X: The Unknown (1956)

 

Director: Leslie Norman (and Joseph Losey)

Screenplay: Jimmy Sangster

Cast: Dean Jagger as Dr. Adam Royston; Edward Chapman as John Elliott; Leo McKern as Insp. 'Mac' McGill; Anthony Newley as LCpl. 'Spider' Webb; Jameson Clark as Jack Harding; William Lucas as Peter Elliott; Peter Hammond as Lt. Bannerman

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #208

 

An early Hammer film, a tale of a strange radioactive entity that has spring up from a fissure in the Scottish countryside, the first thing that came to mind pronounced is how safety measures when handling radioactive material has become more severe over the decades after. Back here, almost an entirely different reality of Britain in appearance and atmosphere, it was perfectly fine to just have a lead box for radioactive metals and a see through pane to stand the other side of to experiment on it, not even full body suits.

In seriousness though, whilst that was a perturbing aspect of the film, it is significant that when the original Godzilla was made by Toho in Japan in 1954, and the Americanized version only was made in 1956, there was a film here which is blatant as a metaphor for the dangers of using radioactive energy and substances without realising their danger. Of note, adding to this, is knowing this was meant to be a sequel returning to writer Nigel Kneale's popular character  Professor Bernard Quatermass, following from The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), only for Kneale to prevent this¹. In hindsight, you could have easily seen this film as a Quatermass production, but instead we have scientist Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), an expert in radioactive materials who finds himself drawn into this scenario when, during military training of locating radioactive materials with a detector, a group of army soldiers are caught off-guard by a fissure in the earth to appear.

The location, rural Scotland in the Lochmouth region, does add a lot of weight to this film even if it is a traditional b-movie that involves a monstrous form, [Spoiler Warning] a radioactive and living mass of mud-likegoo which absorbs radioactive energy [Spoiler Ends]. This is all in mind that you have a violent contrast to a wholesome idyllic place of the past against then-modern science. Here people still go to Church, as in one scene, and when they need to flee their homes, they hide in said Church with the vicar making sure everyone is safe. There are cars and electric lights, but this is still as much a place, even if shot in England, of the World War II and even pre-WWII era, contrasted by Royston's workplace of vast laboratories and computers, even if he himself prefers working in his little shed with his own experiments.

And, in spite of its monster, rendered with models being engulfed in its form, especially in the early stages X does have a darker side because of its tackling of radioactivity. Anyone who is in presence of this being, shown from its perspective for its victims, suffers radioactive burns which can more than likely kill them eventually, even just being near the entity. Even a child, a young boy dared by another to enter spooky woods, which is very adult to have done at the time and still is today. And, still by today's standards, there are a few gruesome moments, especially with someone when attacked in an x-ray room of the hospital being melted to death beyond the skeleton in its presence, which is still icky to see decades later. More so, it is a surprise to see in British horror film from the late fifties such scenes, a reminder than Hammer, whilst a cultural institution in the modern day, were pushing boundaries in terms of what they could get away with, the irony of them become antiquated in the mid-seventies ironic when even this, one of their obscurer films, has such scenes. It also presents one scene, as a result, which does become haunting in context of its themes and time of creation. That the father of the child injured, who has just died before in the scene, berates Royston for his involvement in working on radioactive materials, which he takes the blame for in a universal sense. This ultimately cheesy film still taps into a real fear post-atomic bomb which can be found and adds a greater weight to it.

Ultimately it leads to a monster film finale, which could be seen as a lacksidasical one in hindsight to all this, though let us not ignore this was a horror film first, and that it manages to still have a weight with the themes it decided to tackle. With the Quatermass connection, it would have actually improved the film if Nigel Kneale was willing to play ball. Not least, because The Quatermass Xperiment itself, the Hammer adaptation, ends with a cheesy looking monster, but managed to make its themes still stand out regardless. The themes in the version of the film we did get are still strong in this form, and Dean Jagger is actually an interesting lead who could have been a Quatermass-like figure himself in more productions.

