Cash on Demand (1962)

Posted on December 5, 2011 at 5:12 am by Jeff Kuykendall

For Cash on Demand (1962), Hammer Films took on Charles Dickens for a modern “Christmas Carol” – one delivered as a nail-biting heist thriller. Peter Cushing stars as our Scrooge stand-in, Fordyce: a cold-hearted bank manager who casually bullies and threatens to terminate his constantly-terrified staff. The film takes place on a snowy December morning, and convincingly unfolds in something close to real-time. While the opening credits roll, and tense music plays (by Wilfred Josephs), the camera roves about the empty bank offices and down the steps toward the basement vault, studying every nook and cranny of the building: what will essentially be the only stage in the action. Then the employees begin to arrive, including the kindly Mr. Pearson (Richard Vernon, A Hard Day’s Night), Fordyce’s first in command; the efficient Mr. Sanderson (Norman Bird, Burn, Witch, Burn); young and flirtatious Sally (Lois Daine, Hell is a City) and Peter (Barry Lowe, The Camp on Blood Island); and Ms. Pringle (Edith Sharpe, Satan Never Sleeps). When Fordyce arrives, all joy is efficiently siphoned from the building. He immediately shows disapproval that Ms. Pringle has displayed some Christmas cards on her desk. “Banking is one of the few dignified business left in the world, Ms. Pringle. Do you mind terribly if we keep it that way?” “I’m sorry, sir,” she says, and removes the cards. He then berates Pearson for the state of a pen with a corroded tip, blaming him for not keeping it in tip-top shape. “It obviously hasn’t been cleaned or examined in weeks. This isn’t a post office, you know!” The madness continues: Peter is almost fired because a customer was overpaid ten pounds (even though the customer discovered the error and returned the money); and because Pearson tried to cover for his mistake, he’s accused of embezzlement. Pearson, weary of the constant conflict brought to bear by his manager, asks for transfer to another branch. Fordyce quickly responds, “Do you really think I could recommend you to another branch?”

Fordyce (Peter Cushing) obsessively polishes the bank's plaque on his way to work.

By now, the audience should sufficiently loathe mean Mr. Fordyce; and they should probably expect that he’ll be visited by three ghosts in the evening. But here the screenplay by David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer (from a play by Jacques Gillies) takes an abrupt turn: into the bank arrives the commanding Colonel Hepburn (André Morell, who was Watson to Cushing’s Sherlock in 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles), who immediately overturns Fordyce’s authority by claiming to be from the “head office of the Home and Mercantile Bankers’ Insurance,” the insurance company in charge of the branch’s security. In fact, it’s a minor bit of business, but one of the very first things Hepburn does is reverse an order by Fordyce – he asks Pearson to stay in the office for a few minutes longer and close the door; Fordyce, who isn’t accustomed to being undermined, shows alarm. But it’s just the opening salvo in what will become an increasingly strained relationship. When Pearson leaves the room, convinced that Hepburn will be spending his time at the bank overseeing a thorough inspection, Fordyce takes a call from his home, and learns that his wife and child are being held hostage. She begs her husband to do everything Colonel Hepburn says. And so the bank robbery begins.

Cushing takes a panicked call from his wife, held hostage by Col. Hepburn's accomplices.

At just 80 minutes, Cash on Demand is a short programmer, meant to play on double-feature bills, but it’s an efficient, deeply satisfying suspense film. With its limited sets, the story’s stage origins are plainly evident (the furthest we get from the bank’s confines are the snow-covered street and sidewalk just outside the front door), but this also plays to Hammer’s strengths, relying upon masterful staging (by television director Quentin Lawrence) and compelling performances, in particular our two leads: most of the film is just Cushing and Morell alone, as Morell, with a steely gaze and a menacing smile, issues his orders, and Cushing, stripped of his precious authority, is psychologically beaten into submission. As a viewer, our sympathies shift; at first we feel some schadenfreude to see Fordyce reduced to a quivering mess. But Morell’s plan is executed so flawlessly – and Fordyce is so unresisting (since his family is in mortal danger) – that we anxiously await something, anything to expose Colonel Hepburn to the staff or to authorities. Gradually we see some suspicion in Pearson’s eyes. He gets on the phone to make a casual inquiry into Hepburn’s credentials. Time begins to run out, and Hepburn heads out the door with his bags of cash. The suspense may be handled more subtly than Hitchcock, but it works, all leading to an understated but gripping climax that runs with Fordyce-style efficiency. Cushing and Morell both had distinguished careers in British film, but they’ve rarely been as good as they are in this modest little thriller.

