THE SIXTH SENSE @ 35

Recovering from a patient's attempt on his life, psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe takes on the case of a troubled young boy who claims to see ghosts. They're an odd match: the boy Cole is angering his single mother as she struggles to keep things going, the man is dealing with the implosion of his marriage, feeling increasingly powerless to reverse the motion. At least he can help the boy back to reality with treatment and that might benefit his troubled sense of self. But what if the ghosts were real? And if they are, what do they want with Cole?

M. Night Shyamalan's international breakthrough was his third feature but it came loaded with an M.O. that continues to serve him in his decades long career. With a zest for the weird tale, Shyamalan became famous for his stories' twists. A South Park episode that involved the Pentagon consulting Hollywood figures to help them with terrorists had Michael Bay offering special effects sequences and M. Night Shyamalan coming up with twists (they went with Mel Gibson; it's a hilarious episode). When you're "honoured" by South Park in the early '00s, you've pretty much made it. Then, by the time he got to Lady in the Water and The Happening the public who'd flocked to his movies were decreasingly impressed with what was feeling too much like formula. At this point, though, the engine was only getting started and felt accomplished and confident.

Shyamalan shoots his hometown Philadelphia with what feels like a nostalgic care. Overcast days bring out the colours against the blue grey of the older buildings and leafy streets. Interiors of schools and grander homes are all wood panelling and spiral staircases. This setting combines both the present of the story with the past of memory in concordance with the developing closeness of Malcolm and Cole. The man first sees the child from afar, across a street, leaving his house on his way somewhere and it's Malcolm's interception that begins their story, almost as though the man is meeting himself as a child. This adds depth to what is a fairly stretched simple story as it gives each of the paired characters a motive of discovery.

The much celebrated Haley Joel Osment as Cole keeps his side of the partnership solid, bearing a burden that might only get heavier as he grows older. His evident intelligence is clear when, in pushing the experience, he confronts what might well be fatal fear. His shouldering of the unworldly has rendered him worldly and the sophisticated kid we eventually see has shed his fear with honours.

Bruce Willis, having gone from the quirky Moonlighting tv show and into the realm of the action hero quite abruptly, had sought throughout the '90s roles that could expand his public image. He went back to quirk in Pulp Fiction but in Twelve Monkeys he spent most of his screentime drooling and sedated. There were more of these but because his biggest draws were the Die Hards and Fifth Elements he was still seen as a quipping G.I. Joe figurine. The reserve and intellect he brought to Malcolm whose actions played only in his head and whose potency seemed deactivated when faced with his wife's suitors rendered him a surprise to audiences which earned the same kind of approval as Osment. It's a sober but nuanced performance.

This wasn't Toni Collette's debut in American movies but the notices it drew from critics ensured it wouldn't be her last. Her beleaguered mother deals tough love with a bitten lip and her youthful beauty has been worn to hardness. When her breaking moment arrives her performance is delivered with a restraint that can give its witnesses the strain of the ugly cry face, as though we're downloading it. It doesn't flash into the explosiveness of her maternal role in Hereditary but shouldn't; it's one of those moments where you as audience feel prepared to be wrought by experts.

This tale of confrontation and reconciliation remains more than watchable with a confidence of conviction palpable in every scene. Shyamalan handles jump scares as effortlessly as suspense setups (the room at the top of the stairs is a terrifying moment but it's entirely suggestion). The confidence is largely due here  to Shyamalan's own in pressing ahead with a story of  industrial strength emotional pain in a sombre supernatural setting, offering an action hero as a melancholy figure and banking on a child actor to carry so much. 

I had this film spoiled for me in one of the groups on Usenet (it was in the title, in caps, of a post, so there was no avoiding it. For a movie that was sold as a big twist fest that should have been fatal. I went to see it with a friend and didn't spoil it for him. He was impressed with the machinery of the revelation. I chose to watch scenes alternating between knowing what I knew and letting them flow over untainted. It worked differently from intention but it still worked. And that's the point, really: if you're human story is strong enough and delivered well enough you should find yourself caring that you know someone on screen is going to be unmasked as a secret real estate agent from the planet Zingo. 

