Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960)

Posted on May 7, 2012 at 9:27 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Television may have been cinema’s chief competitor, but Hammer Films was never afraid to mine the small screen for inspiration, from its eerie adaptations of Nigel Kneale serials (the Quatermass trilogy, The Abominable Snowman) to the feature-length sitcoms of the studio’s waning years (On the Buses, Man About the House). Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960), likewise, cashes in on the audience’s familiarity not only with the Robin Hood character but with the Richard Greene-starring Adventures of Robin Hood TV series which ran from 1955 to the year of this film’s release, 1960. That was a good year for Hammer. The previous years had seen the birth of “Hammer horror” to terrific box office; Peter Cushing was emerging as the studio’s marquee star, and Christopher Lee was quickly building a fan base as their in-house Karloff. But while James Carreras, Anthony Hinds, and Michael Carreras guaranteed there was more horror product in the pipeline, they also continued to diversify their output with dramas, suspense, comedy, and swashbuckling adventure. Sword of Sherwood Forest fit right in, a typical example of Hammer’s style from that period: adapt a known (usually literary) property, gloss it up with some first-rate actors, color, beautiful widescreen (“Megascope”) cinematography and a fine score – and, if at all possible, put Terence Fisher on the job. Fisher had proven himself adept at turning small budgets into classy, noteworthy productions. He was the man to ensure that the big-screen Robin Hood looked much grander than the television version.

Typically intelligent use of widescreen storytelling from Terence Fisher: while Maid Marian (Sarah Branch) quietly dresses following a swim, the whinny of her horse (at right) gives away her position to Robin Hood and his men.

Unusually for a Hammer film, the star (Greene) was also the co-producer; but if Greene had better leverage on set to protect his idea of the Robin Hood character, Sword of Sherwood Forest doesn’t feel like a vanity project – just classic Hammer. A new supporting cast is brought in, many of them from the studio’s repertory company. (This was the studio’s second go at Robin Hood. The Men of Sherwood Forest was released in 1954, directed by Val Guest.) Most notably, the Sheriff of Nottingham is now played by Cushing. You could say he was born to play the role, but I think the same of his performances as Van Helsing, Dr. Frankenstein, and Sherlock Holmes. Cushing presents the villain in an intriguing fashion: we can see his motives, his point of view – he’s an agent of the government who considers the Merry Men nothing more than terrorists. It’s only when we see him brutally betraying and murdering one of Robin Hood’s friends that we remember what a scoundrel he is. And still, he’s not the most evil man about. Oliver Reed – Hammer’s own werewolf – rides into town with stormy eyes, a falcon on his arm, and a nasal whine in his voice; playing Lord Melton, he’s accompanied by the young Earl of Newark, played by The Gorgon‘s Richard Pasco. The Earl’s cleverness appeals to Robin Hood, but disguises a secret agenda. Beautiful Sarah Branch – Maid Marian – previously appeared in a Hammer noir, Hell is a City (1960). Robin’s best mate, Little John, is ideally cast with Nigel Green, who would later appear in Hammer’s Countess Dracula (1971), but to me will always be the brawny and big-hearted Hercules from Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Also present is Jason‘s Zeus, distinguished character actor Niall MacGinnis, here playing the comic relief as Friar Tuck.

The Sheriff of Nottingham (Peter Cushing) threatens to kill a hostage if he doesn't reveal the location of Robin Hood's hideout.

I didn’t grow up on the Adventures of Robin Hood series, so – to my eyes – Richard Greene seems a bit too old and bourgeois for the role, and not quite the young and athletic rebel I expect. (He’s no Errol Flynn, but is he preferable to Kevin Costner? By miles.) This is most distracting when he’s romantically paired with Sarah Branch, who was twenty years his junior. But this is a quibble. Greene is obviously comfortable in the role, which translates through his performance regardless of your familiarity with the TV series. When he picks up the bow for some trick-shot competition with the Earl of Newark, Fisher milks just the right level of iconic excitement you expect to get from the character, in the same way that Fisher maximized Dracula’s seductive bites and Sherlock’s feats of deduction. The plot is a somewhat unusual mishmash of origin story and series finale. Robin has never met Maid Marian before, and King Richard is still abroad, but the bandit’s ongoing confrontations with the Sheriff of Nottingham are about to come to a boil: when the Sheriff executes a farmer (Darren Nesbitt, Number Two in The Prisoner‘s “It’s Your Funeral”) for no good reason, Robin seeks revenge. He also begins to untangle a conspiracy to assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jack Gwillim, also destined for Jason and the Argonauts), which leads to further betrayals and some literal backstabbing. When one major character is killed off in the film’s climax, I was genuinely surprised; this isn’t your typical B-movie programmer, but a Robin Hood adventure with consequences. Nonetheless, Hammer planned an immediate sequel that didn’t quite happen. (It wasn’t until 1967 that the studio followed up with A Challenge for Robin Hood, with a different cast.) Sword of Sherwood Forest is pure matinee fun, climaxing in a convent-bound swordfight that allows Fisher to showcase his skills at directing action. If you’re looking to explore Hammer Films beyond their horror brand, here’s a good place to start.

