JINNAH (1998)

          Directed by Jamil Dehlavi
         
              Starring:

           Christopher Lee

           James Fox 

          Maria Aitken

          Shashi Kapoor

          Richard Lintern

          Shireen Shah

          Robert Ashby

          Indira Varma

         Sam Dastor 

         

The original decision to cast the internationally respected British actor Christopher Lee in the role of Pakistan’s founding father Dr Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in this 1998 Pakistani production, co-written produced and directed by Jamil Dehlavi, was, on the face of it, a baffling one: its backers conceived the movie as an event picture, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the country’s formation, so presumably its target audience would not have been expecting so see Pakistan’s national hero and first Governor-General, whose birthday is a national holiday, portrayed by a white western man wearing tan-coloured makeup. For a good many reasons, production on the movie was mired in controversy, not least because of the assertion by some commentators that casting an actor better known for having once played Count Dracula as Pakistan’s greatest and most beloved leader was deeply insensitive and inappropriate. Even so, after many delays to filming Jinnah eventually opened to great acclaim in Pakistan, and proved to be very popular there. Lee went to his grave insisting that he gave his best screen performance in this role, and the film’s success seems to indicate that he managed to persuade Pakistani audiences at least, of the integrity and honesty of his portrayal, which genuinely seems to have been inspired by Lee’s belief in the essential decency and humanity behind Jinnah’s determination to defend the rights of India’s minority Muslim population, even when the cost was to split the country in two.  

 

Controversy inevitably surrounds Jinnah the man and his political stance, in this region of the world, since it was under his leadership that the Indian Muslim League split with The National Congress over its support for Gandhi’s use of satyagraha, which was part of the revered leader’s program of non-cooperation and civil disobedience designed to provide opposition to the British authorities’ presence in the country. Jinnah believed Gandhi’s emphasis on religious traditionalism only encouraged sectarian divides to further develop between India’s Hindu, Muslim and Sikh populations, which were already prone to conflict. He believed that change should be affected through constitutional means and that an Independent India should be a modern secular state. Neither the socialist Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru (who was to become India’s first Prime Minister after independence) nor Jinnah welcomed the bouts of inter-faith slaughter that regularly flared up under British rule, since they provided a convenient rationale for the British to argue that their continued presence was needed in order to keep the peace. It is Jinnah’s awkward fate though, mainly because of his support for partition and for the creation of a new nation state for the Muslims of India, rather than a united India with all the faiths living together as Nehru and Gandhi preferred, to be associated and sometimes blamed for the sectarian bloodshed, the many massacres and the regular flare ups of inter-faith hostility which accompanied Pakistan’s birth after partition in 1947. Dehlavi’s film sets out in part to rescue Jinnah’s reputation from just such accusations, while striving to maintain a tactful, diplomatic tone that indicates a desire to remain respectful and level-headed in its treatment of all the historical personages involved in Jinnah’s story -- such as Gandhi, Nehru and Britain’s Lord Mountbatten – all of whom played such vital roles in the event that is central to Jinnah’s place in history.

The movie’s general tonal approach is of a type that will be familiar to all from popular western prestige cinema, evoking the likes of the period films produced during the 1980s by Merchant Ivory. It aims to capture something of their exotic mixture of escapist travelogue, colonial-era splendour and some degree of melodrama. It clearly wants to be thought every bit the equal of such well-regarded examples of the genre as the TV mini-series based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown; or David Lean’s 1984 film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; or, indeed, Richard Attenborough’s great historical epic Gandhi. The film was, then, clearly made with the hope of finding an audience in the west as well as in Pakistan. If the casting of a well-known and distinguished western actor in the main role helps the film focus a spotlight on the importance of Jinnah’s background as a Muslim who was at least partly educated In the West, and was influenced as much by the principles of liberal law that he encountered during his time at Lincoln’s Inn as by the traditions of the religion he was born into, then the selection of writer-director (and co-producer) Jamil Dehlavi to helm the project can also be assumed to have been made with similar concerns in mind: as the son of a Pakistani diplomat and with a mother who was French, Dehlavi’s childhood was divided between Pakistan and Europe and he has lived for most of his career in London, where he has worked for the BBC and Channel 4. His other cinematic projects have often explored clashes of eastern and western cultures and values. Dehlavi’s appointment on this film became another flash-point of controversy since he was forced to leave Pakistan under a cloud in 1983 after the shooting of his film The Blood of Hussain, which was about a fictional military dictatorship overthrowing the Government. Unfortunately, its release happened to coincide with a real-life military coup which took place in Pakistan under General Ziaul Haq -- who imposed martial law and immediately banned and attempted to confiscate Dehlavi’s film, forcing the director to flee the regime; the actual negative was narrowly saved from destruction after being flown on to London ahead of the director himself.

When asked about his involvement with Jinnah by an English language newspaper in Pakistan, Dehlavi said that the producers and financers wanted him to present an ‘idolised’ version of the Quaid-i-Azam (the Great Leader), but as co-writer and director Dehlavi was able to have his way in the end and present a version of Jinnah’s life that emphasised the more human aspects that lie behind the national myth. With Jinnah being such an important feature in the construction of the official image Pakistan projects of its nationhood, it is also inevitable that the various Islamic movements which make up political and cultural life in the country, be they secular or more traditional, Have often sought to claim his legacy for their own ends. This film interpretation of Jinnah’s life story hits upon an ingenious narrative device that essentially allows it to portray the man as opposing opposites simultaneously: as being both larger-than-life -- semi-mythic, even – while also being seen as intensely humble and down to earth. In effect, Dehlavi and his co-writer Akbar Ahmed, situate the historical details of Jinnah’s life within a framework of fantasy that is informed by references to several classics of western literature and film, namely Charles Dickens’ much-filmed A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death  -- in which the dying Jinnah in spirit form finds himself required to travel back through time, revisiting various incidents from his public and personal life in the company of a sort of angelic inventory keeper for the afterlife, played by Bollywood legend Shashi Kapoor, who informs him that: "you’ve stopped by here so we may decide where to send you." Christopher Lee’s calm, commanding, dignified portrait of Jinnah the historical personage is thus presented in a context of fantasy cinema; of imaginative fiction defined by wild flights of fantasy and myth in which Lee’s understated biographical portrait of Jinnah is surrounded by the genre’s inventive whimsicality and flashes of humorous surrealism. For instance the Heavenly assessment area Jinnah first encounters when he arrives in the afterlife looks like an oak-panelled library or cloister in some august western place of learning such as Oxford or Cambridge University, where Shasha Kapoor is seen fretting over the recent delivery of some new “computers from the future” that are in the process of being unpacked to be set up as the replacements for the leather-bound paper ledgers previously used to store the records of each Earth-departing subject sent for assessment. The comedic image presented here, of Heaven as a place of administrative failing, of incompetence and bureaucratic bumbling, provides the narrative impetus for Jinnah’s personalised re-assessment after it is discovered that all of his paper records have been wiped, but that the computer system is also still down and Jinnah’s files have become corrupted. Kapoor therefore has to assess him “manually” and accompany him on a step-by-step tour through his life in order to answer the charges which have been brought against him.  Viewers in 2016 will of course also be amused by the antiquity of these “wretched new-fangled computers” which cause Kapoor so much trouble because: “no-one here really knows how to use them!”

