I suppose that I should be writing some eulogy to the Summer gone by, this being the last day of August. Sadly, though, this hasn't been a vintage August - as soon as I took time off, the weather turned and for much of the month it felt more like Autumn than Summer. Besides, today has greater significance for me - this is the last day that I'm getting paid by my usual employer as, tomorrow, my six month 'career break' starts. So I might not be getting another pay packet until next February. That said, not only are my finances extremely healthy - more than enough in the bank to see me through several years without work if necessary - but there is the prospect, as the autumn progresses, that I might be able to pick up some supply teaching work. Moreover, I'll be looking into some other possibilities for part-time work - that's what this break is all about: exploring alternative opportunities for work. I've already got my CV with a few agencies, but the problem is that the jobs they are sending me are all linked to my current work - which is precisely what I'm trying to get away with. Some tweaking of my profiles is clearly in order.
In the meantime, the immediate problem facing me is what I'm going to do with my time. It has gradually been dawning on me that I have prospect of great swathes of free time ahead of me, but I've not actually made any firm plans as to how I'm going to fill it. It hasn't seemed quite real up to now. But here I am, for the first time in decades, a free agent, my time entirely my own. The fact is that, usually, at this time of year, I'm still on holiday, so that's how I'll be treating this week - like my usual last week off before the long haul to Christmas at work. After that, well, apart from exploring employment opportunities, there's work I have to do on the house, (which I actually made a start on yesterday), there's the model railway, various films i need to write up here, maybe catching up with friend and family I haven't seen since lockdown kicked off and several new projects which are beginning to form at the back of my mind. You know, the sort of stuff I've thought about doing in the past, but have never had the time. So, there you are _ I'm standing on the verge of a brave new world.
Jesus! Some things are just so predictable, aren't they? Take this fake furore whipped up by the usual suspects on right wing media over the Last Night of the Proms. As soon as the idea was floated by the BBC that this year they might not include things like 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'Rule Britannia', because of their imperialistic overtones, in light of Black Lives Matter etc, the onslaught started. Every right-wing 'newspaper' and knee-jerk reactionary radio talk show shock jock were denouncing those bed-wetting commie pinkos at the BBC for being unpatriotic. 'They just HATE Britain' they all screamed, as if a nation can be defined by a couple of tunes written in the last century but one. Songs, incidentally, which extol a vision of Britain as a world dominating maritime power which hasn't existed in reality in nearly three quarters of a century. But really, who cares? Isn't about time that they did something different at the Last Night of the Proms rather than perform the same bloody tunes year after year? What was once an innocent celebration of popular classical music has become another one of those events which have been hijacked by right wing nationalists, Brexiteers and Little Englanders to try and force their agenda down our throats.
So, you know what? We should let them have it. This year let them go the full hog - indulge their penchant for Nazi cosplay, so there are plenty of swastika flags being waved among the union jacks. Mix in a few good Nazi songs to go with the jack boots, then, as they all join in with the chorus of Land of Hope and Glory, the huge pictures of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson can unfurl behind them. Then, as it all reaches a crescendo, Boris himself could appear on the balcony and give it all the double thumbs up. And then do you know what we should do? Seal the doors and gas the fucking lot of them. Just think, a whole swathe of the mot hard core rightist cocks wiped out in one go! Even better, you can guarantee that in the build up to this climax, all the right-wing bastards watching at home will have been wanking themselves silly and the appearance of Boris would undoubtedly have wiped a large proportion of them out with heart attacks brought on by sexual ecstasy. The other half, hopefully, would expire, blue faced and gasping, as they witnessed the extermination going on, live, at the Albert Hall. I know, I know. I'm having those horrible violent fantasies again. But what the Hell, a man's allowed to dream isn't he? Besides, it all helps balance the vitriol and bile that daily pours forth from the right-wing press, as their readers celebrate the deaths of asylum seekers and get outraged over the fact that Argos had an online ad where all the people in it were black. What a sad world we live in.
(Once again, for the benefit of crackpots, police and MI5, this is intended to be read satirically and I'm not actually advocating the use of violence against anybody. Besides, I'm just stating my opinions and if you try and stop me then you are against free speech. Yah, boo, sucks! Just sayin'.)
Time was that I used to post a lot of my holiday videos here. But times change. The urge to video everything waned, for instance. Moreover, the amount of time it took to edit some of my more ambitious attempts at film-making became prohibitive. Plus, the focus of the blog began to shift and, correspondingly, I started to feel guilty if I posted stuff not in line with this new focus, as if I was somehow letting the readership down. But what the Hell, it's my blog and I'll post what the heck I like here. So, here's a quick video of my trip to the beach yesterday. While the sun was out and it was a pretty pleasant day weather-wise, the wind was up on the coast, with the sea correspondingly rough. Barton-on-Sea, where I was yesterday, has suffered a lot of erosion and when the seas are rough, the waves can break spectacularly on the rock constructed sea defences. So, here are a few minutes of the sea hurling itself onto the rocks. To be glimpsed further out to sea were a couple of those laid up cruise liners which are currently scattered around the UK's coastllines. They were too far out for me to identify them - my binoculars aren't powerful enough - but I did manage to get this fuzzy photo of them lying just off the Isle of Purbeck:
But I wasn't just on the beach yesterday, afterwards I moved inland and ended up going for a longer than intended walk in Wiverely Enclosure in the New Forest. It was unintentionally long as I hadn't realised how much the main path snaked around and turned back on itself before finally returning me to its starting point. Still, along the way I did spot a deer (or did he spot me?). He actually stood still long enough for me to get a fuzzy picture of him:
So there you have it, (whether you wanted it or not), a day out of my holiday, which might be drawing to a close. I haven't decided yet. My current trial separation from work means that my time, currently, is my own. While I might have some other work coming up, I'll probably still be free next week, so if I get a nice day, I might head for the coast again. We'll see.
Slowly but surely, films that haven't had TV screenings for what seems like decades are being exhumed by Sony from their vaults to provide content for their three free-to-air film channels. Last Sunday it was the turn of In Like Flint, the 1967 sequel to the previous year's hit James Bond spoof, Our Man Flint, starring James Coburn. While still superior in just about every department to the woeful contemporaneous Matt Helm films starring Dean Martin, In Like Flint is still the lesser of the two Flint films. (I know there was a TV movie in the seventies - a failed pilot starring Ray Danton, entitled Dead on Target - but, as beyond the lead character's name, it has just about no connection with the sixties films, I don't count it as part of the series). The budget is clearly lower and the scope of the action far more limited and it just isn't quite as much fun as the first one. It is also incredibly sexist. Yes, I know that it belongs to a genre which traditionally traded on sexism - these spy movies are essentially male fantasies tailored to a predominantly male audience - and I am well aware of the rampant sexism of the genre's progenitors, the Bond movies, but nonetheless, even by the standards of the genre, I found the level of sexism in In Like Flint quite startling.
