IRMA LA DOUCE (1963)

When asked by the acclaimed Hungarian-born production designer Alexandre Trauner to explain his latest project in a single sentence, Billy Wilder pithily summed up what turned out to be the most financially profitable movie of his career, Irma La Douce, as “the story of a man who is jealous of himself”. This almost facetiously paradoxical prescription applies to a film that, if one were to be forced into assigning it a more general descriptive label, would broadly have to be defined by the somewhat dubious phrase ‘sex comedy’. It slots into Wilder’s prestigious filmography among a string of romantic comedies Wilder began regularly producing in Hollywood after he was teamed up in 1957 with a new writing partner, I.A.L Diamond, for the Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper-starring Love in the Afternoon. This marked the beginning of a long-term writing-partnership that soon spawned two of Wilder’s greatest classics: Some Like it Hot and The Apartment –- the two films responsible for the pair coming to be renowned for their ability to push the Hollywood production code to its limits with their instinctive, uniquely acerbic attitude to the foibles of human nature; and a tendency to incorporate transgressive themes into a popular genre more usually associated, in the public mind, with escapist frivolity. 

But by the time Irma La Douce came around in 1963, the boundaries previously defining what it was and was not acceptable to portray on film were already in the process of breaking down completely. Wilder’s forte had always been his penchant for introducing into his work moods and themes which at the time often didn’t feel like they had a right to belong in the romantic comedy subgenre at all whilst still always managing to work, broadly speaking, within the strictures and codes that defined that subgenre. Irma La Douce saw a Hollywood old hand attempting to adapt filmmaking habits formed during a career in which sophistication, wit and a certain subtlety had always been necessary requirements for smoothing over the more contentious or subversive themes his films often dealt with below the surface, and apply them to a story broaching a subject matter for which there didn’t appear to be much call for sophistication, wit or subtlety: namely prostitution. Furthermore, he was attempting this on the cusp of a period when all the rules previously governing what it was or wasn't contentious to show on cinema screens were about to be radically overhauled, if not thrown away completely. 1963 was, after all, also the year that saw Jayne Mansfield appear in the first nude scene in a mainstream Hollywood picture since the Pre-Code era -- for the film Promises! Promises! -- exploiting a brief period before the end of the Hays Code and the MPAA film rating system becoming an effective alternative.  Marilyn Monroe would have earned the distinction herself the previous year if her nude swim scene in George Cukor’s abandoned Something’s Got To Give had ever seen the light of day, but elsewhere in Europe sex comedies and dramas were already way ahead of Hollywood in tackling such risqué subject matter. There were very few qualms about portraying nudity and sex on the big screen in European cinema at this point.

Wilder’s approach to the conundrum is uniquely interesting, and, although he later publicly judged Irma La Douce to have been an artistic failure (despite its commercial success) because the comedy and the conventions the film inhabits had been rendered just a little too broadly, it is in fact precisely the cover provided by this broad-brush approach to the material which also allows Wilder the freedom to seriously interrogate, without alienating his audiences, some unspoken emotional truths that lie hiding in plain sight behind the otherwise colourful frivolities inherent to his treatment of the material. It’s the implicit assertion informing Wilder’s approach with this film that these truths don’t just apply to this particular story’s cast of prostitutes and their relationships, (which are depicted within a heavily stylised milieu) with clients and pimps, but to any of us who have similarly to negotiate the gap between an identity largely imposed upon us by the societal norms that have been established among our peers (and by the institutions that govern and impinge our lives in other forms) and the private identity it is also possible to construct for oneself in the act of indulging a life of fantasy  –- in other words, the film is talking about a situation that has the potential to be applicable to pretty much all of us. With Irma La Douce Wilder is presenting his viewers with an apparently very particular situation, dependent upon an absurdist parade of comic exaggerations, misunderstandings and ridiculous deceptions. But although apparently limited by its exotic circumstances and particularities, the reality is that this film is every bit as biting an existential expose of the hypocrisies that determine the petite bourgeoisie lifestyle as anything in the oeuvre of late-period Luis Buñuel. The difference is that with Wilder it comes garbed in an approachability informed by the language of a comedy painted in the ravishing hues of a gaudy Technicolor Hollywood musical; and in which the likeable comic screen personas of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine -- the stars of Billy Wilder’s irresistible romantic comedy masterpiece The Apartment -- have been invited to hold court for us in a film made in an increasingly permissive age, where the director could have just 'let it all hang out'. Wilder remarked about the movie how his aim was to “strike a happy medium between Tennessee Williams and Walt Disney” -- a telling contrast, and, despite the director’s own reservations about the film in later years, a very accurate description of its unique qualities

The picture’s origins as a stage musical lie at the very heart of our understanding of how Wilder’s idiosyncratic approach to tone in this movie came to be established. The story was adapted from a French musical which first opened in Paris in November 1956 and then ran for four years at the Théâtre Gramont. A Peter Brook-directed London production opened a year and a half into the Paris run at the Lyric Theatre in the West End, and became even more successful than its French predecessor. For its film incarnation, Wilder was required by his producers the Mirisch brothers (who scuttled his plans to make this another black-and-white outing) to film in 2.35:1 scope Technicolor, mimicking in every way the larger-than-life zest familiar to countless MGM musicals from the same period. This was a much bigger deal for Wilder than it might have been for many other directors at this time since Wilder was someone who had always been and would continue to be extremely averse to filming in colour at all, and had done so only sporadically until late into his career. At the time of the filming of Irma La Douce Wilder judged his least successful venture thus far to have been the lacklustre 1948 Bing Crosby musical The Emperor Waltz … and yet here he was again, many years later, faced with the prospect of making another Technicolor musical!

Or at least that was originally the intention … Quite soon into the production process, Wilder and Diamond decided to completely ditch all of the production’s original songs. This was the divisive and seemingly insane decision that turns out to be either the film’s greatest strength or its undoing, depending on your position regarding such matters. It can be viewed as a pretty radical, not to say extremely brave, artistic decision: after all, Alexandre Breffort’s libretto and lyrics had been complimented in the original stage production by the melodies of the much-admired Marguerite Monnot: a former classically trained Concert pianist who turned to the composition of popular music for a living after a bout of ill-health put paid to her flourishing concert hall career. Monnot was, thereafter, responsible for writing the popular French standard L’Etranger and had since become well-known for an extremely successful collaborative song-writing partnership with Edith Piaf in the 1940s.

It seems like a crazy decision to attempt to make a musical without the actual songs, and especially foolhardy to throw out the songs of one of the French stage’s most successful songwriters -- but something very unusual and subtle occurs in the transformation the decision enables. The film still retains the stylised look and the general tone of a Hollywood musical, based around the fundamental suspension of disbelief necessary for acceptance of the convention that characters are allowed to directly express their feelings in communion with the audience by bursting into song. But this is a film in which role-play is central to existence, and in which the characters often aren’t able to express themselves openly because of the particularities of the role their societal position requires them to inhabit or to attempt to fulfil. In other words, the film presents the audience with personalities who seem to exist in every particular as characters from a big screen musical, yet who have had their ‘natural’ ability to express themselves through song removed by the circumstances defining their societal position in the narrative. Wilder’s biographer Ed Sikov put it best in On Sunset Boulevard, his book on the director’s career in cinema:

The wonderful thing about Hollywood musicals is that characters can tap immediately into their emotional lives by opening their mouths and singing. The drab constraints of everyday life give way to melody, and often the more sentimental the song the more affecting the moment. Wilder does not permit his characters such easy access. Love, joy, regret, despair, bliss, triumph – these are the mainstays of the musical comedy, but for Billy they’re too quick, easy, and pretty. In Irma La Douce he uses orchestral themes to underscore what’s going on in his characters’ hearts, but he doesn’t give these hearts the freedom to express it directly.