With this framework in place, the film becomes a kind of interrogation of Jinnah’s personal record and historical legacy. Various charges that have been levelled against Jinnah in assessing his actions during his lifetime, and after his death from tuberculosis in 1948 – that he was “arrogant”, “ambitious”, “humourless”, and “stubborn” -- are presented, but the key debate posed is over the question of whether Jinnah was right to have insisted on the creation of Pakistan in the face of opposition from Nehru and Gandhi, given the enormity of the consequences ... millions dying as the result of the division of one country into two, and disputes over the exact placement of ‘the Radcliffe Line’ which brought about divided communities and mass migration leading to vicious bouts of ethnic cleansing. Lee’s naturally borderline haughtiness and his aristocratic, even slightly pompous demeanour off-screen, turns out to be just perfect for capturing many aspects of the persona of the real-life Jinnah that might not have appealed to some of his critics, and make him look inflexible and, perhaps, intransigent alongside his more informal, relaxed rivals such as Gandhi, Nehru and Mountbatten. Also, the affair between Nehru and Lord Mountbatten’s wife Edwina, who are played by Robert Ashby and Maria Aitken, is presented here surprisingly sympathetically as ‘a spiritual union’ between two people who love India, although Mountbatten’s knowledge of their relationship is downplayed and his own infidelities not mentioned (perhaps the sheer ‘spiciness’ of the Mountbattens’ private lives was not considered appropriate subject matter for this type of movie). But the issue also provides evidence of Jinnah’s personal integrity when he is shown refusing to allow his party to use stolen love letters, belonging to Edwina and sent by her to Nehru, to be used as propaganda tools during his negotiations over the formation of Pakistan with the British as the discussions are being led by Lord Mountbatten, India's latest Viceroy, appointed by Clement Attlee. As Jinnah re-visits moments from the past, he also gets to see what other people have said about him; but he turns away from one tender meeting between Nehru and Edwina, seen early on, because of it is “private nature” (the conversation takes place in Edwina’s bedchambers). We witness many formative events from Jinnah’s life as a dynamic young man, where he is played by Richard Linter, during which he becomes fully westernised in dress and in attitudes as a consequence of the time he spends working as a Lawyer in London (he later practiced as a barrister in Bombay); he also goes against convention to marry the daughter of an elite Parsi family.

 Jinnah’s belief in western-derived constitutional norms, which Jinnah wants to see adopted by an independent India, also puts him at odds with the ideas being pursued by Gandhi. The film puts great emphasis on Jinnah’s uneasiness with using religious feelings to stir up support against British rule, which is what he believes Gandhi to be doing by insisting on wearing traditional Hindu clothing and encouraging a vision of an independent India that rejects modernity and industrialisation completely. Jinnah thought this would only lead to sectarianism. In the film he worries that such ideas release “darker forces – powers that cannot be quelled; illogical urges and great anger." While always portraying Gandhi (played by Sam Dastor ) in a sympathetic light, the film, in the end, favours an angle on events that assumes it is the combination of irrational forces set loose by Gandhi’s traditionalism and the dirty dealings of Lord Mountbatten (who is again given a largely sympathetic and likable portrayal by Edward Fox despite being indicted in the screenplay for causing most of the bloodshed) over the details of the positioning of the divide between India and the newly formed Pakistan -- which the film contends was part of an attempt by the British to make sure the country became a failed state very quickly. The irony, that it is his realisation that the Muslim minority population would suffer the most under Gandhi’s system but that Gandhi’s leadership and support in the matter was unassailable, which leads Jinnah to become more and more concentrated on religious matters himself, even starting to adopt elements of Islamic dress in later years as he becomes more strident and hard-line a spokesperson for the Muslim community, is  somewhat muted by the film’s efforts to portray Jinnah as a moderate -- with a secular vision of Islam in which women are treated as equals and the rights of Christians and Hindus are respected equally alongside those of Muslims (when a traditionalist attempts to chastise him for ‘allowing’ his sister to campaign alongside him, Jinnah cites the fact that the women of the Prophet’s family were politically active after his death as justification for his progressive vision of Islam). However, the film does gently imply a hardening in Jinnah’s position as he ages, which results in his refusal to accept his daughter Dina’s marriage into a Parsi family (even though he had also done the same thing as a young man) because it goes against religious custom, and her decision to remain in Bombay with her family instead of joining him in the state of Pakistan after partition.

Such issues are only given a limited amount of time in an overstuffed screenplay which, inevitably, given the Christmas Carol-style narrative device employed, can only provide a snapshot of a life, and so inevitably comes to look like the sort of account that cherry picks its events from a complex set of circumstances in order to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. There are some inventive scenes, such as the older Jinnah (played by Lee) advising his younger self on the path he should now take after losing support for his ideas to Gandhi (an effective way of signifying an internal change in outlook that leads Jinnah to abandon the fight for a unified independent India and to push for the formation of a new Muslim state instead); but there are also too many instances when the film devolves into flavourless dialogue scenes between the main players where they sit around explaining and justifying their positions to each other on key events, causing the film to play, during such moments, like more of a panegyric to Jinnah's greatness.The whole rather pails when set alongside the recent work of Peter Morgan, for instance, who, particularly in his new Netflix series The Crown, has been granted the space to devote large amounts of time to exploring the complex emotional underpinnings of relationships as they develop between people caught up in events that feel like a great meshing of gears is driving historical forces beyond any individual’s control. The score, by Nigel Clarke and Michael Csányi-Wills, is prone to sweeping romantic blandness, and even the riots and massacres are filmed in an oddly detached, formal way -- as though they were merely generic battle scenes in an action movie. But Christopher Lee is given enough moments of emotional catharsis towards the end to allow him to stand out, especially in two scenes in particular: one in which Jinnah discovers that the train carrying Muslim refugees he has come to greet as it arrives in the new country has been attacked, and that everyone on-board except for a single newborn baby has had his or her throat slit; and another in which Jinnah personally supervises the relief effort as the post-partition chaos unfolds, but breaks down to beg forgiveness from a man who has lost his wife in the melee and the accompanying slaughter.

