Hotel Du Pud (part one): Harry Alan Towers and “Ten Little Indians” (1974)

by Dean Brandum

Following on from my post providing a brief history of the international co-production comes the first in a series turning the spotlight on the films tainted with this unsavoury brush. First up, the third version of Ten Little Indians (1974). Never even released on video in this country and long-unavailable on the tape format in either Britain or the United States, it has yet to appear anywhere on DVD (officially, at least) and remains a most difficult film to see. Having lingered (festered?) in my memory since a TV screening around 30 years ago, it became one of many films I have been determined to track down over the years in an obsession to place some order on the collected fragments cluttering my subconscious.

Original avertising admat for the film.

I finally found a copy and upon viewing Ten Little Indians, I was immediately gripped.  No, not for reasons artistic as it is an inept and shoddy production, lacking credibility and logic and devoid of even the most basic of thrills. Instead, the film captures most beautifully the entire euro-pudding movement, not only in its production method, but (no doubt unintentionally) as its own subtext.

“”Ten Little Indians,” the latest remake of the Agatha Christie story, looks less like a movie than a movie deal…an international movie mess of the sort that damages the reputations of everyone connected with it” – (Vincent Canby – New York Times)

Before we get to that we have to trace the history of this forgotten, minor landmark. It is a long tale – too long for one post. What I must do is introduce you to the inimitable Mr. Harry Alan Towers…

“I can step off a plane in any country in the world and within 24 hours have a film in pre-production” – Harry Alan Towers.

The son of a theatrical agent, Harry Alan Towers was born in London in 1920. By his early twenties Towers was becoming known to the public as a radio personality and within the industry as a producer of scripted dramatic series for that medium (many of which he wrote himself). By the age of thirty he had established offices in several countries (including Australia and the United States) distributing these series. His success in radio and ability to produce vast quantities of high quality programming saw him drafted into television by Lew Grade at the ATV network. Towers’ commission was to produce television programs with the same efficiency as his radio business and he accomplished the task with relish. Although he was creating strong profits for the network, Towers was asked to resign due to conflict of interest concerns. In what acts as an indicator of his future unorthodox business practices, Towers was asked to create a nightly chat show and given a substantial production budget, Towers decided to host the show himself, be thrifty with the other costs and keep the rest of the allocated budget for himself, as a hosting fee.

After a brief foray into feature film production with a pair of B-films produced by his Towers of London banner, in 1963 Harry Alan Towers was on the run and hiding out in South Africa. Two years earlier, he had skipped bail after being arrested in New York on the charge of running a call-girl ring. Naturally, that ruled out any return to the United States, but due to a number of previous deceitful dealings in his native Britain, his creditors were eagerly awaiting his arrival home, meaning setting up a production base in Britain was also out of the question.

Undaunted, Towers teamed up with Oliver A. Unger, a producer who had made his name and fortune in the 1950s – the early years of television syndication – most notably through purchasing old cartoons from the major studios, editing them into half-hour programs and selling the packages to television networks and individual stations. Hoping to extend into theatrical film production and distribution he hooked up with the experienced Towers in 1963 and they planned a number of projects that contained exciting action, colourful backdrops and could be cheaply filmed. With Towers’ showmanship, Unger’s U.S. experience and the conditional agreement of several fading screen stars willing to perform in these productions, they managed to sell the North American distribution rights to the Canadian based Seven Arts Pictures (this was the company that pounced upon the troubled Warner Brothers Corporation in 1967 when they bought out founder Jack Warner’s controlling interest. However, Warner Brothers-Seven Arts lasted a mere two years before a financially disastrous 1969 saw that Seven Arts stake bought out by the Kinney Corporation).

With the Seven Arts distribution deal in place and the resultant funds from the rights’ sale in pocket, by 1965 they had completed an impressive slate of six feature films which they unveiled in the market section of that year’s Cannes film festival. Operating under the banner of UPI (Unger Productions Incorporated) a full page advertisement in Variety immodestly announced that these were pictures of “Major Importance”. With no mention of Towers’ involvement whatsoever (Unger was listed as sole producer of each film) the suspicions of creditors and law enforcers either side of the Atlantic would not be raised.

Four of the titles were filmed in Africa. Mozambique was an adventure tale of diamond smugglers, 24 Hours to Kill fell into the espionage and intrigue genre that was highly popular in the wake of the successful James Bond franchise, Coast of Skeletons was a remake of the colonial drama Sanders of the River (1938) and Sandy the Seal hoped to capture the family audience. With the likes of Mickey Rooney, Steve Cochran, Dale Robertson and Richard Todd there was enough (fading) star wattage to fill out the lower half of double features in the English language markets. However the savvy Towers also peppered his cast with a number of actors popular in Germany, where Towers would later base many of his operations. The American sales had financed most of the productions but it was a silent partnership with the Munich-based Terra Filmkundst that completed the budgets. Their financing was conditional on the casting of German actors in each of the productions in order to increase their appeal in those markets. This accounts for the likes of Hildegarde Neff, Paul Hubschmid, Elga Anderson, Walter Slezak and Lex Barker in the films. The venture was a successful one with all of these titles having all territories sold by the end of the festival. However, although the rights to these titles were available individually, they were generally sold as a complete package at discounted rates when buyers paid the higher fees for the two gems in UPI’s slate – The Face of Fu Manchu and Ten Little Indians.

Towers had always known the value of a good story, especially one with an inbuilt audience familiarity. The Scarlet Pimpernel series was one of his early television productions and in the early 1970s he was to film versions of Black Beauty and White Fang. More recently he has produced Blood of the Mummy, a version of Phantom of the Opera and a series of Edgar Alan Poe adaptations. Apart from their marketability as known literary commodities, these properties were also public domain titles, meaning Towers did not have to pay screen rights to the authors, much less any later royalties. But the downside to this ploy was that these titles were overly familiar to audiences, having been filmed many times, both for the cinema and television. Towers needed exclusivity with some prize material so he purchased, for £25,000, the rights to a number of novelist Sax Rohmer’s books, including thirteen that featured Oriental criminal mastermind, Fu Manchu (although Towers also produced two films based on Rohmer’s less known other arch-villain, Sumuru).

