CAPTURE KILL RELEASE (2016)

In films such as Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and the Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel-directed Man Bites Dog, filmmaking itself becomes implicated as a dangerous tool that promotes and enables murder for voyeuristic psychopaths who use it to procure their victims, while exposing the prurience of the gaze of not just the amoral antagonists of these films, but of us -- the viewers at home -- who are presumed to find this stuff entertaining. This point was drummed home with a particular nihilistic intensity in John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which includes a moment when disturbing videotape footage of a home invasion and its aftermath, including the cold-blooded murder of a family, is played in its entirety, filmed by the serial killer duo at the centre of the movie using the victims' own video camera. This lengthy scene is immediately followed by the entire thing being re-run once again, but this time we’re watching it as the killers play back the video footage in slow motion on TV for their own entertainment. Such elevated concerns about the ubiquity of the acts of filming and viewing, and the fear of increasingly eroded ethical boundaries that might result seemed recondite back then when home video was still a novelty, but now that the technology in an age of camera phones and video streaming is so taken for granted that it’s become an everyday, even essential, part of modern life, the idea has become opaque and almost invisible to us, and is barely ever alluded to in the flood of found footage-style movies which have appeared over the last decade, most of which seem to exist as a cheap means for budding exploitation film-makers to access a now easily accessible medium.

Following in the wake of the cult success of the ultra-morbid Faces of Death series, fabricating authentic-looking ‘snuff’ footage of atrocities has become a staple of both the found footage and tied-up-and-tortured subgenres, and the two are made to fit rather snugly together for this indie Horror drama co-directed by Brian Allan Stewart and Nick McAnulty (who also wrote the screenplay) -- which presents itself as self-shot footage taken from the digital camcorder of a married twenty-something couple (Jennifer Fraser and Farhang Ghajar – whose screen characters share the actors’ real names) as they set about making a video diary record of a shared home project that they hope and expect to strengthen the bonds of their relationship.

The film starts from the moment Jennifer first unpacks the new digital recording device, purchased specifically for the project, and thereafter gets so excited by its novelty that she won’t give up filming absolutely everything in sight while her husband has to resignedly put up with her annoying kid-with-a-new-toy over-enthusiasm; he later perks up at the thought of making a sex tape, but this plan falls by the wayside when Jennifer falls asleep in the middle of his back massage foreplay. 

The first signs that this is no ordinary couple, and that their intended video diary is to be rather less mundane than the documenting of some home renovation project or whatnot, comes as the couple film themselves in a hardware store and Jennifer’s casual chit-chat is all about which axe or hammer etc. will make the most suitable murder weapon! Part of the joke here is that the average hardware store actually is a serial killer’s paradise, containing every weapon and restraint under the sun a psychopath could possibly need for executing the perfect kidnap-and-kill plan, all gathered conveniently under one roof; the main source of the film’s sour brand of humour, though, at least initially, lies in portraying the couple’s perverse hobby exactly as though it really were like any pastime an average couple might choose to engage in as a bonding exercise. The two share intimate moments as they pour over anatomy textbooks in the evenings while looking for tips on dismemberment and removing teeth; they go scouting for likely victims together in their car, and have blasé discussions about who might make the most suitable ‘victim’ in a tone that suggests comparing favourite movies. Both can agree that a child would be a bit tasteless, and Farhang has hang-ups about murdering a woman in case people think his motivation was sexual; and he won’t consider ethnic minorities or gay people because the public might mistake the act for a hate crime. Jennifer thinks a teenager would make a good target though because no-one likes them: “there’s got to be at least one person who would thank us for killing any given teenager,” she muses.

What gradually becomes clear to the viewer is that this is very much Jennifer’s project, and that Farhang is kind of meekly going along with it more out of a desire to please his partner and to feel fully invested in their marriage by indulging her interests than out of any real excitement of his own about murdering people for kicks. Unfortunately, Jennifer’s preferred pastimes are mainly those of a sadistic, thrill-seeking sociopath! This is fine when the couple are still in the planning stages, because Farhang can endlessly procrastinate by finding ways to delay the actual implementation of the act: his list of unsuitable victims becomes so long (no handicapped, no elderly people) that it ends up leaving very few options still on the table; and he takes every opportunity to highlight ever more potential for unforeseen problems that might derail the project completely (he wonders if their bath will actually be large enough to hold a corpse while it bleeds out, or even to cut it up in afterwards). But a visit to Jennifer’s mother (played by the actress’s real mom) highlights just how ingrained in her nature the voyeuristic filming of suffering really is when a stack of old VHS video cassettes (as well as her very first video camera) are uncovered in her old room and Jennifer reminisces about a childhood video project: filming herself throwing the family cat down the stairs to see if it landed on its feet! 

The second half of the film documents the unravelling of the couple’s fraying relationship as Jennifer’s impulsive bloodlust leads her into ever more reckless acts of sadism, such as drowning a neighbour’s cat in the kitchen sink and forcing Farhang to film her doing it! (“It’s gonna be a lot easier with a person, don’t worry!” she blithely informs her disgusted husband.) Rather than stick to their original, carefully thought-out idea, which was based on the wisdom of choosing someone who likely won’t be missed, she becomes fixated on taking revenge on an obnoxious rich guy in a suit who insulted her in the street: stalking him, staking out his house (she find out he has a mistress, which she then tries to use as a further justification for killing him) and all the time trying to persuade her husband to make him the focus of their kill plan. Finally, Jennifer goes ahead with the first stages of the plot with another choice of victim, yet without consulting Farhang first -- who comes home to find a strange guy sitting at the dining table sipping drugged wine. With the plan already in operation he has no choice but to reluctantly go along with it.

The entire film is constructed like a home movie, with the actors shooting it themselves using a digital camcorder, although so many semi-amateur non-found footage horror flicks these days are shot in the digital video format that there is little mileage to be milked from the medium as far as creating any sense of authenticity is concerned because nearly all low-budget films now look like this! The biggest drawback, inevitably, is that both husband and wife are thoroughly unlikable -- he’s whiny, needy and weak; she’s flippant, callous and utterly selfish – and we have to spend the entire movie with them, without any relief. Even their potential victims are either pathetically trusting or grossly unpleasant. There are moments of dark comedy, though, located in Jennifer’s completely self-centred attempts to paint her sadism in a positive light, such as when, having forced a visibly numb Farhang to dismember the dead weight body of their eventual victim in the bath using an electric saw (the unbelievably convincing gore effects are some of the nastiest I’ve seen in a long while) until there’s nothing left of it but hunks of bloody flesh, she still takes it upon herself to complain when he asks that for the sake of his own sanity she stop constantly referring to their victim by his name, expressing her fake outrage at her husband's request with the throwaway comment, “well, he was a person … I think we should show a little respect!” 