 The ‘orchestral underscoring’ mentioned above is the subtle work of composer André Previn, who, throughout the picture brilliantly quotes Monnot’s original melodies in his score, weaving the emotional colour of the missing songs into the fabric of the performances the characters themselves are frequently depicted giving for the benefit of each other in the narrative, thus stressing how what they say to each other is not necessarily what they feel. A romantic pathos emerges that seems to exist in the grain that contrasts these two modes of expression. While it can, by this method, give a subtle but clear-eyed account of the foibles and imaginings, disguises and self-deceptions that underlie human relationships of all types, the movie, in other areas, fully embraces the freedom imparted by the musical form it has otherwise abandoned to broach extremes of human behaviour whilst still maintaining its air of frivolity and lightness. Comedy and violence and exploitation are, like Lemmon and MacLaine’s mismatched coupling in this film, strange bedfellows indeed all the way through it; while the movie’s moments of comedy are frequently dominated by absurdity and unrealistic interactions which are allowed to stray far beyond the threshold usually constraining those of other romantic comedies. The running joke that starts with Lemmon placating Irma’s feisty pet dog Coquette (which hates him) by giving it champagne to drink so that he can woo her in peace, reaches a crescendo of absurdity that would never be acceptable in any normal picture of this type when Irma seriously comes to believe -- after a series of incidents in which we see the dog passed out face-down in her doggie bowl on the counter of a bar or propped up groggily against an empty champagne bottle at the foot of Irma’s bed -- that Coquette is a secret alcoholic: “I think she drinks,” Irma whispers conspiratorially at one point to Lord X (who is, in fact, Lemmon in disguise); “I keep finding empty bottles under the bed!” This is an absurdist comic scenario being played totally for laughs (in reality, Lemmon’s treatment of the mutt would denote unspeakable cruelty), that seems to completely undermine any possibility of an emotional truth ever being addressed in the movie. Yet Wilder is still operating throughout the film on the same heightened plane of reality occupied by the Musical, where metaphor allows for all kinds of liberties to be taken with realism. Given the huge commercial success that Wilder enjoyed with Irma La Douce in the US., despite its obvious attempt to link surviving in a colourful yet chronologically unspecified world of French prostitutes and their ‘mercs’ (pimps) with the compromises we all have to make in our lives, it’s probably true that the exotic setting and unreal tone allowed audiences to turn a blind eye to these stark particularities. This is one instance where Wilder got to have it both ways – unlike with Kiss Me Stupid where viewers were turned off by the cynicism once they saw that it was unambiguously being directed at them.

The film starts with some beautiful Parisian slice-of-life documentary colour footage, presenting a montage of images that were shot on location in the capital as the city slowly comes to life in the early morning: street cleaners hose down the squares and public spaces that surround the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower in preparation for the opening of restaurants and daily markets that will soon be filled once more with the bustling crowds that give unique flavour and vibrancy to French life. Wilder re-uses here a similar opening idea (including its lengthy narration) that he made use of in Love in the Afternoon, immediately establishing for the average American viewer that the scene of the action-to-come will be safely far-removed from anything he or she might recognise in their day-to-day life, before dissolving into a stunningly detailed studio-created street set designed by Trauner and populated by a small village of extras. It’s a Parisian red light district centred on the fictional Hotel Casanova and the adjacent Moustache’s Bar, with pavements lined by an exotic parade of prostitutes rendered as flamboyantly as they would’ve been for any Fellini picture, and juxtaposed, in our first encounter with them, by a row of butchered carcasses seen at the meat market; as well as a monumental stack of cabbages assembled for a vegetable stall display. Wilder’s cinematographer, Joseph LaShelle, famed in particular for his stunning black-and-white photography not just in some of Wilder’s best but in noir classics like Preminger’s Laura, here proves himself equally versatile and adept with colour film -- his work emphasising with sumptuous clarity the intricate detail and coordination between costumes and sets required to imbue this fabricated world of vice with the buoyancy of strength and character that makes it so hard to resist as a hyperreal film microcosm of society at large. One of the film’s most attractive features is the opportunity it affords Wilder to flesh out seemingly unimportant background players with their own personalities and foibles. This is a detail included by Wilder with the aim of providing an immersive context to his make-believe world. It creates a flavour of life which comes magically to the fore and gives one to believe that there could be a million other stories and relationships occurring simultaneously between the many other couples we see in the background, on the streets or at the tables of Moustache's establishment. Wilder people’s his studio sidewalks with a rainbow collection of personas, the outrageous kinks exhibited by Irma’s fellow working girls for the benefit of clients also providing contemporary cinematic jokes for the viewer at the expense of other famous movie representations of prostitution, such as Richard Quine’s 1960 film The World of Suzie Wong. Soon-to-be cult actress Tura Satana is given her screen debut here (she was later to be indelibly linked to the cinema of Russ Meyer through her iconic role in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), as a character who works under the nom de guerre Suzette Wong; even more bang up to the minute is a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s then-recently released Lolita -- which is hilariously satirised in ‘60s comedienne Hope Holiday’s portrayal of one of the movie’s more prominently featured street women. She appears as a middle-aged ‘tribute act’ to Nabokov’s notorious child nymphet, adopting the hairstyle and memorable heart-shaped sunglasses that were worn by Sue Lyon in Kubrick’s film while emphasising, for comic effect, just how far this approximation of the character is from ever being mistaken for jailbait.  

At the centre of everything, though, and providing the movie with its heart and its soul, is the central relationship between Jack Lemmon’s character, the naïve, initially prudish, rules-bound policeman, Nestor Patou, and Shirley MacLaine’s experienced career prostitute, Irma La Douce. Patou finds himself ‘promoted’ from basic park patrolling duties at Bois de Boulogne into a world for which he is utterly ill-equipped, defined by its deception and corruption. No-one, apparently, informs him about what actually goes on inside the Hotel Casanova and the immediate environs of his beat, nor that his colleagues at the station know all about it and are being paid by the pimps who hang out alongside the working girls and their clients at Moustache’s bar, to turn a blind eye. When, after some comic misunderstandings at the start of the film, Patou finally realises the truth and tries to arrest practically the entire neighbourhood, he ends up being first ritually humiliated by the prostitutes (who laugh at his naivety) and then sacked by his superiors, since his inspector turns out to be one of the clients caught in a compromising situation and arrested when Patou raids the hotel. Nestor Patou starts out in the film as someone who is innately secure and confident about his identity, and who follows the rules of his society and of the profession that defines his role in it to the letter. The problem is that the official rules are not the same rules that everyone else around him in practice recognises and observes. This leaves him, essentially, alienated ... and having to re-construct himself anew. He comes to do so with Irma’s help after, unlike her colleagues, she senses a kernel of kindness and honesty in his affectless innocence which intrigues her and leads to her taking him in and putting a roof over his head after he defends her against some rough handling by Hippolyte, her flashy but unfeeling pimp (Bruce Yarnell).