André Morell as the sinister Colonel Hepburn.

The film is available as part of an indispensable 3-disc, 6-film DVD set from Sony, Hammer Films: The Icons of Suspense Collection. Released in early 2010, the set (the third in a series of Hammer “Icons” collections from Sony) spotlights the British studio’s thrillers of the late 50’s and early 60’s, many of which had previously languished in obscurity. Cash on Demand is one of the gems of the collection; but so is The Snorkel (1958), Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (aka Never Take Candy from a Stranger, 1960), and, best of all, Joseph Losey’s The Damned (aka These are the Damned, 1963). Seek it out.

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972)

Posted on December 2, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

As vividly illustrated in the new film Woody Allen: A Documentary (2011), by the late 60’s Woody Allen was such a tremendous celebrity that on national television he was belting out songs in a top hat before the giant letters W-O-O-D-Y, and boxing a real live kangaroo while the audience cheered him on. In What’s New Pussycat? (1965) and Casino Royale (1967), a few of his trademark one-liners survived while the directors did their level best to deplete as much actual comedy as possible from the finished products. Hollywood comedy in this period usually amounted to star-studded casts, slapstick chases, sexual innuendo, and pie fights; of course Woody Allen seemed like the Second Coming. But he needed to wrest control of his own films. Beginning with the pitch-perfect Take the Money and Run (1969), Allen began filming his scripts – at a low budget and with complete independence. At last, his comic voice was captured intact on-screen, though his talents as a director were still somewhat unpolished. The film was a hit, allowing him to make Bananas (1971), a manic vehicle which paid homage to the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope. For his next film, he turned to a far more unusual inspiration: the bestselling sex manual of 1969 by David Reuben, M.D., Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask).

The rabbit-themed opening credits, set to Cole Porter's "Let's Misbehave."

The timing was right for Allen’s comedy to explore sexuality in all its amusing variations. In 1972, the release of Deep Throat had launched “porno chic,” and society’s elite were lining up at theaters to attend X-rated films; it was one of the stranger fads of the twentieth century, as the free love of the hippies had eroded into the more decadent liberation of the 1970’s. In the realm of art house film, pictures like Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” (beginning with The Decameron in 1971), and Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) used sex to explore politics and human nature. Enter Woody Allen, with his comic persona of the bespectacled nebbish, thrust into this world of wild sexual license: horny, intimidated, and always ready with a one-liner delivered, as a self-defense mechanism, directly to the camera. This character drifts through one comic skit after another in the film version of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex – which is what, by now, his fans demanded – but with the benefit of hindsight we can see how Allen was also starting to develop his talents as a director.

Dr. Ross (Gene Wilder) reacts to the news that his patient has been having unapologetic sexual relations with a sheep named Daisy.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s second segment, “What is Sodomy?” (Allen structures the film by creating his own answers to questions from Reuben’s book.) Gene Wilder plays Dr. Ross, a clinical physician treating an Armenian patient, Milos (Titos Vandis), who one day explains that he’s in love with a sheep named Daisy (“the best lay I ever had”). Milos wants Ross to see Daisy, to find out why she’s been so aloof lately – and while Ross strenuously objects, Milos runs outside, fetches the sheep from a truck, and carries it through the waiting room crowded with patients. “You’ll have to excuse me,” Ross stammers to the gathered throng, “his sheep has a strep throat.” In the natural comic escalation of an Allen short story, Ross unexpectedly falls in love with Daisy, and steals her off to a hotel room, where he orders from room service “chilled white burgundy, a little caviar, and some grass – oh, just plain, green grass.” After a blissful affair, his life begins to fall apart, until a betrayed Milos angrily comes to take Daisy back to Armenia. What makes this segment special is how Allen handles it: now that he’s entirely behind the camera and not playing the clown in front of it, he can experiment with a different tone, spotlighting Wilder’s own acting style, which is played by reacting naturally to comic circumstances rather than using Groucho Marx one-liners. And this dramatic, realistic style of acting is what you need when the premise of the sketch is this outlandish. (It’s a shame that this is the only collaboration we have between these two comic greats, since Wilder is so good at delivering Allen’s dialogue.) But also look at the montage which opens this segment: a breakdown of Dr. Ross’s daily life into brief moments lasting only a few seconds long, cold, reserved, businesslike, all to establish a tone that can be deliberately undermined by the introduction of comic absurdity (Milos and Daisy). If you had come into the theater late, you might think you’d arrived at the wrong film. This was not the same man who had directed Bananas. He was proving he could adapt his style to suit the material, which would serve him invaluably in films to come.