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Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)

Posted on May 5, 2012 at 11:37 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Perhaps Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) wouldn’t automatically spring to mind when considering the most influential and important films of the 1950’s, but it reserves a certain special place in cinematic history for one simple reason: it elevated the still-nascent “nature film” into a narrative, one with no moralizing message tacked on at the end. It wasn’t much of a narrative, I’ll grant you: a sexually repressed beanpole becomes overstimulated by the large-breasted pin-up girls that populate his workaday world. But the film boldly crossed that arbitrary line of morality drawn by the establishment: if you’re going to have nude girls, the film had better be educational. (To which exploitation filmmakers responded, “What’s more educational than documentaries about naturism? Long scenes of nude girls playing tennis, for example?”) Russ Meyer and producer Pete DeCenzie set out to make a naturism movie with a plot, and so was born the “nudie-cutie,” a genre that played gangbusters across the country. There was no pretense of educating or moralizing. It was right there in the title: this was immoral filmmaking. Flush with success, Meyer followed up Teas with Eve and the Handyman (1960) – starring his wife, Eve Meyer – and Erotica (1961), each film now facing competition from a flood of imitators. Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962) marked the last of his collaborations with DeCenzie, partly because, as Meyer biographer Jimmy McDonough notes in Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, “[DeCenzie] complained that RM was holding back on the money shots by keeping the females in pasties.” (I should note, because such things are important, that some of the performers in the film are in fact pasties-free.) He would linger in this ephemeral genre a little longer before heading into the second, and cult-iconic, phase of his career, faster pussycats and all.

Russ Meyer's screenwriter Jack Moran recounts ribald tales of the Wild West.

Of his surviving nudie-cuties, I like Wild Gals the best. I kind of sort of love it. But wait – let me explain. This is a micro-budgeted, borderline-home-movie, probably-shot-on-a-weekend, candy-colored, corny-humor burlesque show which sees Meyer growing more confident in his triple-duty of photographer, editor, and director. It’s a full-bore explosion of Meyer’s Id, and what makes his films so fascinating is that the explosion wouldn’t abate for the next two decades – his Wild West would only get wilder from here on out. He begins with one of his many calling cards, an industrial film-styled narrator, this time reading a monologue about America’s pioneer past, over shots of ghost towns and half-toppled cabins, before briefly, hilariously abandoning his desolate landscapes and flashing into the present with shots of “Denver! Las Vegas! SAN FRANCISCO!” – just because. Then we’re back to the old West, the O.K. Corral, and, instead of actors and horses, we’re treated to impressionistic shots of streams of paint flowing into a river (to represent “painted men”), a flag, a spear, sound effects of gunshots, and a first-person view of stumbling into the tumbleweeds to die, since, you know, Meyer isn’t on John Ford’s budget here. Finally a shotgun leans toward us from out of a dark window. Then out of the cabin emerges our host for this evening’s entertainment, an Old Prospector Type played by the film’s co-writer, Jack Moran, who would go on to write Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and a few other Meyer 60’s films. His makeup is terrible. We accompany him to a saloon, only to discover he’s arrived at the one hour it’s closed (between 9 and 10am), so he sulks outside and dreams of the days when this town was so much better – more violent and immoral.

Meyer populates his nudie-cuties with burlesque performers, pin-up models, and war buddies.