The film does have an in-built excuse for the standard complaint that most dogs the majority of found footage films: that it’s unbelievable how their protagonists will always continue filming under almost any circumstances. Here that trait is specifically tied to the pathology of one of the couple and becomes a plot point in the final act of the film when Jennifer continues filming in the aftermath of the crime, and drives a wedge between herself and Farhang by unwittingly capturing and throwing a spotlight on the differences in their instinctive responses to the preceding act of murder, thereby documenting the disintegration of their relationship as surly as she did the destruction of a human being. She even secretly films herself at one point promising Farhang that she will stop filming him all the time! Unfortunately, occasional sparks of knowing humour like this are not enough ultimately to raise this entry above the mass of similarly nihilistic, low-budget entries in the found footage and/or kidnap-and-gag-then-torture straight to DVD bin.

The UK DVD release is on the Eureka label and comes with two deleted scenes, teaser trailers and the untreated footage for several scenes in which the couple use an old VHS recorder from Jennifer's old house, all of which were in reality shot using the standard DV format, than artificially degraded to make them look like low resolution VHS tape.             

              

THE ORCHARD END MURDER (1981)

WARNING: This review contains spoilers throughout

Christian Marnham’s tawdry offbeat thriller The Orchard End Murder furnishes audiences with a curious viewing experience in 2017 for a number of reasons, not least of which being the fact that – uniquely for a film of its kind -- it presents us with a very particular (and rather twisted) outlook on a mid-1960s milieu filtered through a lens which has been shaped by the equally distinct and time-locked cultural perspectives of the early-1980s  --  which is when this was filmed and then distributed as a fifty-minute second feature to play opposite current Hollywood movies of the day as a means to take advantage of the tax break being provided back then by the Eady Levy. Thus, it’s also now a time capsule whose oddly inappropriate comic excesses and warped tonal peccadilloes seem, ultimately, to flag up how much it embodies an outlook with roots in societal developments that have a lot to do with past ideas about the notion of a divided England: more specifically, the memory of a perception of there-having-been, at one time, an encroachment of suburbia and its ideals on the time-honoured ways of the English countryside, which continues to affect the relationships previously crucial to the functioning of traditional village life. In fact, such developments might be traceable all the way back to the post-war period, when the divide first began to form between a cultural heritage that takes its values, traditions and customs from a way of life that's guided primarily by the needs of agriculture and the rhythms of the surrounding landscape it depends upon, and the demands of an affluent middle-class commuter set that began to move in from surrounding areas from the mid-1940s onward -- sending commuters traveling in and out by rail each day who eventually also take control of local institutions without necessarily sharing the emotional investment in the area that comes of being an indigenous, integrated part of the community. For British viewers, this short, brutal-but-comic domestic horror thriller is as loaded with cultural subtext as Tobe Hopper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre no doubt was for U.S. viewers of the mid-1970s. And now, in a period when the UK seems as divided and as uncertain of its future as it ever has been since the Second World War, this often deliciously grubby exploitation piece seems vaguely to grasp its way towards becoming a pertinent critique of short-sighted provincial middle-class mores and Little Englander-ism because-of rather than despite being an iteration of the theme rooted in a now-largely vanished world of steam trains, British Rail branch lines, and tea and scones with vicar at the cricket pavilion. 

In many ways, The Orchard End Murder was taking up the baton of low-budget British Horror where the independent filmmaker Pete Walker left off. Walker arguably perfected the optimal blend for the times of sensationalism and titillation with his grungy, pessimistic 1970s thrillers, which were informed by and made possible through a combination of the new social permissiveness of the 1960s and the relaxing of censorship laws in the UK which took place in the early ‘70s, helping to create a climate guided by what Walker chronicler Steve Chibnall has termed, ‘the commercialisation of sexual display.’ While stately bastions of the genre like Hammer Productions struggled to adapt to this state of affairs, Walker’s savvy breed of new independent filmmaker flourished by integrating contemporary themes and exploitation subject matter, discovering a knack for the business of generating publicity in the process; whether it was the positive or negative kind didn’t much matter to them!  

By 1981, though, even Pete Walker was finding it difficult to operate successfully in an increasingly financially-straitened, moribund British film industry. His latest film at the time, House of Long Shadows, was a knowingly arch post-modern take on the hoary old Gothic Horror genre, but it was a throwback nonetheless, attempting to mine for nostalgic appeal the popularity of its quartet of veteran Horror stars: Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, John Carradine and Christopher Lee.  The Orchard End Murder, which came out at about the same time, though, operates in a similar way to Walker’s classic trio of Horror thrillers by generating a dread atmosphere and conjuring an ineffable sense of despair still discernible despite, and in some sense because of, the prosaic mundanities of the contemporary English country way of life it frames, pointedly set during the decade whose sexual attitudes first spawned and enabled Walker’s best films. The film even borrows the talents of cinematographer Peter Jessop, Walker’s go-to camera man and collaborator on nearly all his projects -- although, ironically, Jessop had been unavailable to Walker for the filming of House of Long Shadows -- and recreates a blissful, lost idyll of quaint Home Counties gentility which the film then proceeds to deface with lurid dabs of queasy sex, comic perversity and the macabre. What strikes one almost immediately is how confident and efficiently fine-tuned these 50 minutes of suspense are, considering the fact that the film effectively constitutes a writer-director feature debut for Marnham. In fact Marnham was already much steeped in the craft of film-making, having been forced to begin working as a young trainee assistant editor in a film processing lab because the job offered the only means at that time of earning his union card from the Film Producers Guild. He became friends with Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson during this period, and was later presented with a golden chance to to hone his skills as a director by making commercials for the advertising firm Cammell-Hudson Associates for several years during the period when Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg were also busy working on their masterpiece, Performance. 