The film concludes oddly -- with Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru meeting again in the afterlife, and watching in dismay a series of BBC news reports from a TV studio control room displaying images from the conflict between India and Kashmir, which give them cause to reflect upon the horrors of religious extremism (Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist, angry at his willingness to recognise the legitimacy of Pakistan as a state), before the film concludes with a heavenly trial of Edward Fox’s Mountbatten, with Jinnah acting as the prosecutor, indicting the British for their role in bringing about the troubles that have afflicted the region in the years after partition. In the end, one can see why Lee was drawn to the role, and how the range of responses he gets to deliver over the course of the film might have assigned it a special place for him in his lengthy filmography; but in of itself the picture as a whole is far from being one of his greatest. This new dual-format release from Eureka Entertainment provides an acceptable rendering of a fairly soft focus film lensed by Nicholas D. Knowland, who has since gone on to work with Peter Strickland on Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, but it contains no extras at all, which is a shame as there is a making-of documentary and Christopher Lee has previously recorded a commentary for the film, both of which have appeared on a previous DVD release. Nevertheless, Christopher Lee fans will be happy to have this film made available once more, if they do not already own it -- a valuable addition to their collections.               

Released in Dual-Format Edition by Eureka Entertainment

EURO GOTHIC: Classics of Continental Horror Cinema - by Jonathan Rigby

Jonathan Rigby has previously published two of the most comprehensive and therefore essential guides to the history of horror cinema yet to be made available in the English language. With the exemplary English Gothic, first published in 2000, and its ‘prequel’ American Gothic which followed it in 2007, he gave us two detailed and immensely readable tomes both of which, between them, explored horror movie production in Britain and across the Pond in Hollywood from the dawn of picture-making to the present day (American Gothic terminated in 1956 when, thanks to Hammer, Britain for a time largely took over as horror movie capital. The recently expanded update of English Gothic follows the story right up to recent times, with its inclusion of UK films that entered production in 2015, although all of those mentioned were illustrative of the slew of the forgettable micro-budget digital horrors that these days come and go like clouds in the virtual ether of a subscription to Amazon Video). This being so, news that Rigby was planning a third volume in the series, that would set out this time to tackle the monumental subject of European horror, was understandably greeted by all true genre fans with a sense of expectation that can only be described as gleeful. The wait since that initial announcement has seemed like a long one, but the magisterial Euro Gothic is now finally upon us, and the results are every bit as ‘up to snuff’ as readers of the previous two volumes will have surely anticipated they would be. 

Rigby’s most recent publication before this, Studies in Terror, which came out in 2011, was a wide-ranging overview of the genre, selecting what the author considers to be horror cinema’s greatest ‘landmarks’. It traversed the entire world for horror favorites, to take in everything from 1920s German Expressionism to contemporary Japanese ghost pictures while incidentally offering us a first glimpse at Rigby’s appreciation of some of the classics of French, Italian and Spanish horror cinema. This was to be a mere taster, though, for a commentary on the subject that now reaches the zenith of its full expression in this handsomely produced volume, lovingly chronicling and critiquing scores of European horror and fantasy pictures, most of them dating from the late 1950s through to the end of the 1970s. The author's detailed tour of the genre is book-ended by what can in retrospect be cited as the point of emergence for Europe’s tradition of cine Fantastique, when the first magic effects films of Georges Méliès were produced in 1896 and, a little later, those of Paris-based Spaniard Segundo de Chomón; the end comes, for Rigby, with  the death of much of Europe's genre movie production in the wake of the 1980s VHS home video boom, which itself was petering out somewhat in the years succeeding 1983, after indirectly having forced various changes in the funding structure of the film industries on the continent, which brought about catastrophically deleterious effects in the profitability of genre film-making in countries such as Spain and Italy, whose industries had for decades previously thrived upon it.

In his introduction to Studies in Terror, Rigby reflected on how the success of individual horror movies is often dependent on their ability to generate a series of ‘moments’ that make a particularly strong impression on the viewer: ‘get enough of these moments together in one picture and the filmmakers might have a genuine classic on their hands.’ Arguably, more so than is the case with the horror and fantasy output of any other region of the world, the horror cinema produced in Europe during the bulk of the period covered in this book has predicated itself on just such a philosophy -- often sacrificing narrative coherence on the altar of the striking set-piece. This idea goes back to the genre’s earliest beginnings in Germany, when expressionism gave birth to a new form of cinematic terror that, while based on the motifs of Gothic literature, was also rooted in the psychological upheavals of the Great War. As this volume illustrates profusely, the supremacy of the image and of the horror ‘moment’ in general, was a concept that has continued to play a hugely important role in perceptions of the horror cinema that has been created in many European countries since then: from the poetic surrealism of Jean Rollin’s vampire fables of the late-sixties and seventies, to the outrageous, flamboyantly gore-splattered illogicality displayed by Lucio Fulci’s 'metaphysical' zombie movies, produced and released in the early-eighties.    

This volume, although for obvious reasons the heftiest yet published by Rigby, since it deals with all kinds of films made right the way across the best part of an entire continent rather than merely with the horror movie production of just one country, as did the other two books, offers a not quite so up-to-the-minute picture of the continental horror scene as that which was recently provided for Britain in his newly updated edition of English Gothic: the sheer quantity of movies made in Europe during the genre’s heyday in the sixties and seventies means that, just as, say, every single giallo picture ever made cannot feasibly be referenced here (that in itself would require a book of equal length to this one!) so there has to be a cut-off point to act as an appropriate moment at which to bring the curtain down on this examination of the genre in general. The year this book selects to be that moment is 1983: chosen by Rigby as his end-point apparently because this was also the year in which the European genre suffered its most cataclysmic downturn in production.

This means that there can be room only for the most cursory of mentions for a great many films that come after that date but which are still considered by a sizable group of fans to be genre classics, and therefore no less worthy of detailed comment than some of the avalanche of cheap euro slasher/gore efforts that were tossed out in the early 1980s, but which still get covered here because they come before the self-imposed ’83 curfew. The most striking omissions are Michele Soavi’s extraordinary quartet of films (only mentioned in brief summery on the last page of the book) and Dario Argento’s cinema post 1982’s modern giallo favorite Tenebrea. Though in the latter's case all but the most die-hard fans of the maestro would dare to quibble with the assertion that the quality of Argento’s output has been in marked decline for many years now, Phenomena and Opera are surely still prime period works and would normally deserve more than just a casual mention; while to say that everything that came after them is not even worth that is to considerably short-change such daring expansions of the giallo template as The Stendhal Syndrome – dismissed by many puzzled fans at the time of its initial release, but since re-evaluated as one of Argento’s very best – or even his version of The Phantom of the Opera, which, whatever else may have been said about it, was certainly the last Argento picture to look like it had been even half-decently funded.

