The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

"Each man creates his own God for himself, his own Heaven, his own Hell."

I'd seen and blogged a couple of Roger Corman’s Poe films before, and found they’ve always been impressive in how they were scripted, shot and acted. But this one absolutely stands out as the finest by far. It’s superb, taking an Edgar Allan Poe short story and making a dark philosophical treatise that almost echoes Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

The setting is simple; a gothic castle in Renaissance Italy and the dark, plague-ridden countryside. But the film eschews realism in order to make the countryside darkly stylised, while there’s a sense that this community is cut off from the rest of Italy, giving Prince Prosperous absolute power over all he surveys. An openly Satanist prince would not possibly have been able to survive in Renaissance Italy, of course, but the film exists in its own claustrophobic, deeply atmospheric little world.

And at the centre of it all is the magnificent, extraordinary Vincent Price, giving one of the performances of his career. His mellifluous voice, the arch of his eyebrow, the looks of sardonic sadism- all this makes him utterly compelling as a charming sadist with absolute power and a love of Satan. There are subplots- Hazel Court as a princess fated to a gory death after giving herself to the Devil, and the horrifying revenge of a dwarf for the insult to his lady- but the film entirely focuses around the compelling figure of Prospero, and his eventual comeuppance is glorious.

I’ve blogged a fair few Roger Corman films by now, many of them excellent. But this is his finest achievement by far.

The Quatermass Experiment: Part 2 ("Persons Reported Missing")

"Don't. Don't comfort me."

OK, confession time. When I blogged Part 1, last year, I was somehow under the impression that only the first episode existed. Oops. I now realise, having seen it, that the second episode exists too, and is awesome. And I have to admit that  it's even worse than that; I watched all of the original three Quatermass series years ago, except this episode. Oops.

Moving swiftly on, this is a fascinatingly dark episode, as you'd expect from Nigel Kneale. The main plot chugs along as we slowly discover that the surviving astronaut nay (mostly) have the body of Victor Carroon, but he also seems to contain the minds of all three.

All this is grounded in the mystery of whatever horrific thoughts Quatermass is so obviously suppressing, the conflict generated by Paul Whitaun-Jobes' tenacious journalist, Jimmy Fullalove, and most of all by the big reveal that Jusith Carroon had been having an affair and was about to leave her husband. Now she faced a future as a guilt-ridden carer to a man she doesn't love.

This is superb drama, made four years before Sputnik but giving us a believable depiction of space travel even if, being pre-Suez, it shows a superpower Britain as the pioneer. Extraordinary.

The Quatermass Experiment: Part 1 ("Contact Has Been Established")

"It's one of them things. They dropped one."

This is, sadly, one of only two episodes of this six part serial that I will be blogging; the others don't exist. They will never be found, whatever Philip Morris has been up to, as they were never telerecorded in the first place, which is a shame. Television in 1953 was a very ephemeral medium, all of it live aside from a few pre-recorded film sequences. For repeats, the actors would simply repeat their performances. You saw it once and it was gone.

1953 was a long time ago and looks it; the picture quality, naturally, is rubbish and the long scenes are there because it simply wasn't possible to include more than two or three different scenes. Television was very much theatre with a camera pointed at it. There's a scene break here where the picture fades to black and stays black for what seems like ages.

Nevertheless, this is a superb piece of television scripting and production, dripping with atmosphere, however limited the live performers may be, and a reminder of the brilliance of both Rudolph Cartier and the great Nigel Kneale. This is a world in which science is admirable and scientists great men, but only because science is a desperate and fragile attempt to impose order on a terrifying world in which dark things lurk at the edges, not least human nature. It's refreshing, though, to see the scientific talk isn't being dumbed down in any way. And this is an era, what perhaps we can call the Dan Dare era, when it was possible to imagine Britain as a space pioneer. Sputnik lay four years ahead. To people in 1953 the achievements of the British Experimental Rocket Group were scarcely imaginable.

The plot is simple enough- a rocket has been sent into space, gone missing, but has now returned under mysterious circumstances. There is much tension in this scenario, later to be lovingly ripped off by Doctor Who in The Ambassadors of Death. Only in future episodes will it become apparent that something else has come back with Caroon.

And yet, the real unpleasantness is very much on Earth. A useless civil servant busybody is there to annoy and to serve the plot function of being exposited at, while newspaper columnist Jimmy Fullalove (a very young Paul Whitsun-Jones) exhibits all the cynicism of today's red top tabloids. (And this angle, that of the press,would also come to be lovingly ripped off by Doctor Who in The Web of Fear.)

We also have some comedy working class characters and a dear old lady played by Katie Johnson of The Ladykillers fame. She is truly from another age; IMDb tells me she was born in 1878 and made her stage debut in 1894!

Sadly, as but one more episode exists, we won't get to consider the whole thing. We can only judge the first two episodes, but this at least is a brilliant episode. One more to go, though...

Doctor Who: The Mutants

Part One

“Did you ever read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall?”

“No. Is it good?”