Fabrizio (Woody Allen) can only sexually satisfy his wife Gina (Louise Lasser) by making love in public.

A further stylistic experiment arrives with “Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?” Allen takes a simple idea – a man discovers his frigid wife can only be sexually excited by making love in public places – and makes it much funnier than it ought to be by treating it as a parody of the kind of 60’s Italian movies that usually starred Marcello Mastroianni. Allen makes a strange substitute in that role, but wears the sunglasses and gold jewelry and carries off the machismo necessary, speaking in phonetically-learned Italian with subtitled lines like “But you just lay there passive, like a lox.” As the camera follows the husband and wife (Allen is Fabrizio, and Gina is played by Allen’s ex-wife Louise Lasser) through restaurants and film studios, the director proves himself capable of creating a mise-en-scéne in the style of Fellini, Visconti, or Antonioni, but funnier. As Fabrizio’s friend closes in on him, questioning his sexual ability against a towering, blank wall (dwarfing Allen), he asks him delicately, “Are you…small?” “Small?” Fabrizio scoffs. “Like a French bread! Small.” To answer the question “What Are Sex Perverts?”, Allen successfully imitates the style of a 1950’s black-and-white game show, replete with spotty reception. Allen’s game show features Jack Barry of “What’s My Line?” hosting “What’s My Perversion?”, in which celebrity guests like Regis Philbin try and fail to guess that a contestant likes to expose himself on the subway. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex also offers Allen the opportunity to parody Hamlet and horror B-movies.

Regis Philbin is a celebrity guest on "What's My Perversion?": "When you're doing your perversion, do you have any need for props? You know, whips or leather boots?"

As with most sketch comedy movies, not everything works. “Are Transvestites Homosexuals?”, in which a straightlaced husband (Lou Jacobi) is caught by his wife and friends cross-dressing, is unfunny throughout, and feels twice as long as a result; uncharacteristic for Allen, the denouement of this little story is downright terrible. “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” isn’t bad, only guilty of not being quite as funny as it ought to be (Allen plays a court jester who tries to seduce the Queen, played by Lynn Redgrave, until he’s thwarted by her chastity belt). A segment inspired by Kinsey-style sex studies shares the same fault, until, unexpectedly, it transitions from a Frankenstein parody (with John Carradine as the mad doctor) into a brilliantly ludicrous giant-monster film, with an enormous breast terrorizing the countryside, and Allen racing to stop it. (In one moment, he confronts it with a crucifix while it squirts milk at him.) With some comic momentum at last building, we move into the final, strongest sketch, a look at the inner workings of the male body during foreplay and intercourse. Allen plays a reluctant sperm, and Tony Randall and Burt Reynolds are stationed in the command center, acting like they’re in a WWII submarine thriller. So the film ends on a high note, and with a true climax (see also: The Kentucky Fried Movie).

Victor (Allen) helps the police capture a giant rampaging breast in a giant brassiere.