This quibble is not intended in any way to downplay, though, the enjoyment that is to be had between the covers of this characteristically superbly written work, the pleasures of which are manifold. It is still easily destined to become the go-to account for anyone seeking instruction in the history of the European horror movie and/or wishes to understand the context of its emergence during the key period covered. The continent produced many unique styles and distinctive flavours as the horror genre slowly took root in many corners at various different points in time, particularly influencing the cinematic output of Germany, France, Italy and Spain during the golden period of horror production from the late ‘50s to the late 1970s. Just about every worthwhile horror picture made in those countries during that time gets covered here to a greater or lesser degree with the book always a compelling read, juggling Rigby's ability to generate real insights and display a deep knowledge of many very different cinematic styles, which he lays out for the reader with his customary knack for descriptive eloquence. As a by-product the book also exposes his evident enthusiasm for the many forms that the European horror film has assumed during its long ascendancy: from the jagged modernist abstractions of the aforementioned silent era German expressionists, to the poeticism at the core of the medicalised body horror which emerged from the French fantastique in reaction to the atrocities of war; from crepuscular 1960s black-and-white and colour Italian Gothics inspired by the success of Britain’s Hammer Productions and Roger Corman’s colour Poe series, to the innumerable numbers of West German Krimi thrillers and their equally fecund offshoot the Italian giallo - both updating the lurid crime literature imported from Britain and America, and popular on the continent after the Second World War. 

Rigby skilfully conjures in writing the texture and sensibility of many of the most well-regarded euro-horror movies of the classic era, such as the subtle Ostend arthouse atmospherics showcased in Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness, or the imaginative, heat-drenched Iberian surrealism which informs the aesthetic delights of Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series. All the big hitters are here, obviously: Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Jean Rollin produced enough timeless classics in their heydays to ensure they each get their due; while the likes of Jess Franco and Paul Naschy were prolific enough also to guarantee themselves a large chunk of coverage herein, most of it favorable. Even if you do not agree with each and every summery and analysis of the 113 individual films written about in-depth here (very many more than that are also given a respectable amount of space), you will be hard pressed to fault the amount of time and effort that has clearly gone in to the research that lies behind Rigby’s assessment of these films and the filmmakers responsible for them, many of whom also have their careers discussed at length during the course of the book.

The book, amply illustrated with production snaps and including two colour sections, is of course impeccably researched, and also highly readable, even quotable (the author pithily sums up the appeal of Jess Franco’s cinema during his latter career as being the product of ‘a filmmaker who needs to film like a shark needs to swim.’) and the layout – which replicates that of Rigby’s other books -- includes cast lists for each major film covered, a quote from a contemporary review (where possible), and a relevant comment from a participant. Throughout its pages, Rigby’s writing always indicates an honest attempt to engage sympathetically with a multitude of idiosyncratic film-making styles and it becomes a sheer pleasure to immerse one-self in this treasure-trove of writing on Europe’s finest horror productions; the book will also become an invaluable reference source, and an educational fount of new viewing ideas for anyone approaching the genre afresh. 

Very highly recommended. 

             

MORGIANA (1972)

Recently cited by director Peter Strickland as a major influence on his new film The Duke of Burgundy (which I have yet to see), Morgiana is an eccentric, gaudily decorative vision of the grotesque, created by Slovak director Juraj Herz in 1971. A fairy tale fantasia that seems to have emerged directly from the same world as the stories of the Brothers Grimm, it’s part Gothic melodrama and part Jungian psychoanalytic allegory of the repressed: a sort of trippy period storybook of distorted doppelgangers, kaleidoscopic mirror images and split personalities fragmenting in hallucinogenic fugue states.

Made in the wake of the political clampdown which came after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in reaction to the liberalisation program of 1968's Prague Spring, Herz's film nevertheless managed to avoid the worst of the ensuing censorship wrought by the administration at the time; the director was never really part of the Czechoslovak cinema's New Wave, and the dark, skewed, otherworldly ambience of a film like Morgiana seems to owe more to the puppeteering of Herz's training in the theatre faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (where he was a contemporary of Jan Svankmajer) than it does to the artistic developments in Czech film which came about in the early sixties. Looked at today, the film has a similar dreamlike texture to the early work of Jean Rollin and to some of Jess Franco’s erotic revelries, making it part of a European tradition of the Fantastique that's as much informed by pantomime or children's stories as it is influenced by the dark Gothic splendour of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction. Such qualities are captured in the exaggerated theatricality of the film’s acting style, the lush decorative ornamentalism of its set dressings, make-up and art design, and the gaudy excesses of its period costuming.

 The fairy tale-like characters of Morgiana are as elaborately dressed up dolls or mannequins existing in a hermetic fairy-tale principality (although some of these dolls are rarely seen without a cigarette in hand), who're painted in the most vividly exaggerated, Felliniesque shades of greasepaint while possessing thick spidery eyelashes plastered in mascara. It's a horror film in the sense that Herz dwells on unsettled (and unsettling) psychological states, but dramatised in the form of a seemingly prosaic yet heightened melodrama centred on a sibling rivalry turned malignant; one that is set amid a feverish fictionalised Poe-like Gothic world of crumbling villas, windswept cliff-tops and isolated ruins. Like a piece of Angela Carter fiction, the ostensibly trite, childlike storybook plotting conceals a rich undercurrent of neurosis and festering adult madness.

The film is based on a short story by the Russian writer Aleksandr Grin and tells the tale of two sisters (both played by one actress, Iva Janžurová): one of them -- Klára -- is carefree and happy, dresses in lacy white clothes and sports a head of magnificent red-golden curls (she looks like a figure in a Gustav Klimt painting).  Klára is adored by everyone and has many suitors, all of whom she treats with the same good-natured indifference. Viktoria, on the other hand is dark and pale, dresses exclusively in black, is considered ugly, and is generally disliked or ignored by all. She harbours suppressed feelings of hatred and jealousy directed towards her unsuspecting sister, and only retains any real affection for her pet Siamese cat, Morgiana.

 Things come to a head when both sisters inherit separate properties in the will of their recently deceased father. Before she leaves the home they both grew up in, Viktoria sends away for a clear liquid, slow-acting poison -- which she receives in a wax-sealed package that arrives via the post -- and she sprinkles it into her sister's glass of sparkling water. She then makes the long coach trip to her new home, many miles away, but cannot help but wonder if the poison she was sold was actually real or not; she feels divorced from her previous actions, living so far away from news of her sister's condition. Eventually, she hears that Klára is indeed feeling unwell and suffers from an unquenchable thirst. But couldn't this just be coincidence? On the other hand, the poison was designed to act very slowly so as to relieve suspicion and not leave any trace of itself after the victim's eventual death.