From its opening seconds The Orchard End Murder impresses with the quality of its direction and writing, combined with the gorgeous cinematography and clever sound editing it showcases throughout; Marnham establishes his central character, her circumstances, and the situation she is about to face at the start of this tale with a simple but perfectly judged device: as the title credits role – simple white text against a black background – the usual title music is replaced by an awkward phone conversation in which a young woman called Pauline Cox (Tracy Hyde) -- who, it is quickly established, comes from the leafy south-east London suburb of Sidcup -- rings up a man she evidently barely knows, called Mike Robbins (Mark Hardy), after having previously obtained his number after meeting him on a night out in town. Hopeful expectation born of sheer boredom is a succinct summery of the frame of mind we sense from Pauline, and which has led to the making of this call, perhaps looking for stimulation and thrills in random sexual assignations to distract from the emptiness of suburban inanity. At first curt and formal towards her tentative inquiries, then solicitous and ingratiating when he recognises Pauline as the woman he has previously had a fumble with in a local car park, we immediately peg Mike for a bit of a player; and although both parties are ostensibly looking for 'a good time' with 'no strings attached’, there is an unvoiced intimation throughout of the uneven power imbalance that's manifested by the social dynamic in operation behind their words to each other during the setup of this assignation between a working class cinema usherette with few prospects and a public school-educated chartered accountant.

Mike isn’t available to take her out that night, though. Instead he suggests she join him for a Sunday drive out into the Kent countryside. For there’s a "lovely little place" there called Charthurst Green where he will be taking part in a cricket match with some work colleagues and social acquaintances. Pauline’s rather incredulous response (“a cricket match?!”) to the idea of being made a party to this impeccably middle-class pastime is eventually tempered by Mike’s plan that they go off and ‘have some fun’ afterwards: perhaps, she contends hopefully, they might pick up where they left off in that car park? But when Mike remembers that he doesn’t yet know where she lives and  hurriedly asks her for her address so that he can pick her up ‘in his sports car', Pauline pointedly hesitates before answering. Then, without exactly refusing him, she replies by asking that he simply pick her up ‘under the clock’ in Sidcup high-street. We are given to think then that, despite everything else, Pauline is at least sensible enough not to impart her address to somebody who at this stage she barely knows – yet this turns out to be a wariness that will dessert her utterly later in the film, when the plot calls for her suddenly to become bizarrely reckless in her desperate need for human contact.  At this stage, though, we have yet to actually clap eyes on either Pauline or Mike, yet we already feel we have grasped the situation and obtained some knowledge of the personalities of both protagonists, as well as got a handle on the social dynamic underpinning the uneven relationship that has defined their interactions thus far. A title card then lets us known that events are taking place in 1966, and a high-angle crane shot above the cricket ground at Charthurst introduces the familiar and comforting sights and accompanying sounds of a traditional English sporting pastime. Maintaining its altitude, suspended above the scene of play, the camera pans to the right, past an adjacent country lane and above a substantial plantation of apple trees in a neighbouring field -- which is where we find Pauline and Mike, whom we see as small figures canoodling under cover of the orchard’s canopy. But the scene also includes another figure, over towards the edge of the frame, observing them furtively and skulking behind the cover of nearby trees and bushes … 

In just one shot, Marnham has indicated the terrain this film will inhabit throughout its running time -- both a geographical and a psychological terrain. Images of countryside activities and locales associated usually with peacefulness and calm will be constantly invaded by a sense of unease and tension; the mundane becoming infused with a feeling of profound dread because of the intrusive appearance of something that doesn’t quite fit the scene: this is British Home Counties Horror 101. When Marnham cuts from Pauline and Mike’s tryst to a shot of the bowler at the crease in the next field, rubbing the seam of the cricket ball against his crotch as he prepares to bowl, the juxtaposition of the two shots, though innocent in isolation, becomes a sly innuendo – a strategy Marnham employs throughout the film to suggest the darker undercurrents of sexual threat contained within apparently harmless situations and activities. This is a theme encapsulated in the Garden of Eden symbolism expressed through the film’s various manipulations of the visual motif of the apple. Apples are first seen growing in a young orchard, then being collected by child ‘scrumpers’; one is later picked by Pauline herself, presaging terrible developments -- before, finally and ominously, we later see a great mountain of discarded rotting apples dumped at the site of a remote chalk hole: a trajectory that indicates this fruit represents loss of innocence leading to death. 

The first half of the film is structured like a cautionary parable, taking a traditional slasher movie form that begins with that familiar, viewer-implicating POV voyeur’s shot from the bushes we’ve become used to seeing in so many slashers, which then cuts to a close-up of Pauline as she breaks away suddenly from Mike in reaction to an apparent noise in the distance that alerts her to the idea that they might not be alone, and giving her: “a horrible feeling … like somebody just walked over my grave!” With the spell of amour momentarily broken, Mike suddenly realises that he is up next to bat, and thereby instantly lets Pauline in on the lowliness of her ranking on his list of concerns for that day: he is here primarily for the cricket, with hanky-panky being merely a pleasant but inessential bonus addition to the proceedings. He hurriedly leaves her, not wanting to let the side down. 

Our identification with Pauline’s escalating feeling of isolation and creeping loneliness -- her sense thereafter of not belonging in these surroundings, or among these people – provide, in the following moments, the context in which we view these scenes, and informs our understanding of what she does next. Although we have been told that these events take place in 1966, Pauline is the only person whose fashion sense and styling gives that fact away on screen: with her Op art print-patterned dress and Vidal Sassoon-like bob cut hairstyle she stands out amongst the traditionally uniformed cricket players and the staid, mostly elderly middle-class attendees frequenting the picnic area. Yet Tracy Hyde’s naturalistic performance indicates not a modern, hyper confident ‘It’ girl of the High Sixties, but someone who has scrimped and saved to afford the occasional trip to Biba at the weekend where she can find something ‘hip’ to buy and wear on her nights out. The soundtrack becomes laden with audio cues that intimate the stultification a conventional upbringing in the semi-rural suburban outskirts of a big city might produce in a young woman seeking to forge an independent identity in those surroundings during the 1960s: the gentle rustling of leaves in the summer wind; the drowsy but insistent buzzing of insects as village church bells toil politely in the far distance … these are the sounds that provide the backdrop for the polite chit-chat over tea and scones that emanates from one of the trestle tables at which the vicar is busy holding court while light-heartedly discussing what turn out to be ominously relevant subjects -- such as the nature of the Biblical Adam and the concept of fate. Taken together, all such elements seem to conspire to produce in Pauline a feeling of alienation and disconnection from her apparently idyllic milieu, and she is soon tempted by the uncomfortably bourgeois atmosphere generated by these surroundings, to go wandering alone in the nearby orchard to escape the unpleasantness of the unwanted sensation they have left her with.