The film as well looks gorgeous in context - mostly set in the countryside, the film in monochrome as well has an evocative edge which helps greatly with the production, even making the monster more alarming than goofy as it is a literal mass which cannot be halted. (Thankfully cinematographer Gerald Gibbs, a veteran who had worked on films like No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) beforehand, would be hired for Quatermass II (1957)). The other intriguing thing to consider is that, with some of his footage surviving in the final production, this was originally a film to be helmed by Joseph Losey, which adds an additional strange touch. Losey, who would eventually be the auteur behind many idiosyncratic dramatic films in the sixties to the eighties, would get a Hammer film entirely to himself, The Damned (1963), which was also about the perils of radioactivity, and thus adds a nice little bow to cinematic history when few directors get enough shot with the same studio on similar material.

 

===========

1) Referenced HERE.

Secret Ceremony (1968)

Director: Joseph Losey

Screenplay: George Tabori

Based on a short story by Marco Denevi

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor as Leonora; Mia Farrow as Cenci; Robert Mitchum as Albert; Peggy Ashcroft as Hannah; Pamela Brown as Hilda

Canon Fodder

 

Ducks don't drown.

Continuing with the curiosities to be found in the filmography of Joseph Losey, an American expat who spent his later career in Europe and Britain, Secret Ceremony offers the curious site of Elizabeth Taylor, the legendary Hollywood actress, on a red double-decker English bus, which is odd, or a prolonged scene of her eating breaking and even burping, images you would have likely not seen back in her American films of the fifties a mere decade earlier. All of this is in an opening of a very strange film, made when the moral guidelines of yore were collapsing and idiosyncratic dramas existed, here funded by Universal Pictures and made in England. All in which Taylor's stranger Leonora, a woman still grieving for a lost child, is pulled into the lavish home of Mia Farrow's Cenci, frail yet with striking blue eyes, the heir of a great fortune whose mother had died. In almost a permanent child-like state, she takes to Leonora as her mother, (with the photo used actually looking like Taylor herself), and Leonora being brought in to role-play this out.

The result is the film quickly turning into a psycho dramatic role-play, Leonora happy act this out and eventually developing a protective bond over Cenci, a figure of clear psychological problems left defenceless in an ornate and elaborately decorated home. This game of role-play lingers, of Leonora the mother and Cenci the doting daughter, but with Cenci the person very much in her own world in this scenario she brings Leonora into. Farrow's performance is also the most striking aspect of Secret Ceremony. Even among everyone else, even Roger Mitchum with a beard, she stands out despite the character potentially being seen as broad, even problematic, but with Farrow giving the performance everything she has got so it becomes credible. In mind that a) the character is meant to be a possible trauma victim of molestation, least near with Mitchum's stepfather character, and that b) a manipulative side slowly reveals itself as the film goes, she gives a performance so good this works with complexity. Even the more exaggerated details, such as the game of pretending she is pregnant in public with a stuffed toy up her dress, Farrow nonetheless makes this all credible.

In general Secret Ceremony is a curious and deeply eccentric film; Losey is not a director I would view as an auteur with a clear set of ideas, but he was a working director who was fascinated with filming psychological dramas from this to The Servant (1963), one of his most iconic films penned by playwright Harold Pinter, who between his odd tangents (a Hammer horror film, Modesty Blaise (1966)), was fascinated with character dramas where pieces of their personalities are peeled away to reveal more layers. This film though does have its own distinct touches, as I do not think you would have found Cenci's two aunts in the Pinter work, two women allowed a moment of sympathy of being sisters ignored by her mother, but still openly pocketing priceless objects and ornaments each time they visit out of greed with pure exaggeration to their characters, even the antique store they run and live in Leonora storms into.