In tracing the evolution of Nestor and Irma’s tentative love affair as it develops in these rather unpromising surroundings, Wilder and Diamond constantly perform a dexterous screenwriting high-wire act that calls upon their screenplay to strike a nimble balance between full-blown romanticism and world-weary cynicism. It’s a trick that also revels in the paradoxes and contradictions thrown up by a tale so rooted in Wilder’s obsession with narrative deceptions and the self-defeating disguises one has to assume in pursuit of romantic love. On their first night together in Irma’s small but cosy upstairs apartment, after a shy and downcast Nestor has been cast out into the street, he wearily observes during one of the movie’s sweetest scenes between the two, how “if you hate somebody you can do that anytime, anyplace. But if you like somebody, you’ve got to hide in dark corners.” This paradoxical insight becomes the key to understanding the increasingly whimsical and surreal events which come to be integral to the irony-laden narrative. The career-hardened cynic Irma, who seemingly has a different identity for each and every client, falls in love with Nestor’s simplicity, integrity and honesty as she is the product of a world severely lacking in all three of those qualities. Because she is in love with him, and because he has not a penny to his name, Irma yearns to provide for Nestor, and the only way she can do so is by making him her pimp -- a complete reversal of the usual power dynamic that defines this most problematic of working relationships.

The workings of their particular relationship bring about a sense of internal crisis in Nestor’s idea of his proper place in the world, which leads him into an elaborate deception which then threatens everything that brought the two of them together in the first place. Suffering from chronic jealously at the thought of Irma being with other men, and unable to cope with the knowledge that she is now working the streets more for his benefit than her own, Nestor engages the services of the bar owner Moustache (Lou Jacobi) in helping him develop a disguise as a British Lord whom Nestor intends will become Irma’s only client by being so rich that there is no need for her to sleep with anyone else. Lord X is also sexually impotent and will pay Irma a fortune merely to play cards and listen to his (entirely fictitious) woes concerning Lady X and her alleged affairs. Of course, being penniless, Nestor doesn’t have the money himself to pay Irma, so he borrows it from Moustache and then works night shifts at the market preparing the next day’s meat, vegetables and fruit for the various stalls the following morning so that he can pay back what he owes at the end of each month. But this plan only ends up leaving Irma feeling neglected because Nestor is always so tired from secretly working all night long that he pays her no attention and just wants to sleep all morning after his shift ends at dawn, and he has to sneak back in through the window of her apartment before she wakes.      

This, of course, is an ironic reversal of just the kind of situation that would normally end a relationship. Usually, husbands and boyfriends might furtively sneak out to visit prostitutes at night or conduct an affair ... not go to work to earn an honest wage without their significant other (who is a prostitute) finding out about it! Even more ironically, when he has the chance to pretend to be someone else through the acting out of his rough ideas about how a British Lord might behave (which are entirely based on film clichés of Britishness regurgitated in an often almost stream-of-consciousness fashion) Nestor suddenly loses all his diffidence and becomes a charismatic, supremely confident and amusing individual whom Irma starts to fall for because Nestor has in the meantime become so distant. This is how the latter ends up becoming jealous of himself and decides he has to ‘kill off’ Lord X when he realises that his fake persona is more attractive than he is -- a turn of events which can only increase the levels of confusion and absurdity.

At the heart of it all is the question of just what identity truly is. Is Nestor Patou the naive, trusting policeman we encountered at the start of the film or is the romantic idealist who defends Irma’s honour after he loses that role his true self? Or is it the jealous cynic who engages in willful deception to such an extent that he fakes an entire identity in order to deceive his partner about his true desires? Everyone in this narrative can only be understood after we've taken on board the multifarious identities they need to assume throughout the course of the film. The intricacies and ironies all work themselves out in the end, of course, with a final scene set in a church during a wedding where the entire congregation is made up of prostitutes and pimps and policemen, and the bride gives birth thirty-seconds after tying the knot. How this kind of thing got past the Legion of Decency at the time is anyone’s guess, but times were indeed changing in 1963, and despite producer Hal Wallis’s moral outrage (“this is, without doubt, the filthiest thing I have ever seen on the screen” he raged), audiences lapped it up. If Wilder’s original intent to cast Charles Laughton in the role of Moustache had been possible (the actor died before production got underway) Irma La Douce might have been an even better film than it is -- but in the event, this is still a much more entertaining picture than its critical reputation had previously suggested, and it deserves the recognition and rediscovery it will now hopefully receive on the back of this exemplary new Blu-ray release from Eureka Entertainment. Lemmon is superb and gets to display a much wider range than usual, including a talent for Buster Keaton-style slap-stick; while MacLaine is delightful throughout -- moving effortlessly between tender bemusement at Nestor’s gauche displays of romantic simplicity, and screwball exuberance ... Her interactions with ‘Lord X’ in particular show Wilder and Diamond’s dialogue at its most sparkling and inventive.

Irma La Douce looks superb after having a 4K upgrade for this release in the UK as part of the Masters of Cinema series. Interesting contrasts in perspective can be gleaned by comparing the views of Kat Ellinger and Joseph McBride in their respective commentaries … both are Wilder fanatics but coming from different generations and with fascinatingly different perspectives and views on the film’s themes and about Wilder’s approach to the subject matter. Neil Sinyard provides an informative historical overview of the movie’s production in a new video interview, and the animated trailer produced at the time to advertise the movie is also included on the disc. The accompanying booklet features an essay by Richard Combs and a selection of rare archive photographic material.                                   

HUMAN DESIRE (1954)

Fritz Lang’s hugely under-appreciated movie from the latter half of his career, Human Desire, seems in general not to rank highly with film scholars and has never been considered one of the Austrian-German-American filmmaker’s finest works. It was released to an indifferent box office response by Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures in 1954, and clearly wasn’t the follow-up to The Big Heat (made for the same studio the previous year) that had been anticipated there, despite sharing two of the stars of that film as its leads, namely Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame.

The film was a faithful remake of Jean Renoir’s 1938 movie La Bête humaine, based loosely on Émile Zola's novel of 1890, which had been in production at Columbia before Lang had even joined the studio and was assigned him later by producer Jerry Wald.  

Although  departing significantly from the novel on which it was ostensibly based, Renoir’s film (which starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon) had lived up to its title thanks to its frank depiction of a destructive love triangle participated in by three characters, each of whom is shown to be a deeply ethically flawed (and homicidal) individual. Lang’s remake follows exactly the same narrative template as that which Renoir developed from Zola’s state-of-the-nation metaphor but replaces the psychotically unhinged character played by Gabin with wholesome box office star Glenn Ford. In doing so it apparently compounded the perception of the movie as nothing more than a watered-down version of its predecessor. Lang seemingly endorsed this pejorative view when, in an interview addressing the fact that his film actually became more popular in France than the Renoir version, he said: “the French consider this [film] formally very beautiful. That’s nice, but it’s not La Bête humaine".

The success of The Big Heat brought with it enough clout for Lang at Columbia for him to be able to propose at least some changes to the production: he managed to get the pre-existing Maxwell Shane screenplay rewritten, with his preferred choice of writer Alfred Hayes brought on board for the job. This was someone who had worked with Lang previously on 1952’s Clash by Night and had been involved unofficially in scripting the Neo-Realist works of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti in Italy after the war. Initially still beholden to the logic of Renoir’s original film, Lang had also proposed casting his old friend Peter Lorre in the ‘anti-hero’ role formerly inhabited by Jean Gabin, but his efforts on that front fell through. Lang and Hayes were further stymied by Wald’s insistence that the title ‘The Human Beast’ should refer only to the female character at the centre of the narrative’s love triangle (here played by Gloria Grahame rather than Lang’s first choice, Rita Hayworth) who should, therefore, be written as a devious femme fatale character with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The whole point of Renoir’s film, of course, was that humanity as a whole should be revealed by it to be inherently corrupt and sick, not just the women!

