DANTE'S INFERNO (1935, 1924) - black and white visions of hell

Three films inspired by storyboards from the 19th century...
I'm not interested in the concept of hell as a final destination, but it's a great scenario for a horror movie - demons, chaos, torture and the like. The new video game (and spin-off animated movie) of Dante's Inferno demonstrates that the story still powerfully captures the imagination.

While 13th century poet Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy in three sections, the first part Inferno focussed on the punishments of hell. While Dante's epic poem is highly regarded in Italian literature, it's the 1857 illustrations by Gustav Doré that are regarded as definitive. Doré's printing methods off wood engravings make his visualisations appear deceptively older.


Doré's fantastic and evocative work also drives the cinematic visions of Dante's Inferno, able to inspire camera composition and lighting effects. The movie adaptions that I've seen (1924, 1935) are more interesting to me than any recent incarnations, because they bring to life the black and white gothic of Dore’s engravings. The scratchy faded quality of unrestored film even adds to their dreamlike quality. The films could almost be ancient newsreels of expeditions through the depths of hell.

I first became aware of the movies called Dante's Inferno from a few startling stills in Classics of the Horror Film and A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen (all shown here), before I encountered any of Gustav Doré's work. In both films, ambitious underworlds were realised through huge sets shrouded in flame and smoke, with special make-ups to transform actors into demons. The limited information around repeatedly guessed that the 1935 film had recycled the 'hell' footage from the 1924 version. But having seen both, this doesn't appear to be true.

The biblical morality and the classical precedents of art and literature also enabled film-makers the licence to fill the screen with torture and nudity...



 

DANTE'S INFERNO(1935, USA)

The title actually refers to a fairground attraction, the story is of the people who run it. Spencer Tracy plays Jim Carter, a lazy sailor who loses his job as a ship's boiler stoker. He hits rock bottom when he has to make up as a black guy, (gulp), poking his face through a hole in a sideshow tent as a target for Coney Island punters to throw wooden balls at! I shudder to think what that game was called... Tracy remains in blackface for several more scenes, even as Pop McWade (Henry B Walthall - a regular performer for D.W. Griffith, also the scientist in Tod Browning's The Devil Doll) shows him around his elaborate exhibit devoted to Dante.

The two team up when Carter drums up new business for the empty attraction by hyping up all the famous, beautiful women of history that have been damned for eternity and the tortures they now endure. (Ironically, the film also sold itself by exaggerating the horrors of hell and the nudity of its inhabitants.) As the exhibit becomes a hit, Carter builds up an entertainment empire, only to fall foul of too many shortcuts in health and safety and the results of bulldozering his rivals...

The meandering storyline fails to portray Carter as being that much of a baddie, as his business practices are infinitely less shoddy than Gordon Gecko's. At home he's such a convincing family man it's hard to dislike him. He's hardly 'hell' material and the story is often far removed from anything from Dante. The climax is also confusingly off-topic, a spectacularly fiery disaster at sea which, luckily, only an ex-boiler stoker can avert.
The movie's highlight is Carter's guilty fever dream - an eight-minute descent into hell that absolutely looks like Gustav Dore's engravings. This haunting sequence is quite extraordinary, the focus of the film's publicity and posters. Huge elaborate sets, incorporating pools, fires, smoke effects and stuntwork, covered in dozens of half-naked extras. Cavernous functional scale models and matte paintings blend with the live action. Admittedly it all looks like it's from an entirely different film.

Obviously the writhings of the nearly naked actors had to be sufficiently subdued to get past the Hays Code, but the visible lessening of their suffering makes hell look, well, not that bad, and even a place I'd like to visit. There are only fit young men and women in this underworld. The women's bodies are practically obscured by overlong wigs, leaving the men to bear the brunt of the nudity. Frankly, they're all rather hot.
The hooded figures trooping around the underground mountains obviously inspired the hellish sequence 'inside' Disney's The Black Hole. Most of the 'vision of hell' is on YouTube, re-edited to the music of Enigma...

This movie is of interest as a Spencer Tracy vehicle, and as a melodrama with two spectacular scenes of disaster. But the vision of hell is easily worth the price of admission. Dante's Inferno (1935) needs a release on DVD, though it can still be spotted on TV on Turner Classic Movies.

DANTE'S INFERNO(1924, USA)

To check if the 1935 version used any footage from the earlier film, I resorted to a 67 minute bootleg of this silent movie version. Here the story sticks closer to Dante's message, and spends far more screen time in hell.