The late sixties in general is distinct as, with the film codes for American cinema dissipating, a film like this is still staying away from explicit content but is so much more frank about topics like sexuality, to the point the film still has a potency even in the modern day, its age actually allowing it to catch one's expectations off-guard with its strength in ideas and drama than content. (All the cussing, barring the f-word being changed for feck, with a colourful assortment of English words used, adds as much to this). It is an odd film to have where Robert Mitchum, of the old studio system, also has to adapt to this era too as a creepy scholar/step father who is attracted to his step daughter, believing that incest is the banal result of the private property system. Yet like Taylor, and Losey their director too, he adapts to this perfectly, enough to be a mirror for his future work in the seventies.

The same goes for Elizabeth Taylor, someone if you were to look at the start of the sixties, with Cleopatra (1963), went through an era of such drastic change, by way of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which would force her to drastically change to keep up. In comparison Mia Farrow, who would gain her acclaim from Rosemary's Baby (1968), was a new actress in comparison to Taylor, someone who originated in the studio system and by this point, as that system would die out, went along (especially with Richard Burton) in a curious list of films. Joseph Losey would direct her again, and Burton, in one such baffling curiosity Boom! (1968), a notorious adaptation of a notorious Tennessee Williams play which would also never get made like it turned out decades later. And that this paragraph has referenced three films from the same year - Secret Ceremony itself, Boom!, and a film called Rosemary's Baby which is an iconic film of the new era of Hollywood cinema at the time and in American horror - which are so different to each other, really does emphasis how distinct and at times weird this period in Hollywood was, bearing in mind co-productions, and for the better.

The film itself, if anything, has taken advantage of the fact it would never get made again. Affectively a slow burning chamber piece, Secret Ceremony does have changes in location, especially at the coast in the finale act, but a large part of it is down to only three key actors (Farrow, Taylor, Mitchum) and a main location in Cenci's mansion, a location which is so distinct it adds to this film of psychological games and conflict. Even in terms of how Secret Ceremony resolves itself, the film takes the least expected directions, [Major Plot Spoilers] be it a major character committing suicide and Mitchum being abruptly knifed in the final scene [Spoilers End], leaving one on something memorable. So in terms of another Joseph Losey film, this does emphasise more how I want to see his films, growing fond of him due to productions like this. In terms of this period in American cinema, there are plenty of films like this I also really want to see more of now.

The Trout (1982)

 

Director: Joseph Losey

Screenplay: Monique Lange and Joseph Losey

Based on the novel by Roger Vailland

Cast: Isabelle Huppert as Frédérique; Jean-Pierre Cassel as Rambert; Jeanne Moreau as Lou Rambert; Daniel Olbrychski as Saint-Genis; Jacques Spiesser as Galuchat; Isao Yamagata as Daigo Hamada; Jean-Paul Roussillon as Verjon; Roland Bertin as The Count

Canon Fodder

 

You're either sexual or you aren't.

The Trout is a minor film from Joseph Losey, a director who has become a fascination for me. He has a legacy of very well regarded films, especially a series in the later part of his career in Britain that were written by playwright Harold Pinter, such as Accident (1967), but his filmography is all the way through full of oddities, real life influences and curiosities. He began as an American director making classical Hollywood films like The Boy with Green Hair (1948), or even (for the first of his oddities) a 1951 American remake of Fritz Lang's M. He was blacklisted in the middle of the communist scare in fifties Hollywood, part of a series of campaigns in the late forties and fifties which would lead to filmmakers and screenwriters among others being exiled from being able to make films in the USA.