From here, the film skilfully constructs an uneasy and almost uncanny atmosphere using the most prosaically kitsch of materials: Pauline ends up at a quaint Gatekeeper’s cottage, situated a little way up the road from the leafy local railway branch line its occupant oversees, and production designer Simon Haynes (whose credits at IMDb seem rather sparse beyond this title) contributes to the viewer’s rapidly dawning sense of there being something slightly ‘off’ about the whole scene by constructing an environment for the cottage that appears, deliberately, just a little too picture-postcard-perfect to feel completely real. With its neatly manicured lawn and the picturesquely arranged ivy that adorns a surrounding, pristine-white picket fence, this chintzy cottage design looks like something from a fairy tale picture book, and it puts you on edge as soon as you see Pauline ambling unsuspectingly up its winding gravel pathway in much the same way as do the first daylight sightings of the Sawyer household in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To add to the absurdist sense of unreality which attends the scene, the garden is heavily adorned with dozens of ornamental garden gnomes. When the beckoning personage of the Gatekeeper/Stationmaster -- hunch-backed, bearded, and wearing little bottle-top-shaped spectacles -- appears at an upstairs window, looking like a novelty figurine popping out of a cuckoo clock and resembling one of his own colourful gnome collection as he welcomes Pauline to this “proper little gnomes’ fairyland”, inviting her in for “tea in my parlour”, one can’t help feeling that Pauline’s weird-o-meter should be buzzing off the scale by this point -- especially when he casts the gnome menagerie in terms of them being just like his “little friends”.

But even when the Stationmaster (an enjoyably creepy performance by Bill Wallis) follows up his initial invite with a (one would have thought) unnecessary reassurance that he ‘won’t bite!’ there is so clearly a sinister glee being indicated when he also notices in passing that some wasps have been caught in a ‘honey trap’ jam jar left out in the garden (“look where your sweet tooth has got you now!”), that for Pauline to accept his offer appears a positively suicidal decision on her part. The interior of the cottage is reassuringly drab in an English provincial sort of way, as china tea sets and lugubriously ticking pendulum clocks abound; a gloomy silence prevails that is only punctured by the Stationmaster's forced cheeriness as he merrily regales Pauline with an anecdote over tea and a slice of fruit cake, about how the former owners of the abode committed suicide by lying together side-by-side with their heads lined up along the railway tracks outside! It’s this mixture of bland domesticity and outrageously macabre detail which puts the piece broadly in the same bracket as Pete Walker’s best work, with the emphasis being on the quiet desperation that belies the cosy picture of contentment such surroundings generally denote to the outside world while usually disguising a multitude of sins. In some ways, the image that emerges of the Stationmaster’s rustic existence here has parallels with the depiction of Pauline’s solitude in suburbia, suggested earlier  when she found herself reluctantly seated among the great and the good of village life: with a disguised passive-aggressive note of bitter animosity just discernible beneath the amiable badinage, the outlandish host chats about how he has lived in this village all his life, and how he used to know everyone by their first name, as they once knew him; but now that city dwellers have taken up residence in so many weekend homes here, the village has become full of people who …”have no idea what I think … or what I do!” This is a comment that also carries intimations of a sinister double meaning, of course, but Pauline’s life in bedsit land in Sidcup seems similarly isolated, despite her insistence that “I live my own life.” A comical air of creepiness attends the Stationmaster’s attempts to ingratiate him-self with a young woman who he clearly thinks might be of ‘easy virtue’ as he tries to elicit sympathy by complaining to her about how “strangers can be very cruel … and make fun of my little deformity”; he even manages to persuade her, tentatively, to touch his hump at one point!

It also turns out that the Stationmaster has adopted a hulking, mentally challenged young man called Ewen -- an orphan Borstal boy who also lives with him and helps out, through his work as a local handyman, the various dignitaries and weekend residents whose needs clearly now dictate the rhythms of village life. Unfortunately, poor Ewen isn’t quite so practiced in the art of leaving a pleasant first impression with young women: he appears at the tea table cradling a cute bunny rabbit in his arms, but before Pauline has even reached the end of her first exclamation of appreciation for the cuddly creature, Ewen has started slamming it into the table, his features contorted as he lets out a bloodcurdling scream! Given the level of insanity now clearly on display as Ewen stalks off with a large kitchen knife promising to “take it out and skin it”, you’d think the shaken guest would now be making every excuse under the sun to be on her way by this point, despite the Stationmaster’s timid explanation that Ewen is “a very mixed up young man!” Instead she takes pity on him and agrees to go for a walk with him in one of the orchards, thus sealing an extremely unpleasant fate to come … 

Marnham’s script takes the Psycho route when determining the structure of the piece: it introduces Pauline as the central character, and therefore the site of the audience’s sympathies – but then kills her off before the half-way mark. Not unsurprisingly, Ewen turns out to be unable to control his spasmodic sexual urges during the couple’s saunter amongst the ripening apple trees; and indeed, at first, Pauline, despite having witnessed his disturbingly bizarre behavior earlier, seems more than willing to entertain the possibility of indulging in at least some light petting, if not a full sexual liaison with the lumbering manchild -- although we don’t get any insight into why exactly she would choose to take this course of action other than maybe out of sheer boredom. Here the film fully embraces the exploitation feel of many Pete Walker projects -- from Cool It Carol to Home Before Midnight -- in its depiction of a sad, grotty little enclave of a repressed (and repressive) England where the prospect of some rushed, cheap sex on a filthy mattress in a damp chalk hole dump for discarded fruit provides the acme of recreational entertainment. Clive Mantle, in one of his earliest screen performances, plays the taciturn, sexually immature hulk with a quiet desperation which allows the film to almost get away with attempting to make him the sympathetic party later on, even after we’ve just seen him attempt to rape Pauline in a violently graphic sequence during which her dress gets pulled off and her breasts pawed at, and which culminates in her finally succumbing and getting throttled to death during the course of Ewen’s unsuccessful attempts to have sex with her on a slag heap of rotting apples (oh, the symbolism!). 