Mortimer Judd is rich and ruthless. He kicks his pet dog, he's that bad. He's a slumlord during the depression, and his business has just bankrupted his next door neighbour, Craig, driving him to the brink of suicide. As a parting shot, Craig sends Judd a volume of Dante's Inferno, inscribed with a curse...

As Judd reads the book, the curse visits him in the form of a demon, causing him to visualise Dante's story. As the poet strays from the path, Beatrice summons Virgil to protect him (pictured) and lead him to safety, but the only way out is through hell... An angel even flies in with a blade of light, to force away attacking the demons and predatory creatures. As Judd watches Virgil leading Dante through hell, his life also descends in a downward spiral. The demon sends a few just rewards his way while he's alive, as a taster for his inevitable punishment in the fiery pit.

The story owes much to A Christmas Carol, though it's harder hitting in many ways, showing enthusiastic devils arriving to take away doomed souls from their expired bodies. The difference is that, unlike Scrooge, Judd can't see the supernatural visitor who is inspiring his visions and steering his fate.

Like the 1935 remake, hell is realised with huge sets, crowded caverns covered in naked extras, surrounded by flame and clouds of smoke. Foreground miniatures and forced perspective angles expand the scale of the vision, adding giant demons. The smaller devilish inhabitants are a lively lot, wielding flaming pitchforks and, ahem, whips. I noticed that the tableau of the naked girl being whipped (pictured above) had been censored out of this print, only showing the whipping, not the whippee. Possibly it was too sexual, too violent or too naked!
The damned being trapped under slab-like tombs, the curtain of fire, the forest of suicide victims, all come from the pages of Dante as drawn by Doré. But while several tableau are inspired by the same images as the 1935 remake, the footage has been filmed very differently, as far as I could see.

Coincidentally, this 1924 movie also has a character in blackface make-up, Judd's butler. A then-typical portrayal of slow-moving, eye-rolling comic relief. Watching some of his short films recently, it was interesting that Buster Keaton used black actors as incidental characters in his short films, around the same time and earlier, without such stereotyping or the need to use white guys in make-up.

This version of Dante's Inferno has the most lively and twisty plot, intertwined with many more ancient visions of damnation. But it isn’t available on DVD either. The consensus is that two reels (about twenty minutes) of the film has been lost forever (the original running time should have been 91 minutes), though the story didn't seem to suffer for it!

INFERNO
(1911, Italy, L'inferno)

While researching this article, I learned of an even earlier silent version from Italy. It's a straightforward recreation of Dante's tour through hell, led by the Roman poet Virgil. There's no 'wraparound' story set in the present day. Typical of the time, the action is presented wide and distantly, like a stage, with few cuts or close-ups.

This very early film starts off resembling the short films of George Melies, with very basic visual effects and pantomime devils, the main difference being the exterior locations, quarries and cliffs standing in for the caverns of the underworld, but rather overlit for somewhere that's supposed to be underground.

The achievements of the film become more evident further on. Dozens of near-naked extras portraying the damned in various stages of suffering, even being buried headfirst in the ground with their legs sticking out. Some basic splitscreen work to make the sky black, render a walking corpse headless, and portray the gigantic Lucifer.

More interesting costumes are the winged demons, and some elaborate animal suits of a lion, harpies and a gryphon. Though the wirework to make them fly is more like a scenery change. It's still an ambitious achievement for a time when movie-making was so young.

This version, the nearly-nude inhabitants of hell at least look like everyday folk, rather than the beautiful denizens of Hollywood's hell. Limbless people are even used to represent the damned, predating the climax of Michael Winner's The Sentinel!

According to a comment on IMDB, this was the first feature-length film to be screened in the US, breaking the feared 'one-hour' barrier, at a time when exhibitors didn't think audiences would sit still that long for a relatively new entertainment! Arguably this could then be described as the first ever horror film. Once again the main draw of the movie was a mix of nudity and torture.

Sadly this, the least interesting version of the three, is the only one out on DVD (pictured), as it was recently restored and rescored by Tangerine Dream.

The 1911 Inferno also has a website with more images.

Watching these again, my allegiances changed from 1935 to 1924 as my favourite film version, though the hell sequence in the 1935 version is easily the most spectacular.

 

THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) - a giant among disaster movies

THE TOWERING INFERNO
(1974, USA)

During my Earthquake review, I hinted that The Towering Inferno was the mother of all disaster movies, certainly in the seventies cycle. It was exciting to see this in the cinema in 1975 (the UK got most films about six months later than the US), and it still stands up very well today - not something you can say of all Irwin Allen's movie productions. The non-CGI stuntwork and big-name cast is hard to beat. I’d finally got it on anamorphic widescreen DVD earlier this year, and Paul Newman's recent passing prompted me to finally watch it.