The Face of Fu Manchu was the first of five Towers films to feature the character (played by Christopher Lee), with the first entries resembling Hammer Studios productions, but the final pair (as directed by Jess Franco in 1970) delving deeper into the territory of sleaze and sadism that would characterize many of Tower’s productions in the coming decade.

Ten Little Indians was the final film on UPI’s 1965 Cannes slate and the one with the most mainstream potential. Agatha Christie had written the novel Ten Little Niggers in 1939 and upon its release was hailed her masterwork and remained her personal favourite of all her writings. The novel tells the story of ten strangers who are invited to a weekend on ‘Indian Island’ as the guest of a Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owen. Never having met their host the guests are under the impression they have been invited due to their fame and expertise in their various professions (judge, doctor, detective, entertainer etc).

Yet they never meet their host who only makes his presence felt via a gramophone recording in which he accuses each of the guests of being guilty of a serious crime (each involving the death of innocents) for which they have (so far) gone unpunished. Furious at the allegations but unable to leave the island, the guests endure a horror evening in which their party is reduced in number as one by one they are victims of an unseen killer. Central to the décor of the dining room is an ornate piece of china depicting ten Indians and with each death one is mysteriously broken from the display. The children’s nursery rhyme (from which the novel takes its title) in framed in each room, which each line seemingly foretelling the circumstances of each of the guests’ deaths. The invited party (who have admitted their guilt for the crimes of which they were accused) soon realize that, having searched the house and its grounds in vain,   Mr. U.N. Owen does not exist and the killer is indeed one of them, implementing this elaborate plan in order to fulfill his or her insane scheme of social justice. Suspicions are raised and tempers flare but the killings continue. Eventually Vera Claythorne kills the last suspect, her love interest Phillip Lombard. She appears to be the only survivor but the judge – already believed killed – reappears to admit he is the mastermind of the scheme. Stating he is terminally ill, he drinks poison, leaving Vera alone with a noose hanging from the ceiling. Realising that the police will believe her the killer and seeing no way out of her predicament, she hangs herself – the final piece of the judge’s plan now complete and following the exact last lines of the nursery rhyme:

One little Indian left alone alone.

He went and  hanged himself

And then there were none.

Ten Little Niggers differs from many of Christie’s more celebrated work in that it does not feature a sleuth (professional or amateur) solving the crime and detecting the identity of the villain. Yet it still remains a archetypal example of classical British crime fiction. Featuring prototypical aristocratic and upper-middle class gentlemen and ladies hiding dark pasts of violence and improper behavior, the plot convolutions throw up numerous red herrings until the dénouement unmasks the real criminal, an unexpected character with a once seemingly foolproof alibi. With its settings rarely straying from the confines of the mansion (a subsidiary character itself), Ten Little Niggers conforms to the ‘drawing room’ characteristic of the form, as does its preoccupation with manners and conduct (un)becoming.

The novel may have been a hit in Britain but its title caused obvious discomfort American publishers. She agreed for it to be released there as And Then There Were None and subsequent edition in Britain and the Commonwealth were retitled Ten Little Indians. Christie also had the problem that the novel’s downbeat conclusion proved problematic for adaptations into other media. Christie herself rectified the situation by writing a version for the stage, with a reworked ending that had not only Vera and Lombard surviving, but actually innocent of their supposed crimes. The judge was not as infallible as he (and the audience) believed, realizing the last act of his grand plan was in ruins only after he had sipped his fatal drop of poison. Certainly this adhered to the most popular aspect of melodrama in which villainy is quashed in the final moments by the virtuous, restoring a moral order to the universe and offering a catharsis for the audience (with the promise of a romantic future thrown in for good measure). However, it could be argued that for those with a more cynical bent, the original narrative restored its own order, with the judge’s virtue and sense of righteousness (albeit with a brutal bluntness) righting the moral unbalance that social norms have been unable to correct. For the needs of a potentially wide audience though, the proposal that society’s conventions of law and justice are inherently flawed was a notion too impalpable to contemplate.

Christie was correct. Her stage adaptation opened in November 1943 to capacity crowds London and replicated that success in New York the following year. The film industry was immediately interested and independent producer Leo V. Popkin purchased the screen rights from Christie and the resultant 20^th Century Fox production marked the first time a Christie property had been filmed by Hollywood (five previous Christie works had been filmed in her native Britain and another in Germany). Directed by Frenchman Rene Clair with celebrated screenwriter Dudley Nicholls opening it up for the cinematic approach, And Then There Were None was cast with a gallery of fine character actors including the likes of Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Louis Hayward, C. Aubrey Smith and Dame Judith Anderson. Released in 1947 the film was expectedly acclaimed as an outstanding mystery-thriller but was tellingly praised for its casting, period atmosphere, stylish design and musical score – the hallmarks of a well budgeted studio system production of the day. It is the care (or lack thereof) taken with the material that would mark the versions filmed by Harry Alan Towers in the decades to come.

Towers’ purchased the screen rights from Harry M. Popkin in the early 1960s, with Popkin believing that the story’s surprise ending was too well-known by audiences for another film version to succeed. However, although he sold the property for a low sum he took a production credit on the film and a cut of any profits as part of the deal. The reason Towers was interested in the material was due to the success MGM had enjoyed with a series of Miss Marple adaptations filmed at their Borehamwood Studios in Britain. Starring the inimitable Margaret Rutherford as the amateur village sleuth, dotted with a cast of eccentric English stereotypes and a bright comedic sensibility, these inexpensive productions were very popular as mainstream releases in Britain and on the American arthouse circuit. However, after four films in as many years MGM discontinued the series as they were hoping for more than a cult following in the United States. MGM owned the rights to a large proportion of Christie’s other work, except for those stories that featured Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. A notoriously difficult person to deal with, Towers never considered negotiating for her unsold stories and instead sought out this one, already purchased property. In order to replicate the feel of the MGM Marple films he hired George Pollock, the director of that series to film his version of Ten Little Indians and filled the cast with a number of well-known English Character actors such as Leo Genn, Stanley Holloway, Dennis Price and Wilfred Hyde-White. The leads were Shirley Eaton who had memorably been a victim of ‘Goldfinger’ in the James Bond film of 1964 and the imported American actor Hugh O’Brian who had starred as television’s Wyatt Earp for six successful seasons and was now attempting a career as a leading man in the cinema. As with the rest of the Terra Filmkundst financed films, three roles were given to German actors – Daliah Lavi, Mario Adorf and Marianne Hoppe which also enabled the film to be eligible for German subsidies and tax concessions.  Finally, in casting calculated for the youth market, American pop singer Fabian played the first of the murder victims.