The rest of the film develops the Stationmaster as an equally sexually freakish miscreant, and goes all in on the idea of rural England being a hotbed of twisted vice and sexual perversion behind the pastoral gentility of its homely village décor and mock Tudor heritage façades. The interior of a track-side railway sidings shed becomes a macabre shrine when Ewen transfers Pauline’s corpse to it so that he can indulge in a grim make-believe parody of domestic living, with some necrophilia on the side; and when the Stationmaster finds out, his reaction is to throw a hissy fit and accuse Ewen of cheating him because he “stole my flower!” The remainder of the film plays as a, frankly, tasteless piece of comic farce involving the mad Stationmaster and Ewen attempting to dispose of Pauline’s body in the middle of a large-scale police manhunt, after her disappearance is reported on the national radio. They seek to transfer it in a cardboard box on a trailer that’s attached to the back of a bicycle they normally use for collecting jumble for the Girl Guides (“I don’t think Brown Owl would approve of this!”), hoping to bury it in a secluded field after the site has already been searched by the Police. The film ends on a dismally facetious note with Pauline’s corpse finally being discovered in a shallow grave and a forensic pathologist assiduously dusting her exposed buttocks for prints as they emerge from the excavated dirt: a sight which results in Ewen losing it again, jumping into the grave, and attempting to ravish the soil-besmirched corpse in full view of some by-now-very-suspicious police detectives! Throughout this portion of the film, we’re constantly reminded how true the Stationmaster’s earlier exhortation actually is about nobody really knowing what he thinks … He and Ewen occasionally interact with a well-to-do out-of-towner called Mr Wickstead (Raymond Adamson), who wants Ewen to come round and trim his garden topiary sometime – but who is clearly otherwise not in the least bit curious about the lives of these suspiciously furtive locals.   

With its TV episode runtime length (50 minutes approx.) and the stylistic flavour of its excellent, melodic musical contributions from composer Sam Sklair -- which often imitate the kind of fretless base-dominated cues one would’ve been routinely exposed to in episodes of contemporary television shows such as Bergerac in the 1980s -- the film cultivates the disreputable air of something that feels like it may have been at one time commissioned for TV but then got subsequently side-lined for being far too explicit to actually screen – although this was never in fact the case. The way the tone shifts between a jokey nudge-nudge, wink-wink furtiveness and a grim atmosphere of incipient sexual violence informs the quirky melancholy character of the piece, which emerges from the film being, ultimately, both an example of sexist objectification and a critique of social alienation at the same time. One also senses that the central murder scene ended up being more powerful and disturbing than its makers intended when it was originally shot; Marnham’s apprenticeship as a director on numerous commercials imparted to him the ability to maximise the impact of his material, and he employs a number of techniques (discussed in the BFI release’s interview extras) which add such a gut-punch to the reception of that murder scene that it sets it apart from the lighter tone of the performances being given elsewhere. Nevertheless, the resulting contrast adds rather than detracts from the film’s uneasy reconstruction of the English countryside as a macabre but picturesque site of domestic solitude and sexual desperation.

This being a little-known programme-filling short rather than a main feature does not take anything away from its watchability, and anyone who prizes British Horror from the ‘60s and ‘70s will find this early-80s offering equally as fascinating. The new BFI Flipside release offers a gorgeous 2K digital restoration using the original 35mm film print preserved in the National Film Archive as a source. The image is almost perfect, although the audio track does get a little crackly in places towards the end. The dual-format presentation comes with a number of extras that make the release a valuable historical summery of the culture of independent filmmaking as it stood in the early 1980s, just as the programme short was about to die out with the removal of the tax break system of finance which made it possible. Christian Marnham’s first films outside of the advertising industry were documentaries and the disc includes a 25 minute short made in 1970 called The Showman. It’s a fascinating, and almost equally as macabre record of the career of the variety circus showman Mr Wally Shufflebotttom Snr: a portly, elderly sideshow host who toured British fairgrounds in the early 1970s touting his flaming knife-throwing act, which incorporated striptease  performances enacted by vacant-looking ‘dolly birds’ who we get to see jiving to a Gary Glitter track in order to tempt the shifty-looking punters in. What could sum up the 1970s in Britain better than that image? It’s yet another cultural document which appears to prove that the ‘60s/’70s were another country in terms of how sex was dealt with back in the day and, Marnham’s short account of the development of his career during this period, and of the making of this particular film, is extremely compelling. There is a longer 38 minute account of the making of The Orchard End Murder included, which is again fascinating; and Tracy Hyde has also been tracked down to discuss her previous life as an actress in a 12 minute interview. Actor David Wilkinson, who plays one of the cricketers in the opening section of the film, also talks of his memories about the filming of the feature. The accompanying booklet features two astutely perceptive articles by Josephine Botting on The Orchard End Murder, and Vic Pratt on The Showman: both writers are curators and historians at the National Film Archive who offer perceptive analysis of this bizarre lost period from the nation’s film history.  

                 

DEATH IN THE GARDEN (1956)

Between 1946 and 1964, the great iconoclastic Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983) found himself, like many of his contemporaries during the Spanish Civil War, living and working in Mexico, where he was able to resume his directorial career and make at least twenty films in a variety of genres while working to tight schedules and with extremely low budgets for producer Óscar Dancigers -- a Russian émigré, blacklisted by Hollywood for his Communist sympathies. He was to become a citizen of the country in 1949.

 This period of activity had been

 the most productive of Buñuel’s life thus far as a film-maker, following a fallow fifteen years in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (when he had worked on film propaganda for the defeated Republican Government), which was pent languishing unproductively on the pay-role of MGM studios in Hollywood, and, later, working for the Museum of Modern Art in New York as an editor who at one point was asked to produce (among other assignments) a truncated version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. The Mexican film industry allowed Buñuel to develop the economical, deceptively-simple-but-subversive poetic realist style that was to help shape and define the approach he utilised with the later masterpieces he made in Spain and France, when he would be completely free of the genre constraints that ultimately make many of the films from this period appear a little rough and uneven. However, in the early-1950s Buñuel was also able to cultivate the beginnings of a sporadic international career by participating in a small number of co-productions, beginning in 1952 with an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which he made for American producer George Pepper. This saw the director working in colour for the first time, as he attempted to mould his Spanish-Mexican hybrid sensibility to a more commercial form of international genre film-making. The experiment was evidently considered enough of a success to thereafter nudge Buñuel into accepting a small number of other foreign co-production deals in the second part of the decade, starting with Cela s'appelle l'aurore in 1956, which inaugurated what critic Raymond Durgnat has called Buñuel's "revolutionary triptych": a trio of films that examine how morality operates under conditions of revolutionary rebellion against a brutal dictatorship. This Franco-Italian co-production opened the way for several more team-ups with French producers, starting with the rarely seen film discussed below, which is now released on Blu-ray in the UK (in a dual-format edition) by Eureka Entertainment as part of its august Masters of Cinema line.  