However, despite their having to work within these ludicrously restrictive parameters, it is possible to see that Lang and Hayes did, in fact, manage to subvert them enough to produce a film that is, in its own quietly penetrating way, just as ruthlessly cynical and cutting in its assessment of the inadequacies of human nature as anything in Renoir’s film, if not even more so. For some reason this has largely been overlooked down the years, and the standard conclusion – that Human Desire is a shallow Hollywood re-tread of the Renoir 1938 original – has become the unchallenged one, with even Lang’s biographer Patrick McGilligan dismissing the movie as a minor one in Lang’s oeuvre and condemning its characters as ‘ill-drawn’. In fact, the film manages, very subtly and quite cleverly, to make a virtue of the restrictions cumbersomely placed upon it by unfeeling producers and unpromising casting decisions. Instead of Peter Lorre, Lang found himself saddled with the distinctly wholesome (and therefore unsuitable) Glenn Ford as the male lead: a popular actor who was best known for playing ordinary guys usually situated as sympathetic audience identification figures. The role of Jeff Warren was originally conceived in Renoir’s film as a man who suffers from a congenital urge to murder women when he gets too close to them, only the mechanical routine of his day job as a locomotive engine driver helping him control these base urges. It’s hard to imagine Ford in that kind of role, so Hayes and Lang were compelled to reconfigure his version of the character to be less dangerous and less alienating than he’d been in Renoir’s film, thus changing the essential nature of the story. Here, Warren has just returned from the army after three years in the Korean War, and can’t wait to take up his old secure job on the railroads again. He’s lodging with his engine mate’s family and seems on the verge of kindling a tentative relationship with his colleague’s daughter Ellen (Kathleen Chase), who has blossomed into a young woman in the years he has been away. Warren apparently yearns only for the simple pleasures of an uncomplicated small-town life, underpinned by routine and the support of a ‘good’ woman.

The narrative engine driving this film noir is the examination of how such a straight-down-the-line everyman such as Warren becomes involved in covering up a murder plot for the wife of the assistant yard manager at his railroad branch after her unhinged alcoholic husband kills a rival and implicates her in the act. The script is apparently structured like the kind of tale Jerry Wald had been demanding of Lang all along: a good, wholesome, morally upright man is led astray by a duplicitous woman, a femme fatale who attempts to manipulate him into committing a second murder to get herself out of a blackmail fix. In fact, if we examine how the film un-spools the details of its traditional noir plot and the moral dilemmas that underpin the story, we quickly realise that Warren is only nominally the central character in the film at all. He’s actually too dull and self-regarding to spend that much time on; only his sense of entitlement and privilege will prove to be crucial elements in the play of events that subsequently unfold. The real emotional centre of the film lies with its main female character Vickie Buckley, as played by Gloria Grahame in what just might be her finest performance. It’s certainly one of the meatiest female roles in the noir canon, and notable for the fact that Lang does explicitly make her viewpoint the central focus of the movie for large portions of the run-time, apparently in sympathy with her position – because that’s where most of the tension in the tale actually resides.

At the end, of course, we’re encouraged (again, at least on the surface) to abruptly switch our sympathies back Warren’s way: he accuses Vickie of conniving to get him to fall in love with her simply so that she can more easily manipulate him into killing her no-good husband, only revealing the full details of her situation when he has already become too involved to escape the accusation that he’s been an accomplice in covering up her knowledge of the first murder. Realising the nature of her deception, the spell of erotic infatuation is decisively broken and, in the final moments of the film, Warren ditches Vickie and goes back to his carefree, orderly, regulated life, represented by the straightness of the railroad tracks and the barren, uncomplicated openness of the landscape his engine traverses on a daily basis as he daydreams about inviting his sweetheart Ellen to the Railroad Employees’ Association ‘Annual Dance and Frolic’.

A traditional happy ending, then? Has order been restored and the potential for chaos that occurs when one unwisely succumbs to erotic lust in the 1950s been put firmly back in its box and overcome once and for all? Actually no: the end of Human Desire contains one of the most disturbing conclusions to any film that you will ever encounter from any period. For it leaves us with its lead female character -- spoiler! -- brutally strangled to death (a favourite Fritz Lang scenario) with no consequences for the perpetrator and, even more shockingly, no sense that the hypocritical male lead – the person we’re all meant to be rooting for – knows or would actually even care very deeply even if he did, having freed himself from a tangled moral web of vice, blackmail and abuse in order to skip merrily back to his mainstream life where ignorance is, quite literally, bliss.

Vickie Buckley is a compelling, tragic figure who has lived a life beset by abuse and the constant need to work around the unpredictable vicissitudes of male privilege. She’s introduced to us as her temperamental husband, Carl, returns home, having just been fired from his job as assistant railyard manager after getting into an argument with his superior over an unloaded shipment. Carl, played by actor Broderick Crawford, who in real life was also known for his problems with alcohol, is considerably older than his wife, and she is at first positioned for us – reclining on the bed in the couple’s cramped house on the edge of the noisy railyard – as a louche gold-digger, twisting a hapless old fool around her little finger for her own advancement. However, the entire force of the narrative lies in its various quiet attempts to undermine this clichéd assumption. Carl, we soon come to realise, is a monster: ruled by violent fits of temper, his drunkenness and overpowering jealousy. He pleads and cajoles Vickie into meeting up with one of the railroad’s major business clients because he knows that this man, John Owens (Grandon Rhodes), once had a thing for her and that his clout with the railroad company might allow her to persuade Owens to get him his job back. We can see not only that Vickie is reluctant to go along with the idea (presumably being quite aware of her husband’s jealous tendencies), but that she is frozen with hostility at the very thought of what the plan will entail; only very late into the film do we discover that Vickie’s mother had once worked for Owens as a housekeeper when Vickie was sixteen, and that at around this time he must have forced himself upon her. Carl is perfectly willing to use this ‘relationship’ for his own ends, but when the plan actually works and Vickie does what she has to do to help her husband get back his job, he instantly becomes violently enraged by the thought of her with another man and viciously assaults her. 

Gloria Grahame’s performance in this scene is one of the elements that enable the film to suggest depths of character that go beyond the mere written word of the script. Her reaction to Carl’s violence is clearly that of someone who has been violently beaten, subjugated and hurt many times; a brittle, jagged fear is contained in her involuntary cries and in the way in which she cowers and shrinks from the anticipation of her lumbering husband’s cruel blows. When, at the end of the film, she appears to be revelling in the confirmation of her husband’s worst suspicions, not only admitting her adultery with Owens but emphasising how she also unsuccessfully tried to get him to have a relationship with her so that she could leave Carl, this taunting seems a deliberate act of suicide by someone who is fully aware of her husband’s murderous temper, knows what his reaction is likely to be, yet is on a downward spiral having just been rejected by Warren. It is also a completely rational attempt by someone trapped in a dangerous situation in a small town with a violent, unpredictable bully, to get herself out of dodge by the only means available to her. All of Vickie’s actions, far from being the schemes of an emotionless manipulator, seem more like the desperate actions of an abuse survivor who is trapped in the tightening grip of a nightmarish vice propelling her towards increasingly life-threatening predicaments: first of all she is forced to meet with another much older man for her husband’s selfish benefit, and then take part in his murder – for which she is blackmailed as a means of allowing her husband to continue to exert his violent control over her.