On the surface, In Like Flint actually seems as if it is going to eschew the usual sexism for a story line that has more to do with showing women as being empowered. Basically, the plot concerns an all-female global organisation attempting to supplant the world's patriarchal leadership in favour of female leadership. Interestingly, unlike other films featuring similar plots, In Like Flint doesn't characterise these women a bunch of vicious man-hating bitches. Instead, the organisation's leadership is comprised of women who have pursued successful careers in male-dominated fields. Moreover, their methods are predominantly non-violent: they recruit new female members by means of subliminal messaging, helping them realise that they they are being oppressed by traditional male dominated social and economic structures. They also remove male opponents through kidnapping rather than assassination. The worst they do to their enemies is put them into cryogenic storage. Their ends are benign: creating a better, less violent society, But it all unravels toward the end - Flint expresses utter incredulity at the idea that women could run anything, let alone the world, (an opinion we perhaps shouldn't be surprised at - the man has a personal harem of compliant sex objects, for God's sake). This, despite the fact that for the entire film, he's been outwitted and harried by this all-female organisation. Then a male ally of the organisation, a US general, takes over the whole scheme for his own nuclear blackmail plan and all the women are suddenly helpless again in the face of his soldiers' guns and, naturally, turn to that epitome of masculinity, Flint, for salvation.
Perhaps I'm missing the point, perhaps it was all intended satirically, with Flint's entrenched chauvinism being the real target. But somehow, I doubt it. That would simply be too sophisticated for a studio spy spoof made in 1967. Indeed, in a way the film reflected the era it was made in - the so called 'Summer of Love' and the supposedly 'permissive society', a time when young people finally challenged establishment conventions. Except that that wasn't really what happened. For one thing, all those hippies and the like had little to do with female emancipation: 'Free Love' was mainly a pretext for blokes who otherwise wouldn't get any to get their ends away. Moreover, hippies and other sixties radicals were predominantly middle class themselves - their lifestyles financed by private means and/or their establishment families. Working class youth were too busy having to work for a living to spend much time rebelling. So, it seems apt that In Like Flint's veneer of female empowerment should ultimately be revealed as a cover for rampant chauvinism. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into an inconsequential sixties spy spoof.
It's a subject I know that I keep coming back to, but I think that it is of increasing importance: just how can some people keep on supporting Trump? What does he have to do in order for the apologist to stop making excuses or saying that it is somehow all the Democrats fault and telling us how at least Trump isn't Hilary/Obama/Biden/a Commie? Does he actually have to shoot that person of Fifth Avenue, or wherever it was he said he could shoot someone and get away with it, he was so popular? I ask because, having effectively declared war on the American people for having the audacity to exercise their right to protest, stoked up racial discord, killed thousands of Americans through his inadequate response to Coronavirus, lied, lied and lied some more, he's now decided to top it all by trying to rig the forthcoming presidential election through voter suppression on a massive scale. At what point to these Trump apologists say enough is enough? Part of their problem, I suspect, is that they've invested themselves so heavily into championing Trump against his critics,(this is particularly the case for the professional contrarians who have rallied behind him, bigging up their support as public opinion moves the other way), is that they simply can't change tack now without a catastrophic loss of face. Their only way out is to buy in to all the Trumpian crap about 'rigged mail ballots' in order to weather his possible defeat in November, on the grounds that he didn't really lose, those damn Democrats stole it from him.
Still, if I was one of these Trump apologists, I'd be looking at who I was keeping company with and feeling uneasy. Just look at all the right wing cranks, loonies and crackpots they are lining up as guests for the Republican National Convention - people like that couple who like to point guns at protestors walking past their house. You know, I'm pretty sure that, right now, if they found an incredibly aged Adolf Hitler wandering around the jungles of Paraguay, they'd have him shipped to the US to be a guest at that convention - and Trump's supporters wouldn't bat an eyelid. Perhaps they will find him in South America - maybe somebody really did save his brain (actually his entire head in the film of the same name) and, thanks to the Trump billions, have it installed in a shiny new robotic body so that Herr Hitler can give the keynote speech in support of Trump's nomination and re-election. After all, they both seem to have the same game plan: win an election then ensure that there aren't any more elections. You can hear him now, as he stands on that podium, with the searchlights behind him pointing skywards as he endorses Trump: 'Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuckwit!' Yeah, I know, I'm doing it again, I'm drawing that offensive and ridiculous parallel between Trumpism and Fascism. But those right-wingers really hate it - it gets them foaming at the mouth with impotent fury. So I just do it all the more. Damn it, for decades they used to label all of us on the left as 'Commies' and continue to do so, despite the collapse of Soviet communism, so fair's fair. You are getting a taste of your own medicine, fascists! Best of all, though, we lefties actually have some justification for using the fascist label: even if Trump isn't an actual full blown fascist, there is no doubt that his administration's policies have created a dangerous situation in the US whereby the conditions under which fascism thrives are being created. So, you jack-booted Nazi bastards - stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
I remember when Death Ship (1980) was released to cinemas. Despite being a low budget horror film, it had a considerable TV campaign behind it. The film could also boast some 'name' actors, George Kennedy and Richard Crenna, for instance and even a 'name' director in Alvin Rakoff. In truth, though, the latter, better known fr directing far 'worthier' projects on film and TV, seemed an odd choice for what amounts to a 'Nazisploitation' film. Upon viewing the film, he seems an even odder choice - under his direction, the film never really gets into its stride, with the shocks too obvious and what should be suspenseful sequences undermined by a lack of pace and focus. To be fair, a lot of the blame lies with the muddled script, which abandons any sense of logic or plot development in favour of a series of all too obvious would be shock sequences, which, at best, are only vaguely explained.
