BOND-A-THON: The Man with the Golden Gun

 

12 January 2012, Nottingham, England. Yours truly decides to host a Bond-a-thon on The Agitation of the Mind. I can only assume the rationale floating through my mind went something like this: Yeah, cool, I get to watch the Connery films, I get to re-evaluate the Timothy Daltons, there was that one with Brosnan that had a pre-credits speed boat chase along the Thames, and I get to wrap the whole thing up with Craig’s reinvention of the franchise. Woo-hoo! This is going to be so cool. Bartender, bring me a vodka martini, shaken not stirred.

I cannot recall, during this moment of deluded enthusiasm, whether it ever crossed my mind that, discounting Connery’s reprisal of the role in ‘Never Say Never Again’ as non-canon, Roger Moore has made more James Bond films than any other actor. And if even the vaguest consideration of the Moore years did cross my mind, there was probably another rationale to hand, something along the lines of: ‘Live and Let Die’ is pretty decent, ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ co-stars Caroline Munro and Valerie Leon therefore eye-candy a-go-go, and ‘For Your Eyes Only’ marks something of a return to form. Hell yeah, let’s do this thing.

If, on 12 January, someone had whispered in my ear: Yo, Fulwood, you’re also going to have to watch ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, ‘Octopussy’ and ‘A View to a Kill’, there might have been second thoughts. I might have re-envisage the project as a best-of-Bond-a-thon. In fact, if that rhetorical whisperer had put in an appearance, there would have been no need for them to mention ‘Octopussy’ or ‘A View to a Kill’. They’d have had me at ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’.

‘TMwtGG’ is the franchise’s nadir. Just looking back at my review of ‘Live and Let Die’ and the issues I had with it throws ‘TMwtGG’ into sharp relief. Bog awful theme song? Sir Paul McCartney, I apologise: your three minutes of widdle-wank is fucking Mahler compared to Lulu’s execrable effort. Racism? The treatment of black characters in ‘Live and Let Die’ is an exercise in race relations compared to the wholesale stereotyping of Asians. How bad is the racism? Let’s put it this way, there is a ludicrous amount of screentime, just after the halfway mark, where Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), holidaying in Bangkok, repeatedly lambasts the locals, calling them “little brown pointy-heads”. Between this and the flying car, watching ‘TMwtGG’ is a two-hour exercise in losing the will to live. Yeah, there’s a flying car.

 

It would be twenty years and ‘Die Another Day’ before the 007 saga gave us anything as face-palmingly stupid. And, oh Christ, I’ve got that motherfucker to watch before this whole moviethon is over.

The annoying thing is that ‘TMwtGG’ could have good. It could, conceivably, have been fucking great. For all that the films have drastically departed from the books, often to their detriment, one genuine improvement is made in this case. Ian Fleming’s novel, written just prior to the author’s death, was published in its first draft without his customary revisions; consequently, it’s a thin and sketchy piece of work and suffers from the lack of an interesting villain. Scaramanga, in the novel, is a grubby little mobster whose much-hyped facility with a pistol barely compensates for his lack of personality. In Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz’s script, Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) is Bond’s equal – indeed, the opposite side of the coin to 007: a gourmand and a sybarite who lives well and has no qualms about what he does for a living. 

Christopher Lee was Ian Fleming’s cousin and would probably have made a chillingly amoral Bond (in the alternative universe where Sean Connery accepted Matt Busby’s offer of a contract to play for Manchester United and became a footballer instead of an actor, I’m still undecided as to who would have made the most interesting Bond – Christopher Lee or Patrick McGoohan). As Scaramanga, however, Lee exudes serpentine charm and menace in equal measure. I’ve never known Lee not to be magnetic whenever he’s onscreen, and ‘TMwtGG’ is not exception.

 

The film also flirts with topicality in its choice of McGuffin: the “Solex Agitator”, a device that ramps up the efficiency of solar power. The energy crisis was big news as the film went into production, and still in the news at the time of its release. Scaramanga’s designs on the Solex, essentially setting himself up as auctioneer to the super-rich with unlimited energy and its conversion process to electricity up for grabs by the highest bidder, elevates him from mere assassin (albeit one who pulls down a cool million per hit) to the kind of über-villain audiences had by now come to associate with the Bond movies.

