I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

 

This is one of those novels which have been translated to the screen again and again, not least in The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, which I may well have blogged. And yet, in novel form, the premise is truly allowed to blossom. We have possibly the last person on Earth who has not become a vampire, and we really explore the minute detail of how he adapts, survives and reacts to the strange and nightmarish new world in which he finds himself,

And interiority is crucial here. We are privy to Neville's thoughts, feelings, despairing binges, bleak memories, and why he acts as he does, far more so than any film version could ever make us feel, by virtue of the medium itself.

And so (SPOILERS) the twist at the end comes, if anything, as even more of a shock, as it has real moral force. Ruth makes not only Neville confront the moral horror of the fact that Neville has been gleefully staking living vampires as well as dead ones... and it turns out that a treatment is possible which will give them reasonably normal lives. Neville, with whose deeds the reader has been complicit, is in fact a murderer, and must die.

This is a surprisingly brief novella, and it focuses narrowly on the worldbuilding, the twist, and one everyman character. But what it does it does very well indeed.

An Inspector Calls (1954)

 "I don't know anything, not any more..."

I saw the original J.B. Priestley play in the West End, many moons ago, and it made a big impression on me. So much so that, having seen the play once, I was able to recall a surprising amount after a couple of decades, and predict what would happen next.

That is not, of course, to criticise the play, a trenchant commentary on the entitled and sometimes murderous arrogance of those who take their privilege for granted. The world, even in 2024, is full of Eva Smiths, and of Birlings who need taking down a peg or two.

The play suits adaptation to film well, with a number of flashbacks, and the largely character actor cast is solid, with Jane Wenham being particularly impressive. Yet Alastair Sim owns this film. He is menacing, magnetic, charisma itself: the quiet, otherwordly centre upon whom all things revolve. This is a career defining performance.

Guy Hamilton helms the film in a straightforward, unshowy manner, perhaps. Yet that is exactly what is needed here: directorial restraint. Simply using the words and the performances to carry the devastating story is exactly what is needed here. 

After this performance from Sim... it would surely take extreme bravery for anyone else to portray this part on film.It's a rare film which is elevated to greatness by one performance... but this is certainly one of them.

Rear Window (1954)

 "We've become a race of Peeping Toms."

I last saw this film a scary number of years ago, and can't remember what I thought, although I seem to recall liking it. And yet... this is one of those films that is easy to admire but hard to love.

It's not that this isn't a masterpiece. The very concept is inspired- the claustrophobia and boredom of beng stuck in a two room apartment leads Jeff (a too old but neertheless excellent Jimmy Stewart) to spend his time spying on his neighbours, until he thinks he's witnessed a murder.

And there is such mastery in how the visuals are handled, from the design of the neighbourhood (deliberately complex, three-dimensional and amost Escher-like) to the moment where Thorwald eventually meets Jeff's gaze, and the tension that follows. The future Princes Grace of Monaco is superb, as is good old Hollywood stalwart Thelma Ritter. There's a rather nice theme running throughout of marital harmony or its absence.

And yet... it takes ages to get going and, clever though it is ad as charismatic as its stars may be, the film is just too slow for most of its length for the suspens to realy work: the concept ad execution don't really maage to fill the film's length.

Still, none of that takes away from the fact that this film is a super technical achievement.

Godzilla (1954)

"It's getting even closer, It looks like our doom!"

I'd never seen a Godzilla film in my forty-two years until now. Yes, I know: the shame. But all is remedied; our friend Becca has now ensured, for Christmas, that all but the most recent Godzilla and related films will be blogged over the coming months. That isn't to say I won't be blogging any other movies, of course, but expect Tokyo to suffer a lot in future blogs.

I don’t usually blog films on a school night, which is usually reserved for telly. But tonight I get to procrastinate and put off for another day the need to see the final episode of War of the Worlds.

So, Godzilla. It would spawn the most epic film franchise of all time but, in 1954, was just one film, obviously based on King Kong. It’s more than just that though. For one thing, this is a film of the Atomic Age, both thematically and when it was made- and nowhere was more Atomic Age than Japan, the only country ever to have been nuked in war. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see Godzilla, supposedly an old island mythical beast, having been changed and made invulnerable by radioactivity- which, by the rules of Atomic Age science fiction cinema, is magic and can do anything.

This is clearly a post-war society, though; when Godzilla rampages through Tokyo to utterly destroy it in those wonderful set pieces in the centre of the film, we get a reference to characters having to go to shelters “again”, and we also get a widow telling her children that they will soon join their father, the implication being that he died in the war. This is awkward, because on the one hand Imperial Japan was a deeply inhumane place guided by a truly evil ideology which has touched many of us- my Grandad Gordon fought in Burma and told me only the most child-friendly of the atrocities he saw, and it was obvious there were others. Let’s just say he never bought a Japanese car.