Shyamalan has returned from his critical wilderness with creditable fare like Old or The Knock at the Cabin. If he still indulges his twist endings he also brings solid filmmaking to the table. My gripes with his work overall is that he has also indulged tendencies toward magical plot hole fillers like in Signs (most people go on about the contradiction in the alien invasion but I can't stand the final moments and the completely uncritical acceptance of the reason given). When he keeps the twist simple and its delivery subtle he works (there's a good one in The Visit). If I prefer Unbreakable to this among his early movies it's only because the plot is more engaging but seeing this again was a pleasure, a visit from an old friend with whom you can resume a decades old conversation.

Viewing notes: I watched this on Disney + in 4k which was a delight but it has been available in a range of versions since it was new. 

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT @ 60

The Beatles as themselves go to London to record a tv appearance. Oh, and Paul's troublemaking grandfather is along for the ride as well as the band's manager Norm and his sidekick Shake, a paranoid tv director and a great legion-headed monster of fangirls. Then, they leave again. And that's it except that this film, meant to be a kind of feature length commercial to keep things going before the inevitable commercial demise of some fly by night beat group, was made with such skill and energy that it became the way movies about pop music would be made in perpetuity.

Prior to it was a mixed bag of showcases (performance clips stitched together with a basic plot) and attempts to expand the stars' horizons by getting them to act in full strength narratives. But for every solid Jailhouse Rock or Expresso Bongo (a title that makes me wince just to type, it's like hearing someone say excape) there were countless soggy promo jaunts or cinematic outings built around pretty bipedal voids. This might have been one of those. There are good reasons why it wasn't.

First, Dick Lester, American ex-pat who had made short films with the Goons comedy troupe, had lifted one of those showcase scripts to comedic heights in It's Trad Dad. Instead of having to shoehorn his stars into a PR-written screenplay, he worked with Alun Owen's genuinely funny script. Owen had spent time with the band, picking up character tips and the kind of interpersonal wit that they would soon typify them throughout the world. Oh, that's the other thing: Rather than Cliff (all respect) Lester had The Beatles.

The Beatles had just spent a year that took them from a modestly charting northern English outfit to the biggest band in Europe. The term Beatlemania was coined to cope with the phenomenon of the mass of screaming young women who seemed to burst from the plumbing like stormwater whenever the band appeared in public. The film production company United Artists were chiefly interested in sales of the accompanying soundtrack and paid little mind to the quality of what amounted to them as an ad. Between pre-production and production, though, The Beatles landed in New York, went for a tiny live tour and appeared on salient tv shows that amounted to them becoming a multi-megaton culture bomb and, in a few weeks, rendered them the biggest act of any kind on the face of the Earth. So, the movie was going to hit, whatever it was, but that it was this movie that has kept it respected across decades.

After a title sequence deals with the mania like it's an epic scaled male toss fantasy, the band get on the train for one of the most enjoyably blocked, written and performed opening sequences of its time. Their characters are established, the subplot of Paul's grandfather is introduced and a sequence involving the stuffy older generation is played out with an expansion which heralds the departure this outing is making from more standard pop movie fare. From mugging in the carriage window at the posh banker to suddenly appearing outside the train, banging on the window and calling: "hey mister, can we have our ball back?" If it looked like a light faux documentary before that it wouldn't from that point. From the solo spots to the breakout in the sports field to the police chases this is going to be a promo exercise and a pisstake all at once.

That's where The Beatles themselves come in. While the screenplay was written and ready before the explosive American tour, the footage coming back from it, the sharply funny press conferences and the Maysles' documentary of it with its own train scene that could have been a first draft for the fictional one, informed this film. The guys were young, energetic, ambitious and naturally funny. The press party scene is reality pushed very little and the laddish larking on the train, in anything, constrained by the script. While the tv performances in the movie are mimed to records, the live performances on Ed Sullivan were tightly delivered. The movie felt, suspended disbelief aside, real. Even the production constraint of using black and white helped as it kept the look and feel closer to the Billy Liars or Kind of Lovings of the British new wave than the bright technicolour of the Cliff Richard movies which, by comparison, looked like showbiz.