Viktoria decides to test a little more of the drug -- just to make sure. She sprinkles some into the household dog's bowl of milk, but is called away at a vital moment and is unsure whether it was the dog, her beloved cat Morgiana, or the servant's infant son who actually drank the poison! Meanwhile, Klára begins to suffer from acute hallucinations and strange altered states of consciousness. Two of her suitors -- a doctor and a handsome soldier -- start to suspect something is amiss, while the fortune teller who originally sold Viktoria the poison threatens to blackmail her when she too learns of Klára's strange illness and puts two and two together. 

With a set of strident and insistently pulsing orchestral theme cues by Lubos Fiser, and delirious visuals courtesy of the work of cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera, whose copious use of wide-angle lenses, frequent and surreal handheld cat's POV shots, and hazy hallucinogenic prism effects for representing Klara's distorted and disorganised sense of reality (which look kind of like a 3D film does without the coloured glasses) give Morgiana something of the feel of Polanski's Repulsion if it'd been shot amid the elaborate Art Nouveau production design gaudiness of Suspiria -- the latter an appropriate reference given both films' attempts to conjure the ominous ambience of a delicate fairy tale cast under the darkest of storm clouds – or else a Kubrick horror film set in the world of Rainer Fassbinder.

 The film succeeds in establishing an otherworldly air of 19th Century decadence, set in some unspecified central European never-never land where unspeakable murderousness lies barely concealed by the doll-like manners of the narrative's cast of flimsy storybook characters. Herz apparently wanted to make a film that was more overtly about a schizophrenic psychological state, but was forced into taking a much more straightforward narrative route when his original script -- which would have revealed at the end that there had only in fact ever been one protagonist, each sister being merely a different side to the same personality -- was forbidden by the authorities, although Herz still manages to find ways of symbolically implying that idea throughout the film.

Herz made the film with no love for the project, and thought of it merely as an exercise in keeping his film-making muscles active during a time of censorship and repression. The duel performance of Iva Janžurová underpins everything here, and is so convincing it's easy to forget that both roles are being played by the same person; the join is impossible to spot thanks to Herz's impeccable editing skills. Despite this, the director's original ideas have been forced underground and into the subtext of the movie, which makes them far more powerful than they probably would have been if Herz had stuck with the original split personality plot outline, which, nowadays, seems rather more clichéd than it probably would have in 1971.

Alongside the strikingly offbeat and haunted visual stylishness of the film, Morgiana builds an unsettling sense of disquiet, displaced reality and a sense of duality through several subtle strategies. Firstly, Viktoria is presented as a considerably more nuanced would-be murderess than her scary make- up and Gothic style of dress would immediately suggest: after secretly applying the poison to her sister's drink at breakfast, she begins to suffer from second thoughts, and even attempts to persuade Klara not to drink her water and to send for another glass instead.

Once her sister does eventually down the mixture, though, Viktoria experiences a sense almost akin to elation, and the thought that she might have got away with such an act unleashes a cruel and recklessly vindictive streak in the woman, leading her to launch an attack on one of her own servant girls in order, presumably, to experience the rush all over again, by clumping the girl on the head with a rock from behind while she is bathing with her co-workers near the rocky beach! Then as the weeks pass, doubt and paranoia start to creep in and Viktoria wonders if she is really responsible for her sister's illness at all. Her attempt to poison the staff dog as conformation only leads to even more suspense and a feeling of unreality -- as now she is forced to examine every little tick or unusual action of the three possible recipients of the dose of poison for signs of their impending doom.

 Meanwhile, Klara's unsettled mental state leads to hallucinations in which she encounters a second version of herself clad in a scarlet dress, one who seems more like Viktoria in her sour, vindictive actions. This and Viktoria's increasing sense of detachment leads to exactly the air of schizoid unravelling of identity as Herz had intended with the original script, while the surface narrative continues to conform throughout to the fairy tale motif of the innocent 'Snow White' heroine and her black-clad Wicked Witch nemesis. The film eventually settles into the familiar routines of Gothic fiction, particularly evoking the work of Edgar Allan Poe, specifically the short story "The Black Cat". The role of Viktoria's pet Siamese cat Morgiana is eventually to be both that of symbol of guilt and harbinger of death representing accidentally delivered justice, seemingly from beyond the grave.

I was watching Morgiana via the UK DVD released by Second Run. The full frame transfer (the film's original aspect ratio according to the disc booklet) is full of speckles and often appears rather dark. It probably doesn't represent the film's colourful decor and ornate production design at its very best but it's good enough to convey the general tone and style of this unique work. The removable English subtitles are clear and understandable and the Czech language audio is delivered in clearly restored mono. There is a 15 minute filmed interview with Juraj Herz included as an extra, in which he discusses the origins and intent of the film in Czech with English subtitles; and the disc is packaged with a 12 page booklet of essays by writer Daniel Bird and Dr Ian Conrich of the University of Stirling.

This is a strange and haunting little film, and was rarely seen on these shores for many years until the release of this DVD. All lovers of the Fantastique will be glad to have it available again and from what I've heard about Strickland’s latest, it will make the perfect companion piece to it.

OUTER SPACE: THREE COSMIC TALES FROM THE CHILDREN'S FILM FOUNDATION (1956-1977)

Whatever the theme by which the BFI chooses to link the three features that make up each of the volumes in its on-going Children’s Film Foundation DVD range, the content is invariably -- and comfortingly -- extremely similar in its design and method. Despite decade-specific modifications employed by each era’s film-makers in their approaches to the storytelling, we can always expect to encounter resourceful kids (shedding their tweed and sprouting longer hair and thicker regional accents as the black-and-white 1950s melt into the Technicolor ‘70s) learning about team work and moral responsibility, and usually managing to thwart the activities of a sorry collection of bumbling adult crooks and spivs in the process -- whether our young heroes and heroines happen to be involved in the business of building and racing their own go-carts, accidentally acquiring madcap superpowers, or helping out teen runaways who're looking for their lost families. The same principle applies to this latest trio of tales, which follow on from the recent Weird Adventures volume in presenting another grouping of fantastical fantasy fables, this time all of them set in the banal but recognisable everyday environments of home or school that would have been exceedingly familiar to the films’ young audience, each film centred on their child protagonists’ interactions with a varied selection of peculiar beings from outer-space.