 La Mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden) was adapted from a now-forgotten novel by Belgian writer José-André Lacour, but its main inspiration was almost certainly the classic 1953 Henri-Georges Clouzot suspense movie The Wages of Fear, with which it shares one of its main French stars, Charles Vanel (also to be seen in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief), who plays very similar roles in both films, which also share key thematic concerns as they both take place in Latin American countries whose natural resources are being exploited by American corporations. This being Buñuel, there’s also a heavily emphasised anti-clerical element too, as the corrupt fascistic military regime in the film, which benefits from U.S. largess at the expensive of the indigenous workers, also gets ideological  support from the compliant doctrine of non-violence being preached by the Catholic missionaries simultaneously flooding the region. But whilst Clouzot’s Anti-American message became the backdrop to a taut suspense thriller, Buñuel’s film is riffing on even more generic survival-adventure fare that has a mismatched, antagonistic, rag-tag band of fugitives forced to flee into the hostile South American jungle after a violent revolutionary uprising at a mining outpost is put down by Government forces.  

In the very few lines Buñuel devotes to the film in his memoir, he regrets not being able to get a better handle on the script -- much of which was being written on the day of shooting, with Buñuel getting up at two in the morning and handing the scenes he’d been working on that night to his French collaborator, Gabriel Arout, at dawn, who would then check Buñuel’s French for mistakes before filming took place later on in the day. The novelist Raymond Queneau turned up at one point to lend some extra support for a few weeks, and Buñuel wryly notes how the writer (whose 1959 novel Zazie dans le metro was later filmed by Louis Malle) always displayed such good humour and ‘infinite tact’ by never saying outright that a script idea was bad, but merely delicately suggesting ‘alterations’ instead. Despite all this, according to Buñuel: “the script remained impossible.” 

Perhaps partly because of this dismissive tone and the fact of the film’s relative rarity (until this colourful, crystal clear HD print turned up for the Blu-ray release), Death in the Garden has never been treated as anything much more than a minor work in the Buñuel filmography. This might well now be changing as it transpires that the director was perhaps being rather too harsh in his judgement of a work which frequently finds subtly interesting ways to adapt the adventure film mode to traditional Buñuelian concerns. It turns out that seeing Buñuel successfully working what is, for much of the picture, a commercial ‘action’ genre piece, and then slowly warping its conventions in the second half with absurdist ideas drawn from his familiar arsenal of tropes, actually puts rather a refreshing new spin on many of them. 

The first half of the movie is devoted to establishing a core group of disparate ne’er-do-well characters whose priorities are soon shown to put them completely at odds, but who are going nevertheless to be forced to rely on each-other for survival later on. If there is one single unambiguous take-home message coming from Buñuel with this film, it is that simple, prescriptive moral formulations are inadequate for dealing with the ever-shifting messiness of human relationships, especially when those relationships are placed against  a backdrop of social chaos created by systems of political oppression that bring with them unpredictable consequences. Buñuel had a cast of fairly well-known French actors at his disposal for this picture; and a lush, bright, ‘50s Technicolor palette is provided by Mexican cinematographer Jorge Stahl Jr. to lend proceedings in a picturesque Latin American village and the teeming jungle surrounding it an epic quality which, when combined with Buñuel’s deceptively workman-like (but effective) direction, creates an impression during the opening forty-five minutes of a film that might easily pass for a fairly decently mounted mainstream action feature.

The first scene opens on a rocky Mexican quarry in a remote valley near a stream, where sun-beaten prospectors are shown urgently shifting for diamonds. One of them is Charles Vanel, who plays an elderly French fortune hunter called Castin: modestly hoping to earn just enough from staking his claim to enable him to one day return to his homeland and open a restaurant in Marseilles. For Castin -- one gets the impression -- the entire journey has been something of a romantic adventure; the extent of his naiveté is demonstrated when it becomes apparent that he has also fallen in love with, and expects to take back home with him to marry, the hard-nosed blonde prostitute who’s currently running the town brothel which caters to many of the prospectors who pass through the region from all over the world, looking to make their fortune in the diamond fields. Her name is Djin, and she is played by Simone Signoret … the distinctive German-born actress who is best known for her role as Joe Lampton’s older lover Alice Aisgill in Room At The Top, Jack Clayton’s 1959 adaptation of John Braine’s novel of the same name. Meanwhile, for Horror fans, she is synonymous with the ice-blooded conspirator and killer she so effectively rendered for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s twist-laden thriller of 1955, Les diaboliques. Djin -- defiant, ballsy and devious -- definitely does not come across as the type to be content with marriage to an aging sentimentalist followed by a settled existence running a busy restaurant. She has her own ‘business arrangement’ going with a local boat-owner called Chenko (Tito Junco – who also appears in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel) who ferries in fresh blood from Brazil to keep her clientele entertained; a military unit seconded at the outpost, and headed by a Captain Ferrero (Jorge Martínez de Hoyos), turns a blind eye to the couple’s activities for a cut of their profits. “There is nothing more important than making money” is a phrase that trips easily from Chenko’s tongue, and it’s a motto Djin herself seems fully to endorse: fairly early on in the first act, an adventurer called Shark (Georges Marchal – the quintessential leading man of ‘50s French cinema) turns up in the village and finds out just how far Djin can be trusted when money is entered into the equation. 

Shark ambles into town in the middle of a minor revolt prompted by a Government proclamation rescinding all independent prospectors’ claims and taking the diamond fields into public ownership. Looking for a place to stay for the night he accidently ends up in Djin’s bed, who, when she finds him there, decides she quite likes the look of him and makes love with him. Unfortunately, she also decides she likes the look of the money belt he keeps strapped to his chest … She reports him to the corrupt Captain Ferrero, who comes with a military attachment to take him into custody on fabricated charges of bank robbery. Djin’s partner Chenko is rustled up as a ‘witness’ and Shark ends up in a police cell while Djin and Chenko receive their cut of the money stolen from him. Shark manages to escape just as a full-scale revolt kicks off after the military execute by firing squad an injured, unconscious man who’d been accused of taking part in earlier protests: a scene which anticipates a similar instance of absurdist cruelty perpetrated by corrupt officialdom in Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war thriller Paths of Glory.