The people in Godzilla remember and refer to the war, though, and that’s interesting. Post-war Japan seems so very disconnected from its ugly predecessor but these people lived through it, and accepted the need to abandon aggressive nationalism and cruelty. Certainly, the society we see here is a civilised one- give or take the odd professor acting as an old fashioned patriarch with his daughter’s fiancé.

All this, and the very ‘50s angst about the abuse of nuclear science (with Serizawa’s oxygen destroyer weapon an obvious metaphor for other weapons of mass destruction- note that, before using it, he burns his notes, and his death is a suicide so the knowledge dies with him; I think the film’s stance on nukes is clear) make this feel like more than the straightforward ‘50s monster movie that it is at heart. That’s an interesting combination; a subtext with a film like this.

Fundamentally, though, never mind all that: it’s Godzilla, and he’s destroying Tokyo in awesome set piece scenes with truly excellent model work. The film is brilliantly structured to hold back suspense- Godzilla doesn’t appear until we’re 21 minutes in and he’s been truly built up as a threat. And there’s just enough character melodrama to get us to like the characters without trying to rival the monster as a source of drama.

Films in this genre don’t get much better than this. There’s a reason why this is a classic. But will the follow-ups be as good...?

The Black Knight (1954)

"I know I'm not a knight, but is it impossible to become one?"

I only sat through this film because it had Patrick Troughton, Peter Cushing and Andre Morell in it. I wish I hadn't. I can honestly say that this is the worst film I've blogged thus far. Even Teenagers from Outer Space was better than this.

The historical inaccuracies... where to begin? Obviously you accept a certain amount of artistic licence for the Arthurian genre, with the early sixth century setting typically being depicted as the High Middle Ages, but here we have Patrick Troughton as King Mark of Cornwall, leading an anti-Christian alliance of pagan Vikings and druids(!) with "Saracens" who apparently prefer associating with pagans than people of the book. Hmmm. One of these "Saracens" is Knight of the Round Table Sir Parmenides, who has his own castle in the English countryside. 

But that's not all. The centrepiece of the film sees our very silly alliance of baddies perform a comedy pagan ceremony of sacrifice at a matte painting of Stonehenge. After their defeat Arthur orders the monument to be trashed, a bit like Daesh in Palmyra. This is appropriate, I suppose, as Arthur spends the entire film behaving like a twat. Oh, and he's depicted as a King of "England"  the very country that any real life Arthur would have devoted his life to strangling at birth. Arthur didn't like immigrants much, a lot like most Britons today. This Arthur seems positively encouraging of diversity, notwithstanding his twattishness.

Even disregarding these frighteningly ignorant depictions of history- children actually watched this film!- the plot is annoying and relies on Arthur being stupid and thick-heatedly disbelieving for the plot to work.

Patrick Troughton gives us some top class moustache twirling but Alan Ladd phones it in as heroic blacksmith John. Then again, with a script as hopeless as this, why wouldn't he? A film not worth bothering with.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

"There's just one thing, Mark. Going into unexplored territory… with a woman?"

It's a bit of an oddity, this film. It tends to get lumped under the "Universal Horror" label (by The Monster Squad, for one), although it's much, much later than the others; it doesn't have a literary basis; and it feels as though it has at least one foot in the '50s sci-fi pool. This certainly isn't a B movie; though; the Amazon location is effective and atmospheric, the script and performances are both excellent, and the monster itself looks extraordinary.

The plot is fairly standard, really, almost clichéd in its themes of science going too far and a monster with a King Kong complex. But that isn't the point; the film works because of its successful building up of tension and the effects of that tension on the well-rounded characters who make up the expedition.

The tension is almost unbearable in the early scenes with Kay swimming in the lagoon while the creature, filmed underwater, swims just underneath and just below her, and looks as though it could grab her at any moment while she swims on, oblivious. The character of Kay is interesting, too. Although she's a rational and level-headed scientist, and clearly shown to be a very good one, she's nevertheless the token woman, and therefore treated pretty much like a child, to be kept out of danger at all times. And her desire to go for a swim is presented as a typically feminine act of intuitive silliness but, hey, that's what these ladies are like!