Oddly, the 2000 DVD of the film, released as part of MGM’s first Woody Allen Collection box set, features a still on the back cover of a scene which is not actually in the finished film: a skit about a black widow devouring her mate, with Allen and Lasser in spider costumes. (The scene was dropped when a suitable ending couldn’t be devised.) The sketch is not included as a supplement, and the disc is as bare-boned as all Woody Allen DVDs, offering only the theatrical trailer. At least it’s in anamorphic widescreen. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex seems, in retrospect, like a stepping-stone to more ambitious filmmaking from Allen. It’s not as consistently funny as Take the Money and Run or Bananas, but his experimentation here plants the seeds for the high-concept experiments to come: Sleeper (1973), which uses science fiction and Buster Keaton-style comedy as its satirical tools; Love and Death (1975), mimicking Ingmar Bergman and David Lean as he takes on Russian literature; all leading to the breakthrough of Annie Hall (1977) and the emergence of his own unique voice as a filmmaker. It took making a comedy about a sex manual to loosen those limbs.

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Mysterious Island (1961)

Posted on November 30, 2011 at 5:09 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Since I just covered 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), this naturally leads us into Mysterious Island (1961), the film adaptation of Jules Verne’s sequel, which follows up on the fate of Captain Nemo and his Nautilus. Eventually. In the meantime, Ray Harryhausen, fresh off The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), uses his visual effects magic to liven up Verne’s two-part novel, liberally adding giant monster battles, because, let’s face it, everything is better with giant monster battles. Since the film – produced by Harryhausen’s frequent cohort Charles H. Schneer – was made for Columbia Pictures and not the Walt Disney Company, when Nemo does show up, he’s played by a different actor (the great Herbert Lom), and the design of the Nautilus is just different enough to avoid a lawsuit. Although its budget was significantly smaller than the Disney version’s, the film was a hit with the matinee crowd, and to this day many still count it as their favorite of Harryhausen’s impressive resumé.

Captain Harding (Michael Craig) and Herbert Brown (Michael Callan) plot their escape from a Confederate prison.

The film begins with the siege of Richmond, Virginia, in 1865. Our heroes are Union soldiers in a Confederate prison: the cool-headed Captain Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig); Neb (Dan Jackson), a black soldier; and young Herbert (Michael Callan, looking a lot like Tommy Kirk), who’s handsome but neurotic. They stage an escape during a storm by stealing a hot-air balloon, and are joined at the last minute by a new prisoner, war correspondent Gideon Spilitt (Gary Merrill), and a Confederate soldier, Sergeant Pencroft (Percy Herbert), whom they hold captive. The exciting escape sequence is assisted considerably by the rousing score by Bernard Hermann. Hermann – perhaps the greatest film composer of all time – greatly enjoyed scoring the “Dynamation” fantasies of Harryhausen & Schneer; he’d provided memorable themes for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and The 3 World of Gulliver, and would reunite with them again for the triumphant Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Unlike his nerve-jangling body of work for Hitchcock, exploring the realm of fantasy allowed him to tap into a more romantic, Rimsky-Korsakov vein. You can hear this shift as the prisoners approach the balloon (a convincingly-integrated model), and especially as they soar above the clouds, losing their course, and finding themselves over the ocean.

Our heroes scramble as the tempest brings down the balloon.

After an exciting sequence in which they’re forced to cut loose the basket and clutch desperately to the ropes beneath the balloon, they crash into the sea, and swim to the titular island, which announces itself with Hermann’s noble trumpets. Optically matted into the center of the island is a smoking volcano, and surrounding it are steeply-jutting mountains of rock and cradles of jungle. The landscape is rife with possibility; the viewer wants to begin exploring immediately. The party crosses the island to find any signs of humanity, but instead only encounter another beach, where a giant crab suddenly erupts out of the sand, snapping at them with its claws. This creature is one of Harryhausen’s finest stop-motion creations, though he actually used a real crab instead of molding one from scratch. He wrote in his book An Animated Life, “The reason for using a real crab was that nature had made such a good job of creating this complex creature that whatever I would come up with would never look the same. To avoid boiling the poor thing live in water, I had him professionally and humanely killed by a lady at the Natural History Museum in London. She took it apart and laid it all out on a board to show me how it fitted together. Later I ‘reconstructed’ it by mounting the pieces around the armature my father had built to my specifications.” He then used close-ups of live crabs for the shots of the snapping mandibles. The result is a gripping sequence which ends when the heroes flip the creature onto its back, then topple it into a boiling geyser; the next shot is of everyone dining happily on crab meat.