In fact, the film's whole scenario simply makes no sense. The titular vessel is some kind of World War Two Nazi prison ship which has somehow been sailing the seven seas, crewless, since the end of the war, preying upon shipwreck victims, apparently using their blood, or maybe just their fear and terror, (the script isn't very clear on this), as fuel. All of which begs the question, (well, several questions, but we'll deal with the obvious first), as to how its presence has never been detected - it isn't a literal ghost ship, it is clearly very solid as it goes around sinking other ships by ramming them, (although sustaining no damage itself). Which brings us to another question: why does nobody apparently notice all those cruise liners (it seems to specialise in sinking these) going missing? Then there's the question of what happened to the crew? Is it their ghosts operating the ship, or does it have some kind of malignant life force of its own? Moreover, just why was it being used as a traveling torture chamber in the first place? While there were prison ships operated by the German Navy on World War Two - the 'Altmark' being the best known - they were just that, floating prisons, used to house survivors from merchant ships sunk by the Germans until they could be transported to neutral ports or back to Germany. No torture was involved. Indeed, what would have been the point? That sort of thing was generally done on land in prisons and concentration camps, with Jews, spies and resistance fighters the victims.
Despite all of this, Death Ship is a reasonably diverting ninety minutes. A lot of the acting performances - particularly Crenna and Kennedy - are, under the circumstances, actually quite effective. For a low budget film the production values are pretty good. The ship itself, at times, provides a brooding presence, but, in the end, never really exudes much real menace. The shocks are too crude and obvious to really horrify, instead coming over as somewhat unpleasant. The pity is that the central idea of a haunted ship has considerable promise, but is stymied by a plodding narrative that never properly develops the idea. Still, it is better than 2002's Ghost Ship which uses a similar idea (not to mention a similar poster), but which quickly becomes mired in a confusing plot which eschews suspense for body count. You never know, one day somebody might finally do the idea justice.
I've been out and about a bit this week, in between the bouts of rain and, on Tuesday, found myself walking through part of the New Forest, where I came upon this spectacularly fallen tree. The photo doesn't really do justice to just how big the tree was. It has clearly been down for some time - note how grass has grown over the site of its uprooting - probably blown down earlier this year. I'd like to say that it had stood there for decades before falling foul of the power of the weather, but it is clearly one of the conifers the Forestry Commission tends to plant these days. They are quick growing and therefore can be harvested for timber within a few years of planting. So, despite its impressive height (or rather length, now that it is horizontal), it probably wasn't that old.
In fact, there has been a fair amount of tree-felling in this particular enclosure recently, judging by the number of stacked logs to be found beside the various paths. That and the signs warning of forestry work going on and the distant sounds of power saws. Anyway, to return to the original point, it is no bad thing to sometimes be reminded of the power of nature - in this case a huge tree felled by the elements. Indeed, it is a far better way to be reminded than by having your roof damaged by gale force winds, as happened to me a few years ago. As you can probably guess, I'm struggling to come up with a proper post for today - I was out again for most of the day: a trip to the beach followed by a long walk in another part of the forest. It was a perfect day for it - no rain, the sun out and a pleasant breeze. Which, unfortunately, meant that the beach was far too busy for my liking. (It was also bloody expensive, with parking charges jacked up to £2.50 an hour! I think I'll be avoiding Lepe beach in future - other nearby beaches give you two hours parking for £2.00 - at some you can even find some free parking). Still, I'm at least managing to salvage some kind of Summer break from this car crash of a year.
Mark of the Wolfman is where it all began for Paul Naschy and the saga of his best known character, Waldemar Daninsky, the eternally doomed werewolf. It also marked an early international success for Spanish horror movies, achieving a widespread release (albeit over a period of several years and under multiple titles - it was called Hell's Creatures in the UK, for example). There is something apt in the fact that, for its 1971 US release, it was retitled Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, despite having nothing to do with the famed monster maker, (the US distributor had promised exhibitors a Frankenstein double bill, with Al Adamson's Frankenstein Versus Dracula as the top half, unable to secure a second, genuine, Frankenstein picture, he simply acquired the US rights to the Naschy film and retitled it), as Mark of the Wolfman was clearly inspired by the old Universal horror series. Indeed, one of the first horror films the young Naschy ever saw was the original Universal 'monster rally', Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, which, like Mark of the Wolfman, brings together multiple monsters. Certainly, in terms of its plot elements, settings (lots of Gothic castles, musty tombs and dungeons) and characters, Mark of the Wolfman is a very old-fashioned film, looking backwards to the 'golden age' of monster movies, rather than taking its cue from more recent horror trends, like Night of the Living Dead, which was released the same year. On the other hand, it ups considerably the gore and violence quotient in comparison even to the then most recent Hammer films.
As previously noted, this was the first film in what was to become a long running series of films featuring the Waldemar Daninsky character. It is notable that the movies quickly abandon any pretense of continuity, with the character's werewolf origins and profession varying from film-to-film: sometimes he a nobleman living in hereditary castle, other times he is an anthropologist or an explorer. Sometimes he married, sometimes not. Even the era he lives in varies: in the earlier films he is clearly a contemporary character, whereas later films adopt historical, often medieval, settings. The constant is that Daninsky is continual subjected to the curse of lycanthropy, with the films chronicling his attempts to lift the curse while simultaneously trying to protect those he loves not just from his own bestial alter-ego, but also from other supernatural or evil threats. The pattern is set here, in this first film. Daninsky is portrayed as being a mysterious figure, clearly from a wealthy background, but fallen on hard times and forced to sell parts of inheritance in order to survive. He has the misfortune to be bitten by a werewolf inadvertently resurrected from his tomb at the abandoned Castle Wolfstein by a pair of gypsies. He kills Wolfstein, but soon finds himself turning hairy and murdering the locals. Assisted by a local girl who has fallen in love with him and her erstwhile fiance, Daninsky desperately searches for a cure by day, while chained up in the Wolfstein dungeons by night, eventually learning of a German scientist who might be able to help him. Summoning the scientist, Daninsky and his helpers find themselves confronted by a brother and sister pair of scientists representing themselves as the original's children. They set themselves up at the castle, but quickly reveal themselves as vampires, chaining Daninsky up and putting his helpers under their spell. They resurrect Wolfstein, who has a fight has a fight to the death with Waldemar, The latter, still in wolfman form, then proceeds to deal with the vampires before, himself, succumbing to a silver bullet fired by the girl who loves him.