The solo spots work away from this, though, putting each one into a character signifying situation. John has a small but funny mini comedy of errors with a gossiping tv staffer. Ringo goes paradin' around London and shows some promise as a film actor. My favourite is George walking into the marketing office and dealing with the hyped up ideas man, trading buzzword proposals with flat Scouse knockbacks. Paul's was dropped from the edit as it dragged the pace. The film was destroyed but you can still read the scripted scene with a Google search. None of the band individually is given lines longer than about ten words. The object was not to make Richard Burtons of them but to sell the "naturalism": if this is showbiz let's make showbiz more interesting, let's make it at least feel real.

Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's troublemaking grandfather is perfect casting. The running gag about him being so clean is in direct reference to his iconic tv role as old man Steptoe who was always the "dirty old man". If The Beatles are knockabout and larky, he is constantly undermining, an agent of chaos. Oddly enough, for a film about youthful freedom, it's his unredeemed chancing and undermining that expresses most of that sense of unbridled action. The managerial team of Norm and Shake are possibly the least convincing as comic figures with Norman Rossington's frustrations at failing to control John feeling like they come from an old army life comedy. John Junkin as Shake is more successful, being given some of the weirder side moments and lines like wincing as George shaves his reflection in the bathroom mirror, which are more in keeping with the contemporary comic feel. Beatles movie stalwart Victor Spinetti's paranoid tv director feels a little too contrived over the decades but the contrast between his high strung superiority and the big, fluffy Dr Seuss jumper he's wearing does a lot of the talking.

And then there's the music. Yes it's mimed (but impressively so, you can easily follow chord changes on fretboards and drumming as they do it) but it sounds better for all that. The tv live set is compacted (with more than a few crossfades between songs. The point of going through all of it is really to show the bargain: you scream for it, we'll play it. The mini Beatlemania in the next to last scene, after all the fun chases and banter and satire and jibes is what sold the most tickets as the girls paid to see people identical to themselves screaming out the explosive thrill of being young and electric and, however briefly, powerful. (Incidentally, if you look at the audience here you'll also note how multi-racial it is. It's not presented as a big point but it wouldn't look like that if they'd made this in America.) This is the film's climax in more than one sense and it's compelling. We're not witnessing idolatry so much as mass assertion and it's not on stage but in front of it. Whatever reasons they gave for creating their music this was, at this time, the number one, the demographic which, in other circumstances they would need to pursue was rushing at them as a tsunami of adoration, such that I will never be able to fully imagine.

Finally, for all its contrivances, A Hard Day's Night works now the way the things it most immediately influenced don't. Apart from the song scenes, any given episode of The Monkees is a dragging watch. I'll give John Boorman's Catch Us if You Can a point for bearing some serious social commentary (with the Dave Clark Five!) but it still doesn't reach these heights. For me, it's the kind of contrived naturalism that the members of the biggest band in the world affected when witnesses were about. Whether in their matching suits or Emperor's New Psychedelic Threads, The Beatles playing up to cameras, trading wordplay with journalists or clowning felt like them. It meant that there was no question of selling out as they were already unassailable. That meant that anyone who tried to use the formula came a cropper or produced something that looked like a respectful copy which was against the point. Hard Day's Night still works because, as preposterous as this sounds, it feels real.

Viewing notes: I watched the splendid Criterion 4K of this but it can be seen for free on Brollie and SBS on Demand.

THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON @ 70

A palaeontologist finds a bizarre claw like fossil while at a dig along the Amazon. Taking it to colleagues in the US, he returns with a team of experts, led by the qualified but corrupted by managerialism and greed boss of the institution. At first finding nothing, the team move operations further along, to a lagoon off the main flow and soon attract the attention of one of the owner of the claw's descendants. When the creature's stalking gets reversed all that managerial go and funding greed activate and soon it's a battle of wills to turn the gill man into a take home assignment. Who will win? 

The thing that might clue you into where this monster movie stands ethically happens right at the start. In a prologue about the formation of the universe there is an initial mention of a god creating the universe. That quote from Genesis is the last you'll hear of it. The narration goes on to deliver a superficial but accurate account of speciation. An early scene at a diving platform involves a female scientist telling the palaeontologist about the dangers of the bends. There are mentions of tectonic plate movement and discussions on the rights and wrongs of hauling a strange animal out of its habitat and others on whether that should be dead or alive. The first uttered statement of the film might have mentioned a god but, as Hamlet almost said, the rest is science.