The presence of Christopher Lee and the inclusion of a newsworthy subject, however, are all ‘TMwtGG’ has to offer; and the filmmakers seem perversely determined to offset these things by as many stultifying creative decisions as possible. We have mentioned Lulu’s theme song (“the man with the golden guuu-uuu-huuu-uuun”) and Sheriff Pepper’s xenophobia. Let us also consider a ludicrous kung-fu sequence where two schoolgirls beat the shit out of a gang of tough customers (the fact that neither actress seems to have any facility for the martial arts just makes the whole thing even more laughable); an otherwise fine car chase ruined by comedic sound-effects; Britt Ekland’s simpering performance as Mary Goodnight, easily the dippiest Bond girl ever to don a bikini, (particularly annoying since the much more engaging Maud Adams – as Scaramanga’s kept woman Andrea Anders, is cavalierly disposed of); and the painfully unfunny Bond vs midget final scene.

Oh, and the potentially engaging business about the Solex? It comes down to a big laser that blows things up.

 

Towards the end, Scaramanga challenges Bond to a duel, declaring that “it will be a battle of titans”. “There’s a handy four-letter word,” Bond replies, “and you’re full of it.” Watching ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’, it’s hard not to feel a certain affinity.

PERSONAL FAVES: Get Carter

 

Mike Hodges’ career has had its ups and downs, but fuck me if the man didn’t make a stone cold classic first time out. ‘Get Carter’, adapted from Ted Lewis’s stark novel ‘Jack’s Return Home’, is arguably the great British crime movie. A slice of grim and unflinching northern noir, it boasts authentically gritty locations, an unapologetically amoral aesthetic, and a career-defining turn from Michael Caine. 

I’ve neglected the Personal Faves project for a while. ‘Get Carter’ is a punchy and uncompromising choice to get back into the grove with. 

 Jack Carter (Caine) is a London-based villain whose associates aren’t too keen on the idea of him taking a sabbatical in his old stamping ground of Newcastle, but Carter’s insistent. His brother Frank has died – ostensibly in a car accident, ostensibly while drunk – and Carter’s convinced he was murdered. On the train up from London, he reads Raymond Chandler’s ‘Farewell My Lovely’, and what follows is as complex in its plotting and character interrelationships as anything by Chandler, even though Carter eschews Philip Marlowe’s laconic style for a brutally direct investigative approach. 

He starts out by bracing Eric Paice (Ian Hendry), a “face” from the old days. Eric is evasive when it comes to questions about Frank, and won’t say who he’s working for now. Carter wastes no time in determining that Paice is employed as a chauffeur for gang boss Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne). He also has some probing questions for Frank’s bit on the side, Margaret (Dorothy White). Carter’s expectations that Margaret will take care of Frank’s teenage daughter Doreen (Petra Markham) – who, it is heavily intimated, might well be Jack’s daughter – are met with reluctance. 

   

Carter’s blunderings earn him the disapprobation of the local underworld and increasing pressure is exerted on him to return to London. Meanwhile, bent property developer Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley) tries to coerce Carter into disposing of Kinnear in order to extricate himself from the mobster’s extortion. Aided by the booze-addled Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), sometime plaything to both Kinnear and Brumby, Carter’s search for the truth is given a nudge in an unpalatable direction by her offhanded revelation that she’s appeared in blue movies for Kinnear. 

‘Get Carter’, for all its plethora of characters and complexity of narrative, is an incredibly lean movie. Its aesthetic is stripped down. The cinematography is an exercise in documentary realism. The milieu is bleak. The dialogue, though mainly sparse, offers some eminently quotable dialogue: “A pint of bitter – in a thin glass”; “Get yourself a course in karate”; “You bloody whore!”; “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. For me, it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.” All of these lines are the more memorable for their context. No spoilers, but Caine’s delivery of “I know you didn’t kill him. I know!” is just as chilling as the action that accompanies it. 

Anyone even remotely familiar with the film won’t need me to tell them, particularly after the above quoted moments, how much of a bastard Jack Carter is. Caine’s interest in the role sprang from the people he’d seen, in his youth, dragged into crime as an escape from poverty, a fate that could easily have been his. He referred to Jack Carter in interviews as “the ghost of Michael Caine” and described the character as a corrective to the tendency, in British cinema, to portray gangsters as comedic or inept. As Caine pointed out in a much-quoted turn of phrase, “gangsters are neither funny nor stupid”. Carter certainly isn’t. Carter’s cold, ruthless and entirely self-serving. He uses violence without a second thought, yet the violence in the film is sudden, brief and not overused. There’d be no point in a man like Carter overdoing the violence. It’s a means to an end, as is virtually everything else in his life – nothing more.