Cut to breasts. The trenchcoat crowd heaves a sigh of relief. The rest of the film is essentially R-rated Looney Tunes, with Meyer repeating the same brief sequences over and over, escalating his gags minutely with each pass. Two cowboys fire at one another with guns, approaching each other slowly but missing each time. They run out of bullets and start slugging one another. A topless, golden-tressed girl is tied to a stake by an Indian who can’t get the fire at her feet started (eventually, bored, she just hands him a match). A man heads into an outhouse, and two old pranksters swap signs with the outhouse marked “Ladies.” A woman steps inside, and leaves a few minutes later with a smile. Then a line of women begins to form. Another girl tries to enjoy a glass of champagne, but a drunk cowboy keeps accidentally shooting it out of her hand, and she makes pouty faces. Three naked girls lasso unsuspecting passersby up onto their balcony. A man walks into a shack. A gorilla follows him, and leaves wearing his clothes. A girl walks into the shack, and the man leaves wearing her clothes. An Indian walks into the shack, it shakes back and forth, and the naked girl goes running out with the horny Indian hot on her tail. All of this is frequently interrupted by glimpses from a crazed saloon on an abstract, colorful set that seems to exist in some strange limbo between the Adam West Batman and Lars Von Trier’s Dogville: the backdrop is crudely drawn, the props deliberately phony, and the walls seem to change color from one moment to the next. These are rapidly-edited shots of Russ Meyer Pop Art: a grinning and toothless old woman (“Princess Livingston,” who would later show up in Mudhoney and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls); a menacing man with a hook (Meyer); firing revolvers; bottles being guzzled; grotesque masks; a grotesque mask and a hook; lovely ladies; jiggling breasts.

Sammy Gilbert is a Stranger who cleans up the town, resisting its many temptations.

The effect is some pre-psychedelic wonder which any head-trippers could enjoy, offering all the stream-of-consciousness juxtapositions, color, strangeness, and overstimulation they could possibly want. But this is just Russ Meyer being his booziest, reflecting his favorite environment: a corny, horny burlesque show, with risqué humor that nonetheless feels harmless and quaint. So you wouldn’t feel quite so sleazy going to Wild Gals of the Naked West – it’s all in good fun. A payoff to the film’s many running jokes comes in the form of a straight-laced Stranger (Sammy Gilbert) who is at first oblivious to the wanton lust and violence that surrounds him, but, eventually, cleans it all up – by handing some clothes to that girl using the bathtub in the middle of the street, to name one example. Despite his Do-Goodery, he does take one beautiful admirer to bed after his hard day’s work, which allows Meyer a parodic sex scene that plays out in overwrought visual symbolism, years before Monty Python made the same joke (though Python did it better). Our narrator is dismayed by how the town changed in the Stranger’s wake, opining that we all ought to have just “a twinge of meanness…something for the good to work against.” So you see? Russ Meyer could offer a moral after all.

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The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976)

Posted on April 27, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

It’s eternally odd to me that Asterix the Gaul is relegated to mere cult status here in America. It seems that everywhere else on the planet he’s as iconic as Mickey Mouse – he even has his own theme park in France – but in this stubborn New World, Asterix has long been as obscure as Tintin, for whom not even a Steven Spielberg movie could quite bring the (elsewhere famous) comic book character to household name status. I can’t help but think of the culturally ignorant contestants on last season’s The Amazing Race, who were asked to dress up as two characters from the Tintin books, and then try to determine who they were by asking random Belgians. The answer was Thomson and Thompson (or, in the original French, Dupont and Dupond), though one couple submitted their answer as that great comic team, “Charlie Chaplin and Charlie Chaplin.” When I was a child growing up in California, Tintin and Asterix were, tantalizingly, just barely accessible. I would visit the library and get a thrill whenever one of their books was on the shelves. I loved them both, but Asterix connected like a magic-potion-powered punch. The irreverent humor, the ancient Rome setting, the appealing artwork and clever layouts of Albert Uderzo, the rich comic plots and nonstop puns of René Goscinny…I was in love. And the fact that I was in a long-distance relationship (with a comic book from France that was damn difficult to find on these shores) only made me all the more lovesick. In my teenage years, I lucked into a giant stack of Asterix books in a local used bookstore, and bought them all. Periodically I still return to that stack, and the stories of Goscinny & Uderzo have aged well. Now you can click on Amazon.com and have a wealth of Asterix available to you. But this is a different age, where the rich taste of discovery has been watered down, measured by points and clicks.

The MGM-inspired logo for Goscinny and Uderzo's Studios Idéfix.