That did not stop Losey however, and what is fascinating is that he managed to find his feet in Europe and the United Kingdom. In the midst of this is where some curiosities do appear. The Pinter series of films are highly regarded, but there is also a Hammer produced sci-fi horror The Damned (1963); the comic book adaptation Modesty Blaise (1966); the infamous Tennessee Williams adaptation Boom! (1968) with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; another Taylor involved production with Mia Farrow called Secret Ceremony (1968); and a career that until the end of his career involves working with Jane Fonda on an Henrik Ibsen adaptation (A Doll's House (1973)), an adaptation of Don Giovanni, an abstract suspense film (Figures in a Landscape (1970)), and even in his final film working with Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Dors (Steaming (1985)). The Trout, the second to last film, belongs to his history of working in France as well, though unlike some of his acclaimed work from those productions, this is a very odd film if a very enticing one.

A young Isabelle Huppert, in this psychosexual drama of desire set in the trout industry, is introduced in her first scene as Frédérique handling a trout, massaging a form of oil out of the fish to use, and that as the beginning of a film in tone and existence introduces a work which asks many questions, both with virtue and problems. It feels its girth, a slow paced film in the early eighties of French cinema, all brown wooden panelling and natural colour palettes, one with enough pedigree behind it to succeed. One of the screenwriters, Monique Lange, penned Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film Women in Chains (1968), another anomaly in a veteran filmmaker's career but one which looked to great innovation alongside a salient, transgressive plot with nuisance, so the same spark of talent is here too.

The Trout bursts with sexual and psychological desire and angst which is compelling, able to do so with only one piece of nudity, from Huppert herself in a scene teasing a trout farm employee when her character is younger, baring her breasts, only to trick him into handing over money expecting contact that is more physical. Contrasting this though is how unglamorous France looks as a culture in this period on film, which is a unique aspect it could use to its advantage. Sexual power games transpire in a bowling alley of all places, where trout farm businessman Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel), in front of his wife Lou (Jeanne Moreau) and Frédérique's husband Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser), attempts to kindle something more by way of a bowling competition with a money prize between each other. Add into this a younger colleague of his, also vying for Frédérique, and this is a psychosexual drama not of the glamour of Losey's earlier film Eva (1962), where Jeanne Moreau herself was the target of affection, but one where banality seeps in as the older man pines for Frédérique, whilst the younger manages to convince her to go to Japan on a business trip. In the midst of this her husband, who is actually gay, is nonetheless a frailer man who takes her trip to Japan with an emotional collapse.  

I had originally considered Losey himself overcooked the film in tone, which was why it is a minor film. But honestly, the truth is that The Trout is actually a compelling film to have watched, but too peculiar to have ever become a huge work in his filmography or of the era, simply for the fact this is a premise about psychosexual drama in the trout industry, which always lingers in the mind rather than becomes the launching pad for a film which develops as iconic status as Losey's own The Servant (1963), the most famous of those Pinter collaborations in the same mood. Helping considerably is that Huppert herself, this early in her career, is great in a role of Frédérique that is a complicated character to react to. With a structural aspect used that is a continuation of Accident, where flashbacks based on emotional recollection took place, we see that as a younger woman just into adulthood, in a group of young girls who prided themselves as free spirits teasing perverted older men, she could be seen as a feminist figure, whilst the film proves her even more complicated then this.

One who wraps men around her fingers at this stage slightly older and then, other times very vulnerable, even to the point when, with the possibility of having sex with a character, frigid with a wariness of the scenario or actually not comfortable at all. Sometimes she could even be argued as asexual and unfortunately still with an aura that drives men to act like idiots around her for their libidos. There is even moments where she is utterly unlikable as a character, though it is with note that the one moment which crossed a line is one the character of Frédérique recollects as a regret with shame, where to torment an older colleague of her fathers, who shared women in a bedroom of his, she goes beyond just tormenting him to throwing his prized taxidermied framed fish out a window into the river below, which is looked back to with guilt for her. Frédérique as a character is both figure who is powerful, but is not the image of the seductress as she has moments of reacting negatively in the situation. Huppert is able to make the character work, which not surprisingly shows how talented the French actress was already before a decade's long career which cemented the legacy she would create for herself.