Set in a Scandinavian chateau, but filmed at one of Ireland’s stately homes (some footage shot in the Austrian mountains was spliced in for establishing shots), the 1965 version of Ten Little Indians was one of several British-German co-productions during the 1960s. Apart from the German subsidies available to Towers (via his ‘Tenlit’ company, established just for this film and delisted shortly afterwards) the film’s quotient of British talent allowed it to be eligible to take advantage of the Eady Levy. Instigated in 1949, this was a tax placed on all cinema tickets sold in Britain for foreign films. The pooled revenue was then shared amongst the British films screened that year, proportional to their box office (a percentage also went to the National Film Finance Corporation and the Children’s Film Foundation). The more a British film earned, the more it could claim. This fund rewarded successful films and promoted further filmmaking ventures. However, not matter how well intentioned, the system was ripe for exploitation. American films shot in British studios were often eligible, no matter if that was the extent of their ‘Britishness’. In the late 1970s the worst abuse of the system occurred when distributors of the American blockbuster Grease purchased a £25,000 20 minute British short film about skateboarding and paired it on programs with Travolta musical. This provided enough British content for not only Grease being able to avoid paying the Eady Levy, but qualifying for £200,000 of the Eady share and virtually draining the pool in a very quiet year for the British film industry. The system was finally abandoned in 1985 in favour subsidies granted on individual proposals.

When it played it cinemas during 1965, Ten Little Indians was targeted towards a youth audience. Taking a cue from American producer-director William Castle who marketed his films with various gimmicks, Towers included a 60-second ‘Fright Break’. This entailed the screen turning black shortly before the dénouement and a narrator explaining to the audience they have one minute to guess the twist ending. Each murder is replayed on screen as a clock ticks by in the corner. The minute over, the film resumes. Receiving mixed reviews but healthy boxoffice, the major release of UPI’s slate was its most successful. Towers and Unger parted ways and the Englishman entered the second period of his international co-production, known as his ‘blue phase’, teaming with Spanish director Jess Francofor a series of sex and sadism shockers aimed at the growing adult film market.

After Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (1970), Harry Alan Towers realised that the darker environs of the sadistic sex film were losing their boxoffice appeal as they became increasingly ghettoised into grind-house cinemas and smaller drive-in chains. He and Jess Franco parted ways, with the Spanish director happily prospering in that field for several further decades.  In late 1969 Towers arrived in London trying to gain financial backing for a version of Anne Sewell’s “Black Beauty”. Unfortunately he arrived too late. A couple of years earlier the British-based Hollywood companies would have shown strong interest in a children’s film set in the English countryside but as the decade closed they were moving their investments out of Britain. With the respectable production companies interested in neither Towers nor the oft-filmed story, he found unlikely backing through Tigon, a company associated with low budget horror and erotic films. They had previously distributed his Sandy the Seal and were intrigued by the idea of a foray into the family market. Tigon supplied part of the budget and Towers spent the next few months raising the rest of the funds in Spain and Germany. Shot in Ireland and Spain and featuring the usual assortment of international stars, Black Beauty (1970: James Hill) was well received by critics but failed to make much of an impression with audiences. Undeterred (and having made a nice personal profit from presales), he embarked on a series of further family films, each based on established, public domain, classics.

Although the Spanish-French-Italian White Fang (1973: Lucio Fulci) was a well-reviewed success, two other productions were beset by difficulties. Treasure Island (1972: John Hough) starring Orson Welles as Long John Silver and using the star’s own, pseudonymous screenplay (with other names also attached for the purpose of national contribution) ran short on finances and filming was shut down on several occasions. Tower’s showmanship had lured Charlton Heston to star in Call of the Wild (1972: Ken Annakin) but the star detested the experience, describing Towers as ‘shadowy’ and ‘untrustworthy’. Once again finances did not flow smoothly and Heston has said that working with a West German, French, Italian and Spanish crew was just like ‘the United Nations’ with lots of yelling, no-one understanding each other and nothing getting done. Heston was so incensed at the quality of the finished product that he persuaded Paramount, who owned the U.S. distribution rights, to not release the film. It eventually received a few brief screenings in 1975, after it was on-sold by Paramount to the exploitation distributor Intercontinental Releasing Corporation for a pittance. Costly and requiring much arduous location work for a market offering only slim returns, Towers never truly conquered the family film market. In 1973 he was looking for a new opportunity the on that would arise was a return to an old success, but relaunched with a decade of new skills acquired on in the fierce market of international film finance.

And now, an intermission….

Pan(ned) Atlantic – The dreaded international co-production.

by Dean Brandum

To any self-respecting, serious film-buff, the term ‘international co-production’ is cause for instant derision and immediate dismissal. Conjuring up memories of turgid and incomprehensible narratives set in far-flung corners of the earth and populated with a gallery of disinterested, fading performers delivering depressingly dreadful dialouge. Once a staple of 1960s-1970s cinema (and later filling many a late night TV schedule), such Europuddings are still concocted, but their multi-national pedigrees are somewhat better disguised.  Indeed, if you follow the production histories of many recent Hollywood blockbusters you will find they are a complex web of financial necessities are considerations, with input from a consortium of international backers. Tax concessions, currency exchange rates, available production facilities, appeal to foreign markets are all woven into the getting a film off the ground. Today’s international co-production may appear more seamless than those earlier forays into a true, global cinema, yet such smoothing of the edges has robbed the mode of its jet-setting soul.

There is little love lost for the original euro-pudding (or ‘runaway production’ as the trade more kindly described it), however, in a regular series, I would like to delve into this rather forgotten past and pay some tribute to the films, their makers and how (and why) they came into being.

For those unfamiliar and those just trying to forget, perhaps a very brief and potted explanation is in order…

“In the age of political integration, co-productions are inevitable and necessary. Indeed, they provide the only strategy to boost the cinema economically and to secure a film’s success at the boxoffice. Worries that artistic input might suffer in purely economic considerations might be justified. But much more important is to find the foundations for workable joint productions with any country in the world which is willing to co-operate…” – Horst Axtmann in 1967

Following the Second World War the European Cinema was in a state of crisis. Individual nations were deep in debt, talent had been decimated and infrastructure destroyed. Assistance to the European countries from the United States arrived swiftly to both wartime allies and enemies in the form of loans and rebuilding programs. A number of American films also arrived on the continent, provided free for educational, inspirational and entertainment purposes.

