clearly into the horror genre. Every one of these factors would strongly influence both the structure and the feel of the next few versions, which is strange, because the movie itself was a box-office disappointment and seldom available for decades. I guess this movie is like the Velvet Underground; not too many people saw it, but everyone who did went off and made their own Burke and Hare movie. But anyway, they couldn’t have picked a better one to try and rip off, because between the fine cinematography, terrific performances and blackly funny script, this one’s a real winner. Only the shapeless structure holds it back from being a real genre classic, but that’s forgivable in light of the things it gets right. I don’t want to say it was worth 16 people getting murdered to get a horror movie this good… but you know, not a bad silver lining, anyway.

*On the subject of Parliament’s reticence to help medical schools gain easier access to cadavers, Knox quips, “with five hundred walking corpses there, you would think they could spare one.”

OUR STORY SO FAR:

1948: The Greed of William Hart

1956: The Anatomist

1960: The Flesh and the Fiends

1972: Burke and Hare

1985: The Doctor and the Devils

2010: Burke and Hare

Burke and Hare-athon Checklist!

• Title: The Flesh And The Fiends
• Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
• Story regulars: Burke, Hare, Knox, Paterson, Daft Jamie, Mrs. Burke, HGMS. No Mrs. Docherty in this case, and our usual HGMS is actually TWO HGMS’s this time around.
• Attitude towards Dr. Knox: Ambiguous, but ultimately positive.
• Wonky eye or no? Hell yeah, the best ever.
• Scottish accents? Only Billie Whitelaw as Mary Paterson attempts a Scottish Brogue, but she's pretty crazy. I didn't mention that to save space in the review, but boy, does she make dating an alcoholic prostitute not look very appealing despite the cleavage.
• Irish accents? Both Rose and Pleasance oblige with an Irish accent, though neither goes over the top with it.
• Heaving cleavage? Yes sir.
• Rockin’ theme music? No, although a nice scary score.