None of which is exactly ground-breaking, but it is rather well done. Mark of the Wolfman was clearly seen as a prestige production, being shot in colour, widescreen and 70mm (it only played in this latter format in Germany, apparently) and its production values are excellent. Director Leon Klimovsky, in the first of a number of collaborations with Naschy, gives the film a highly polished look, handling the action scenes of Daninsky's werewolf attacks, the battle with Wolfstein and the pursuit of the vampires with aplomb, ultimately driving the whole film along at a brisk pace. The entire production is also very atmospheric, with Klimovsky often conjuring up a dream like feel to sequences - particularly those involving the vampires and their mesmerised victims. The first appearance of the vampires, emerging from the swirling smoke at an otherwise deserted railway station is outstanding, lingering in the memory long after the film has ended. The performances, although, as always, hampered by variable dubbing in the English-language version, are generally adequate, with Naschy succeeding in making Daninsky a suitably enigmatic and haunted character (even before he is bitten), tortured by the curse placed upon him. Only the male vampire really jars, with the actor playing him twirling his cloak and posturing far too melodramatically at the film's climax.
While Naschy (who also wrote the film under his real name of Jacinto Molina) and Klimovsky might have succeeded in making Mark of the Wolfman something of a minor classic, it could easily have turned out differently, as a brief look at one of the sequels will show. 1973's Fury of the Wolfman is the third in the series (or fourth if you accept that the supposedly never completed Nights of the Wolfman was ever anything more than a fantasy on Naschy's part), arguably the first proper sequel, if you discount the science fiction monster mash Assignment: Terror, in which Daninsky is really a supporting character. It reworks much of the material from the first film - a werewolf on werewolf fight, Daninsky's capture and torture by an evil woman (also called Wolfstein and the daughter of a dead scientist), the resurrection of a character killed off earlier and a silver bullet fired by a woman who loves Waldemar - but without Klimovsky at the helm, it is something of a farrago. Discarding continuity, (this time Waldemar is an explorer back from Tibet, where he was bitten by a Yeti, thereby giving him the curse of lycanthropy, finds his wife has been cheating on him, so murders her before being himself killed), the scenario quickly becomes over-complicated and is told in a confused fashion. There is little in the way of atmosphere or suspense and is very flatly filmed. Even the werewolf sequences are largely botched, the exception being a sequence lifted from Mark of the Wolfman, which the director doesn't bother to match with the new footage, (Daninsky's shirt, for instance, changes colour). Naschy maintained that the film's director, Jose Maria Zabalza (who was a last minute replacement for Enrique Eguiliz), was an alcoholic and was drunk throughout most of the filming.
To be fair, Fury of the Wolfman isn't entirely without entertainment value, coming on like a particularly demented Universal monster rally, desperately throwing in everything - multiple werewolves, walking dead, murderous hippies - in a desperate attempt to keep things moving. It is what, when I was a child, I thought horror films should be like - a crazy blur of blood, monsters, castles and action - but very shoddily done. Whereas the first film had a mythic feel, Fury is just a mess. Mark of the Wolfman showed that, with some care and skill, virtually the same elements could be forged into a good version of my childhood self's ideal horror film. It is actually to my great regret that I didn't see Mark of the Wolfman when I was in my early teens ( I had read about it, but it was the pre-video age when such films never appeared on UK TV). I would undoubtedly have liked it even more than I do now. Fortunately, with the next instalment after Fury, The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman, the series got back on course with Leon Klimovsky at the helm once more. Further adventures followed, including another encounter with the abominable snowman in The Werewolf and the Yeti (the Yeti's bite infects him, although the film is entirely self contained and separate from Fury of the Wolfman - it is also, I believe, the only entry in the series with a happy ending as he finds a cure), and a meeting with descendant of Dr Jekyll (Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf). Various other adventures followed, several of which, including a Japanese excursion, have sadly never had English language releases. The series is fascinating, with each film essentially self contained, thereby presenting Waldemar as a character doomed to forever repeat his cycle of lycanthropy throughout history and across Europe - it doesn't matter where or when he exists, he cannot escape his fate.
Oh, if you are sill wondering about that US release title, it is justified by a semi-animated title sequence, in which the Frankenstein monster is shown turning into a werewolf, while an unseen narrator intones the information that after being cursed with lycanthropy, the familiy changed its name to Wolfstein. Yeah, that explains everything...
You know, I actually saw someone come out with it again the other day - that most idiotic phrase in history: 'they should keep politics out of sport'. Don't misunderstand me - it didn't come as a surprise, I just knew that somebody, somewhere must be saying it in the wake of 'Black Lives Matter' and all those sportsmen 'taking the knee'. It was just that it took so long for it to materialise within my sight. It is one of those constant refrains: we heard it during the South African apartheid era when teams from, well, everywhere, were banned from playing South African teams, also during the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics. It is as if those saying it really believe that there is some kind of abstract, universal, notion of 'sportsmanship' which transcends political and moral principles. Except that there clearly isn't - for some, both individuals and nations, it is apparently OK to use performance enhancing drugs. What most might call cheating, they rationalise as 'gaining a competitive edge', no different from swimmers shaving their body hair to reduce friction, for instance. But what really irritates me about the people who say this, is that they want to propagate the idea that sport isn't political in the first place. Yet they are, generally speaking, the very same people who, through their complaints about footballers kneeling for the national anthem and so on, clearly think that the national anthem should be played before a sporting contest, even though its playing is, in itself, a political act. Everything's political.
I also recall, during one of those intermittent tours of apartheid era South Africa by 'England' cricket or rugby teams, made up of rogue internationals, someone in the pub trying to defend them by saying that British Airways still regularly flew to South Africa, but didn't face any kind of penalties. The difference, obviously, is that, unlike these rogue teams, British Airways was in no way purporting to represent the UK - they were an entirely private carrier (courtesy of Thatcher's privatisation programme) which happened to have the word 'British' in its trading name. But a team touring South Africa and playing international matches against an official South African team under the 'England' banner are clearly making some claim to be 'official' representatives of the sport involved. Moreover, by organising the tour in the first place, South Africa was making a deeply political statement: attempting to demonstrate how ineffective international sporting sanctions against them were, that greed would always trump any sense of 'sportsmanship' among some sportsmen. That's quite apart from the fact that the racial segregation of sports in South Africa, which helped spark the international boycott, was a political act. Sport has always been political - and not just at international level. Let's not forget the tradition of the sectarian divide in Glasgow football, with Celtic the catholic team, Rangers the protestant. While it is no longer the case that only catholics can play for the one, protestants the other, the divide still very much exists between supporters and is as much political as it is religious. Then there's Tottenham Hotspur and the anti-semitism faced by supporters, which includes prominent Jewish supporters of Chelsea trying to tell Spurs fans that their self-identifying as 'Yids' is anti-semitic while simultaneously supporting a club whose supporters regularly chant 'You're on the way to Auschwitz' when playing Spurs. So please, don't tell me that politics should be kept out of sport when what you really mean is that they should only keep politics you disagree with out of it.