During the war, Hollywood lost its once lucrative European markets. Apart from Britain, the studios were only importing (and deriving income from) the British Empire, Latin America and a handful of neutral countries of negligible value. With a number of markets now again available, the studios leapt into the void created by the war and the dearth of local product by flooding European cinemas with the backlog of films accumulated over several years. The American industry was also aided by the loss, during the war period, of the many practices such as quotas and tariffs imposed by governments that had restricted the import of foreign (especially American) films. With the approval by the US government for a legal cartel formed by the studios to enhance export opportunities, these factors allowed for a concerted effort by Hollywood to gain a position of power in a vulnerable European film market. That it was detrimental to the European industries was an inevitable consequence.

Yet, the European nations fought back. Apart from the damage to European industry and culture, the American studios were draining currency from desperately poor nations with little tangible in return. Restrictions on film imports were implemented and, in an attempt to stem the currency loss, new regulations were imposed whereby the American companies could only use such funds (or percentages of them) if they were used for purposes of production or investment within the European countries. In 1946 Italy and France signed an ‘experimental’ co-production agreement, ratifying it in 1949. Of the many bi-lateral and more expansive agreements made in the decade after the war, this was the most successful, producing over 230 films by 1957. Germany signed with France in 1951, France with Argentina and Spain in 1953, then with Yugoslavia and Austria two years later. Eventually nearly all of the filmmaking countries (including smaller nations such as Holland, Hungary, Sweden and Denmark) of Europe had passed agreements, often with overlap. Each of these agreements had a complex set of criteria for each participating company to fulfil in order that the production met the requirements of national representation within the pact. This process was often tied in with government initiatives that supported film production, such as subsidies and tax rebates. Various categories were established (often markedly different over each agreement) in which the percentage of investment could be evaluated. This would determine such details as how many performers and crew would be required from that country and, how many scenes would need to be shot there. Indeed, in many cases, having a compatriot fulfil a certain high profile position, such as director, would be regarded highly by the regulators at the expense of some other, otherwise mandatory, requirements.

When quantified in numbers of pure production, the co-production method was highly successful. Between 1949-1964 there were 1091 films made involving at least two national partners. Mostly genre films, the filmmakers adapted quickly to ever-changing market tastes. In the process some genres such as the German ‘Heimatfilme’ (domestic melodramas of the ‘homeland’) which were very popular in the 1950s had vanished by the end of the decade. Action became the key ingredient of the co-production, a selling point that appealed to audiences across all national boundaries. The concentration of spectacle also alleviated the reliance upon dialogue, relegating it to general conversation and exposition. This also strengthened the films’ claims to being truly pan-European, with post-synchronising (dubbing) of the soundtrack made easier. Importantly, action-based genre films, especially those featuring Europe’s most cinematic natural and urban landscapes, could be exported outside of the continent, including to the lucrative US market. Although not within the scope of this discussion, it must be noted that many well received films that played well in the international arthouse market were the product of co-production details. Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was an Italian-French co-production, as was Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973). Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) was financed through Italian, German, French and American partners. The system did allow an auteur-cinema to flourish, as long as the directors were willing to bend to certain pan-national conditions.

Hollywood was suffering its own crises at home during this period. Forced to divest itself of its theatre chains they also faced a post-war slump in the audiences who were now finding their entertainment in other sources, especially television. The various measures set up in Europe to negate a perceived attempt at American domination actually proved a blessing in disguise for the Hollywood studios. After attempting a number of underhanded schemes to access boxoffice funds frozen on the continent, the studios finally relented and began investing in European films. Believing that spectacle would lure audiences back to cinemas, they found Europe offered the scenery required for such exotic epics and that production crews were not only capable but comparatively inexpensive. For a time the giant Cinecitta studios in Rome were known as ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ due to the number of what would be referred to as ‘runaway’ American productions shooting there. The Hollywood studios also carefully met any requirement for such films to be declared ‘French’, ‘Italian’, ‘British’ or wherever they were shooting in order to receive the due government inducements such as tax minimisations and subsidies offered by that particular country. Although Britain was reluctant to join any pan-European co-production agreements, they also benefited from American involvement, with Hollywood investment paving the way for a number of successful films in the 1960s that were ostensibly British but backed with American finance. In fact, American involvement was so important in Britain that when it was withdrawn late in that decade the British industry ground to a halt, subsisting through much of the 1970s on low budget exploitation product. The success of European genre films in the 1960s also allowed for a number of small distributors in the United States to expand rapidly by importing these films at low cost to an appreciative American youth market, who had become the most important audience for the Hollywood studios. A company such as AIP made a fortune by cheaply acquiring the distribution rights to Goliath and the Barbarians (1959: Carlo Campogallianni) and after similar successes then began financing European productions.

Even within the confines of the action genre the co-produced film would move through various cycles and forms, mimicking successful Hollywood hits or even finding variations on their own profitable formulas. From peplums to gothic thrillers, westerns to detective thrillers, espionage adventures to softcore pornography, it became a business of gambles and speculations, whether a producer could jump aboard a particular genre when it was popular with audiences and if they knew it was time to move on before the audience tired of that particular formula.

From the early 1960s, there was a surge in the number of films co-produced by companies in two or more countries, particularly within Europe. Although their initial aim was for Continental success, many found their way to the United States, often through the distribution arms of the major Hollywood studios, who found them to be ideal product for cheaply buffering their release schedules. The derision for the international co-production from critics in the United States and Britain stemmed from a number of factors. A New York Times review of The Viscount (1970: Maurice Cloche), a West German-French-Spanish co-produced espionage thriller partly set in the USA was typical in relaying several of the prejudices which could be expressed in a short-hand fashion in many reviews for such productions:

“[The Viscount] pretends to the title and the class of a high-born Bond-type picture and all it is is a low-grade gangster film-so low that it thinks Jersey City was the height of elegance as a center of crime in years gone by. Charge that up to the fact that it is one of those European sausage films – ground out by a group of co-producers representing West Germany, France and Spain-and you know what usually happens when the Europeans try to show how wise they are about America….it is the sort of picture they’d be strongly inclined to brush under the rug in Hollywood-or quickly sell to television for burial on the late night shows.” (Crowther).