Given her precarious position, it would almost be understandable if Vickie had been attempting to manipulate Warren in precisely the manner she is later accused of by him when he learns the truth about everything. The two meet for the first time after Owens is murdered by Carl in the carriage of the train on which Warren is also a passenger, travelling home after completing relief work for a colleague. Carl sends Vickie out to distract Warren in the corridor by flirting with him and tempting him into the club car so that Carl might slip out of the murder carriage unseen. In fact, Vickie doesn’t really have to do much flirting since Warren is all over her from the minute he first claps eyes on her. All she is guilty of is not mentioning she’s married and that her husband is hiding in one of the adjoining carriages having just cold-bloodedly murdered a man. Of course, given her husband’s cold, naked brutality and deranged self-justification for his actions, who could really blame her for not mentioning that? Warren, who is clearly smitten despite almost immediately learning Vickie’s true identity, still covers for her later at the inquest where it is established that Owen was murdered. No one asks him to do this. Indeed, Vickie clearly looks like she’s half expecting Warren to come clean. The fact that he doesn’t is entirely on him, and immediately buts Vickie in a similarly potentially compromised position with regard to Warren as the one she is already in with her husband -- who is using the threat of releasing a letter he forced Vickie to write to Owens to set up their meeting, in order to implicate her in the crime. Warren thereafter knowingly enters into an affair with a married woman while her husband goes out and gets drunk every night, eventually losing for the second time the job Vickie had only just succeeded in getting back for him. He encourages her to leave Carl after she shows him the deep bruises and finger marks on her neck and shoulders – further proof of the life of abuse she has been silently enduring – but, of course, she can’t: not so long as her husband still has the incriminating letter in his possession. After many clandestine meetings at Carl’s tiny cluttered house (dominated by the oppressive clatter of passing trains which Vickie claims she now finds preferable to the quiet when she’s alone) or at night -- in abandoned work sheds at the railyard where Carl is no longer welcome -- Vickie comes clean about her forced involvement in the murder perpetrated by her husband, and suggests that the only way out for them both is for Warren to kill Carl.

Warren actually gets as far as stalking Carl through the deserted railyard at night and across the tracks of the railway line with a spanner in his hand, but this suggestion of murder, in reality, marks the moment at which the film appears to not only revoke its sympathies for Vickie but to recast her in more sinister terms than up to now we had been inclined to think of her. She has made the mistake of assuming that Warren’s experiences in the war would have made him more amenable to such a drastic proposal and tries to impugn his masculinity when he recoils in disgust at the idea of murder. Given her past history and experiences with men thus far, it seems understandable how she might've come to such a misconceived conclusion. Shouldn't her attitude be seen as more an indicator of psychological damage than outright calculating perfidy? If you go back and watch the film with this in mind, there’s next to no evidence of the calculating femme fatale the screenplay now reimagines her as for the benefit of the angry expository monologue Warren delivers before ditching her for good. In fact, far from deliberately drawing him into her net and only then revealing the full situation when she’s quite sure Warren will be implicated, it is he who first pursues her in order to start the affair. Then, sensing she is holding things back from him, he demands to be told the whole truth. Only after this demand does she eventually cave in and tell him what he apparently wants to know, at which point he promptly blames her for the situation that knowing this truth now places him in, and accuses her of planning the entire scenario! It is exactly the same inconstancy and self-absorbed accusatory male pride as Carl exhibited to start this whole saga off in the first place, and it means that, once again, Vickie finds herself abandoned to her fate, this time by someone it appears she almost certainly really did love, despite her stupid miscalculation.  The cynical cleverness at work in Fritz Lang’s film lies in its apparent endorsement of the male hero’s hypocritical self-regard, at least on the surface, while forcing us to confront the results of his indifference and complacency: the film ends (spoiler again!) with that hideous strangulation scene – Carl slowly squeezing the life out of Vickie in the carriage of a train that’s being driven all the while by the now happily oblivious Jeff Warren, whom we cut to immediately afterwards dreamily thinking of inviting Ellen to the works dance, the film ending at this point as though his finally freeing himself of the ‘fallen woman’ who led him so astray (and who now lies lifeless a mere few meters away) somehow constitutes the uplifting happy ending Daniele Amfitheatrof’s rousing score  seems to indicate as it swells on the soundtrack!

It’s quite possible that in attempting to mould the screenplay to fit the requirements of its producers and to accommodate the personas of its lead male performers Lang and Hayes were entirely oblivious to the way in which the film they finished up making could also be read as an indictment of the smug complacency of small-town life and of male privilege in general, portraying it as an actively dangerous threat to women who don’t fit the approved template for feminine behaviour or who fail in their efforts to conform to that template; it’s possible that they really did just see their characters as flawed, watered down versions of those originally created for the Renoir film. And it might be that Gloria Grahame brings more to the role of Vickie Buckley than was actually on the written page, and so injects a whole extra level of meaning into the film that has just been hidden within it all these years, lying dormant and waiting to be discovered when the times were more amenable to the disturbing message that that meaning now suggests. Taking the film noir out of the streets of the big city and into the quiet backwaters of a semi-industrialised small town only throws a spotlight more intently on its characters and emphasises the ethical quagmire they inhabit. Burnett Guffey’s cinematography turns the rather bleak and dusty barren documentary landscape of loading bays and engineering sheds we see by day into a shadowy sink-well of sin by night – a realist cataloguing of everyday mundanity that provides a dark venue for its lost inhabitants to lose themselves either in drink or in sex when the light drains away from the picture at the end of the working day. Robert Peterson and William Kiernan’s art direction and set decoration fully service the contradictory Langian tendency to suggest secrecy and criminality simply by looking still more intently than usual at the mundane trivialities of domestic life: the consumerist clutter of bird cages and ornaments and showroom furniture that fills up the Buckley home, but provides only a kitsch simulacrum of the suburban stability and normality that is otherwise completely absent from their broken relationship. Today, Human Desire feels more apposite than ever. Lang’s fatalistic nihilism captures something bleak and eternal about inequality between the sexes, that's built into the grain and running through the texture, here, of everyday lived experience.

Eureka Entertainment and Masters of Cinema present Human Desire in the UK for the first time on Blu-ray. The HD transfer is solid and the dual-disc presentation also features detailed background on the feature in a lengthy video presentation by film historian Tony Rayns. The package also includes a 40-page booklet with new writing on the film by Travis Crawford, critic and author Richard Combs, and writer Adam Batty, alongside rare archival imagery.                                

         

                         

ORPHÉE (1950)

Cocteau’s 1950 masterpiece Orphée interweaves poetic myth with photo-realism, historical and biographical detail with a playful invention, and early 20th-century avant-garde practice with techniques originally designed to facilitate the tropes of popular entertainment cinema. It does this so smoothly, and without apparently expending any effort on the process, that the act of watching or re-watching it is often accompanied by a sensation something akin to passing through one of the director’s own trick mercury ‘mirrors’ to enter that place that, in the film, is called the zone. This, a fanciful artistic construct of Cocteau’s poetic imagination, is a location made from, we are told, "the memories of men and the ruins of their actions": a shadowy nebulous state that is depicted evocatively by the ruins of wartime occupation whilst arguably being recreated inside the mind of every receptive viewer each time Cocteau’s alluring images pass fluidly before our eyes to mingle with the invisible detritus of our own imaginations, memories and sense of history -- sparking myriad associations and countless revelries. 