I was going to write about another film today, but decided that there is a physical limit to the number of such posts anyone can write in a single week. So, Paul Naschy's debut as perpetually doomed werewolf Waldemar Daninsky in Mark of the Wolfman (1968) will have to wait for another day. I've actually been getting on with my holiday this week - I managed to find time for a walk in the New Forest the other day and a trip to the beach yesterday. I've been pleasantly surprised by the relatively low level of traffic on the roads. Indeed, yesterday the main obstacle was the weather - I had to drive through the mother of all storms to get to the coast. I thought it was never going to end - then suddenly I was through it and the sun was out again. Even the beach wasn't that crowded. Sure, there were more people there than I'd normally expect to see on a weekday in August, but everyone was distancing and it was all very pleasant. My only complaint would be that it was so hazy that I couldn't see the fleet of currently redundant cruise liners moored in the Solent. Although the haze did lift sufficiently that I could glimpse one of them before I left.
But, did I learn anything from my holiday experiences so far? Well, I was reminded of the fact that eating an ice cream cone when you have a moustache can be a very messy business - it has been so many years since I had a 'tache that I'd quite forgotten. This, in turn, reminded me of why I really need to get rid of this lockdown 'tache - it's far too high maintenance, requiring constant trimming and grooming. (Despite my best efforts, it was still stiff with dried ice cream by the time I got home yesterday evening). I've also been reminded that the simple pleasures - a woodland walk, an ice cream on the beach - are often the ones I crave most. Neither stifling heat nor humongous thunder storms and torrential rain can dull the enjoyment of these experiences for me. Anyway, that's enough pretentious twaddle - it's been another rambling Friday post, but I'm too tired after a busy week to come up with anything better. Hopefully, next week we'll get back to the films I've been watching. Not just Paul Naschy but all manner of other stuff I've been catching up with.
Like Vengeance of the Zombies, Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue is seventies continental zombie film set and partially filmed in the UK. Which is where any comparison ends. This Italian/Spanish co-production is a far more effective film, making excellent use of its locations and building up a fair head of tension and suspense in many scenes. Moreover, it has a far more straightforward plot than Vengeance of the Zombies which unfolds in a far clearer fashion. Known under multiple titles according to market - Don't Open the Window and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie in the US, for instance - Jorge Grau's film has often been dismissed as simply being a reworking of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. While clearly inspired by the earlier film, Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue also goes off on several tangents of its own, developing its own zombie mythology and featuring a featuring a far more dynamic structure, eschewing the static siege scenario that takes up most of the narrative of the Romero film in favour of a fluid narrative involving twin investigations by the police and the main protagonists.
But at its heart, Grau's film shares with Night of the Living Dead the theme of generational conflict, with an older, establishment authority figure being driven by their entrenched prejudices to persecute younger, characters. While the US film only overtly addresses this at its climax, with a redneck sheriff casually killing the hero, who is black and young, because he assumes that he is one of the living dead, Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue develops this theme throughout most of the film. The central conflict becomes less that of the hero and heroine against the living dead, than that between Arthur Kennedy's reactionary police sergeant, (played with a bizarre 'Oirish' accent) and the two young protagonists, Edna and George (played by Cristina Galbo and Ray Lovelock, respectively), who he suspects are responsible for the spate of gory killings in the Lake District. To the sergeant, they are clearly guilty as, not only are they young, but they are also outsiders, In Lovelock's case, his prejudice is heightened by the fact that George has long hair, a beard, comes from London and rides a motorcycle - all of which clearly mark him out as some kind of degenerate hippy. In reality, as the audience are aware, George actually owns an antiques shop and is clearly highly intelligent, (despite being cocky and abrasive). Blinded by his preconceptions, the sergeant interprets everything George and Edna do as further proof that they are crazed killers, probably Satanists, to boot.
Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue also expands on the origins of the zombie outbreak. Whereas Night of the Living Dead vaguely alludes to radiation from a space probe being the root cause, Grau's film provides a more elaborate explanation for its more localised outbreak of the living dead. Here the culprit is an experimental pest control machine being tested on a local farm by the Ministry of Agriculture. This uses ultrasonic radiation to kill insects, with the unintended side effect of reanimating the recently dead by stimulating their nervous systems. As it turns out, it isn't just the dead being affected: new born babies at the local hospital have also become aggressive, biting anyone that comes near them. While George, with the help of a local doctor, works out the link between the machine and the zombies, nobody will believe him and his attempts to destroy it simply reinforce the sergeant's belief that he is some kind of crazy counter-culture revolutionary. Another distinctive feature of the zombies of Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, compared to their US predecessors, is the fact that they are far from mindless ghouls, blindly blundering around in search of their next meal. They exhibit a significant degree of intelligence, apparently deliberately propagating themselves by smearing their blood onto other corpses in order to reanimate them, and using tools to achieve their objectives, (the uprooting of a stone cross from a grave to use as a battering ram against the door the hero and heroine are sheltering behind). Indeed, the end of the film carries a clear implication that they retain at least some memories of their previous lives and some lingering sense of identity.
The film starts slowly, building up small details before gathering pace as the living dead begin to appear. Grau handles a number of set-pieces - the tramp/zombie that menaces Edna as she waits for George in the car, the siege at the church, the zombie takeover of the hospital - to good effect, with plenty of tension and suspense. There's also plenty of quite convincing gore - certainly more convincing that seen in many subsequent Italian zombie films - and surprisingly high production values. As noted before, Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue features extensive location shooting in the UK, (much of it in the Peak District, despite the film being set in the Lake District), with Grau making the most of some bleakly beautiful and remote looking locations to create a sense of unease as the living dead erupt messily into the landscape. He also succeeds in creating a sense of isolation for the two protagonists - clearly always outsiders in the local community, divorced from their usual support networks and well out of their urban comfort zone. The interiors were shot in Spanish studios and, as is often the case, the spelling on the English language signage in the hospital and other buildings is eccentric, to say the least.