Within this review is the belief that the film is attempting to defraud the audience, by modeling itself on a genre created, refined and perfected by British and American filmmakers (in this case, the high-class spy thriller). It tries to present a familiarity with the American milieu, yet its background reveals it an imposter in Hollywood guise. The reviewer displays a possible xenophobic streak in his distrust of European comment of American issues (and seems to feel that the newspaper’s readership agrees). The film’s international pedigree is described in a manner that implies financial considerations over artistic ambition (referring to producers rather than a director), with no singular national vision. That it was ‘ground out’ demeans the film as a low-grade factory created product, but one without any class, skill or even pretence to art. The inclusion of “one of those” indicates a pre-supposed knowledge on behalf of the readership in that that they are well-aware of this type of film and its inherent traits. Finally, in a direct comparison with Hollywood product, The Viscount is assessed as being so inferior as to being worthy of the then lowest and last rung of mainstream exhibition – late night television.

Yet, for all the invective they suffered, the internationally co-produced genre film flourished for many years, particularly in Europe and through various channels still found distribution in English language markets.

Even when the budgets were substantial and the aims highbrow, the critics rarely let up -

The Red Tent (1969: Mikhail K. Kalatozov), an Italian-Soviet aviation drama featuring a cast of mixed nationalities including Sean Connery, Claudia Cardinale and Hardy Kruger “Soon succumbs to that spectre of modern movie-making, International Co-Production….one is left with a niggling doubt about the wisdom of spreading creative co-operation over so many boundaries” – Monthly Film Bulletin.

Such critical invective may be explained by the refusal to accept the notion of a trans-national cinema. This stubborn attitude was borne of a belief in the inherent ‘purity’ of a singular national voice which – through the work of a filmmaking collective from that particular country – will impart a sincere representation of the issues, concerns and art of that nation and its people. The by-product of a transnational cinema which utilizes cast, crew, finances and locations from several nations is an inevitable dilution of such a voice. The transnational film it was believed, was one created by filmmakers thrown together for funding purposes rather than any true desire to work together, creating a narrative with the intent of appealing to as many nationalities as possible and in the process, thought many critics, pleasing very few. These were the sentiments of Sidney Cole in 1962. Within his concerns for the future of European film was an anxiety for the future of his own industry. As founder of the British Film Technicians Union, he feared that, in order to compete with a flourishing pan-European market, Britain film companies would be forced to integrate, losing their cultural identity in the process.

Cole had other things to worry about – namely Hollywood pulling up stumps by the end of the decade and leaving the British industry in ruins, taking nearly two decades to return to a near-viable concern. In that time, Hollywood reconsolidated its position as of world dominance and, streamlining their release slates, fewer overtly international co-productions were included in their schedules. Instead, the major studios adapted the mode to their own benefit – securing their own international finance, taking advantage of available concessions, shooting where cheapest and, with varying degrees of discretion, slotting international stars into their casts, for maximum global boxoffice potential.

The true euro-pudding was left to the continental market and when they found American distribution, it was generally in the lower tiers of the art and grind markets, eventually ghettoing in films direct to video or the wasteland of cable television. Oh yes, in these single continental currency days the highbrow euro-pudding is still around and can be found on display at various notable festivals. Check out The Barber of Siberia (1998: Nikita Mikhalkov), Vatel (2000: Roland Joffe) and Luther (2003: Eric Till). The bewildering world of pre-sales usually ensures the films make profits, even if few actually perform well at the box office.

Films seemingly from nowhere, trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by pleasing few in the process. Yet there are pleasures to be found as I hope this ongoing series of Europudding pieces will illustrate.

Bricked Vermeer: Subversive Frames and Fulci’s “Sette Note in Nero” (1977)

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

In 1971, a waiter plucked Johannes Vermeer’s classic of the Dutch Baroque period, The Love Letter (1669-70) right off the walls of the Rijksmuseum in one of the most notorious art thefts of the decade. The story goes he took it home, rolled it up and shoved it under his bed. While the painting was eventually restored to its rightful owner, this surprise sojourn into the world of suitcases and mouse droppings caused near irreversible damage to one of the Netherland’s most prized and canonical artworks.

On first glance, Vermeer’s work lacks the heavy metal doom of Caravaggio or the sensory dizziness of Peter Paul Rubens, painters who would perhaps more immediately share a sensibility – aesthetically and thematically – with the films of Lucio Fulci. Vermeer is altogether too domestic, too ordinary, too provincial, too twee. Fulci, on the other hand, is best known for epic, explicitly gruesome horror films and giallo. At his horror best, Fulci produced some of the more fascinating and loved genre films in both Italy and the world, notably E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà (The Beyond, 1981), Zombie (1979) and Paura nella città dei morti viventi (City of the Living Dead, 1980). Despite this, there is still a vague attitude that surrounds Fulci as a poor-mans-Argento, an overzealous, bumbling second-in-command who sometimes just happened to fluke a remarkable film.

This is, of course, simply untrue. If one can extract oneself even momentarily from the starry-eyed cult of Argento, Fulci’s work differs substantially and, lets face it, both directors are as guilty of producing duds as the other (Il Cartaio, I’m talking to you). If there can be one distinct formal feature that separates them, it would be this: light is to Fulci what colour is to Argento. And it is precisely this point that marks the first intersection between Fulci and Vermeer – in their respective mediums, both artists relied on light to create their unique visions.

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Vermeer’s The Love Letter is much, much more than just a cute reference in the unfolding narrative of Fulci’s giallo-supernatural hybrid Sette Note in Nero (Seven Notes in Black, 1977). Much critical attention to Vermeer’s work by art historians has focused upon his signature utilisation of “paintings within paintings” – it is common for paintings to appear on the walls of the scenes he is depicting, and those mini, diegetically-contained paintings themselves provide “clues” as to the broader themes of the piece as a whole. In The Love Letter, for instance, it is the two paintings in the background that provide the main indication that the letter received by the woman in yellow is, in fact, a love letter. This frame-within-a-frame feature of Vermeer’s work is pivotal to Sette Note in Nero, both aesthetically and thematically, and is emphasised by the privileged inclusion of Vermeer’s painting itself.