Throughout the film does not feel bad, or for me in hindsight, never tedious, merely one culturally in a place which is curiously peculiar. Disco did not die into the 1980s as most presumed, only staying in Europe as part of the film's mind games include those that transpire in disco clubs. It shows Losey was able to step out of his comfort zone late in his career, and The Trout gets really interesting even as a cultural object when you get to the segments in Japan. In the same ballpark as Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983), it shows the vast world of Japan as a culture from an outsider's eye, viewing it as a curious environment. However Japan's culture is so rich, varied between the modern metropolises to their ancient temples, it is cannot be patronised by the film. It plays to eccentricity when even the taxi characters take have a little TV in the dashboard to watch, but the world is one so vibrant it adds a new dynamic, especially as both the world before of upper class French business was rife in tedium and lusts.

It offers potentially rewarding side characters as well, from an older woman, who has had many romances around the world, offering advice and friendship to Frédérique, to the male owner of the Japanese trout company Daigo Hamada (Isao Yamagata), who due to illness and awareness of his mortality as a result is both enjoying life and able to be an ear to Frédérique, a sane man where, rather than exoticising Japan, the questionable behaviour comes from her fellow French citizens in the midst of throws of desires.

The question that still sticks out is what The Trout actually achieves, and again, I feel the problem is that it is just too eccentric to have been able to take as a huge film. Losey has well regarded work in his career, but then there is Boom!; John Waters rightly holds it as a masterpiece, but it is a bizarre piece, and Losey, self-described as “romantic Marxist”, whilst capable at tackling really rich psychological character dramas likely has other odd creations like that or this in his career. Even with a film like Accident, a precise creation of achievement especially for the flashback structure The Trout borrows, it could have easily become overegged and of its era, something I feel this later film does. I will say, in complete honesty, I enjoyed The Trout immensely, though with knowledge that this is curious premise to even have put together. It does have pacing issues, which cannot be denied either, even for a film only ninety or so minutes. It is a production that has complex and fascinating turns this narrative takes, but is still in the midst of a drama surrounding fish and feels peculiar as a result.

It entices with a finale that has startling relationships, an abrupt murder and tragedy. [Major Spoilers] People show desire for both men and women, Rambert is attracted to both Frédérique and her husband, Jeanne Moreau gets kills in a fit of rage, and the film ends with tragedy with the older man, even a murderer now, is destroyed by what he has done and is a tragic figure held in sadness by those now having to run his business. [Spoilers End] Characters, like the younger businessman's original girlfriend, are stuck on the side adrift, and it cannot be denied that, entirely set within a middle to upper class world of sexual power plays and wealth, lavish homes in the French countryside and modern bowling alleys, that the banality even in the visual look is actually worthy for the tone, offsetting their world as actually one of bored people seducing each other. Frédérique, whilst a complicated and imperfect figure, is notably not of wealth, but from the introducing one of the working class on the trout farm, who entices for her beauty and aura; Daigo, whilst an upper class business man, is a humbled man with the ability to tap into Japanese culture which is about the transient life, so he is not going to stumble into the same mistake as his French counterparts, and the older woman who travelled the world was able to have enjoyed life and even eventually found someone who was a soul mate, rather than empty lusts.

If anything, The Trout is admirable and in needing to be seen. It is a hard sell, even just from that charmingly ridiculous title that nonetheless tells you what the film actually is about. That for me is the real issue with trying to gauge with The Trout, which it is about this odd premise, in the midst of a really glacial film, utterly remote from the films where Losey had touched the zeitgeist in terms of the Pinter films or, with the one of theirs that won huge awards The Go-Between (1971). A film like The Go-Between (1971), a British period drama, had the advantage of period dramas adapted from novels with Julie Christie in them that, whilst still an exceptional film with the same complex psychological drama within it, can least be sold as a novel adapted period drama with known actors. The Trout, whilst with known bankable actors and a novel adaptation, is something a bit more difficult to digest.