And the science is not mad. The worst character here is Mark the boss who gets and goes mad with reputational lust and is driven to present the monster to the world and be nearly blinded in glory. The more restrained David is ready to consider the bigger picture and reach beyond his paranoid decade right into our own with his concerns about the ecosystem. As clunky as the dialogue can get and as overwrought the blocking, this creature feature sci-fi horror keeps to what it knows. 

Unfortunately, after that initial scene in which Kay explains the relationship between divers and water pressure, she doesn't get much more to do except sound off like a smoke alarm whenever the scaly danger appears. She does, however, get one of the most celebrated setpieces in all mid century genre when she goes for a dip in the lagoon and unwittingly performs a water ballet with out creature who has taken an instant shine to her. This is a breathtakingly beautiful sequence. A subsequent viewing will add the detail that the matching of water tank and location exterior is all but seamless.

One good reason for that is that the film was originally shot in 3D and projected to a very quirky cool set of audiences sporting sunglasses with different coloured lenses. I have never seen this presentation though I'm told that stereoscopic screenings have appeared in my lifetime. I will not miss the next one that I can get to. And there's something about that that should impress you. While you can pick out some moments filmed to capitalise on the 3D, before you know that it won't occur to you. Contrast almost every other 3D film you've seen or heard of in which things are meant to poke through the screen or lunge at the audience (Friday the 13th Part Three is a good example), flaunting the technology. The underwater scenes in this film are at base level dreamy and beautiful.

Another reason to give this oldie a good spin is the creature costume. Designed by the stylishly skilled Millicent Patrick the one-piece outfit is a marvel that neither creases with movement nor stretches like rubber. Patrick was until recently swept aside in the credits for the design in favour of Bud Westmore who led the makeup team and commissioned the practical creation of the suits (one for land and one for water). Not only is the costume pretty convincing even now (in 4K!) but the details work, the gills around the head breathe in a way that looks natural rather than mechanical. Until practical effects improved in the following decades and a handle was found on the CGI, this was the gold standard in monster costumes. It even allows emotion: a moment that always strikes me is the one when the creature scales the hull of the boat and angrily tears a piece of the structure off. The actor who did that, in those few seconds, kept the monster from being a thing with an immovable face.

There's the other thing. While the creature's wrath is meant to menace the sense that the expedition has invaded his home is palpable from the off. His wrath at their incursion and the effects of their self defence is vengeful but the threat of this, wherever it has originated, still makes him a figure of terror. A measure he resorts to in order to sabotage their progress is genuinely disturbing (no spoilers) when thought about.

This is one of the roundest of all the Universal monster movies, adding compassion to the intended terror. So, they lifted the creature's infatuation with the beautiful Julia Adams as Kay straight from King Kong but this was, after all, intended to sell tickets and popcorn first. Yes, the tongue trumpet use (blaaaaaare!) is overcooked, some of the performances uneven, and if the locals aren't quite iggrant natives they're not quite autonomous citizens, either. However, rather than have things to say to our time (which we should already know) it's both wondrous and shaming to see that such issues were concerns three score and ten years ago. Find it. See it.

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY @ 60

It's the eve of a disarmament deal between the US and the USSR and Colonel Casey (aka Jiggs) is noticing strange things happening around him. His boss, General Scott, seems to be gearing up for a profile lift and it's working. He's attracted the support of conservative media figures. Even the protestors outside the White House have reduced their conflict point to support of either President Lyman or the General. Jiggs, loyal to the General for many years, is getting worried about a possibly too secret communications section and some cryptic wires passing between the chiefs of staff that appear to be about betting on horses but look suspiciously like code. Nothing is quite adding up to normal so, as General Scott makes a fiery speech against the disarmament talks, Jiggs goes straight to the President and reports his suspicions. Things are pointing to a military coup. A few crucial details gets him taken seriously and he is asked to report from the belly of the beast.