Shark uses the ensuing bloodshed as cover for his escape; a scene in which he finds some crates full of dynamite and ammunition in the cellar under the police cells leads to one of the few instances of bravura action spectacle in Buñuel’s cinema, when Shark sets a gasoline trail alight that leads to the cellar stash and there’s a massive explosion destroying the entire police headquarters! Army reinforcements arrive and the revolt is used as an excuse to target and remove foreign prospectors who’d previously worked harmoniously alongside locals seeking their fortune from mining the local diamonds. Castin – now with a head wound sustained during the fighting -- is falsely accused of being one of the ringleaders of the revolt. He and a recently arrived missionary friend called Lizzardi (Michel Piccoli) try and hide out at Djin’s, but are forced to flee with Castin’s deaf-mute daughter Maria (Michèle Girardon) when a reward of 5000 pesos is put on his head and the locals are told that random executions of  Castin’s co-workers will take place if he doesn’t give himself up. Castin, Lizzardi, Maria and Djin set off undercover of night to flee downriver in Chenko’s boat, but it is hijacked by Shark, who is also trying to escape to Brazil and has unfinished business with a number of his fellow escaping renegades.

This dramatic, tense situation is the lead-in to the jungle survival-adventure aspect of the narrative which characterises the second half of the film, when the group is forced to abandon the river and flee into the ‘green inferno’ after a military patrol boat catches up with them. But it also serves as the context that underscores a tense and dynamically evolving set of relationships that we see continue to develop between the conflict-ridden characters as their struggles become more desperate and subject to chance and hardship. By this stage most of the principle characters have previously met, if sometimes only briefly, or they’ve become interconnected in some way during the build-up to the protests and riots percolating in response to the Government’s land-grab and the subsequent military clamp-down: Shark has made love with and also been betrayed by the prostitute Castin ludicrously expects one day to marry (and naively believes he can build a conventional bourgeois family for his daughter with)  … but Shark has also earlier been shown being extremely mean to Maria in the local tavern frequented by the rebellious prospectors, and he brutally assaulted Castin when the father tried to intervene on behalf of his daughter. Djin has herself indicated that she might be willing to marry Castin, but only because she has found out he is rich and, him being also elderly, she surmises that he probably doesn’t have too much longer to live so wouldn’t be a bind on her freedom for long. Maria’s attraction to Shark, despite his appallingly rough treatment of her, becomes clear soon after he is taken into custody, during a moment when she comforts him after he is led through the congregation of a church service being held by Lizzardi, and is beaten to his knees by his captors as the prayers commence. Such a tangled web of conflicting (and conflicted) passions is bound to lead to dramatic tensions, but it also purposely leaves the viewer with no clear-cut hero to root for, as all the characters start out compromised by their very great flaws, which are  displayed in their relationships with each-other: Shark is a violent misogynist; Chenko an amoral opportunist; Djin is selfish and superficial, and Castin a naive fantasist who is easily led. Only Maria comes across initially as an innocent abroad -- but her personality and character will develop in another direction as circumstances change during the coming battle to survive.

A normal trajectory at this point, for a commercial action-adventure feature operating in such an area of genre as this, would involve the gradual coming together of the conflict-prone group as its members realise that they must do so in order to stand any chance of surviving the brutal, unforgiving indignities of nature untamed. Instead, Buñuel’s approach is rather different -- and it results in an infinitely more cynical philosophy than the ‘progress’ narrative that’s usually spun in similar tales of survival, which invariably involve mutual sacrifice re-formulated in terms that envisage it as a sort of ‘penance’ that leads to a higher form of human morality being attained that is founded on cooperation, with those who cannot adapt inevitably falling by the wayside. In Death in the Garden, Buñuel seems more interested in exploring the competing moral frameworks of each of his main protagonists, and seeing how various aspects of them seen in operation during the first part of the film, hinder or help the struggle to exist when conditions unmoored by societal conventions are encountered. The interrogation of morality in Buñuel films inevitably involves an examination of religion at some point -- particularly its Catholic variety; the missionary character of Father Lizzardi, played by Michel Piccoli, becomes the vehicle by which the director approaches these issues for this particular film. Piccoli, of course, was to become one of the most frequent performers in Buñuel’s filmography, as well as a great friend to the director; this was their first collaboration -- and it sees him appearing youthful and white-suited (he bears something of a striking resemblance in this film to Christopher Lee), and cutting an extremely ambiguous figure as a recently arrives Catholic missionary who seems to vacillate between a sincere intent to ‘do the right thing’ and serving his own (and his mission’s) best interests. When the prospectors who face ruin rebel and plot to occupy in protest the diamond fields which the Government is taking over, it is Father Lizzardi who advises them against it, pointing out that rebellion “always results in merciless oppression”. He counsels the angry men that “defying authority will get you nowhere. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword!” Lizzardi might like to persuade himself that he’s trying to save lives here: army reinforcements are coming, and the rebellion will indeed be put down harshly when it spontaneously irrupts in response to an act of state cruelty. Yet Lizzardi seems acutely unaware that he is actively participating in the exploitation of the locals at the hands of corrupt authoritarians and foreign corporations by inculcating in them such a passive acceptance of the status quo. When Shark mockingly raises this point with him, Lizzardi indignantly insists that “we are not responsible for the overseers!” to which Shark replies that nevertheless: “they seem to follow you wherever you go. They must really like you guys!” Also, the missionaries specifically benefit from these kinds of unofficial partnership: it doesn’t occur to Lizzardi to question why it is that he, and all the other missionaries who come to bring the word of God to the native population of the region, have been gifted expensive watches, paid for by an oil refinery company active in the area. 

Perhaps the film’s best illustration of the culpability of the type of religion practiced by the likes of Father Lizzardi comes soon after Shark is taken into custody by Captain Ferrero’s forces as a result of Djin reporting him to them. Lizzardi is allowed to hold mass in a building that also houses rooms and offices being used as interrogation centres by Ferrero and his men; assisted by Castin, he is holding one such service when Shark is marched through the congregation on his way to the rooms at the back of the building, where he will be subjected to interrogation on false charges of bank robbery. Not only are Lizzardi and Castin so absorbed in the solemn rituals of their faith that they completely fail to acknowledge the injustice that is being carried out in their very midst, but they unwittingly become the cause of an act of savagery being perpetrated upon Shark, after the soldiers escorting the prisoner hear the prayer bell being rung and kick him to his knees in order to force him to ‘pay his respects’. When the corrupt military authorities later try to pin the blame for the prospectors’ rebellion on Lizzardi’s own friend Castin because he is a foreigner, Lizzardi doesn’t hesitate to tell Castin that he should turn himself in in order to end the bloodshed! In each instance and in every respect Lizzardi’s moral advice, apparently delivered with only the best intentions, aides and enforces fascist oppression. 