Most disaster movies can only be enjoyed with more suspension of disbelief than usual – how often do ocean liners capsize, how often do bees attack? But skyscraper fires are all too plausible – though I admit that at the time, I thought it was another over-the-top impossible Hollywood fantasy. Watching it now, it’s hard not to think of 9/11. When the World Trade Center was on fire, I was naively expecting all the rescue attempts that I’d seen in The Towering Inferno to be rolled out. I wondered why the nearby helicopter rides weren’t airlifting people off the roof. It’s beyond ironic that the filmmakers had the newly-built Twin Towers in mind when making The Towering Inferno. The film was intended as entertainment, but also acted as a vivid reminder of the dangers on the inadequacy of tall building fire regulations and building standards.


Although it now reminds me of the tragic end of the Twin Towers, the film rises to this retrospective challenge and still holds up today, showing the realities of big fires, and depicting the fire department’s heroism. Admittedly, there are a few too many explosions to pump up the visual excitement, but for Irwin Allen this is restrained. From the promotional films (available on the second disc of the special edition) and the garish gory pre-production art of various overly inventive death scenes, one can only presume that other producers and saner heads managed to tone down the bodycount in favour of good taste.

When starting work on the movie, one of those periodic Hollywood coincidences cropped up - two film studios had the same idea at the same time. In fact, two studios had bought books about skyscraper fires, The Glass Inferno and The Tower. With the WTC newly up, this was not an uncommon worry in America, or even worldwide at the time. The studios, for once, combined efforts and scripts to make one huge movie. One wonders why they haven’t done it since - with the various Robin Hood, Christopher Columbus, meteor’s hitting Earth, head-to-head box office clashes.

Inferno is the best of the disaster movies, with the great cast, grand scale, and a tight story delivering continuing logical peril, and a quite terrifying situation. Faulty wiring sabotages the opening ceremony of the tallest skyscraper in the world. As the guests celebrate in a party at the top of the tower, little do they realise that a fire halfway up the building is closing in on them. As the fire department works slowly up the building, various risky rescue methods are needed to try and get everyone out – including the architect, the Mayor. With so many characters, the story takes a while to tell, but the time flies by. In the cinema, this even had a half-time intermission.


It’s a very special cast, with the late Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and William Holden all expecting top billing. Faye Dunaway (The Eyes of Laura Mars, Network, Bonnie and Clyde) adds frosty sex appeal and additional suspense as she tries not to pop out of her evening dress. Wrinkly but still perky, dancer Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones (A Portrait of Jennie) are the token oldies. Richard Chamberlain (Dr Kildare, The Three Musketeers), Robert Wagner (The Pink Panther) and Robert Vaughn (The Man From UNCLE) are the younger things. O.J. Simpson (Capricorn One) plays the head of security.

McQueen chose the fire chief role thinking it was the best part, but he spends all his time dashing around, ridiculously doing all the toughest rescues himself, reminiscent of T.J. Hooker ignoring all his younger staff. I remember his (very brief) swearing in the film was new to family certificated films back then. Paul Newman gets far more acting time and comes off as a more real and likeable character.


The fire-fighting scenes look genuinely dangerous, setting a high standard of spectacle and stuntwork unequalled until Backdraft came along in 1991. The superb 100-foot high model looks all the more spectacular for largely being shot at night, as does the back-projection and compositing work. Even the model helicopters smoothly intercut with the real thing. The gigantic and fully-functional sets put the money up on the screen. The streets of San Francisco take a pounding from having dozens of fire tenders speeding to the rescue.

British director John Guillerman directed the non-action sequences – getting sobering and dramatic performances out of a great cast. This is one disaster movie that doesn't feel padded out with melodrama. The film's success must have lead to Guillerman being invited to make another event movie - the remake of King Kong (1976).


There's an early pre-Jaws score from John Williams, illustrating how much of his early career was with Irwin Allen - from the theme tunes for TV shows like Lost In Space and Land of the Giants, and into the big time movies with this and The Poseidon Adventure, all produced by Allen. The album was my first of many Williams soundtracks, though naturally it was on vinyl. The score was expanded and released on CD back in 2001, but is out of print now.