But bless Amazon for this: now I once more own The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976), thanks to an imported DVD shipped over from the U.K. All right, it lacks special features, and only contains the English dub, but the dub is well done, and this is the version I grew up with, having taped it off the Disney Channel as a child and watched it repeatedly. (It’s also anamorphic widescreen, which I care about a lot more than extras.) The Disney Channel – back in the 80’s, when it consisted primarily of Disney films and cartoons – used to run all the Asterix animated films, and it was easy to compare them directly and see that the 1976 film was the best (Disney also released the film on VHS; I have no idea if they still own the rights for U.S. distribution, though it would explain why it hasn’t resurfaced here). There’s a reason why Twelve Tasks stuck out from the crowd. Goscinny & Uderzo co-wrote and co-directed the film through their short-lived animation studio, Studios Idéfix; a cute brand logo at the start of the film features little Dogmatix yapping away in parody of the MGM lion. Unlike the two earlier Asterix animated films, Asterix the Gaul (1967) and Asterix and Cleopatra (1968), the Gaul’s third cinematic outing takes full advantage of the animated form. The visual gags are fast and furious, and successfully exploit a more Chuck Jones-styled humor to suit the medium.

"Brutus, stop playing about with that knife. You'll end up hurting somebody!"

Asterix (in the English dub, ideally voiced by British comedian Bill Oddie) and his faithful companion Obelix help defend their Gaulish village from the Roman Empire with the help of the druid Getafix’s magic potion. To those new to the franchise, you only need to know that Asterix is small but clever, and Obelix – whose strength is permanently enhanced from having fallen into the potion as a baby – is large but dim-witted. Julius Caesar, frustrated by the constant humiliation provided by the Gauls, presents chief Vitalstatistix with a challenge: if his finest champions can successfully perform twelve impossible feats, Hercules-style, then he will surrender all of Rome. Asterix and Obelix set forth at once, guided by the mousy Roman envoy Caius Tiddlus; thus begins a most episodic adventure in which each task becomes a comic vignette with its own unique style. The fun lies in discovering what the task will be, and then trying to deduce how Asterix and Obelix will overcome it.

In his first task, Asterix prepares to race the fastest man alive.

Rewatching the film after so many years, I’m pleased to see it holds up pretty well. The animation is rough in a few places (particularly in some of the earlier sequences), but for the most part is a vast improvement over earlier Asterix efforts, and is pleasingly exaggerated in the finest Looney Tunes tradition – notably in the first task, a race against the fastest man alive, in which his anatomy takes on increasingly absurd proportions, until he finally transforms into a rocket; in an homage to Chuck Jones, the film even shatters against the strain, revealing a white nothingness behind it. In the film’s denouement, which rewrites history in the manner of Inglourious Basterds, Asterix openly confesses that they can do anything: “it’s only a cartoon movie!”…which prompts the delighted Obelix to violate one last narrative rule. You could also call the film’s humor Pythonesque, which is perhaps one of the reasons why the British dub isn’t so distracting. In a delightful moment, a solemn old man at the top of a mountain smoothly segues his speech into a pitch for Olympus-brand detergent, which allows Goscinny & Uderzo to cut to Mount Olympus and an efficient parody of the pantheon of Roman gods. A comic highlight is the visit to “the place that sends you mad,” a Roman office building in which our heroes are tasked with obtaining Permit A-38. They quickly find themselves in a bureaucratic knot worthy of Monty Python, and foreshadowing Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985); like Sam Lowry, Asterix fights back by turning the system against itself, giving it the smallest nudge to allow it to implode.

The Roman gods, as portrayed by Uderzo.

Perhaps it was just the 70’s, but it’s hard not to detect a note of Ralph Bakshi here and there, in particular during the task where Asterix and Obelix must survive “the Cave of the Beast,” a funhouse of horrors to which they must even obtain a ticket. The environment they enter is the most experimental sequence in the film, with a bag of tricks that includes mixing live action with animation, a la Fritz the Cat (1972) and Heavy Traffic (1973). Though it never quite rises above the G-level, there are hints of adult sexuality, such as the partial nudity of the film’s briefly-glimpsed Venus, and the feminine temptations of the Isle of Pleasure, where large-breasted, scantily-clad vixens express surprise that Obelix desires nothing more than to feast on wild boar. But then, Uderzo’s women were always a lot more alluring than Hergé’s. The film does show its age with a disco-music dance on the Isle of Pleasure, and the overbearing main theme by Gérard Calvi, but despite a few caveats, The Twelve Tasks of Asterix remains a notable animated film of the 70’s, succeeding in its intention to create an original Asterix graphic novel for the big screen directly from the character’s creators. Goscinny died the year following its release, and Studios Idéfix was disbanded. It wouldn’t be until 1985 that Asterix returned to European cinemas, and big-budget, live action films finally arrived beginning in 1999, with all-star casts and elaborate FX. Unsurprisingly, they have yet to be released in the U.S.

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