While Kennedy's performance is somewhat over the top, not helped by the accent he adopts, he at least speaks with his own voice in the English language version, in contrast to his co-stars who are all dubbed. The quality of the dubbing varies, with many of the voices well matched to the on screen actors. Lovelock, however, is given a jarring 'mockney' accent which doesn't really suit either the character or the actor, (Lovelock, an Italian whose father was an English ex-soldier who settled in Italy after the war, actually spoke English, but dubbing by other actors, even in the Italian version, was pretty much de rigeur in the seventies). Nevertheless, despite this handicap, he turns in a decent enough performance as the never entirely sympathetic hero. Dalbes fares better in the dubbing stakes and is quite convincing as the troubled heroine as her mental state rapidly unravels in the face of zombie attacks and police persecution. Of course, despite the title, none of the action actually takes place at the Manchester Morgue, although it is frequently mentioned, (it is the destination for the recently deceased from the local hospital). That said, Manchester itself does appear in the film, standing in for London in the opening scenes. This sequence effectively sets the scene for the film, as George motorcycles his way out of the metropolis, surrounded by pollution and the indifference of passers by - the population seem already zombified by modern life, as they go through the repetitive motions of their daily lives.
There's no doubt that Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue is much more than just a knock off of Night of the Living Dead. In many ways it is a far more accomplished piece of film making that builds on the earlier film's themes to produce its own unique vision. It is also a lot more sophisticated than the many Italian Zombie films (also inspired by George Romero's Living Dead films) which followed it in the late seventies and early eighties. It has earned its status as a cult classic and is well worth seeking out - after many years of unavailability, since 2000 it has appeared in a number of DVD and Blu Ray editions under various of its titles.
Watching Vengeance of the Zombies really does feel, at times, a surreal experience, as it happily mashes together a multitude of cinematic, literary and cultural references and inspirations with little regard for logic, let alone coherent characterisation or plot development. Even star Paul Naschy, who scripted the film under his real name of Jacinto Molina, later observed that he must have been under the influence of drugs when he wrote it. That said, like most Spanish horror films from the seventies, it is also a lot of fun to watch and has its moments. Like the contemporaneous Naschy-starring Spanish giallo Seven Murders for Scotland Yard, the film is set in the UK. Or rather a continental approximation of the UK, centering around a still-swinging London. To be fair, Vengeance of the Zombies features far more location shooting around early seventies London than Seven Murders. Moreover, its star, Naschy, actually features in some of it, rather than the film makers using a double filmed in medium and long shot. The rest of exterior scenes, representing some remote part of the UK countryside, however, were clearly shot in Spain. As with Seven Murders, the film's makers show a shaky grasp of UK office interiors, particularly those of police stations, with senior police officers once more favouring some very garish wallpaper for their workplaces.
While clearly hoping to cash in on the renewed popularity of zombies, created by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, (it even opens in a graveyard, like the Romero film), the walking dead of Vengeance of the Zombies are a throwback to the Voodoo animated zombies of thirties and forties films. Rather than being flesh eaters who transmit their undead status via their bites, these zombies are the slaves of the Voodoo priest who raises them, silently doing his bidding and exhibiting no will or imperative of their own. But Night of the Living Dead is only one of many sources which seem to have influenced Molinar's script: the opening, for instance, also features a pair of grave robbers, making it reminiscent of Frankenstein Meet the Wolfman, whose grave robbers are equally ill-fated. A dream sequence part-way through the film, in which the heroine finds herself being dragged from her bed to the catacombs, where her blood is used in a ritual to raise the Devil, seems to be inspired by Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House by way of Curse of the Crimson Altar (which used elements of the Lovecraft story uncredited). Naschy, as Satan, is even green skinned, like Barabara Steele in Crimson Altar's dream sequences.- which feature the hero apparently taken from his bed for Satanic rituals presided over by the witch Lavinia (Steele). The key plot device of a pair of twin brothers (Naschy again), one of who keeps coming under the influence of his evil brother, seems to recall Dennis Wheatley's The Satanist, (a one-time project for Hammer Films, which was abandoned following the debacle of To The Devil a Daughter, to which it is a semi-sequel).
None of these apparent inspirations are at all surprising, as Naschy/Molina was a keen student of the horror classics. Unfortunately, his script just can't accommodate them all into a single coherent plot. Indeed, one of the film's biggest problems is that for much of its running time it just feels like a series of events which the audience fervently hopes might eventually be linked up and explained , (not unlike the fragmented narrative structure of another somewhat surreal seventies horror favourite: Scream and Scream Again). The heroine is attacked in her house by a zombie which kills her father, (her sister has already been murdered), various other women are murdered by a masked killer, their bodies subsequently reanimated by him using Voodoo. The heroine consults her Indian guru (Naschy) and eventually follows him to his remote country retreat, seeking refuge, while her doctor boyfriend and the police investigate the murders. Strange and suspicious characters appear, (a creepy rural station master, for instance, who never seems to notice that Spanish trains keep running through his British Rail station), behave weirdly, before, more often than not, being murdered. Some of the murders are both inventive and gory - a mortuary attendant is stabbed to death with the jagged edge of an opened tin can, for example. The Guru behaves suspiciously - could he and the evil twin brother he mentions actually be one and the same person. Actually, no. The brother, who is horribly scarred, exists (and is also played by Naschy), and, of course, is the one behind the murders.
All the victims, (including the heroine's family), had been part of the British Raj pre-independence and were involved in some kind of curse involving a rape and subsequent murder of the alleged rapist on Independence Day 1947. So, naturally, the evil brother (who is able to subvert his twin's will to do his bidding), a Hindu, has been using Voodoo (a religion created by black African slaves and their descendants), to wreak revenge for his people. The sacrifice of the last victim, the heroine, will complete his revenge and allow the summoning of Satan himself in the form of Baron Samedi. But at the last minute, it turns out that the maid is a representative of the Voodoo religion and accuses evil Naschy of having 'betrayed Voodoo', (not of cultural appropriation, though), killing him, before turning her attentions to the heroine - luckily, though, the police turn up on cue and rescue the girl, (after fighting some zombies in the garden). At least, I think that's what it was all about. The disjointed story-telling makes it difficult to tell. Perhaps Molina was trying to make some serious point about colonialism and the exploitation of native populations - but if so, this is completely undermined by the fact that the film's main ethnic characters are played by a blacked up Spaniard.
But the plot isn't really the point. The real pleasure in watching Vengeance of the Zombies comes from its occasionally striking imagery and some surprisingly effective sequences such as the dream sequence and the tin can murder) which intersperse the film. At its best, Leon Klimovsky's direction, with its use of slow motion for the zombies, evokes a dream like feel. On top of all that, it has some great footage of seventies London, a lounge musical score that seems to have come from another film entirely, peak seventies fashions, lots of beautiful (and sometimes naked) continental actresses and even some gore. If you are in the right mood, Vengeance of the Zombies can be a lot of fun to watch. While it is far from Naschy's best work, he is surprisingly effective in his triple roles. Best of all, it is another film which gives a wonderfully off-kilter outsider's perspective of seventies Britain, something I always find fascinating.