Last year, we took time to visit the Bank of America building in San Francisco, used as the main shooting location in the film, as the entrance plaza to 'The Glass Tower'. Unfortunately, nowadays the public aren't allowed inside. However, the suspenseful glass elevator scene was inspired by the wall-hugging elevators at the nearby Hyatt Regency. The spectacular hotel lobby, and its elevators, briefly appear in the film and are well worth a visit. It also served as a pivotal location in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety.

I watched The Towering Inferno on the region 1 DVD special edition (pictured at the top), which includes a second disc full of original promotional featurettes and a very interesting gossipy TV special about the making of the film and the on set clash of personalities of the mega-cast.


I'll also mention the DVD of The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen as an excellent documentary career overview of all his iconic films and TV shows, full of rare footage and insightful interviews. But "Danger, danger", it might make you buy a lot of DVD boxsets...

There's more about Irwin Allen here, and a huge marvellous site dedicated to The Towering Inferno here.

JIGOKU - Visions of bloody HELL

Cinematic depictions of Hell - a starter guide

I've always been fascinated with visions of the afterlife. Having seen some mysterious and spectacular stills, I first sought out the Hollywood versions of Dante's Inferno. Both the 1924 silent movie and the 1935 Spencer Tracy vehicle included tours of the seven levels of Hell according to Dante, visually lead by the intricate engravings of Gustav Dore (whose engravings lent themselves perfectly to black and white cinematic recreation). The 1935 version is worth seeking out for the five minute descent into hell - envisioned using large sets, cavernous models, matte paintings and dozens of half-naked extras.
Incidentally, a new Hollywood remake of Dante's Inferno is about to be unleashed - but this time it's a comedy... It stars Dermot Mulroney as Dante and James Cromwell as his guide, Virgil.

I've searched for films which attempt to depict a different kind of Hell... this time according to Buddha. Three of them Japanese, called Jigoku, only 2 of which I've seen, and a recent Thai remake, called Narok, which also translates literally as Hell...

JIGOKU (1960, Japan)

This is a classic Japanese drama that is practically an arthouse classic, due to its expressionistic underworld sets and earnest acting talent. The first hour sets up a dozen sinners in a rural town, specifically a young man being lead into temptation by an old school friend.

The second hour demonstrates how each sin will be punished in the afterlife - a guided tour is provided by the ruler, Lord Enma. The various areas of Hell are depicted by large apparently wall-less sets (the edges disappear into darkness) and dozens of extras playing the doomed. The strictest of punishments involve being sawn in half while laying face down, or worse still, being flayed alive all the way down to the bone. These bloody make-up effects would have been very strong stuff for 1960, especially since they're in colour.

One scene shows dozens of people buried up to their necks, leaving only a garden of heads visible - this reminded me very much of a similar Hell tableau in What Dreams May Come. I'd highly recommend this 1994 Vincent Ward film for its strong story, as well as it's spectacular visions of Hell, and rare visions of Heaven too.

The 1960 Jigoku is interesting for seeing the differences and similarities in cultures, but is less compelling as a dramatic storyline. Despite its excesses, Hell here is merely stressful rather than frightening.

UPDATE 3rd March 2007 - SciFiJapan has an extensive review, posters and screengrabs from the 2006 Criterion Collection DVD release of this version of Jigoku.

JIGOKU (1999, Japan)

I've not seen the 1979 Japanese remake, but I suspect that the 1960 one was the best, and had the biggest budget. The 1999 Jigoku verges on trashy. Directed by the late Teruo Ishii (Horror of Malformed Men, 1969), it primarily deals with the perpetrators of the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. We see the cultists plotting and executing the attack, then suffering for their deeds by various punishments, including the customary flaying.

The film is held together by Lord Enma (here played by an actress) approaching a young cultist in Shinjuku and warning her of what could happen to her. Unlike in 1960, we quickly move to Hell early in the film - but it's a tiny set with painted walls, a handful of extras, and only a few demons with inexpressive masks on - the monsters look more like 1960's Ultraman cast-offs. Also the gore looks unconvincing and home-made. The film seems more preoccupied in showing topless girls and unconvincing sex scenes. It also looks like a sly way of restaging and exploiting the sarin gas attack story without identifying the film as such.

For me, it didn't feel like Hell at all, and if you want to learn more about the gas attack, there was a good Channel 5 documentary on recently whose reconstructions were far more convincing - they also talked to survivors of the incident and related why and how it happened.

HELL (2005, Thailand, titled Narok) - Thai Region 3 PAL DVD

Thankfully, the story has been taken more seriously by a new film from Thailand (a remake of the Japanese Jigoku) and is out now on DVD. Obviously it's an ambitious project and no budget can do Hell full justice, but it's certainly closer to depicting somewhere you really don't want to go - and that, I thought, was the whole point.