For political thrillers, this one really couldn't have a better pedigree. John Manchurian Candidate Frankenheimer was slated to direct Rod Twilight Zone Serling's adaptation of the Cold War thriller of the same title and the cast was stellar. With the likes of Frederick March as the President, Martin Balsam as his adviser, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas at full strength as the General and Jiggs respectively, as well as a poignant turn by Ava Gardner as a cast off Washington wife, things are set to work. And work they do.

Frankenheimer's challenge was to render this wall to wall talkfest into a compelling thriller. In doing so, he extended the work of his solid classic The Manchurian Candidate to add a box of tropes for political thrillers down to now. Sudden disappearances in public places, deep focus dialogues, guerrilla filmmaking at buildings and even a warship to break open some veracity, as well as a few sneakily inserted predictive technologies like the video conferencing in one scene (it's subtle about it but the story is set several years into the future, in 1970, easily missed today).

Burt Lancaster brings a layered character to the General. He is boomingly self-entitled as a political actor but observes the military code of allowing his medal salad on his uniform to tell his story without embellishment. He seems more ashamed at the potential that his incriminating letters to his ex might embarrass him through their intimacy than with any revelation of state secrets or illicit ambitions. In his exchanges with Jiggs, especially once his awareness of the betrayal at hand is clear, he travels from a whispered confidence to a barely controlled contempt, the stiffness of his posture containing thunder.

Kirk Douglas plays Jiggs as a career officer who is watching as the tide turns, doesn't like it but must accept it. For all the respect he has for Scott he knows Scott's tilt at politics will see him falling through the void if successful. He conceals his disdain for the world of politics as he understands that it is necessary if the tenets of his beliefs (like the Constitution) are to be maintained. 

Both Lancaster and Douglas were action heroes and both were already getting through a decade in which the principles of the self-justifying hero could no longer apply. They adapted into roles like The Swimmer and The Arrangement which featured their demographic laid bare. Their efforts didn't and couldn't shut down toxic masculinity (which can still claim biology as its teacher, pleasantly or not) but they could do turns like this which suggest that while the world of barking machos might reappear after other options prove effective, there will always be a need to grab the muzzles and regroup, pause for a breath and a good look around, and walk gently back into humanity. Movies like this can help us remember that.

I hired Seven Days in May through Prime Video but it should be available on comparable sources.

THE PARALLAX VIEW @ 50

A political assassination. A committee who look like angels of death declare it to be free of conspiracy. We already know better, having seen the professional looking choreography in the opening scene. Three years later, Lee Carter, journalist and witness to the crime visits fellow reporter Joe Frady (also at the assassination) in fear for her life. She shows Frady the list of high profile attendees who have since met violent deaths. Frady dismisses it and sends her on her way. He's looking at her corpse on a slab in the morgue the next day. Begging an advance from his long suffering editor, he goes to a small town in pursuit of another figure under threat, finds him gone. A spoilable scene later and Frady is back on the road with a bundle of documents from an organisation that seems to be recruiting fall guys for political and industrial assassinations. The only way to get into this one is to ... get into it. It's going to be a dark trek.

Alan J. Pakula's paranoia thriller came just after Watergate and the assassinations of the '60s in the U.S. What might have otherwise come across as a tale of political sci-fi now appeared a plausible  scenario. As with his previous Klute, Pakula keeps the histrionics at arm's length and allows the horror of the situation to develop with a workaday pallet and performances that are stronger for their underplaying. By this, he created a genuinely unnerving image of an organisation for hire in quiet control of the government.

This needs good casting if it is to rise above the kind of adolescent conspiracy thinking it suggests and the film's coup was to put Warren Beatty at its centre. Beatty was not only very hot property by the early '70s as the hunque de jour of Hollywood, he was politically active and leaned left: easy on the eye and believable in the field. The star power and the checkout tabloid appeal could keep the most politically apathetic voter rivetted to the story. Beatty even got the character's profession changed from cop to reporter, however grimy the glamour upgrade might have been, it was a better fit. To his credit, Beatty does play this earnestly to the extent that the deeper he gets the more he resembles his cover story characters. The self-isolation he is heading for is clear midpoint and he begins shedding glamour by the scene.