For a moment it looks as though I’ve popped in a Monty Python episode by mistake. It’s…

Gradually it’s becoming less of a novelty to start a story on an alien world, and we know from the start that we’re to expect a trip in the TARDIS courtesy of that large black spherical thing (Lunch?” “No.” “Bomb?”). Jo, continuing her growth in confidence, is determined to go along.

We get an awful lot of exposition this episode, and two blatantly obvious allegories are set up- decolonisation and apartheid, both of which would have been contemporary issues. In fact, I’m sure the Marshall is at least partly based on Rhodesia’s Ian Smith. Interesting that Earth’s empire in the late 30th century is going the way of Britain’s a century earlier- a nice bit of future history.

Oh, and Rick James is every bit as bad as I remember.


Part Two

“I’m surrounded by incompetents!”

Pertwee’s performance is notably worse here than it’s been recently- it’s as if he’s going through the motions. I’m beginning to see a reverse correlation between how engaged Pertwee is in the story and how much he rubs the back of his neck. And there are some rather poor performances elsewhere.


Part Three

“The Marshall’s solution to what he calls the Mutt problem…”


Cotton invoking Grimm’s Law there…

Paul Whitsun-Jones is playing the Marshall as a fairly standard cartoon baddie, and while this certainly works and Whitsun-Jones executes it well, I can’t help feeling there’s a missed opportunity here. The character is written believably- he doesn’t suspect Stubbs and Cotton out of sheer narcissism and obsession, and his descent into irrationality and essentially madness is gradual and believable as written. A different style of performance would have wrung out more of the depth to the character that’s there in the script. Interestingly, this is a character who’s inevitably going to be in very serious trouble with the Earth authorities- it’s only a matter of time. And this makes him all the more dangerous- he’s a cornered dog, liable to cause as much trouble as possible before he’s caught.

The plot’s moving on well though, and so far there seem to be few problems with the script, which so far has been a well-paced and well-plotted effort from the Bristol Boys with some good concepts and no returning baddies- a plus at this point in the series. But there are so many problems elsewhere- Paul Whitsun-Jones, Frederick Jaeger and Rick James are all clearly miscast, and actively bad in the case of the latter. Pertwee’s still oddly subdued too. And this seems to be our first glaring example of what would become the bane of depictions of the future in 70s Who- bland, featureless corridors and silly, unconvincing uniforms. A lot of this has to be blamed on Christopher Barry.


Part Four

“Professor Sondergaard, I presume?”

The good Professor is quite the exposition machine, isn’t he? Still, someone has to be and, frankly, Pertwee’s still looking a bit flat at the moment. One thing hasn’t been explained though- why are the Time Lords sending these hieroglyphs to Ky if he can’t read them? Still, aside from little niggles like this the script is essentially quite good- it’s just everything else that isn’t! The concept of the Solonian life cycle in the context of the planet’s 500 year long seasons is brilliant.

So. An Investigator is coming? Just after Varan’s rebels have taken over Skybase? It’s all getting a bit Colony in Space.


Part Five

“Marshall, you are quite mad.”


Hmmm, so Solos is now radioactive. A fact which, of course, won’t be dwelt on so to spoil the happy ending!

Things start manoeuvring for the endgame here, with some good bits- Jo’s escapology again in what’s actually been quite a good story for her, the Doctor finally gets a good moment with the Marshall, and Stubbs’ death is a genuine shock. But all this is counterbalanced by the sheer awfulness of Rick James’ performance, which seems particularly bad in this episode. Also cringeworthy is the Doctor’s silly speech about “un-people doing un-things un-together”.


Part Six

“I am a scientist!”

*cough*

A rather dull last episode in the end, mainly because of the intrinsic dullness of the Administrator, whose sole function in the story seems to be to stop anything happening until all the pieces (ie Sondergaard and Ky) are in place. He seems strangely fickle too, switching his sympathies according to dramatic convenience.



Well, a real curate’s egg, that one. While not without its faults, the script was actually quite good, with a great central concept, good dialogue and characterisation (wasted in some of the performances, sadly), and mostly well-paced. It’s just that the acting was atrocious- not only was this by far the worst guest cast yet assembled, but Pertwee seems to have caught some of their bad acting germs himself. And then there’s the whole look of the thing, the most generic- looking piece of that’ll-do futuristic space opera yet. I’ll be very generous and give this a 3/5, as I feel sorry for the poor script for being so cruelly treated.