Here, a minibus crash sends a group of friends into the afterlife. Through flashbacks we see what sins they've committed, then we see how they are to be punished. Again, Thailand is a sincerely Buddhist nation, so off we go again to Buddhist Hell...

This initially looks like a wasteland of torture - endless bodies being physically set upon by barbaric demons armed with a variety of simple weapons. Again there's the sawing in half, but here the flaying looks almost real... people being bludgeoned with large wooden mallets, stabbed with spears... the punishments seem to be everywhere. Is there no escape?

Instead of sets, outdoor locations are used, but with digitally altered skies to notify that we're seeing a different world. This is a less subterranean vision than the other films, but it's still claustrophobic, because the pain is everywhere - even when the group try to escape they only encounter other tortures.

The demons who police the suffering are almost-human barbarians. They look convincing and obviously enjoy their work. The special make up effects are successfully gory and mostly work, except for a couple of digital dismemberments. Other SFX like the "dimension gates" - huge tornadoes that carry people from one plane of existence to the next - look digital and fakey, but are spectacularly imagined.

All in all, I found this Thai Hell the most compelling. The tone was consistently grim (reminding me somewhat of Cannibal Holocaust - there too, the characters were documentary makers) until a little unwelcome comedy relief breaks the mood halfway through the film. The ending feels a little rushed and, obviously, some of the sins don't seem to warrant the outrageous tortures meted out later. But this film fits nicely into the new wave of slasher films from Thailand (like Scared and Art of the Devil) as well as the new brutality of Hollywood horrors like Saw, Wrong Turn and The Hills Have Eyes.

At present the film is only available on DVD and VCD from Thailand, but without english subtitles. The 16:9 anamorphic widescreen picture is a slightly cramped representation of the original 1.85 cinema aspect. This PAL region 3 DVD (pictured) has a trailer and a brief behind the scenes package included, as well as poster and design art. But, I'm sure the online publicity photographs alone will get this film a wider release soon.

- - - - - -

Flashback 1975 - Disaster movies, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW...

A look at British movie magazines of 1975, in particular the adverts that nail their release dates. These magazines are still available secondhand on eBay. (These are all handheld photos from magazines no longer in publication - please don't scan books or magazines that are still in print...)

Joan Collins seemed to spend the whole decade in bed, in sex comedies (like this sequel to Alfie), and sex dramas (The Stud and The Bitch). I blame her sister...

Films and Filming, January

The whole year is dominated by big budget disaster movies. I blame Irwin Allen. 

There were three Airport sequels in the 1970s, but it was Airport 1975 that fuelled half of the jokes in Airplane! The other half were inspired by Zero Hour (1957) that starred Dana Andrews, who also appeared in Airport 1975! English author Arthur Hailey started it all by writing both the script for Zero Hour and the original Airport (1970) novel.

Amusingly, Airport 1975 was released in 1974...

Much more about Airport 1975 here.

Photoplay Film Magazine, January

Disney films were the most obvious to drag children to see, though I was often disappointed by just how 'kiddie' they were. Here's a great exception, a Jules Verne-type adventure with no children in the cast. A lost island thrown back to Viking times, volcanoes and some amazing killer whales...

More about The Island at the Top of the World here...

Photoplay Film Magazine, January

Sorry that I'm mentioning movies here that were actually released the year before, but I'm sticking to the publication 'dates' (the month printed on the magazine cover) in order to stay sane. The Man with the Golden Gun was another big Christmas movie that opened in December 1974.

Film Review, February

Rising megastar James Caan and Alan Arkin in an early 'buddy cop' movie, mixing action, comedy and edgy, violent 'rogue cop' rough justice. Director Richard Rush later made cult favourite, The Stuntman, about a megalomaniac film director.

Looking at this year's clippings, a couple of films are mentioned almost throughout the year. Some films would get pre-publicity to raise awareness (easy to do because they'd already been released in America). In the case of Earthquake, cinemas would also have had to wait for the limited number of Sensurround speakers to be heaved around the country.

Film Review, April

Can't find an exact date when Earthquake first opened in Britain, but it could have been as early as January (when Films and Filming did their photo-preview). Seems rather late that Film Review gave it this splashy article in April.

Surrey Comet, August

Even later, Earthquake is only hitting Outer London eight months after the premiere. The giant, sub-base frequency Sensurround speakers caused problems in multi-screen cinemas, as the vibrations would leak into other theatres.