She's also a bit of a catalyst for the fight going on for the position of the expedition's alpha male between her not-quite-fiancé, David, and their boss, Mark. It's Mark's obsessive pursuit of the creature that leads to several deaths including, of course, his own. But it's interesting how the film goes to quite some lengths not to blame science for his harmful obsession; David gets a line explicitly comparing Mark to a big game hunter, clearly stating that it isn't science that leads to his hubristic obsession. It's the 1950s, and scientists must always be shown as heroes. The film is at pains to show that Mark, because of his position as antagonist, isn't a "real" scientist. Even his reasons for going on the expedition (money for the institute which will keep it afloat!) demonstrate that his motives are worldly as much as scientific, however unfair this may be.

The film looks superb, and the visuals are really the reason to see it. The direction is superb, although it would have been nice to have seen the film in 3-D, as originally intended. And the location filming really evokes the Amazon, and gives the film a genuine sense of glamour and exoticism. The boat, too, gives a real sense of claustrophobia, and the conflict aboard the boat really feels earned by the characterisation and the situation. It's a film that makes you jump in several places, and certainly a cut above any Universal Horror movie not to have been directed by James Whale.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot, stamping on a human face, forever.”

I should probably say at the start that this is the 1954 BBC teleplay, written by Nigel Kneale, directed by Rudolph Cartier and starring Peter Cushing. It’s rather interesting to see this for the first time just one week after seeing The Year of the Sex Olympics; suddenly the debt the later play, set in a future with a diminishing vocabulary, owes to Orwell’s concept of Newspeak becomes even more blatant.

This is first class telly, though. Yes, it’s of its time, with a rather blurry picture quality (although, to be fair, the prints could really do with a good clean), and technical limitations mean that a slow pace is sort of inevitable, but this is no bad thing. The cast is superb, with Peter Cushing putting in an outstanding performance, with honourable mentions also going top Yvonne Mitchell and André Morell. It’s quite a shock, too, to see Donald Pleasance in a television role. There’s also a nice little cameo from Wilfrid Brambell.

It’s not just the picture quality that dates this; it is, after all, the earliest piece of telly I’m likely to be reviewing on this blog except, probably, for the surviving bits of The Quatermass Experiment once I get to it. The fact that it was made live (apart from the many film sequence!) isn’t really too obvious, but lots of other things are, notably the plummy accents, Mr. Cholmondely-Warner strength, which are spoken by every character who isn’t a prole. And this is a future with things like valves in it It’s rather interesting, though, to see an adaptation made just five years after George Orwell’s novel was published; the general feel of austerity (how very topical!) seems very fitting, especially as 1954 was the year that rationing finally ended. I couldn’t help also noticing that, among the many sinister notices seen in the programme is one saying “Be ready to produce identity papers”. Orwell would have been horrified at the last Government’s plan to introduce identity cards, now thankfully off the table for now in a rare wise decision from our current lords and masters.

Cartier’s sets, with ever-present posters and pictures of Big Brother, are a triumph of design, and it’s a nice touch that everyone (except, again, the proles, who wear 1950’s clothes) wears what look very much like prison uniforms, while Winston Smith’s room looks awfully like a prison cell. This is a confining, utilitarian world, devoid of all beauty and ornament. The constant televised announcements, which cannot be switched off, remind me a lot of the 15 Million Merits episode of Black Mirror.

It’s a while, certainly more than fifteen years, since I last read the novel, so the sheer levels of totalitarianism on display here come as quite a shock. Big Brother is indeed watching everyone, even language itself is being perverted so as to render “thought crime” impossible, but the scenes towards the end, with Morell’s Obrien as the torturer, are more chilling still. The line asking how many fingers are being held up (blatantly ripped off / homaged, decades later, by Star Trek: The Next Generation), and the following dialogue, make it clear that the Party claims the right to dictate reality itself; there is no empirical truth. Rather cleverly, this is all foreshadowed by Smith’s job of “adjusting” past records to fit with current political convenience.

It’s interesting, although somewhat patronising, that hope lies with the uneducated and ignorant proles, and the fact that their cultural fare is all written or composed by computer could be read all sorts of ways. Hope certainly seems to be closed up elsewhere; even Smith is not quite the pure hero, agreeing to commit all sorts of awful crimes. But the romance between him and Julia is rather sweet and lovely, but also profound. What they have is theirs alone, and it’s real. Nothing else is. And their relationship burns all the brighter for the fact that it, and they, are doomed, and they both know it.

The ending, with both Julia and Winston denouncing each other under torture, is devastating, but brainwashing was very much in the zeitgeist so soon after the Korean War. This is a first class piece of telly, whether in terms of script, directing or performances, but I think its view of the future is a little pessimistic. Totalitarian regimes always have a limited life expectancy. They always burn themselves out eventually; the world is a chaotic place, for good or ill. The future will be far more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four.