Rankings

The Massacre 5/5
The War Games 5/5
Spearhead From Space 5/5
Fury from the Deep 5/5
The Evil of the Daleks 5/5
The Myth Makers 5/5
The Aztecs 5/5
The Tomb of the Cybermen 5/5
Marco Polo 5/5
The Crusade 5/5
Day of the Daleks 5/5
Inferno 5/5
The Highlanders 5/5
The Daleks’ Master Plan 5/5
The Time Meddler 5/5
The Invasion 5/5
The Power of the Daleks 5/5
The Mind Robber 5/5
The Web of Fear 5/5
The Rescue 5/5
The Reign of Terror 5/5
An Unearthly Child 5/5
Colony in Space 5/5
The Macra Terror 5/5
The Savages 5/5
Mission to the Unknown 5/5
The Ambassadors of Death 4/5
Doctor Who and the Silurians 4/5
The Curse of Peladon 4/5
The Gunfighters 4/5
The Claws of Axos 4/5
The Tenth Planet 4/5
The Moonbase 4/5
The Dalek Invasion of Earth 4/5
The Romans 4/5
Terror of the Autons 4/5
The Krotons 4/5
The Ice Warriors 4/5
The War Machines 4/5
The Smugglers 4/5
The Abominable Snowmen 4/5
The Sea Devils 4/5
Planet of Giants 4/5
The Daleks 3/5
The Seeds of Death 3/5
The Enemy of the World 3/5
Galaxy Four 3/5
The Space Museum 3/5
[B]The Mutants 3/5[/B]
The Chase 3/5
The Space Pirates 3/5
The Sensorites 3/5
The Edge of Destruction 2/5
The Dæmons 2/5
The Mind of Evil 2/5
The Faceless Ones 2/5
The Ark 2/5
The Wheel in Space 2/5
The Dominators 2/5
The Web Planet 1/5
The Keys of Marinus 1/5
The Celestial Toymaker 1/5
The Underwater Menace 1/5

Season Five: 4/5
Season Seven: 4/5
Season Three: 3.9/5
Season Four: 3.889/5
Season Six: 3.857/5
Season Two: 3.778/5
Season One: 3.625/5
Season Eight: 3.4/5

Doctor Who: The Smugglers

Part One

"Ben, I'm scared. What's happened to us?"


It's back to normal for the story title- or is it? Is there an actual telesnap or did Loose Cannon slot the titles in themselves? Incidentally, great recon.

So the Doctor finally admits it: "I have no control over where I land!" these early scenes with Ben and Polly are great though- there's a heavily self-referential, here-we-go-again tone to it which is rather fun. The Doctor seems to be secretly enjoying the reactions of the young stowaways in spite of his surface curmudgeonliness. Although he seems to pretend to be annoyed when he says "I really thought I was going to be alone again" I strongly suspect, after The Massacre, he's relieved not to be.

I love Ben and Polly's attitude to time travel. Yes, there's initial disbelief, but it's played for laughs, and at last we have some companions who actually seem to be enjoying themselves! They've only been aboard a few minutes and already they're my favourite companions since Ian and Barbara.

It probably says more about my lack of familiarity with the pirate genre than anything else, but this reminds me of the pirate comics in Watchmen.


Part Two

"My dear sir, I'm sure you could see through any flattery of mine."


Blimey, that was a short reprise!

Polly is fantastic. She's locked up in a seventeenth century cell, presumably facing eventual death by hanging, and yet she says "I don't know. I find it pretty exciting!" Although it's not particularly plausible that all the guest cast seem to think this rather attractive young lady is a "lad"!

This is good stuff. Ben and Polly continue to be great in escaping from the cell, and it seems everyone is in on the smuggling, even Paul Whitsun-Jones!

Part Three

"In these dark days, honesty surely pays!"


The Doctor's escape with the cards is top stuff, I suspect one of the last few great Hartnell moments we have left. Of course, this leads to Pike killing Jamaica for his failure, and his death is suitably grisly to be graced with some actual footage.

Just as the plot strand of the TARDISeers being under suspicion was threatening to outstay its welcome, it comes to a natural end here, our heroes siding with the authorities in the shape of Blake, the Revenue Man. Interestingly, the Doctor chooses to stay behind because "I'm under a moral obligation!" Polly, being great, agrees heartily.

The conversation between Kewper and the Squire makes me aware of how the dialogue is actually quite a good approximation of the period, with real thought being given to the phrasing. I'm very much reminded of Channel Four's recent The Devil's Whore.


Part Four

"Oh, we have an uneasy conscience, have we, Squire? Ye lily livered rogue!"


The plot threads are drawn together rather cleverly in this episode, but it's only afterwards I realised how cleverly plotted it was as I'd been enjoying the ride so much. The riddle itself is clever, as is the unfolding of the "curse". Of course, as with The Gunfighters, I'm sure there are all sorts of nods to genre conventions I'm not getting.

By the point of Cherub's death it's become really quite amusing that the only footage that seems to exist at all involves knives and blood. And I can't help being amused by what, I'm afraid, is my favourite exchange in the entire story: "Polly." "Yes?" "Put the kettle on." Followed by which, of course, there's the incident with Spaniard and Polly goes back to the TARDIS to await the end of the story. Cos she's a girl, you see...!

For the second story in a row, the Doctor slips quietly away at the end. Ben and Polly, bless them, seem to have thoroughly enjoyed their adventure- there's no whingeing at all, which makes a nice change.

Ooh, very cold in the TARDIS? What's all this then?


Overall, this was good fun. A good old-fashioned, tightly-plotted adventure story. Not particularly big or clever, no, but there's nothing wrong with that. 4/5.