Film Review, April

Onto Easter, the first of a series of lavish Agatha Christie adaptions throws their best of British cast at even the smallest roles.

Amicus Films finally admit to making children's films besides horror. Even so, there's giant monsters and a high body count in this first of three Edgar Rice Borough novels, adapted by genre fan and producer Milton Subotsky.

This issue of Film Review could barely believe the number of disaster movies opening in the coming year. But The Towering Inferno was the most spectacular of them all. It's popularity even saved lives, as high-rise buildings were forced to reinforce and improve their fire safety standards.

Film Review, April

Even though it premiered in London in January (at the Warner West End), it was still playing in five West End cinemas three months later. It would run for several weeks in our local ABC and make several re-release return visits too.

More about The Towering Inferno here.

Film Review, April

The original version of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 was based on a bestselling novel. It must have been popular because it repeatedly played through the rest of the decade, if you wanted to make a quality thriller double-bill.

More about The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 here.    

One of my favourite issues of Films and Filming, April 1975, somehow contains photo-features for four of my fondest movie-going experiences. 

Films and Filming, April

The Rocky Horror Picture Show gets five full pages of photographs. I think they liked it.

Films and Filming, April

Flesh Gordon has to be seen to be believed. Starting life as hardcore pornography, Flesh was funnier and sexier than the huge budgeted official adaption that eventually arrived in 1980.

Films and Filming, April

I saw Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise on a double-bill with Rocky Horror. They might even have been released together as a double-bill. With songs by Paul Williams, before he did Bugsy Malone and The Muppet Movie, starring Jessica Harper before she made Suspiria, Phantom references practically every horror movie that had gone before.

More about Phantom of the Paradise here.

Films and Filming, April

Finally, the April issue of Films and Filming also previewed Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.

Photoplay, May

This photo, published in Photoplay Film Magazine, appears to be a scene missing from Young Frankenstein.

Film Review, July

Young Frankenstein was unusual for being shot in black-and-white, as a homage to the Universal horror films of the 1930s. This made publicity photos published in colour rather a revelation. Here's Teri Garr, before she appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Mel Brooks would again be scrabbling for increasingly rare black-and-white film stock when he produced The Elephant Man with David Lynch

Another example of early publicity. Roger Daltrey on the cover for Ken Russell's Tommy, months before the cinema release.

Film Review, November

An early example of a film released with stereo sound, though only in a few cinemas. I don't remember hearing stereo in a cinema before Star Wars in 1977.

Much more about Tommy here.

Photoplay, May

Director Sam Peckinpah dominated the decade. His name on a poster almost outweighed the cast - guaranteeing the toughest of tough, violent thrillers. But his drinking problem meant that he was a liability to insure for U.S. productions, and he'd often have to make his films in other countries instead. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia was shot in Mexico, for instance.

Film Review, June

Monty Python's first original feature film, directed by the two Terrys, Gilliam and Jones, remains my favourite. I'd missed most of their TV shows because I was too young. The films were my first taste of Python. And I liked it.

Film Review, August

First written in the 1930s, the 1970s saw the start of Doc Savage's (200) pulp adventures being reprinted with all new cover art. Classic sci-fi producer George Pal bought the rights to ALL the novels and expected to start a franchise. He blamed studio interference for its failure, when they recut and redubbed the film. A shame, because Ron Ely was the perfect choice to play Doc.

More about Doc Savage - Man of Bronze here.

Norman Jewison's Rollerball first appeared on the cover of Photoplay magazine in 1974. A year later, and six months before the UK release, here it is again on the front page. 

Films Illustrated, September

Whether it ran into production problems (I've read about clashes between James Caan and the director) or whether the release was delayed because of worries about the violent content, I don't know.

Film Review, November

Another crowd-pleasing film that wouldn't stay away, Bob Clark's Black Christmas gave us an early taste of slasher movies before the phrase had been invented. I caught it a couple of times when it was later re-released in double-bills. This was the British debut.






Previous magazine flashbacks...

Lawrence of Arabia and more from 1963

Blow Up, The Trip and more from 1967

Barbarella, Witchfinder General and more from 1968

Rosemary's Baby, When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, Women In Love and more from 1969

M*A*S*H, Myra Breckinridge and more from 1970

The Devils, Deep End, double-bills and more from 1971

A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and more from 1972 

The Legend of Hell House and the last of the Planet of the Apes and more from 1973

Zardoz, Westworld, The Exorcist and more from 1974