All of these films are set on earth, probably for budgetary reasons, but involve groups of children who stumble upon and befriend extra-terrestrial intelligences who, though very different in kind, each happen to have special “magical” powers that make them a potential target for adult connivance and duplicity. Included in this set is the 1977 classic The Glitterball, long considered one of the very best of all the CFF’s productions; at one time this was as regular a Christmas treat as The Wizard of Oz, on British TV and when the CFF and its successor the CFTF were honoured, back in the mid-nineties, with a celebratory screening at Leicester Square Odeon, this sparkling jewel was chosen to represent the organisation’s thirty year mission to entertain and engage the imaginations of generations of Saturday Morning Film Club goers and their successors, the troupe of kids who also came to encounter these films during their perennial outings on UK television in the 1980s.

The first film here was made in 1956, but leaps to attention immediately for some obvious coincidental similarities it has retrospectively been discovered to bear to Stephen Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster ET: The Extra-Terrestrial: the basic scenario is from the outset, of course, necessarily very similar thanks to the subject matter, but with its sober backdrop of rural England in the 1950s, Supersonic Saucer plays amusingly like the plummy voiced, middle-class and extremely well-behaved cousin to its more famous sci-fi relation, in which a group of well-mannered boarding school children who find themselves left behind during the summer holidays, discover and befriend a bizarre-looking alien creature that's stuck up a tree in some quaint English woodlands on the outskirts of their now empty school, and decide to hide it from adults whom they believe otherwise would seek to “put it on display in a zoo” or else exploit its magical powers for ill-gain.

There are a number of uncanny visual similarities to the Spielberg phenomena that cannot help but link the film with ET forever: for one thing, although the diminutive alien in Supersonic Saucer is the primitive puppet product of a company called John Wright Puppeteers and PB Cow Limited, and essentially consists of nothing more elaborate than an elongated rabbit shape conveniently obscured beneath a white hijab-like shroud from which a pair of large round eyes peer adorably through a face- slit, the image it casts is undoubtedly similar to that squat, tortoise-like creature created by Italian special effects maestro Carlo Rambaldi for Spielberg’s classic. Both puppet designers have homed in on the single most important factor for creating the “cute effect”, and in fact John Wright & Co have reduced their creature to just that one particular attribute: two large, sad eyes, copiously fringed with luxurious lashes from which leak streams of tears whenever MEBA (the children’s own name for their intergalactic chum) accidently does something that vexes his/her small charges, or inadvertently gets them into trouble.

Like ET, MEBA also has special powers that appear miraculous to earth eyes, although, being deprived of limbs and digits, it is unable to wave a glowing finger whenever it wishes to accomplish its feats as Spielberg’s entity was inclined to do, but must resort instead to spinning its massive round eyes in a comical fashion in order to, say, make time and events run backwards for brief periods; it can turn itself into its own flying saucer vehicle in order to get about -- an effect which appears as an animated insert whizzing across a series of photographic stills; and the creature is also able to forge telepathic links with the children, leading to much mischief occurring whenever any of them lazily makes a wish without thinking of the consequences first, as the eager-to-please MEBA is likely to procure it for them immediately. Thus, at one point, the alien raids the local bakery in town to rustle up a feast of cake and jelly when the hungry kids express dissatisfaction with the tasteless plate of biscuits that’s been provided for them in their playroom; although, being the conscientious, well-behaved children that they are, they end up forcing the alien to replace the stolen hoard of goodies after solemnly coughing up their own pocket money pennies to pay for what they’d already eaten before it occurred to them that the produce was illegally obtained!

The story kicks off proper when MEBA overhears a conversation between the two young girls who, of its four earthling acquaintances, become the main focus of the alien’s ability to empathise telepathically. Foreign students Greta (Gillian Harrison) and Sumac (Marcia Monolescue) are forced to stay behind and live at their school during the summer holidays, looked after by the Headmaster and Headmistress who live on-site with their pompously professorial and self-regarding pupil son Rodney (Fella Edmonds), because the trip home (to Norway and South America respectively) would be too expensive for their parents to afford. This is what tempts the two girls, during a night-time conversation in bed, into wishing that they had a million pounds, prompting MEBA to take a flight to the bank in town after dark while they sleep and relieve the branch of exactly that amount, spiriting it back to the astonished children’s schoolroom where it is discovered by them the next morning after the town has become far too busy for the alien to be able to venture forth again and replace it. 

The children are thus forced to temporarily hide the money, alongside the school’s already secured trophy-horde of silverware, in the Headmaster’s safe until the following evening -- when MEBA is to once more fly off and put it all back in the vault it was originally taken out of. Unfortunately, the children’s plan is interrupted by nosey caretaker Mr Pole (Patrick Boxill), who’s actually a member of a criminal gang of professional thieves operating from a nearby derelict building. They've already been sizing up the school’s valuable trophy collection for its silver and Pole spies the kids bundling large quantities of cash into the school safe and reports this and the existence of MEBA back to ‘Number One’ – a gruff, over-coated Peter Lorre-type crime overlord (Raymond Rollett). Hoping to put the alien’s bank vault raiding abilities to criminal use, the bad guys abduct MEBA (tempting it into entering a box that is then quickly padlocked behind it by tricking it into thinking it’s going to be part of a surprise for the children) and spiriting it back to their headquarters, leaving Greta, Sumac, Rodney and their diminutive moppet-of-an-accomplice Adolphus (Andrew Motte-harrison) to track down the outfit’s lair in order to rescue their friend using MEBA’s telepathic distress signal as their only guide.  

These forty-seven minutes of cheerful, charming fun end with an image that would become a standard convention of the CFF’s output for most of the rest of the ‘50s and ‘60s, in which the adult wrongdoers are shown ritually humiliated in their stand-off with a bunch of morally determined and resourceful children who, this time out, also have an alien with magic-like powers to help them turn their enemies into bumbling clowns … although, it must be said, even with this type of slapstick conclusion being as common as it so often was in CFF adventures of this vintage, the particular criminal gang in question here must be a contender for the most oafish in the Foundation’s history, as its members prove themselves seemingly unable to spot children hiding in plain sight on several occasions, and invariably fall over themselves whenever given even the slightest opportunity to do so during their pursuit through the tumbledown building they use as their base. 