This film is famous for the psyche test scene. Frady sends the creepy questionnaire into the Parallax Corporation and is summoned to their impressive space in a downtown office where he enters a viewing room with a single chair. There are sensors on the arms. A gentle male voice instructs him to sit, keep his hands on the sensors and watch the show. The lights go down and then we see what he is seeing. To call it a slideshow is to under sell it. The Parallax View psyche test is a nightmare of emotional coercion. A series of stills plays out with intertitles suggesting themes like love, mother, me, home, enemy and so on. This is played over a score that goes from the most wholesome country rock imaginable. But this starts changing, the titles and images stop matching, often taking on the opposite of their first iterations. A famous shot of a mother and son goes from the intended warmth to a disturbing smirk at a child's torment. The enemy might start with images of Hitler or Castro but it comes back as a superhero or a group of affectionate friends. If you had thought the written test was disturbing this show will have you white knuckled.

I have encountered a theory that Parallax are not looking for high emotion in the test results but the impassivity of  the truly dangerous. This is pretty scary and might still work but, considering the opening scenes of assassination and the chase of the perpetrator, the recruitment program might well have a built-in disposal system.

I mentioned the score just then and need to address it. Michael Small's music for The Parallax View is extraordinary. Two contrary motifs weave into each other. The first uses the major thirds and drops to a fourth of military or patriotic music like the bugle tune Taps or The Last Post. The second is a series of dissonant tight intervals played high on a piano keyboard. They have the troubling, unresolved feel of mystery movies. Small introduces both at once in the opening shot of the Congressional committee as the camera tracks closer to them. A pedal note or drone, if you will, holds as the second motif plinks above it. As the leader of the committee reads the final statement, French horns quietly begin the first motif but with a more sinister harmony in the lower strings. The two are woven effortlessly, patriotism and intrigue until, by the time the credits have run they feel like one piece of music. The remainder of the score allows for expansion but retains its character. At one moment the strings playing the dissonant motif threaten to turn into a hoedown but it's just a very brief signalling moment. At another, a sombre scene is filled with the patriotic motif where another composer of this era would have put something more jarring. By keeping in close touch with his material, Small maintains integrity with a film score many have sought to evoke but few come close. Small never bettered it.

As he had done with intrigue in Klute, Pakula brought the political thriller into the new decade and did so at a point where it's really only the differing technology that distinguishes it from recent cinema. John Frankenheimer's earlier Manchurian Candidate covered similar territory but it responded to paranoia in the system. The Parallax View plugs into the community's unease at finding itself at a time when the best were murdered and the worst celebrated while the crooked presided and a bad war seemed to go on forever. Parallax was a service and the question of who was using it remains unanswered. 

While we see the intimidating office complexes and feel our flesh creep at the recruiter Younger gently croon reassurance to his potentially explosive candidate, and the wowing deep focus shots of the finale, we also move through the look and feel of the everyday. Coppola had done this for organised crime with the Godfather, Friedkin for horror in The Exorcist, and Scorsese with Mean Streets, Sidney Lumet would manage it for broadcasting in Network despite a wildly over-literate screenplay. The decade by 1974 had already proved this approach appealed to a community who hungered for the truth of an experience at the cinema. This one gave them the heebie jeebies. It's still scary.

Viewing notes: I watched my Criterion blu-ray of this but the local release on Imprint is more affordable (and might well be the same transfer) with more extras.

FAIL SAFE @ 60

General Black wakes from another dream of bullfighters. He rises and prepares himself for a conference, tending to his sleeping children and having a conversation with his wife that goes from sleepy small talk to a serious plea for him to retire from military service. The conference stars an academic whose anti-communist fervour has led him to embrace the notion of a contained nuclear war. Meanwhile, some corporate visitors to a monitoring facility witness a near thing when a struggling airliner is temporarily misidentified as a Soviet weapon. Then, a few mishaps and perhaps one deliberate moment of international sabotage later, it's on and it's real. Bombers are sent to Moscow. They are beyond recall. If they can't be stopped, it's war, the kind of war that only needs a day or two to wipe out the only known life in the universe.