Harding battles Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion-animated giant crab.

Ennui is alleviated when two more castaways – females! – conveniently wash up on the beach (a third survivor of their shipwreck is dead on arrival): the elegant Lady Mary Fairchild (Joan Greenwood, Kind Hearts and Coronets), and her daughter Elena (Beth Rogan), whose carefully showcased legs become one of the major special effects of the film. Since this isn’t The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, the introduction of the opposite sex doesn’t turn our males against one another; instead, Elena and Herbert happily pair off: she, perhaps, attracted to his anachronistic Elvis Presley hair. He also overcomes his paralyzing fear when he saves her life from a giant prehistoric-style bird (Harryhausen intended it to be a “phororhacos,” though the explanation for its presence on the island was omitted from the final film). Soon they’re requesting the Lady Mary’s permission to get married. And although construction of a boat is lazily progressing, the castaways seem a lot more excited about their new abode, “Granite House,” a cave set high into towering cliffs, which they renovate (there are cobwebs and the skeleton of a pirate) into something a bit more homely, even constructing a pulley-operated elevator. Any resemblance to Swiss Family Robinson (1960) is not coincidental; Mysterious Island builds on the success of that Disney film just as much as it does 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Elena (Beth Rogan) and Herbert are sealed into a honeycomb by a giant bee.

As a child I was terrified of bees, so the most effective sequence for me was always the arrival of the giant bees, who seal Herbert and Elena into a towering wall of honeycombs. The suspenseful sequence ought to be longer (really, the bees should pursue the characters after they escape), but you don’t really notice, because it transitions into a larger setpiece involving a pirate raid on the island, as Captain Harding and his men fire on the pirates from their position in Granite House. Then the pirate ship explodes – sunk by charges placed by Captain Nemo, who emerges from the ocean wearing a diving suit constructed out of giant seashells. Really, does pulp fantasy get any better than this? Herbert Lom’s belated arrival in the film as a white-bearded Nemo initiates a visit to the Nautilus, moored in an eerie cavern. The submarine is less ornately decorated than the one featured in 20,000 Leagues. Lom does, however, play Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” at the organ somberly: a requirement if you’re playing either Captain Nemo or the Phantom of the Opera; and Lom has done both. Nemo’s explanation for why he created the giant flora and fauna on the island is only semi-convincing (he wants to eliminate world hunger, thus continuing his quest for ending war), but he initiates an exciting final act in which even more pulp elements are squeezed into the film, including an exploding volcano, a cephalopod attack (once again animated by Harryhausen) in which our seashell-suited divers strike back using rifles that fire bolts of electricity, a desperate bid to raise the sunken pirate ship, and even the exploration of an underwater city that might very well be Atlantis. All of this is thrown at the viewer so breathlessly that Mysterious Island moves from the realm of Jules Verne into that of 1930’s pulp serials, or Flash Gordon comic strips. In other words, it’s superb.

Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo

Filmed in Shepperton Studios in England (thus the presence of so many British actors) and on the coasts of Spain and beneath their waters, Mysterious Island has a rich, expansive look which has added to its enduring appeal over the decades. Director Cy Endfield, who would next direct Zulu (1964), complements Harryhausen’s effects work with memorable performances from the cast; you come to know these characters quickly, and root for them as this busy little island unleashes its many challenges upon them; thus the film has pleased a broader audience than just “monster kids.” The new Blu-Ray from Twilight Time, in a limited edition of 3,000 units (available, until they run out, from Screen Archives), is recommended, though with a few reservations. The only supplements are an isolated score (which is welcome) and a theatrical trailer; gone are the featurettes from the Sony/Columbia DVD release, so you might want to hold onto that if you have a copy. As with all the Harryhausen films released on Blu-Ray, high definition doesn’t do many favors to his FX sequences: they can be excessively grainy, and the mattes show their seams; some shots of the elevator scaling Granite House are particularly wince-inducing. Still, the presentation is notably improved from previous home video incarnations, with vivid colors. The original mono soundtrack is included as an option, but the new 5.1 surround sound mix nicely showcases Hermann’s thunderous score. If you want it, act quickly. The next limited edition Twilight Time release, Fright Night (1985), will be released in December.

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