The screenplay was an adaptation of a story by Frank Wells (the son of H.G. Wells) but it plays like one of the two joyously quaint Famous Five serials the CFF also produced back in the day, and which used to play in weekly fifteen minute instalments alongside its Saturday morning feature presentations. In fact Gillian Harrison also played Ann in those Enid Blyton spin-offs, and it is her character Greta (and her older female schoolmate Sumac) who becomes very much the centre of attention in this story. On the one hand Greta and Sumac’s relationship with MEBA is a reinforcement of traditional 1950s nurturing female roles, since they take charge of MEBA's care as though the alien creature were a human baby (it is after all swathed in a white shroud and prone to shedding plentiful tears!). MEBA clearly mimics the appearance of, and behaves a lot like, a human baby, and Greta often cradles it as though it were one; also, it is the girls who take charge of the creature at night by resting it in a human child’s crib in their bedroom. But the affinity between the alien and the girls, and special to the younger Greta in particular, is also founded in their sharing a certain ‘otherness’; both of the girls and their alien charge are foreigners, cut off from their families and seeking friendship; and, like MEBA so often is, Greta is pictured crying profusely at one point -- in that instance because of her homesickness.

The schoolgirls’ experience of being outsiders is dramatized through their relationship with Rodney, the head teachers’ son, who also rather pretentiously likes to think of himself as their carer because of his family connection, and assumes a superior attitude from the off: ‘I have to help look after those two beastly little girls!’ the science-obsessed boy moans to a friend during a school outing at an observatory near the start of the film, and when Sumac informs him that her family come from South America, his instantaneous reply of ‘oh, I see -- foreigners!’ at first marks the spectacled, tweed-clad youngster down as an comically small-minded buffoon with an inflated sense of his own self-importance. Gradually though the children form an allegiance through their conspiratorial shared custody of MEBA, and the friendship bond between the children and the alien illustrates how racial and cultural barriers can be overcome through empathy. It is also the two girls who are shown to be the most intelligent and resourceful of the four children when challenged in adversity. This message is contrasted with a flashback to MEBA’s Venusian homeland in which we see the little alien ostracised among his identical-looking puppet peers for being unable to transform himself into a flying saucer as efficiently as them, and consequently being left behind alone on the planet's gaseous rocky surface before deciding to come to earth for a visit.

This theme of outsiders finding acceptance and sharing an understanding with those who might seem very different to them, but who nevertheless share an experience of not quite fitting in, also has some application to the second film on the disc, which transports us forwards in time to 1972 and introduces us to the colourful whimsicality of the peculiarly titled Kadoyng. The film starts, in traditional ‘70s fashion, by setting up our agreeable trio of young protagonists -- siblings Billy (Adrian Hail), Lucy (Teresa Coding) and Barney (David Williams) – in opposition to the flower-bed trampling adolescent yobbery of their stripy tank-top sporting long-haired nemesis Eric (Ian Pigot), whose park vandalism in the company of his loutish friends is dismissed by the lad’s bullish land developer dad Mr Fenton  (played by The Last of the Summer Wine’s Bill Owen) as an irrelevancy, since the lovingly tended flower beds of the trio’s friend, grounds-keeper old Robbo (Jack Haig), and the local plane fields the children spend most of their time traversing in play, are soon set to be ploughed up in order to make room for a motorway bypass that Fenton has been negotiating the contract to build, and which is set to carve its way through the countryside -- destroying the picturesque village of Byway in the process.  

Standing against and protesting Fenton’s plans are Billy, Lucy and Barney’s oddly matched parents, ageing, cardigan-wearing Professor Balfour (Gerald Sim) and his younger, middle-class hippy wife (although this marital set-up seems more down to the vagaries of casting than any attempt at characterisation), who are excitedly looking forward to a village meeting in the town hall at which Prof Balfour will be rallying the locales with a passionate environmentalist defence of the local landmarks which are set to be ruined by Fenton’s development plans, unaware that Fenton already has local political bigwig Pander-Willoughby (Michael Sharvell-Martin) in his pocket, and that the deal has already been decided behind closed doors!

This green parable about the greed and corruption of big business and the destruction of rural England takes place alongside a quirky tale of extra-terrestrial visitation. This being the early 1970s, the alien takes the form of an affable wandering cosmic astronaut hobo from the planet Stoikal (Leo Maguire) whose very glam-looking, gold Easter-egg-shaped sentient space pod 'Babble' crash-lands in a field in the rural idyll of Byway, where it is instantly discovered by Billy, Lucy and Barney. The kids soon determine that the friendly visitor isn’t an invading Russian, but also observe that the otherwise benign-looking humanoid will find it difficult to blend in to village life thanks to the vaguely rude proboscis-like antennae protuberance which sprouts disconcertingly from the top of his head! 

With the aid of their father’s top hat, the children are able to get Kadoyng (named after the sound the antenna thingy makes when the hat is whipped off too quickly) accepted in the community as a visiting friend, and thanks to his use of a portable teleport device, his space pod is soon hidden away in the barn adjacent to the spacious farmhouse that is the Balfour home while the alien attempts to fix it. It’s not long before Kadoyng becomes involved in both the Balfour children’s personal grudge match against gormless Eric and his thuggish comrades, and the fight against Fenton’s destructive motorway construction plans: it turns out that Kadoyng’s protuberance is a sort of organic alien magic wand and has many outlandish special powers, like magicking the bemused village bobby into disappearing each time he threatens to stumble on Kadoyng’s true identity, and the ability to turn the diminutive Barney into a martial arts expert able to fulfil every bully victim’s dream by besting the older, bigger Eric Fenton in a tussle on the plane fields.

The village hall meeting also doesn’t go the way Mr Fenton planned it to when Kadoyng intervenes in order to force the smug ministry official who’s been paid off and drafted in by the land developer to give a speech in defence of the unsound construction plans, to spell out the truth that lies behind his deceptive rhetoric instead (‘Blah, blah, blah. Rhubarb and totally meaningless clichés -- I promise you rubbish, rubbish and only rubbish!’). This sort of whimsical humour is crowned by the unexpected events that occur as a result of Kadoyng’s madcap efforts to thwart the construction permanently by drafting in the children and their eager parents (happily accepting of this cosmic eccentric) to help him make a bizarre alien chemical brew called Conkey -- meant to cause giant immovable alien plants to shoot up on the site at which the bulldozers are scheduled to start work. The humour throughout is absurdist slapstick, buttressed by the central performance of Leo Maguire (who also penned the screenplay) playing his role of quirky alien as though it's part Play School presenter, part mischievous child, and part absent-minded professor whose plots and plans rarely go the way they are supposed to. This last aspect of the story sits somewhat ambivalently with the environmentalist theme, since, in the concept of ‘Cronky,’ the film whimsically seems to endorse and make use of the notion that an advanced alien form of ‘wonder science’ is able in principle to solve all worldly problems, while in practice the formula becomes corrupted through human error and leads to even more potentially catastrophic damage being caused -- although in this case the ‘mistake’ also averts the threat of the motorway project coming to fruition.