Fail Safe, at this distance, is often assumed to be the grim older brother of Dr Strangelove. However, this is down to the times. Cold War tensions were at frightening levels in the early '60s and the two novels that served as the source for the two films might have treated the subject differently but both played to the fear of annihilation. The better known Kubrick film is regarded as a satire classic. Fail Safe is better known as a title than a whole film and that's a pity as the pair are worth companionship in your cinematic consciousness. I won't be doing too much comparison here (best left for when I cover Strangelove) but a significant difference is worth a mention.

The heart of the problem in Strangelove is human. General Jack D. Ripper has a very personal reason for sending the nukes to Russia. The more sober Fail Safe also comments on human folly but expresses it with a look at advanced technology run by brains that haven't caught up to it. The tech on display in Fail Safe is by and large imagined (Kubrick's gets as close to reality as he can) but that means it can look a lot more effective and functional than the available hardware. Dialogue about practical tactics using technology in this film take it into the realm of science fiction which adds a sting. Add to that the warmth of the likes of Henry Fonda's unnamed president and what might have been a stark and unwatchable two hours becomes compelling.

Also, Sidney Lumet. Lumet had form in off-Broadway theatre as well as the fruitful years of tv in the '50s when some pretty chewy social drama was being fashioned. By the time of his cinema debut with 12 Angry Men, he could bring a natural way with actors and a familiarity with the tightness of television shooting whereby close ups on faces are crucial and the blocking is tighter than the most choreographed play. Here he makes the breathless control rooms look by turns as wide as landscapes or as close as broom closets. When the president and his translator are in the tiny room with the big phone, moving toward decisions that will affect life on the planet, their faces can fill the wide frame to a the extent that the close ups are outright rude. The sense is urgency. Lumet had, by this film, an already intimidating rap sheet as a movie maker. 

Lumet is one of the greats who never gets picked out as an auteur the way that even a tv-starting contemporary like John Frankenheimer does. However, if your tastes run to post-war Hollywood through to the end of the century, your favourites will include a few of his titles. He was mainly known for the commitment to tough stories and, as with Fail Safe, his skill at rendering them palatable. When the irony stretches to breaking and the operators in the control room cheer at the destruction of their own war machines we are surprised to share their relief (not a spoiler, btw, there is a lot more to come after that moment) and then agree with the dressing down given by their commander. The stakes are so high here that we have to grasp warmth even in the anger. Strangelove's joke about fighting in the War Room cannot work here. The collapse of control in the control room is left to us as though we are witnesses rather than audience members.

Henry Fonda's President is a fulfilment of casting. He brings a signature blend of down home hickory and gravitas that compels us to graspingly wish his increasingly futile earnestness would just crash through and the world around him would listen and comply. As the body temperature core of the film we want to be in that poley room with him and Larry Hagman when the phone call to the Kremlin gets terrifyingly plain. At the other end of the spectrum there is Walter Matthau's hawkish professor, a brash kill-em-all type with a dangerous confidence in the power of the doomsday weapons and an even more dangerous charisma that has won him popularity.

Lumet did not get the co-operation from the US military and had to improvise. The Vindicator bombers were an invention from the source novel. Rather than work around depicting B52s as Kubrick did, Lumet used footage of smaller range and capacity jets as well as fighters for the aircraft. One approach which shows the planes in negative is effectively eerie. A thought to no great depth will consider this, the refusal by the military to cooperate (echoed joltingly in an on screen disclaimer about the likelihood of the events' probability), to be testament to the closeness to reality: not to the hardware, though, to the thinking. That is what brings Fail Safe from a drama to the stranger territory of a documentary of the imagination.  

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH @ 60

Prince Prospero stops at a local village on the way to his castle. After a scene of verbal revolt from two of the villagers, he orders Francesca, daughter of one and wife of the other, to choose which should be put to death. She refuses. He orders the village burned, ostensibly due to signs that the Red Death plague is there, and he takes Francesca and the two men for his sport to the castle. If he can corrupt her to his avowed Satanic ways, all this might turn to his advantage as entertainment for the crowd of aristocrats he's invited over to wait out the plague in high style.