Outside of the stunning Una sull’altra (Perversion Story, or One on Top of the Other, 1969) and the flawless Una Lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Woman in a Lizard’s Skin, 1971) (two of the most interesting – and most famous – giallos ever made), Fulci’s giallos on the whole are defined even more so than other directors of the genre by hyperactively detailed vignettes, strung together with little more than a flagrant disregard for coherent narrative. But on the whole, despite being such well-known genre staples, there is a distinct lack of consistency in Fulci’s giallo compared to those of Umberto Lenzi, Sergio Martino or (dare I say it) Argento himself. Murderock – uccide a passo di danza (Murder Rock, or Slashdance, 1984) holds little allure outside of its spectacular and novel engagement with its own era, Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972) seems stylistically (let alone narratively) disengaged, and outside of some of the best gore in his entire filmography, Lo Squartaroe di New York (New York Ripper, 1982) feels like little more than an exercise in self-congratulation.

Sette Note in Nero is a relatively simple giallo, and despite the supernatural elements, there is nothing spooky or scary enough about these elements to dislocate the film from its firm giallo foundations. The film starts as a woman drives through Dover to a cliff, where she commits suicide by flinging herself over the edge. In Florence, her young daughter Virginia has a psychic vision and “sees” the death occur. These opening moments place us firmly in Fulciville – the lingering attention devoted to the collapsing skull of the falling woman allows no room for doubt as to why we are here:

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But despite this viscerally bombastic opening, the film is surprisingly low-key in its depictions of violence and (gasp) sexuality, with explicit displays of opened bodies kept to an uncharacteristic minimum. Cutting to a grown-up Virginia (played by Jennifer O’Neill of Scanners fame and, more recently, her vocal pro-life activism), it is she now who drives, smiling, happy and clearly rich as she takes her husband Francesco (Gianni Garko) to the airport. With a soundtrack gooey enough to make a Japanese bubblegum pop band overdose wretch, Virginia is a picture of wealth: it’s all jodhpurs, furs, pot-o-gloss eyeshadow and fedoras in what appears to be no less than a picture-perfect, trouble free life. As she drives away, the film wastes no time as it launches immediately into its key enigma. Virginia has another psychic vision, and this becomes the riddle that the film aims to solve. It’s a pretty straightforward method, and not that much different structurally from Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) or a multitude of other examples. Step 1: Provide incomprehensible sequence (dream, video, psychic vision). Step 2: Make sense of it. Virginia’s mystery montage consists of a shot of a broken mirror, a shot of a room with a red lamp, flashes of red light on a black screen, a limping man, a cigarette, a dead woman’s bleeding face, a magazine cover, a shot of a black and white reproduction of Vermeer’s The Love Letter, and a first-person shot of a brick wall being constructed. The final component is aural, appearing over a black screen: the jingly, haunting seven notes of the films title.

From here, the narrative trajectory from beginning to end is clear. As each element of the psychic vision is explained, the story moves along, snakes and ladders like, to its next stage. Shaken after he initial vision (and peevish at the dismissive response of her parapsychologist ex-lover, Luca – Marc Porel, who was also in Don’t Torture a Duckling), Virginia visits one of her husbands apparently many mansions to renovate it “as a surprise”. Entering a room, she is struck immediately: it is the same room, with the same red lamp, as her vision. Compelled, she decides to dig into the wall, and discovers a skeleton:

When Francesco is arrested for the murder of this young woman (an ex-lover of his), Virginia’s investigation begins in earnest, despite Francesco’s often-violent dismissal of her psychic abilities. Assisted by Luca and his gorgeous assistant, Bruna (Jenny Tamburi, who was just as memorable in Martino’s 1975 film Suspected Death of a Minor), begin to unravel the past. Led to an art gallery, it is here where the film takes a radical shift in mise en scene as Luca and Virginia are suddenly reduced from key players to flat black silhouettes:

It is only moments before the sight of the Vermeer painting strikes Virginia down. The camera lingers so unnecessarily long on the title plate of the painting that it becomes apparent it is not unnecessary at all: Fulci goes to great lengths to make sure we know what this painting is and who this painting is by. To prove the point, the camera pans up and is intercut between the “original” hanging in the gallery, and Virginia’s memory of it from her vision:

The discovery of the Vermeer leads them to the last of the film’s key players, Emilio Rospini (Gabriele Ferzetti), one of the policemen involved when the Vermeer painting was stolen years earlier (note here the synchronicity between the diegetic world of the film and the extratextual realities of this particular paintings history). As the man with the limp from her vision, Virginia is convinced Rospini is involved with the murder of the girl and Francesco’s arrest, and lies her way into his house past his wife to confront him. As she awaits his arrival, Fulci carefully restages in three separate shots Vermeer’s own “picture within a picture” structure:

The film barrels along at a cracking pace, until Luca realises that Virginia’s visions may not be a flashback to the past at all, but a prediction of the future. Having proven her husband innocent of the girl’s murder, Virginia should theoretically relax, but the opposite tellingly occurs: she becomes even more determined and frantic to discover the truth behind her vision, suggesting that whatever had lay behind her previous motivation to liberate her husband was, by now at least, far from her primary concern. The discovery of the body of an old woman who had left a message on her answering machine regarding the promise of clues to the riddle corroborates again with another element of her initial vision, confirming Luca’s theory that it was in fact a premonition rather than a memory. Hastily grabbing “the clue” in question (an envelope, its hiding place also divulged to Virginia through her vision), she is chased into an old church in one of the most perfectly executed sequences in all giallodom:

With such a satisfyingly taut climactic chase scene, it seems only necessary to conclude with the perfunctory dénouement. Virginia arrives back to the mansion and awaits the return of Francesco. She takes the letter but, not reading it, places it on a sideboard. As Francesco approaches, he walks with a limp. having hurt his ankle, and Virginia realises that was he, not Rospini, from her vision. Seeing the letter, Francesco assumes Virginia has learned the whole story and, for our benefit, Rospini recounts from a hospital bed the truth that Virginia had sought. Francesco, Rospini and the young girl were in cahoots in the theft of the Vermeer painting, and Francesco had murdered the girl to keep the spoils, telling Rospini she had in fact escaped with the valuable art. Realising Virginia is now a dangerous witness, Francesco bops her on the head and places her in the empty wall cavity, and begins to brick it up: in a bitter twist, this is the image that she had seen in her vision.