 

 Caine’s is not the only terrific performance. Ian Hendry, struggling with alcoholism, his career marooned in TV while Caine was soaring high on the big screen, is a study in malevolent contempt as Paice; Hodges played on Hendry’s resentment to draw a performance from him that stands as a career best. Softly spoken playwright John Osborne was an offbeat choice for Kinnear, but kudos to Hodges for going with him – Osborne exudes menace, and the quieter he talks (some of his dialogue is a real strain to hear), the more threatening he seems. Tony Beckley and George Sewell – the latter British television’s hard man of choice in the 70s – deliver the goods as a couple of heavies who try to take Carter down in a dockside shoot-out. Bryan Mosley, who would go straight from ‘Get Carter’ to playing a greengrocer on soap opera ‘Coronation Street’, is suitably oleaginous as Brumby. 

Passing over Britt Ekland and her nothing role as gangster’s moll Anna (quite why she gets third billing for what’s essentially a cameo is a mystery), the ladies of the cast acquit themselves just as admirably, particularly Rosemarie Dunham as Edna, the landlady whose guesthouse Carter uses as his HQ. His ejection of two hoods at gunpoint from said establishment, while naked and during a Girl Guides march-past, is one of the highlights in a film not exactly robbed of highlights. 

Seriously: how many gangster movies – in fact, how many movies in general – have so many great scenes? ‘Get Carter’ boasts probably the best car chase in British cinema, at least two on-foot chases that capture the adrenaline and the breathlessness of pursuit, an act of brutal retribution at a multi-storey car park, the aforementioned gunplay on and around a ferry, a bit of business involving a sports car and the River Tyne, some nastiness at a bookie’s shop, and a blunt and unforgettable finale set against the backdrop of an aerial ropeway dumping buckets of slag out to sea. 

   

‘Get Carter’ ends, with a sense of the inevitable, on the least glamorous beach in the history of cinema. Which is apposite since ‘Get Carter’ embraces a genre so often beholden to iconography and showy set-pieces and boils it down to its harshest, bluntest elements.

"You have come of your own free will to the appointed place": another visit to The Wicker Man

If you’re after copy of ‘The Wicker Man’ on DVD, you’ll be most likely to find it in the horror section.

But is it a horror film? The ending’s definitely horrific and the subject matter is paganism and the extremes of religious belief. And yet it’s not a horror film in the way ‘The Omen’ or ‘The Exorcist’ are horror films.

It’s not a thriller either, not really … although there are elements of that genre. It’s not a mystery or crime film, even though the main character is a police officer investigating a disappearance.

If Zavvi or HMV had curio sections, or oddity sections, that’s where ‘The Wicker Man’ would end up. The fact that the only genre you could legitimately assign it to is the musical (there are at least five carefully choreographed musical numbers, all of them pertinent to the narrative) just makes it the more curious, the more odd.

Devout Christian Sgt Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) – a man so pious he’s saving himself for the marriage bed – receives a letter summoning him to the remote island of Summerisle where a young girl, Rowan Morrison, has gone missing. How remote? Howie needs a small flying boat to get there! He goes alone (bad move) and rubs the locals up the wrong way from the word go (bad move part two).

Not that Howie and the islanders were ever going to hit it off, though. Not when the younger contingent fornicate publicly while there elders lasciviously serenade Willow (Britt Ekland), the landlord’s sultry daughter at The Green Man. Not when the local chemist has jars of foreskins and foetuses on his counter. Not when schoolteacher Miss Rose (Diane Cilento) discusses phallic symbolism with a class of girls in their early teens, or one of her colleagues leads a group of similarly aged boys in a sexually suggestive song and dance around the maypole. Not when he witnesses a fertility rite in progress whilst making his way to Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee)’s ancestral seat to voice his suspicions that Rowan is not just missing but murdered.