While Francesca is given the run of the place, her father and husband are locked up in the dungeon and the decadent frolics of the well-born who dance with seemingly interminable energy in a display of bright moving colour. Here happen some telescoping moments like the paedophilic Alfredo striking the dancer Esmerelda in front of Prospero's jester and more than a few allusions to Prospero's master Satan. And, hey, it's not a party without the Red Death himself, who'll be along later.

The Masque of the Red Death is Roger Corman's most complex and ambitious Poe adaptations and plays as the most grown up. Vincent Price's Prospero gives us a believable aristocrat, one eye on his administrative duties and the other on his pleasures. He's urbane and assured of his place but adolescently gleeful to share his Satanism as though it's his own personal discovery he can use to shock the straight world. When it comes to respecting persons, learning that a fellow noble has journeyed through infected territory, he has no problem thwanging the whole family with a crossbow. He might like the darkness and the chaos but he's no dummy.

Patrick Magee as Alfredo is a rounded sinister, expressing his lust for the dwarf dancer Esmerelda as arising from her resemblance to a child. He's a notch under Prospero in that his gleeful receipt of licence the situation gives him takes him beyond his aristocracy into the realm of the workaday depraved. Magee's seriousness in this is intentionally disturbing. The role of Hop Toad (oddly renamed from Hop Frog, another Poe story borrowed here) is taken by Skip Martin in a characteristically non-exploitative depiction. Corman was careful to distinguish characters' othering from offering it to his audiences. Here, we see a performer take to his character, seriously and skilfully. Hop Toad's and Alfredo's binding as characters adds a poignancy to this. 

Jane Asher came from formal theatrical training as well as child roles in British cinema and would have a fun '60s with significant and very cool film roles as well as being part of the Beatles' gangalang, partnering up with Paul. Here she breaks through the woodenness Corman often gave to his leading women by taking the central conflict of good and evil upon herself. Her avowed weapon against the ethical ravages of Prospero is that of hope, something he can scoff at but not fully vanquish. Her modesty at being seen in the bath by the prince is ingenuous enough to see him recoil a little from his own brashness. The worry on her face is confused and it gives the scene depth. She is Price's match in their every shared scene.

Hazel Court is a disruptive influence in the story as without Francesca, her Julia might have been the female lead. She is the humiliated and shunned consort of Prospero. Her anger is admitted but kept repressed until her attempt to escalate her position through ritual and its consequences which are horrifying. It's a performance that can evade memory, surrounded by such a cast, but she meets the complexity of her character's role industriously.

Corman's pallet is bright in the safety of the castle and mud and mist for the wastelands and villages. There is even less concession to realism in the mis en scene than in similar gothic fantasies like Fall of the House of Usher. The more human the vices and entitlement, the more colourful the look. This might be dismissed as old school pictorialism or cheap irony but there's a distinct sense that this itself is just dressing, that the genuine horror is that of the illusion of control that Prospero and his foppish hedonists exhibit. There is a clear sense of the nakedness beneath the finery that will be rendered unto dust. It's not the inevitability of this that bothers the film as much as attempts to intellectualise oneself out of it. 

Corman was notably pessimistic about humanity, declaring more than once that he though war to be the natural state of humanity. Prospero is not far from this, except for his overt Satanism (but this is explained as being less evil than intellectual), but Francesca is its opposite. She is not a Panglossian blind optimist, she acknowledges the delights of the court dances with them easily enough, but her note of hope survives the sensuality where shallow optimism would be eroded. Corman appears to be testing the worst of his excesses with this plain wish. He is sincere enough about it to push it forward at the expense of the audience-pleasing horror he was famous for.

This is the one horror tale that does not end in fire with the same stock shots re-sequenced yet again to show the flames of damnation licking at the hapless figures. The ending which tastes a little too much of cheese today, is a kind evocation of the final image of Bergman's Sixth Seal. but it's a serious proposition for all that. The mini conference of personified plagues walking in line through the waste ground suggests the inevitability of mortality but this is after we see the value of hope against its ravages. We can take home what we want from this but on the eve of Vietnam, the violence against the civil rights movement, assassinations that went beyond the one just before this production, and the ghost of politics future in Watergate. Is a walk on the moon balance enough for us? This time, Corman refuses to say, and his film is by far the better for it.

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