By the time Luca and the police arrive, Francesco has removed all traces of Virginia who is by this time buried beneath the wall, falling in and out of consciousness. Luca questions the cocky Francesco, but the police become increasingly disinterested until all men decide to leave. It is only here, in its final moments, that Sette Note in Nero shifts from colour-by-numbers giallo to something far more important. A large dresser stands at the wall in front of where Virginia has been buried alive – we do not see her again, and we do not know whether she is alive or dead. Just as Luca is about to leave the room, the alarm to Virginia’s watch – the “seven notes” of the title, the same that featured so notably in the church chase sequence with Rospini, goes off.

The formal construction of these final moments is far more brutal in its ambivalence than it ever could be by showing the dying or dead body of Virginia. Luca approaches the dresser, but despite his position as the rescuer in the scene thus far, this action is instead depicted with so much melodramatic foreboding as to make a German Expressionist blush:

There has previously been little evidence to suggest that Luca is anything less than an ally – a little biased towards Virginia, perhaps, considering their implied romantic past and his consequent dislike of Francesco, but certainly nothing warranting the vicious condemnation of this shot. The camera follows the trajectory of the approaching shadow until the final shot of the film is reached and, in case you dared to miss the savageness of the past moments, ends with this image as the credits begin to roll over the sound of Virginia’s alarm:

Why is this one final image so important? Take another look at Vermeer’s The Love Letter, paying particular note to its composition:

The semantics of this visual match cannot be underappreciated. In effect, Fulci has “cut out” the middle ‘action’ section of the frame. He has removed Virginia, just as the lines of Vermeer’s paintings suggest that centre third of his paintings may be equally detached, as it hovers in a strange feat of perception both behind and above its frame. In this way, the two paintings behind the couple in Vermeer’s work are not the only internal fractures. The painting as a whole functions as a kind of triptych. Not only has Fulci removed this central “panel”, but he has removed all decorative traces from the already less ornate side blocks: there are no curtains, there are no maps. There is just a block of brown, and a block of black. The violence inherent in this reduction – a reduction at the expense not only of Virginia herself, but in many ways the narrative as a whole as it was so intrinsically linked to her perspective – for me commits an act of aesthetic subversion akin to that which can be measured by the difference in approach between Vermeer and the American abstract expressionist, Mark Rothko:

Flip Black on Grey (1969/70) on its side, and we can see precisely the jump that Fulci made at the end of Sette Note in Nero. There are exactly three hundred years between Vermeer’s The Love Letter and Rothko’sBlack on Grey, and Fulci – in some crystalline stroke of manic formal genius – demonstrated the pure force of that leap in 20 seconds of languageless film. Argento came close to completely crashing the framework of representation through his art historical engagement with the Italian renaissance painting in The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), but while doubtlessly his most unrecognized master achievement, it simply does not come close to the eloquence, simplicity and unmitigated power of Fulci’s Sette Note in Nero.

Strangeness on a Train: Hitchcock, Highsmith and Maurizio Lucidi’s ‘La Vittima Designata’ (1971)

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alfred Hitchcock was shrewd when it came to gobbling up filmable book properties. His famed adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Psycho pales in intelligence only next to his interpretations of the work of Daphne Du Maurier in The Birds, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn (although Nicholas Roeg deserves full points for leaping upon arguably her best tale, the short story that spawned his film of the same name, Don’t Look Now).

Legend has it that Hitchcock went to some lengths to hide his identity from the young British writer Patricia Highsmith in the pursuit of the rights to her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. Paying less than $10,000 for it, it was filmed and released by the next year and would go on to become one of Hitchcock’s most enduring (and endearing) titles. Understandably, Highsmith was less than thrilled when she discovered such a cashed-up name was behind the relatively meagre offerings she accepted for the rights to her story, an experience she may (or may not) have learned from when it come to the selling of latter titles to other eager filmmakers.

Highsmith’s novel and Hitchcock’s film are for the most part quite similar. Architect Guy (a tennis player in the film) wishes to ditch his slaggish wife to wed the far more genteel (and upwardly mobile) Anne. On a train journey, he chances upon Charles Anthony Bruno (Bruno Anthony). Bruno’s proposition is simple: Guy will murder Bruno’s father, and in return Bruno will, motive-free and arguably undetectably, kill Guy’s slapper wife. Writing him off uneasily as a kook, Guy’s wife is soon murdered and Bruno demands he repay his part of the bargain, or face the consequences of being turned in to the police.

In the book, Guy does kill Bruno’s father. A further mishap on a boat trip causes Bruno’s sudden death, and riddled with guilt and all-purpose angst, Guy tries to rescue him but fails. Although Bruno is dead, Guy finally confesses to one of his murdered wife’s regular shags. In a dual-punch, the man to whom guy confesses takes the “fair enough, your wife was a bit of a ho who slept around so she deserved it” route. But almost immediately, the detective who overhears the confession is announced to think differently, and Guy is arrested.

In its final act, the Hitchcock version paints a very different picture of both Guy himself and his relationship with Bruno. Here on the surface, Guy commits no real crime outside of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for the most part the film plays out as hurtling the audience towards the inevitable “jig is up” moment when Bruno’s villainous plan is exposed. Guy, stranded between his new life of political power and squeaky-clean domesticity and his background with his far more seedy wife, is forced into war on this moral terrain as a battle of wits ensues between himself and Bruno.
Farley Granger takes on the role of Guy only three years after he appeared as one of the leads in Hitchcock’s most formally and conceptually daring film, Rope. While the characters may not be as overtly gay in Strangers on a Train as they are in this earlier effort, both the casting of the homosexual Granger himself and the less ambiguously queer elements of Highsmith’s novel ramp up the sexual tension between Bruno and Guy in the film.

These two Hitchcock films are arguably Granger’s most immediately recognizable titles to a general cinema-going audience, but his work outside of the American industry provides a fascinating flip side to this career, particularly the films he made in Italy. Most notable of these is Visconti’s Senso (1954), but in the 1970s he also appeared in a handful of spaghetti westerns and, more immediately relevant to this article, some giallo. Granger had the small but significant role of Mr Polvesi, the neglectful father of the first murdered teenage girl in Massimo Dallamano’s seminal 1974 film La Polizia Chiede Aiuto (What have They Done To Your Daughters?), and the lead in the lesser known but substantially more ballsy genre entry, Renzo Russo’s 1971 filmLa Rossa Dalla Pelle Che Scotta (The Red Headed Corpse).