The primary coloured exuberance and pleasant humour behind this offbeat comedy is nicely augmented by Edwin Astley’s moogish, vintage echo-chamber electronica soundtrack, while underpinning all the riotous, faintly subversive oddness there remains the issue of the reason Kadoyng ends up having to live among his earthling friends in Byway: like MEBA, he’s considered to be the oddball among his own kind on his home planet; but MEBA was merely made fun of by his peers for not being very efficient at transforming into an animated flying saucer ... the alien still came to earth of its own free will (for no other reason than to see what humans are like) and it was able to leave again as soon as it was rescued from its criminal captors and had begun to miss its home. Kadoyng on the other hand has been cast out as an undesirable influence by a race of ‘mental and physical giants’ who labelled him REJECT 642 and then gave him his sentient craft Babble so that he might find another home for himself far away from them! He ditches the craft on earth when the spaceship develops a fault, and finds his quirkiness translates into something like what is considered to be an agreeable childlike nature in human earth culture -- allowing him to blend in relatively easily … so long as he’s wearing a hat! The otherness of the alien creature in Harley Cokeliss’s The Glitterball though (the third film in this set -- from 1977) is not merely rooted in its possessing strange abilities or in some alienating abnormality of appearance, but in its complete defiance of the normal categories that divide living beings from inanimate objects!

The genius of this simple movie lies in how a production decision made purely for convenience, in order to avoid having to interpret Howard Thompson’s original story idea through a traditional creature design (which would have necessitated effects that most likely would not have been very convincing given the budget Cokeliss was working with), turns out to be its most unique and memorable feature: instead of a puppet or a model alien filmed against inevitably duff looking blue screen, the alien here is nothing more than a golf ball-sized silver sphere which emerges from a football-like UFO after it crashes through the roof of the shed in the back garden of the Fielding family on the night before its three members are due to move into their new home. Using a combination of carefully controlled blasts of compressed air and stop-motion animation by The Wombles animator Barry Leith to organise its movements, as well as utilising simple in-camera techniques such as occasionally running the film in reverse, Cokeliss and his crew manage to make this unassuming everyday object feel like an entirely new form of life, seemingly with its own personality and unique identity, a fact which accidentally puts the film in a similar category to those surrealist works by film-makers such as Jan Svankmajer that mix animation and live action to bring life to old toys and discarded bric-a-brac. 

Helping to achieve this effect are the ambient electronic sounds of former BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundman Malcolm Clark, whose wibbly-wobbly roster of unearthly blips and bleeps become associated with the sphere’s ‘moods’ and perceptions, and are just as important as the film’s animation for creating the illusion of a sentience and a Gremlin-like mischievousness behind the ball's otherwise blank exterior whenever it is shown eating the Fieldings out of house-and-home or, say, evading capture in the chocolate-primed mousetraps that have been laid for it by a family believing itself under siege from a plague of mice, rather than just one greedy little space ball!

After becoming fascinated by the little creature/object when he suspects it of wrecking the family kitchen during the night, the film’s main hero Max (Ben Buckton) becomes the alien being’s protector and interpreter, enlisting the help of his new mate Pete (Keith Jayne) whom he meets while trying to save the sphere from this film’s equivalent of Mr Pole in Supersonic Saucer -- a sleazy, light-fingered pickpocket and shoplifter known as ‘Filthy’ Potter (Ron Pember) that the boys encounter in the shopping precinct’s main supermarket and then spend the rest of the film trying to bring to justice or evade, depending on the situation. Ironically, Max and Pete are left to their own devices largely because Max’s dad (Barry Jackson), who’s a Sergeant in the air force, has been charged with investigating the UFO buzz that caused a fighter-plane-mobilising red alert at his base overnight, thus explaining why he’s not much concerned about his son’s interest in odd-looking silver balls or the rodents that have supposedly been causing havoc in Mrs Fielding’s (Marjorie Yates) kitchen! 

The film becomes the strangest of buddy movies as Max and Pete -- camping out in the latter’s tree house, where he usually goes to look at the stars through his telescope or read his now-vintage copies of House of Hammer and Ghoul magazine (the latter only lasted for one issue, so Pete got himself a real collector’s item there!) -- start to bond with their inscrutable alien charge after they discover that it is actually alive because it’s insatiable appetite for custard, crisps and Gobstoppers gives it away (though it's not too keen on stale meat pies it seems: the sphere comically pukes one of those back up after wolfing a discarded crust found on the floor of Pete’s tree house!). This quest for food is not just greed, despite the enthusiastic slurping noises added to the audio track: the sphere needs energy in order to contact its Mothership, who will send it more little silver helpers to guide the lost alien back home. After the boys go on a messy custard-making spree back at Max’s house, they manage to supply the cosmic Glitterball with enough ‘energy’ be able briefly to communicate with it in English, through the speaker of the Fielding’s battery operated transistor radio!

Director Harley Cokeliss manages to disguise the thin budget incredibly well, and the film even starts out looking like a decently financed action thriller, competing with Close Encounters of the Third Kind handsomely in that regard with its smart opening depiction of an air-force base alert and the radio tracking of the sphere’s ‘football’of a spacecraft, all of which is achieved thanks to some kind help from The 56(F) Squadron Air Force Strike Command and Military Air Traffic Operations National Air Traffic Services. But Cokeliss also struck lucky in obtaining the services of Brian Johnson, Stanley Kubrick’s model-maker on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, at the time, effects and model work supervisor for Gerry Anderson’s live action series Space: 1999. Johnson made the Glitterball’s model spacecraft and the Death Star-like Mothership which eventually comes to earth to rescue it and the boys from the clutches of George Potter, who, by the way, really is one the CFF’s most unlikable villains, happy to rough up two young boys in order to get hold of the alien entity because, once again, he’s a thief whose twigged that its powers will enable him to break locks and gain quick entry to the main safe of the local supermarket -- meaning he’d no longer have to be dependent on petty shoplifting or opportunistically pilfering whatever he can from people’s houses whilst ostensibly doing their window cleaning for them! 

The climax, in which the Mothership releases hundreds of its alien Glitterballs to flood the pristine white floors of the supermarket and bring their comrade home, while teaching old Filthy a lesson at the same time, provides a fittingly surreal, flamboyantly ‘other’ take on the alien contact theme so wonderfully and variously elucidated throughout this collection of  likeable little children's films,  but here made all the more enjoyable thanks to the spaced out cosmic electric ‘psych’ cues supplied by '70s Hammer Films composer Harry Robertson. 

The Glitterball is a film that manages to combine all the tropes essential in any typical CFF movie while still bringing an almost indefinable sense of originality and strangeness to its engaging, comic depiction of unfathomable alien intractability.

All three films look predictably splendid in their new BFI restored DVD versions -- and the disc also comes with an essential booklet featuring several nicely written essays, credit lists for all three films, and archive stills.