Lord Summerisle: I’m confident your suspicions are wrong, Sergeant. We don’t commit murder here. We're a deeply religious people.
Sgt Howie: Religious? With ruined churches, no ministers, no priests and children dancing naked.
Lord Summerisle: They do love their divinity lessons.
Sgt Howie: But they a-are naked.
Lord Summerisle: Naturally. It’s much too dangerous to jump through fire with their clothes on.
Sgt Howie: What religion can they possibly be learning jumping over bonfires?
Lord Summerisle: Parthenogenesis.
Sgt Howie: What?
Lord Summerisle: Literally, as Miss Rose would doubtless say in her assiduous way, reproduction without sexual union.
Sgt Howie: What is all this? I mean, you’ve got fake biology, fake religion! Sir, have these children never heard of Jesus?
Lord Summerisle: Himself the son of a virgin impregnated, I believe, by a ghost.

On the off-chance you haven’t seen ‘The Wicker Man’ and the picture I used on yesterday’s post didn’t give it away, here’s a

SPOILER ALERT

The clash between Howie’s belief system (staunch, pious, puritanical Christianity) and Summerisle’s (paganism, fertility, sacrifice … you know, when necessary) is the life blood of the film. It’s what gives ‘The Wicker Man’ its structure, its tension, its symbolism and its power.

His values and moral rectitude are challenged by the islanders’ sexual liberalism, culminating in his ‘tempting’ by Willow (the darkly erotic tensions that have informed the proceedings thus far get kicked up a notch with Ekland’s renowned dance sequence); casual acts of blasphemy and heathenism fuel his slow-burning sense of outrage; obstructions to his investigation only strengthen his determination to find Rowan.

And of course it’s all, as Summerisle blandly informs him, a game. With Howie as the pawn. The sacrificial pawn. “Animals are fine,” Summerisle opines, “but their acceptability is limited. A little child is even better. But not nearly as effective as the right kind of adult.” In other words, a virgin. (Remember that line in ‘Scream’ – “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex … Big no-no. Sex equals death”? Scratch that!)

It’s when the islanders advance on Howie and bind him and drag him up the hill to the eponymous effigy that ‘The Wicker Man’ makes the leap from compelling and well-made if somewhat offbeat movie to completely unforgettable cinematic experience. The roles played in the May Day pageant are made devastatingly clear. Howie has played the fool and been king for a day – “and who but a fool would do that?” He will, he is told, undergo death and rebirth. Not his rebirth, though; that of Summerisle’s crops. “As a Christian, I hope for resurrection,” Howie retorts, “and even if you kill me now, it is I who will live again and not your damned apples.” Summerisle reminds him that it’s a rare privilege for a man of his religious values to be granted a martyr’s death. Indeed, when Howie is stripped, anointed and dressed, prior to his sacrifice, in a white robe (arms held out at shoulder height in a crucifixion pose), the ritual is almost Christian in its iconography.

Howie warns Summerisle that another failed crop might result in his sacrifice. “The crops will not fail,” comes the defiant response. The debate – the battle, as it were, of beliefs – continues even when Howie’s been secured in the wicker man and the kindling around its base lit. As Lord Summerisle leads his people in a full-throated rendition of ‘Summer is i-cumen in’, Howie gives it some 23rd Psalm, his voice carrying over theirs. He calls down a curse upon them. He beseeches his God to receive his soul.

The closing shot shows the wicker man consumed by flames, a raging fire against a yet more fiery sunset. There’s an almost blood-like quality to the image that’s wholly appropriate for a film about the conflict between two men of equal but divergent religious fervour – one orthodox, one rooted in supposedly less enlightened times – and the fine line between faith and madness evident in both of them.

SPOILERS END

PERSONAL FAVES: The Wicker Man

I started The Agitation of the Mind to celebrate great movies, not to carp about mediocre ones. To indulge my passion in the art form, not to slate it. I wasn’t interested in playground-level name-calling over films I didn’t like.

Which was all very noble and high-minded. But it hasn’t stopped me, over the year and a half I’ve been running this site, from vituperatively drubbing the likes of ‘The Happening’ and ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and having a high old time doing it.

So, before I get on with the business at hand – a two-parter* on Robin Hardy’s cult oddity ‘The Wicker Man’ in honour of Christopher Lee’s 87th birthday – there’s something I need to get off my chest and I’m going to be very immature about it.

Neil laBute’s 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage is a great big pile of poo. So nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!

Right. Back to business.

Christopher Lee was riding high on his popularity as Dracula in a seemingly endless parade of Hammer films when he came across David Pinner’s novel ‘Ritual’ and recognised its potential. Anthony Shaffer was also riding high: the film version of his Tony award-winning play ‘Sleuth’, starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, had garnered great acclaim, and he’d been engaged to script Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, ‘Frenzy’.