Orphée is simultaneously a simple narrative story (told as such, without pretension) and a fantastical phantasmagoria with its roots planted firmly in the traditions of French fantastic cinema from Georges Méliès to Louis Feuillade. It’s one of the first thoroughly unique popular offshoots of the cinema of the surrealists that is also entirely and unmistakably its authors own autobiographical invention. Borne on the wellsprings of Cocteau’s multidisciplinary approach to artistic endeavour, it represents a development of themes already addressed by the artist/novelist/playwright/director’s 1932 surrealist short film The Blood of the Poet (Le sang d'un poète) combined with a story reworked from his 1926 stage play based on the myth of Orpheus. It is cast with friends, lovers (and ex-lovers) and Left Bank cultural luminaries from the contemporary avant-garde art scene of the day. Although it met with bafflement at the time, the film’s subsequent influence on the cinema of the fantastic is incalculable: from Jacques Rivette to David Lynch, anyone who has ever tried at some point to similarly blur the line between forms of experimental art and popular cinema has ended up taking at least something from the toolbox assembled by Jean Cocteau in his realisation of Orphée for the screen.  

Cocteau’s authorial identity is indelibly stamped all over Orphée from its opening seconds: the film’s title cards are written in Cocteau’s flamboyantly illegible hand and decorated with distinctive, spidery pen-&-ink line-sketches; his voice narration begins proceedings with the poetic equivalent of a creator’s ‘once-upon-a-time’ prologue – in which Cocteau relates the classical Greek myth of Orpheus, the lyre-playing bard of Thrace, who, as Cocteau tells it, descends into the underworld in order to save his dead wife Eurydice, but is able to bring her back to the world of the living only on the condition that he never again look upon her face. When he breaks this rule, Eurydice disappears forever and Orpheus is torn apart by the Bacchantes. Cocteau ends this narration by refusing to specify the period in which the tale is meant to be taking place since legends are intrinsically timeless. The irony of this statement, of course, is that the scenes that follow seem designed to identify for us a very specific contemporary setting: we are thrust into the bustling immediacy of post-war Paris, as it was in the late 1940s, with the camera of Nicolas Hayer highlighting with almost neo-realist precision the drab scruffiness of the undeveloped working-class district chosen to stand in here as an alternate version of the Left Bank terrace cafes frequented by the existentialist countercultural types of the period.

Inside the Café des Poètes we find the legendary Orphée has been transformed from a mythical singer, who can charm with the melodies of his beautiful lyre-playing all who hear them, into a handsome bequiffed rock star poet who, as the film starts, has enjoyed many years of popularity and become in the process something of a national treasure who can expect to be mobbed by excited crowds of teenage girls on street corners every time he ventures outside. The brash young up-and-coming artists and poets who frequent this smoky bohemian gathering place, and whom the poet-hero Orpheus tends to look upon with some disdain, have little time for those who, like himself, are considered merely establishment figures whose time has been and gone. Instead, they idolise a young eighteen-year-old upstart called Cégeste who has a rich foreign patron, referred to mysteriously as The Princess, to oversee the publication of his work.

This set-up, established by the opening scenes inside the poets’ café, proffers a much-exaggerated version of Cocteau’s own relationship with his artistic contemporaries, but it is one that many viewers at the time might nevertheless have recognised in outline. He was never quite as unwelcome among the denizens of the Left Bank as his alter ego is portrayed to be in the film, but certainly the Catholic nature of Cocteau’s protean output across the arts had always stood he and his work apart from most of the movements and schools of artistic practice that came to prominence at various times during the course of his life. And, despite the fact that he was reviled for his homosexuality by authoritarian right-wingers and radical movements (such as the Surrealists) alike, there were still questions about the true extent of his associations with leading Nazi figures during the Vichy period that led some to look upon him with a degree of suspicion and scepticism during the post-war years of investigations by the épuration légale: the post-war ‘purification’ committees convened for the judgement of those whom it was felt had prospered under the Occupation -- although Cocteau himself was cleared of any such suggestion of collaboration.

The choice of casting can only emphasise these autobiographically relevant leanings suggested in the material: Orpheus himself is played by Cocteau’s ex-lover and muse Jean Marais, who appeared in everything Cocteau ever wrote or directed for the screen, starting with Jean Delannoy’s adaptation of Love Eternal in 1943. He shot to stardom in Cocteau’s ravishing La Belle et la Bête in 1946 and continued to star in films well into the 1990s, appearing in over one-hundred overall before his death in 1998. Meanwhile, Orpheus’s artistic rival, the young poet Cégeste, is played in the film by an artist who was also Cocteau’s current lover at that time, Édouard Dermit – a situation seemingly deliberately calculated to reflect the rivalry meant to be playing out between Orpheus and Cégeste on the screen, although by all accounts there was no awkwardness in real life between the two during the making of the film. The lead actor’s distinctive matinee idol looks do lend some symbolic weight, though, to the conceit on which the movie largely depends, which is that when the powers referred to in the ancient Greek myth -- to charm and hypnotise with musical prowess -- get translated into a modern idiom, Orpheus must become a figure who is every inch a film star of Marais’s stature. The actor combines the physical attributes of a Hollywood idol with the gesticulating, overly theatrical airs of a prima donna artist, representing an idealised, mythologised version of Cocteau himself while becoming, in the dreamlike fairy tale narrative of the film, an avatar for all the traumas and insecurities that can plague the artist in general as he/she seeks immortality in an artistic sense through the pursuit of their craft.

With the contemporary milieu of Paris as it was in the post-war years of the 1940s providing the film’s mercurial real-world backdrop, Marais’s heightened declamatory performance style signals his character’s separation from the fashionable ‘earthiness’ of the beat poet and artist rivals who we see surrounding Orpheus at the cafe, no longer impressed by the fame his elevated position in establishment society brings him. No wonder he is seduced by the strange, strategically-dressed nocturnal ruins and derelict landscapes of memory and imagination, entered and interpreted with artful trick photographic devices and backscreen projection, he encounters after following the Princess and her entourage beyond the mirror. For this is a cinematic rendering of the underworld from which all artistic endeavour supposedly originates and, in the film, is glimpsed fleetingly through radio messages relayed through the Princess’s Rolls-Royce in the style familiar from Britain’s wartime London broadcasts to the French Resistance, and which are being specifically created here to be heard and obsessed over by Orpheus.

 Interlinked with the heightened representation of the intergenerational particularities of Cocteau’s own rocky reputation within contemporary art circles, there are a related wariness and a suspicion of the role played by femininity and maternity in general -- which is viewed in the film as, at best, an annoying distraction for the sensitive creative artist. Needless to say, this is a horribly outmoded and male-centric metaphor used to stand for the temperament of the artistic character and its processes; it is true that Orpheus’s mirror image of his artistic self -- his Princess of ‘death’ -- also takes on a female form, but hers is an ultra-glamorous, sexually poeticised view of femininity. Poised and aloof yet casually commandeering, and with clear S&M undertones conveyed in both her manner and mode of dress thanks to the striking range of gowns designed by Marcel Escoffier, she is played, with alluring severity, by Spanish-French actress María Casares -- a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who became a doyen of the French stage and had at one time been the lover of the philosopher and novelist Albert Camus. Her role was originally intended for Marlene Dietrich, although in hindsight that casting might probably have been a bit too ‘on the nose’. With her movie star poise and sophisticated aristocratic elegance which, when juxtaposed with her entourage of leathered-up motorcyclist henchmen, provides the film with its most powerful female-centred afterimage, Casares’s Princess offers up a commentary on Hollywood glamour and its fetishisation of femininity into an unobtainable ‘other’that is prone to taking on the femme fatale domination role. But of course, it also recognises and rather revels in the seductiveness of that image at the same time.  