The second half of the film plays to very different rhythms, and feels more languidly paced, than the mixture of character study with action and taut suspense that defines the first part. It transforms into something that will feel that much more recognisable to viewers familiar with Buñuel’s later works, such as Belle De Jour or That Obscure Object of Desire. In that respect this can be seen as a fascinating transitional work which begins to operate on the poetic, absurdist levels of Buñuel’s most celebrated surrealist fables once the main characters leave the cultural institutions of society behind. The military unit initially pursuing the fugitives through the jungle decides to give up the chase on the assumption that “the jungle will eat them alive. They will never get out,” and thereafter we never see or hear from the army again, and that side of the plot disappears. The film instead becomes a deep study of a small group of people who have nothing but themselves and each-other to fall back on once they’re cast into this primordial natural state which, through sound design and stylisation Buñuel is able to imbue with strikingly hallucinogenic qualities. There is no musical score whatsoever throughout any of this part of the picture – only a rising, constant screeching crescendo of cicadas, against a backdrop of howling and crying from distant unidentifiable animals that forever remain unseen. Hearing this cacophony of noise, but not being able to see any signs of life amid the jungle foliage other than the remaining survivors themselves, creates a sense of unease which Buñuel continually finds ways to augment and amplify by other methods; the disorientation the characters experience is exemplified in imagery which feels like it originates in areas of the mind harnessed by dream consciousness: Maria with her hair so elaborately tangled up in jungle vines that she cannot move; a sudden smash-cut to the teeming traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, which turns out to be a delirious Castin gazing at a photograph of the architectural landmark, and represents him imagining being back home – a juxtaposition of images that suggests the artificial nature of the societal structures which lend form to our constructed sense of identity; and the incomprehensible gestalt shift which occurs when the exhausted, starving fugitives stumble upon the smouldering embers of a recently vacated camp fire and are shocked, scared and excited by the possibility of there being other people in the area … only to finally realise that they have been walking, half-delirious, in a circle all day and that this is the same camp they made themselves earlier on. Perhaps the most vivid image that we see of this hallucinogenic nature takes the film into a zone that at one point makes it seem a plausible, if unlikely, partner to Ruggero Deodato’s  Cannibal Holocaust: Lizzardi hacking at a live snake with a machete … Desperate for food, the group struggle to light a fire -- with Lizzardi even contemplating using pages from his Bible to kindle the flames -- but by the time they manage to get one going the half-gutted creature (which still seems – horribly -- to be somehow moving about) has been completely swarmed by an army of angry red ants!

The idea this section of the film posits is not that these characters are changed by the experience of having to survive without food in this relentlessly hostile, heat-suffused environment of swamps and impassable jungle undergrowth, but that their pre-existing dispositions have simply

been re-contextualised in ways that alter our moral assessment of them. Shark’s rebelliousness, his bullishness and tendency towards violence make him a natural leader, while Lizzardi’s willingness to submit to authority allows him to work very well alongside Shark when others have reached the stage of giving up on life. Castin, meanwhile -- now delirious from a head wound sustained during the rebellion -- relies more and more on the religious sensibility (cultivated, ironically enough of course, during his friendship with Lizzardi) to make sense of the apparently hopeless position he and his daughter now find themselves in. But this results in him resorting to superstitious ideas about how God has condemned them and plans to judge them. Djin, the seemingly strong, money-minded brothel madam, rejects the useless Castin and becomes wholly dependent on Shark for survival.

The big Buñuelian ‘twist’ comes right at the end – when Shark discovers a crashed airliner full of luxury food, clothing and consumer items in the middle of the jungle (cue Castin predictably intoning how “God has saved us through a miracle” and Shark reminding them all that “fifty people had to die in order to save us!”). The fugitives, in a reversal of the situation encountered in The Exterminating Angel (where the rich dinner party guests inhabiting an expensive villa become like island survivors who cannot leave their isolated environment), start dressing in expensive designer clothes they’ve recovered from the crash wreckage, and pretty much set up a mini bourgeois enclave in the middle of a South American jungle clearing! This is a deliberate deus ex machina solution, cynically deployed by Buñuel with the intention of showing how, ultimately, these people cannot overcome the flaws in their own natures, and that it is such flaws which will ultimately condemn them, as their effects become amplified by the empty values of a privileged consumer lifestyle transferred to an uncivilised region and fabricated from the accumulated detritus of a fatal catastrophe. 

Maria, previously the innocent of the fleeing party, is introduced to a world she had no prior experience of, and becomes enamoured with the glittering contents of a jewellery box … which brings her into conflict with Lizzardi, who believes these possessions should remain untouched out of respect for their former owners. Djin, clad incongruously, amid the wild vegetation of the jungle, in a luxuriant ball gown, quickly comes to exemplify the passive values instilled by bourgeois femininity: where once she laughed at the thought of being ‘kept’ by Castin, after learning of his plan to take her to France in order to one day marry her, she ends up softly intoning to the group’s ‘saviour’ Shark, how she has come to realise that “a woman is nothing without a man!” A man such as Castin, on the other hand, previously kindly and gentle but now in the thrall of a religious mania and superstitions that are informed by Old Testament ideas of divine punishment and retribution, is the most dangerous kind of man of all: not all of the group will make it to the end of the film thanks to him. The final irony is that the two people, Shark and Maria, who do get the chance to flee by raft across the border to Brazil in the movie’s final moments, were the first two members of the party to come into conflict: where once Maria’s father, Castin, tried but failed to defend her from the advances of the brutalist adventurer, now it is that rough-minded drifter on whom she must depend, and who becomes a father figure of sorts as they face an uncertain future together. 

This release from Eureka Entertainment constitutes the film’s first time on Blu-ray, and the vivid digital transfer serves the wonderful brightness of the colour film palette very well. The disc has over ninety minutes of interview material as its extra features, which see critic Tony Rayns delivering an excellent overview of the film’s themes and its connections to Buñuel’s filmography; film scholar Victor Fuentes examining in detail the director’s Mexican period; and actor Michel Piccoli talking about his lengthy career, and his relationship with Buñuel. Plus there is a 24-page booklet featuring an essay by Philip Kemp. Death in the Garden is a solid addition to Buñuel’s cinema to be made available on home viewing formats. Hopefully, the fruitful Mexican period will get more exposure on Blu-ray soon.