The English-language version seems to be in the public domain, with the the film consequently widely - not mention freely - available on many streaming platforms, including YouTube, Daily Motion and the Internet Archive.
The sense of anti-climax continues as my long break from my employer gets underway in earnest. My achievements today, in spite of my new found freedom, were depressingly modest. Having spent half the day asleep (despite vowing not to do so), the best I could manage today was some modest clearing up of the areas of the house worst hit by months of lockdown sloth and slovenliness. Not that I was allowed to do that uninterrupted, being doorstepped by a couple of those bloody salesmen trying to get you to change your energy supplier. Quite apart from the fact that going door-to-door during a pandemic is surely still extremely high risk in terms of spreading the virus about, I was bloody annoyed because I had twice avoided them earlier in the day. Once when I was in town buying a paper, I had to fend off one of their salesmen manning their stall, then when I got back home, I thought that I had avoided the two doorsteppers when I noticed their approach as I went out again to take my empty beer bottles to the recycling bin. But the buggers came back, Quite apart from the fact that they seem to find it difficult to comprehend the fact that I'm not interested in their sales pitch and, quite frankly, resent their wastage of my time, it is the air of familiarity they adopt with you. I've been on the opposite side of the exchange (sort of, although I wasn't selling anything and was legally required to be there), so know that it is best to remain polite, but business like. Stick to the matter in hand.
Even having got rid of these pests, I still ended up wasting a large chunk of my evening wrestling with my Humax DVR which had suddenly lost its sound output. Or so I thought. It is a quite common problem with these units and is usually resolved by that good old stand by of switching it off and back on again. This time, it didn't work. Neither did a software update, changing the HDMI lead, switching the HDMI port used by the DVR for the one used by the Roku box nor even switching to a scart connection instead of HDMI. In desperation I turned my attention to the remote control. After some experimentation I found that, mysteriously, the volume control had set itself to zero, effectively muting all sound output. I say 'mysteriously' because I never touch the volume control - the sound levels for the TV (through which the DVR outputs) are controlled via a sound bar which has its own remote. Those on the DVR remote should be inoperable. So another day slips by. It isn't as if I actually had any concrete plans for the day. The heat makes doing anything outside exhausting and is currently putting me off of the idea of a trip to the coast, as the roads will inevitably be full of sunseekers from all over the UK invading my nearest beaches because they've been turned away from their own local beaches. Also, whether I like it or not, clearing up this place properly really needs to take a priority - I've made too many false starts over the last six months or so. I know I'm a slob, but even I have limits. I also really need to get on with writing up some of those schlock movies I've been watching of late, (I decided to have the weekend off from cannibals and watched some William Girdler directed B movie goodness instead).
What I perhaps should have mentioned yesterday was that it was my last day at work for the foreseeable future. Well, not all work, but certainly that lousy job that has been grinding me down for years now, undermining my health and self-confidence. Basically, I'm on leave for the next three weeks, then, from September I'm on a six month unpaid 'career break'. (For once in my life, I've decided to be sensible and not burn my bridges, leaving myself a safety net). While I have more than enough money in the bank to comfortably survive six months without working, I'm hoping to spend at least part of the time doing some supply teaching, (I was contacted by a couple of agencies last month, after hawking my CV around the web). It's a way to get back into the classroom, make some contacts and finally use my PGCE productively. I'll also be looking into other possible alternative ways of earning money. I'm in a position now where I don't have to work full time any more, so more casual work has become a possibility. Ideally, I'd like to be like Travis McGee, or Hap and Leonard, fictional characters who work only when they need money. (Although with less violence than McGee encounters, and perhaps less gay and bad assed as Leonard and less cynical than Hap).
Of course as, technically, I'm still an employee, I can't really go into details about the sort of shit I've had to endure over the past few years. But, when I'm finally completely free, I will write up a fuller account of it all. In the meantime, I'm free. At least, as free as the current Covid crisis allows any of us to be. So, for the next three weeks I'm on holiday. After that, I'll be exploring the world of alternative employment in earnest. The funny thing is that I've fantasised for so long about doing this - walking away from this job - that now I've actually done it, it feels somewhat anti-climactic. Which is normal when we make monumental personal changes - the rest of the world carries on regardless, unaware of what we've done. Or, indeed, caring what we've done, because it is an entirely personal choice. There's still a part of me which questions the wisdom of walking away - making me doubt whether swapping a regular income for uncertainty is the right thing to do. But the fact is that something had to change - I really couldn't keep carrying on as 'normal'. I hated what I was doing and that, in turn, was causing me stress which isn't good for my health, (as I found out a couple of years ago). It's still sinking in that, when this holiday is over, I won't have to go back to the office and the routine again. It's an uncertain future, but, for the first time in an age, an exciting one.
One shudders to think what other sexual depravities those teen age call girls were forced to perform - fingering their vice Lord was probably amongst the least of them While language changes over time, with popular usage redefining the meaning of certain words, one can't help but suspect that 'fingering' had a double meaning back in 1959 and that cover strap line was a deliberate double-entendre. True Police Cases, of which this is the cover of the August 1959 issue, was another variant on the men's magazine formula, part of a sub-genre focusing on supposedly ';true' crime. Very lurid 'true' crime, with an emphasis on sex, prostitution, violence and the bloodiest murders imaginable. It is still a viable formula - magazines like True Detective are still around, plying much the same material. Then there are all those 'true crime' TV shows recreating infamous murders or prying into supposedly 'unsolved' mysteries, not to mention the rise of the 'True Crime' podcast in recent years.
There' no doubt that people like to consume vicariously the dubious thrills of real life crime from the safety of their own homes - only the medium by which they experience this 'revulsion' and 'shock' changes. The pleasures some people experience from reading, watching or hearing about 'true' crime is really no different from those felt by people who enjoy so called 'video nasties' - although, interestingly, the former are generally the sort of people who condemn the latter. This, despite the fact that the 'video nasties' never really claim to be 'real', being obvious fantasies. Which is the paradox of the 'true crime' genre - the fact that it is supposedly 'real' gives it respectability, yet at the same time means that its consumers are, in effect, deriving entertainment from the real life terror and misery of actual victims. Mind you, it is probably that faux respectability which has allowed the 'True Crime' genre of magazine to survive while other men's magazines have vanished - it was the one sub-genre that the middle class reader could safely be seen buying, even though, in reality, it was serving up the same combination of sex and violence that filled the pages of the general men's magazines.