Yet, in order for Orpheus to achieve his immortality as a poet, even this all-powerful agent of another realm -- after her attempts to manipulate him with the help of her affable chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) and the (now dead) poet Cégeste have produced such devastating results -- must eventually prostrate herself before the higher (male-dominated) tribunals of the underworld, becoming a self-sacrificial martyr to Orpheus’s cause so that time can be reversed and his personal mistakes undone. In this scenario -- as in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s recent, heavily Orphée-influenced Twin Peaks: The Return, in which Laura Palmer’s death was seemingly revoked -- Eurydice’s death never happens at all, allowing for a pat Hollywood conclusion satirising the notion of the domestic reunion in a manner that seems to anticipate the ironic intent behind many of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas.

Meanwhile, Orpheus’s condescending attitude towards Eurydice throughout most of the rest of the film belies her role as a muse in the Greek myth from which this contemporary version (played by Marie Déa) takes her name. Orpheus comes back from his transformative experience in the zone between life and death utterly consumed by the pursuit of his poetic muse and obsessed with the Princess (who is, remember, his own death – so his obsession is really an obsession with himself). Throughout this section, he is portrayed as aggressively indifferent to the interest or concerns of his partner, yet his callousness is often used to bring light comedy and farce to the film, even when Eurydice is dying from complications to a pregnancy Orpheus has been far too wrapped up in himself to even acknowledge. When he is granted her safe return to the world of the living, even this becomes a tiresome inconvenience for the flustered poet and is played for comedic farce. "Women love complications!" he sighs. The riotous youths who are prone to congregating at Orpheus’s front gate in protest at his supposed plagiarisation of the work of the disappeared poet Cégeste are led by a rabble-rousing League of Women founder called Aglaonice (played by la Muse de l'existentialisme herself Juliette Gréco, a chanteuse known to many of the writers and artists working in the real Saint-Germain-des-Prés at the time). The name Aglaonice is that of a female astronomer from Greek myth who is also associated with sorcery for her power to supposedly make the moon disappear by predicting eclipses. Here she becomes the leader of Orpheus’s enemies because of her almost Sapphic powers of influence over Eurydice and the callow but violent opposition groups that have started to congregate around Cégeste’s café contemporaries.

 But, despite the air of paranoid misogyny that hangs around the form that Cocteau’s mythic modern-day fairy tale takes on, its inherent playfulness and reluctance to take itself too seriously saves it from looking like a completely intolerable relic of the past because of its treatment of its female characters. With his entertaining performance, Marais highlights the vanity, stubbornness and the intractable nature of Orpheus’s self-obsession, and we do feel our sympathy extending outwards to Eurydice and even, in the end, The Princess, for having to put up with him. The film’s success lies in Cocteau’s alchemical ability to convert his alluring mixture of the uncanny and the magical created through in-camera effects, into effective visual metaphors that re-contextualise ideas that have their origination at the very beginnings of western traditions of storytelling. The film probably has more of an appeal today than it did at the time of its release, especially now it has been released from the prison of contemporary (ir)relevance that so often cripples art made for eternity.

This newly restored 2K BFI Blu-ray release presents perhaps the crispest, best-looking transfer of the film yet produced for the home market and comes with a treasure trove of interesting extra features headed up by another outing for Roland-François Lack’s commentary, which was originally recorded for the BFI DVD release many moons ago. A biographical and artistic overview of Cocteau’s career is provided in a 35-minute interview with Pierre Bergé and Dominque Marny, former and current presidents of the Jean Cocteau Committee. The actor and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Mocky reminisces with the film historian Eric Le Roy about working on Orphée, and how the experience has influenced his subsequent career, in a 16-minute piece. In Jean Cocteau and his Tricks – a 14-minute featurette – assistant director Claude Pinoteau discusses the trick photography and effects Cocteau used during the course of the film.

The above features all appeared on the original 2008 DVD release, but also shot especially for this upgrade, there is a 15-minute spot with director John Maybury called The Queer Family Tree, where he talks about the film’s influence on his own films and on gay cinema in general. Finally, Cocteau’s 1952 16mm short film (38 minutes) La villa Santo Sospir -- ostensibly made in order to show off the frescos he created for his friend and patron Francine Weisweiller’s idyllic retreat on the French coast (and which was later used as a location in the 1960 film The Testament of Orpheus) -- is also presented and ends up serving as another showcase for the artist's love of trick photography.

Trailers and stills galleries and an illustrated booklet of thoughtful, wide-ranging essays by Ginette Vincendeau, Deborah Allison and William Fowler cement the deal. The booklet also includes Francis Koval’s 1950 interview with Cocteau for Sight and Sound and a contemporary review by Gaven Lambert, also from S&S. Finally, the artist and filmmaker Sarah Wood offers her reflections on the La villa Santo Sospir short as a final accompaniment to this beautiful rendering of a French classic.    

CRUCIBLE OF THE VAMPIRE (2019)

Now available in the UK on the Screenbound label, Crucible Of The Vampire is director/writer/editor Iain Ross-McNamee’s second full-length feature. It cleverly utilises the topography of a bucolic Shropshire landscape as well as the history behind the manor house used as the film’s primary shooting location, in order to evoke beautifully the golden era of British horror. But the film is a transparently low budget affair, so brilliantly steeped in a mix of the early‘70s folk horror tropes of Tigon British and the racy lesbian vampire action that writer Tudor Gates made a cornerstone of Hammer Films’ Karnstein Trilogy  -- The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Twins of Evil (1972) -- during the same period, that it really is a mystery why Ross-McNamee also allows proceedings to deteriorate, towards the end, into a mire of cheapo CGI digital effects and choreographed fight scenes. Such tactics quickly ruin the genteel air of old school charm that defines the diffident sort of British exploitation it was presumably intending to mimic the tone of in the earlier portions of the picture, only to replace it with a crude low budget aesthetic that’s a dime-a-dozen everywhere else you look in indie horror circles. Nevertheless, before we reach that final act when it goes slightly off the rails, there’s plenty else here for aficionados of 1970s Brit horror to recognise and doubtless appreciate.

The story itself will seem instantly familiar, being entirely built from tropes and narrative strands that appear countless times throughout the genre and are central to many of David McGillivray’s screenplays for British horror movie directors such as Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren. Ross-McNamee and his two co-writers, Darren Lake and John Wolskel, do a particularly convincing job in the first half of the movie of channelling their interest in Hammer’s ‘70s vampire output and the ‘Big Three’ associated with the Folk Horror subgenre, into what essentially becomes a re-working of Warren’s Satan’s Slave, from 1976 -- with witchcraft, necromancy, a dysfunctional family with a dodgy history and an attractive innocent who is led unsuspectingly into a carefully prepared trap set by devilish forces. This gets combined with an awareness of the methods of construction of supernatural tales by the likes of M.R James and Arthur Machen, which are often uncanny historical palimpsests that reveal their concealed layers through an exploration of architectural and landscape history.  