Shaffer’s adaptation retained little of Pinner’s narrative, instead fashioning an enigmatic mystery rich in symbolism and enigmatic mise-en-scene based around a conflict between belief systems (Christianity and paganism). Robin Hardy landed directorial duties and probably had no idea how maligned, misappropriated, controversial and – finally – revered his film would become.

Produced through the ailing British Lion, the company had just been acquired by John Bentley. Faced with union concern that he was going to asset-strip the company, Bentley rushed ‘The Wicker Man’ into production. The May Day setting, crucial to the film’s aesthetic and imagery, called for a springtime shoot; instead, Hardy and his cast and crew found themselves shooting in October. Fake blossom was glued to trees and the dancers called upon to perform au naturel and al fresco in the fertility rite scene braved the late autumn chills.

An eclectic cast was assembled: alongside Christopher Lee and fellow Hammer alumnus Ingrid Pitt were Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland and, after David Hemmings and Michael York passed, the lead role of Sgt Neil Howie went to Edward Woodward, best known then for his role in the TV series ‘Callan’.

An opening credit thanks “The Lord Summerisle [Lee’s character in ‘The Wicker Man’] and the people of his island off the west coast of Scotland for this privileged insight into their religious practices”. However, in his magnificently titled autobiography ‘Lord of Misrule’, Lee recalls “we went to Ayrshire, Kirkcudbrightshire, Newton Stewart, the Logan Botanical Gardens and Culzean Castle … and with these and other sites on the Scottish mainland, we stitched together a totally plausible island”.

If Lee refers to the fictitious island as being “stitched together”, then Hardy’s original 100-minute cut of the film was summarily unstitched, reduced by 15 minutes and the remnants re-cobbled together with little regard for continuity. During shooting, British Lion had passed from Bentley to EMI and was now being run by Michael Deeley, who deemed ‘The Wicker Man’ one of the worst things he’d seen and enforced the cuts which brought the running time down to B-movie length; it was eventually released on a double bill with Nic Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’.

It’s a testament to the atmosphere of creeping dread that suffuses every frame of ‘The Wicker Man’, as well as to the performances and Hardy’s off-kilter direction (the film has the feel of a waking dream; or, in its final stages, nightmare) that even in its ravaged 84-minute incarnation, it’s still one hell of a movie. I first saw it in this version on TV in my mid-teens and it wormed into my subconscious and twenty years later I still find it unnerving and intriguing and compelling.

Robin Hardy subsequently attempted to recover the excised footage and reassemble his original cut. The film canisters, however, were missing, popularly thought to have been amongst a consignment of obsolete stock used as landfill during construction of the M4 motorway. Which could have been the end of the story, except for a print of ‘The Wicker Man’ that had been sent, pre-Michael Deeley’s interference, to Roger Corman who was considering releasing it to the drive-in circuit.

Although there was a limited cinema re-release in 1979 (six years after the ignominious original release), it wasn’t until the 2001 DVD restoration produced by Canal+, who had, by this time, acquired the rights, that Hardy’s complete version of ‘The Wicker Man’ gained any degree of widespread distribution.

The restoration is crucial in terms of pacing, characterisation and establishing Lord Summerisle and his subjects’ paganism in stark contrast to Howie’s devout Christianity. We follow Howie’s increasingly frustrated investigation over two nights on the island (the Deeley-savaged version compresses the entire narrative across one night, making for a cluttered second half where exposition and continuity are sacrificed and Howie lurches from one set-piece to the next); more of the islanders are seen to play a part in the proceedings; and Howie’s character arc from piety to outrage to martyrdom is more effectively – and poignantly – achieved.

Interestingly, Robin Hardy – whose only directing credits since ‘The Wicker Man’ have been ‘The Fantasist’ (in 1986) and some episodes of ‘E Street’ – is currently trying to secure financing for the intriguingly titled ‘Cowboys for Christ’, described as the projected second part of a ‘Wicker Man’ trilogy and slated to reunite the director with Christopher Lee.


SOURCES
‘Lord of Misrule’ by Christopher Lee (Orion, 2003)
‘The Wicker Man’: Wikipedia article
‘The Wicker Man’ website

*The behind-the-scenes stuff today, followed by an appreciation of the film itself tomorrow.