I'm feeling extremely tired today. Tired is probably the wrong word. Weary would be more accurate. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that I received some very bad news about a friend and former colleague yesterday and it is finally beginning to sink in. But, at least in part, it has to do with the fact that I'm only a couple of days away from taking a very long break from my job, the details of which I can't go into until all the details are finalised, but, nonetheless, from Friday I'm on paid leave for a few weeks, regardless. I know it is now only a matter of days, but it just can't come quickly enough. It has become ever clearer to me over the past couple of weeks, as management have tried to force us back onto the streets to resume working 'as normal', despite the steadily rising rates of Covid infection, that I really have nothing left to give the job. I really am completely played out, I can raise neither energy, enthusiasm or even a sense of duty to carry me through the days. I just want to move on now, to whatever the future holds. If nothing else, the news about my friend and news of the shattered health of another former colleague tells me that the casualty rate is getting too high and, selfishly, I don't want to be the next casualty. After all, I've already had one close call health-wise, which, even a couple of years down the line, still affects me.
So, over the next few weeks I'm going to try to put together a summer break as best I can within the current limitations imposed by the ongoing pandemic. Whether I'll be able to get to the coast, or be frustrated by hordes of idiots flooding there from hundreds of miles away, remains to be seen. I tend to favour the smaller beaches generally known only to those of us more local and who are habitual visitors. It's been a strange year, so far and the summer looks to be no different, but we have to make the best of the circumstances. Besides, the very strangeness of this year has helped me make some important decisions about my life - to the extent that I'm finally going to try a change of direction. Still, even if the beach doesn't work out this summer, I'll still have time to catch up with more schlock movies (courtesy of my Roku box). I already have a backlog of stuff to write about here, including a couple of UK set seventies zombie movies, (one starring the great Paul Naschy in multiple roles), not to mention a slew of Italian cannibal films, (of which I have several more to watch). Then there are all those Hong Kong martial arts films out there - a genre I've barely scratched the surface of, (some of them are pretty wild - I saw one the other day called The Nine Demons, where various of the protagonists dressed like seventies glam rockers, deals were made with the devil, everybody had been given names like 'Gary', 'Joey' and 'Roland' for the English dub. and the titular demons manifested variously as flying skulls, small children and hot babes). So, I might make something out of this summer yet. I might have nothing left to give work, but I still have plenty to give elsewhere.
I seem to have developed a penchant for late period John Wayne films. When I say late period, I mean those he made in the last ten years, or so, of his career, from the mid sixties to the mid seventies. Generally speaking, these aren't the most highly regarded of his movies, but they are the ones I most associate Wayne with, probably because they were coming onto TV at a time when I was old enough to actually be watching films, rather than just being in room when they were on. There are a couple of classics among his films of this era (True Grit and The Shootist) and at least one that is nowadays near unwatchable (the execrable Vietnam propaganda piece The Green Berets -lousy not just for its politics, but because it is also poorly made), but the majority are merely intended as action-orientated entertainments. In this respect, they vary in their success, but are rarely less than enjoyable. By the time he made these films, Wayne was comfortable in his screen persona as a leathery, rugged westerner (and most of the films were westerns), more than that, he looked and sounded convincing in such a role. You believed that gunfighters and ranchers of the era were like him. He looked somewhat less at ease playing tough cops in contemporary thrillers like McQ and Brannigan (not to mention being far too old to be playing the characters). What Wayne also showed in several of these films was a willingness to be overshadowed by colourful co-stars, (Kirk Douglas in The War Wagon, Robert Mitchum in El Dorado or even, to an extent, Richard Boone in Big Jake). He was even willing to gently parody his usual image in Rio Lobo, another variation on Rio Bravo, but with Wayne's character this time being the drunk, or play somewhat against type, as in True Grit, where his Rooster Cogburn is again a drunk, but this time quite mean spirited and with a shady past.
But these films didn't just mark Wayne's swansong, they also represented the last gasp of the western as a viable cinematic genre. The truth was that the traditional Hollywood western was pretty much played out, eclipsed by the upstart Italian product which, in turn, became the main influence on future US westerns. There was no real demand for these sorts of films, they were propelled into cinemas and box office success primarily by the presence of Wayne himself. He still had star power, even in the seventies, sufficient to draw in audiences. It is easy to see why - his screen presence and charisma carry these films through over-familiar plots and set pieces and often slack pacing. Without him him, most would be, at best, average examples of the genre. In truth, only True Grit, The Cowboys and The Shootist in any way challenge the conventions and narrative structures of the traditional western. I was moved to contemplate this late phase of Wayne's career after watching Big Jake (1971) this past weekend, when I needed a break from the Italian Cannibal film marathon I was otherwise engaged in. It made me realise how many films of his from this era that I enjoyed. Big Jake is actually a pretty typical example, with Wayne's titular character recalled by his estranged wife to rescue their kidnapped grandson. Nothing happens that you don't expect is going to happen and everything turns out much as you'd expect. But that's the point: it is reassuring in its familiarity. You know that right, in the form of Wayne and his shotgun, will triumph in the end, the child will be rescued unharmed, the shattered family will be reunited and the status quo restored.
The novel aspect of Big Jake is the fact that it is set in 1909, with modernity creeping into the west: Wayne finds himself having to contend with such new-fangled contraptions as automobiles, motor cycles and self-loading pistols. Inevitably, of course, he amply demonstrates that the traditional ways - horses, hot lead, etc - are the best way to deal with old fashioned outlaws like Richard Boone. Sadly, the film never really develops this idea of Wayne's character being a man out of his time, fighting vainly against progress, instead rapidly settling into a more standard western format. It is, however, beautifully shot on location in Mexico. As I said, it is all very reassuring. Which is undoubtedly where a lot of the appeal for me of this era of Wayne westerns comes from - we know exactly where we are with them, who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, right and wrong are clearly delineated and the ultimate outcomes never in doubt. But even more than that, the older Wayne is a reassuring presence, monumental and apparently indestructible, you just know that he can be relied upon to see things through. He had become like one of the rock formations in Monument Valley (one of John Ford's favourite locations); rugged, weather beaten and ever present. It is difficult to think of a contemporary star as iconic as Wayne, (and he was a film 'star' rather than a film actor - his characterisation rarely varied, but his presence was huge). As you get older, (and, according to some in government - not just government, actually - I'm 'elderly' to the extent that in the event of a Covid 'second wave; I'd have to 'shielded' on age grounds alone), such reassurances become more and more important as you find the constant change of the modern world increasingly wearisome.