The film begins in a traditional fashion for this genre, in this case with a black-and-white 1649 prologue in which John Stearne, the main associate of the real-life Civil War-era Witchfinder Mathew Hopkins, hangs an old peasant called Ezekiel Fletcher (played by Brian Croucher of Blake’s 7 fame) from an Oak tree in the Shropshire woodland for the crime of necromancy. His next act is to break into two pieces the cauldron suspected of being used by Ezekiel for his sorcery. Ezekiel’s dead daughter had been seen roaming Jacob’s Wood at night, which is more than enough reason for finding the old boy guilty on the spot without further examination of the issue. Three-hundred-and-fifty years later, though, and one half of what has subsequently become known as the Stearne Cauldron now rests in the University Museum of a young assistant curator called Isabelle (Katie Goldfinch). Conscious that the owners might be attempting to scam the university to pay for repairs, her supervisor sends her to a Shropshire manor house being renovated by a family who claims to have uncovered the other half of the cauldron in their basement while preparing to lay a new gas pipe. It is Isabelle’s job to examine the artefact and decide whether or not the claim is genuine.

Karl (Larry Rew), the owner of the house, tells Isabelle about the history to the building, which was originally built by secret Catholics during the reign of James I, then adapted and expanded during the Victorian era. When he mentions in passing how the Neo-Jacobian pile was formerly a Girls’ School, it sounds like a knowing line included in the script with the intention of it being picked up on by viewers as an obvious reference to Hammer’s Lust For A Vampire from 1971. In fact, a little light research into manor houses in the Shropshire area unearthed the film’s shooting location to be one Acton Reynald Hall: ‘a Victorian mansion incorporating parts of a building dating from early to mid-17th Century’. The building was the home of the Corbett family for generations; but they first moved there in 1644, after their former home became a Royalist garrison during the English Civil War and was destroyed by Cromwell’s soldiery. It was expanded on in the early 19th century by Shropshire architect J.H. Haycock, when the entire village of Acton Reynard, along with several farms, were demolished to make way for the surrounding park. In 1919, though, the building actually was turned into a Girls’ School, and remained one up until 1995! One of the nice things about Iain Ross-McNamee’s film is how it manages to incorporate little bits of the local history of the area into its B movie plot about sorcery, witches and vampirism. At one point Isabelle finds a diary written by a former owner of the house during the Victorian era, which prompts a flashback in the style of M.R. James, where we find out how the half of the Stearne cauldron now buried in the basement was discovered. Jeremiah Cain (Charles O’Neill) describes being led by an unearthly melody floating on the wind in the woods, to the site of the hanging of Ezekiel Fletcher, seen in the 1649 prologue.  It also leads him to the cauldron, which he then takes back to the manor, only to unleash a ghostly presence in the form of a pale, ghostly woman in a black dress who comes to be known as the Dark Lady.

By this point, Isabelle has also been experiencing similar visions of a scary ghostly woman in the night. And there are also countless other odd episodes to deal with involving the, frankly, strange inhabitants who are Isabelle’s hosts up at the mansion: Scarlet (Florence Cady), the rebellious daughter of Karl and his foreign wife Evelyn (Babette Barat), steals Isabelle’s phone and even some of her underwear. And Evelyn insists on providing Isabelle with mysterious bedtime drinks and then hanging about to make quite sure she drains the glass before leaving. These mysterious ‘tonics’ seem to prompt erotic dreams (or are they dreams?) involving white horses and the ghostly pale woman. Even a trip to the local pub results in Isabelle meeting the gardener who works on the estate (played by Neil Morrissey) who then tells her about the terrible fate of his predecessor. The former gardener’s seemingly hostile son follows her back to the mansion along a moonlit path after she leaves the pub that night (providing an opportunity for some very Hammer-like day-for-night photography) issuing incoherent warnings about what might happen to her if she stays at the mansion any longer. Karl himself also becomes more suspect, refusing to allow Isabelle to remove the cauldron from its present site in the manor’s basement and demanding that she arrange to have the museum’s half of the artefact brought out instead to Shropshire in order to find out whether or not they fit together. 

When Isabelle reveals to a barmaid at the local pub that she has just broken up with her boyfriend because he couldn’t accept her religiously derived belief that there should be no sex before marriage, it doesn’t take a genius of a viewer to figure out that Isabelle’s virginal state might have also had some ulterior Wicker Man-style role to play in her being selected to come out to the manor house in the first place. The latter thought is made rather more explicit by the exceedingly forward behaviour exhibited by Scarlet who, not content with confronting Isabelle with the knowledge that she is attempting to seduce her while wearing Isabelle’s own purloined underwear, ends up exploiting a particularly disturbing encounter Isabelle has with the Dark Lady in order to successfully initiate her into the pleasures of Sapphic love!

The plot elements and the sometimes theatrically antiquated performance styles of some of the cast members make it quite plain that Hammer’s trio of films that were very loosely based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla are the main models for the narrative, and for the lightly eroticised style of the movie. The problem with any attempt to recreate this bygone era in the present day is that actors of the personality and stature of Peter Cushing and Ingrid Pitt are not around anymore to do what they so often were able to do for Hammer Films: bring a degree of prestige to the productions they worked on that elevated those films beyond their nominal worth. For instance, the role of head of household Karl is played perfectly convincingly by the performer tasked with the job here, but you can’t help noticing that his role is precisely the kind that would have at one time been played by someone like John Carson if this were a real Hammer film -- and once you see that, it immediately draws your attention to the fact that the actor taking his place can never be an adequate substitute. 

That being said, Florence Cady does make a seductive might-be-a-lesbian/might-be-a-vampire antagonist; and newcomer (and Brie Larson-look-alike) Kate Goldfinch is a suitably engaging lead, although she inevitably struggles with the inconsistency of character that is demanded of her by the script when she goes from being a naïve, out-of-her-depth academic who falls for the same ‘drugged drink’ trick twice in close succession, to an ‘arse-kicking’ superwoman, slashing throats and crushing heads with seemingly no problem whatsoever, who manages to take out a coven-full of robed cult members about to drain her of her virgin’s blood so that they can fully restore their vampire-witch queen to her full glory. Neil Morrissey receives top billing on the cover of the DVD, but in truth turns up for only a handful of scenes, mainly concerned with delivering exposition. He is also given a scene at the climax of the movie just to make it worthwhile his turning up presumably -- although his role in the events depicted is, to be honest, rather minimal. In his director and editor roles Iain Ross-McNamee makes evocative use of the exterior and interiors of Action Raynard Hall to deliver many atmospheric moments in the build-up to the easily predicted climactic reveal; and a dream-like sequence that takes place in total silence and in slow motion is directed (probably unintentionally) like an ethereal Jesus Franco fever dream -- although there’s nothing in the film that's anywhere near as pervy as what ol’ Jess would have presented us with, I’m sure.

But if you can ignore the terrible digital FX, one or two weak performances and a resolution that seems to aim for charged ambiguity but just ends up feeling slightly unsatisfactory instead, there’s still an overall old-school feel about Crucible of the Vampire that is undoubtedly attractive, and will please many fans of the classics of 1970s British horror. It does, in the end, draw many strands of influence together in a way that feels utterly natural and convincing. It’s just a shame the pay-off seems rather rote, and plays by the rules of a more modern breed of horror rather than having the courage to stick with the original low-key style it began with. Screenbound Entertainment has just released the film on dual format Blu-ray/DVD and on digital platforms after it garnered many festival plaudits and awards, so this is a film that will definitely be of interest to many, despite its flaws.