It would perhaps have been too obvious – although not that that ever stopped other giallo filmmakers – to cast Granger in Maurizio Lucidi’s adaptation of the Highsmith novel and the latter Hitchcock film,La Vittima Designata (The Designated Victim, or Murder By Design). Maybe Lucidi knew that his film did not need a big Hollywood name, or alternatively, maybe the casting of Tomas Milian (himself an established star with a slew of his own spaghetti westerns under his holster, most notably Leone’s 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars) was all the star power the film needed.

Despite the obviously differing cultural and production contexts, La Vittima Designata is in many ways even more dedicated to Highsmith’s original tale, despite the change of name and the removal of the train element of the story altogether. In the Lucidi version, protagonist Stefano Argenti just happens to bump into the Bruno figure, Count Matteo Tiepolo, around town. Set in Venice, they meet when there eyes are drawn to the same pendant at a street market (hardly an orthodox shared point of masculine interest), and later happen to share a gondola after a night out with their respective disposable ladyfriends.

What Lucidi’s version adds to the story that is all but absent from the Hitchcock adaptation is a striking sense of romantic tragedy. As the final curtain falls in La Vittima Designata, the surface narrative tensions created by Hitchcock’s cat-and-mouse story are obliterated completely, returning to but then transcending even further beyond the guilt-ridden torment of the murderous Guy of Highsmith’s novel.

Despite the chemistry between Granger and Robert Walker’s Bruno in the Hitchcock adaptation, it is no match for the genuinely suffocating sexual tension between Stefano and Matteo. Tomas Milani’s Stefano is superficially less sympathetic than Granger’s Guy: he is clearly corrupt, intent on using his loathed wife Luisa (Marisa Bartoli) for money to support himself and his new lover, the model Fabienne (Katia Christine), despite the fact that he cheats on both of them by scruffing a German hippy hitchhiker. On further analysis, however, it is impossible to not feel real solidarity with Stefano and his plight. It is no coincidence that Luisa and Fabienne are strikingly similar physically – there is no reason for Lucidi to cast almost identical looking redheads in his two female lead roles apart from the fact that he wants these women to appear indistinct, to fade into the background as one amorphous womanly blur.
The justification for this is simple: despite the absence of explicitly ‘out’ male characters, these female characters do not register in comparison to the explosive chemistry (and narrative dominance) of the relationship between the two men. Hypertheatrical, somewhat camp yet uncompromisingly dedicated to Stefano, the construction of Matteo depends solely upon the performance of Pierre Clémenti (most familiar  to contemporary audiences for his role as Santoni in Gilles MacKinnon’s Kate Winslet vehicle, Hideous Kinky (1998).

While sharing the stalker-like creepiness of Bruno in both the Highsmith and Hitchcock versions in the early stages of the film, in La Vittima Designata this gives way to what develops between the Stefano and Matteo as a something far stronger, albeit sinister (although this time on the part of both parties). In one scene, staying late in his office so as to forge his wife signature with the purpose of stealing her money so he can escape to South America with Red Head v.2, Matteo, wounded, stumbles in seeking Stefano’s assistance. Despite the macabre motives of them both, this simple gesture continues an increasing physicality – both sensual and strangely compassionate – between the two men.

The films’ climax brings this up-until-now implied romantic element to the fore. Like Guy in the novel, Stefano finds no way to escape Matteo’s blackmail scheme and finally submits. He decides to commit the murder of Matteo’s brother as requested. He takes the rifle he was given to the top of a tall building near Matteo’s house and, as planned, shoots through the designated window (hence ‘the designated victim’), the positioning previously established by Matteo to take out his brother sniper-style. The final shot of the film, however, exposes Matteo’s true intent: it is not his brother he wanted Stefano to kill, but Matteo himself. As the corpse of Matteo, destroyed by Stefano’s bullet, sits unmovingly in his chair, unrequited love is granted its ultimate moment of penetrative victory.

The final moment of La Vittima Designata strips away any lingering doubt that this film was about anything but the doomed yet beautiful relationship between Stefano and Matteo. The army of forgettable red-headed women, the wacky German hitchhiker, the mythic brother who supposedly torments Matteo – they are gone. What remains is Matteo: still, peaceful, and joined forever with Stefano through real, feeling, human flesh. The unsatisfying (and ambiguous) heterosexual victory of Strangers on a Train, and the genre-friendly detective-oriented irony of Highsmith’s novel do not begin to share the affect of the conclusion of Lucidi’s film. Instead of examining flawed criminals and the moral predicament of those lured into their world, La Vittima Designata demonstrates with beauty and compassion a heartwrenching romantic tragedy.

Life in the Old Girl Yet: ‘Carrie’ (1976) and the Unbearable Lightness of De Palma Bashing

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Crudely boiled down to the barest of narrative and thematic bones, horror more often than not is predicated upon a world of villains – Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees – and, in turn, the heroes who fight them to restore order. Even when delineations are not that clear cut, it still often exhibits (and may be  defined through) a perverse delight in manipulating and challenging the binaries of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ for its own macabre, sometimes even subversive, purposes. For its critical history alone, it is on these terms that director Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Carrie is of some note. Neatly fitting into this binary system, responses to Carrie can be divided into two schools. The film’s brazen technical excesses and references to Alfred Hitchcock are considered by some critics to be the films greatest virtues, while for others these same elements are Carrie’s downfall and reveal De Palma as naught more than an artless hack. Even more violently opposed are the many critics that have taken part in the most heated debate concerning the film (and “De Palma studies” in general): is he a misogynist? The debate has reached the point of such repetition that over 30 years after its release, the question itself is problematic if only by virtue of its overwhelming dominance of critical treatment of the film. But not all criticism has entered into the invitingly Manichean world that horror frequently encourages. Despite the bulk of material to the contrary, there still appears to be critical life for Carrie outside of the traditional hackneyed debates.

To suggest that De Palma’s technical style – in Carrie at least – is anything less than overt would not only be untrue, it misses De Palma’s painstaking (although perhaps zeitgeist-drunk) formal construction of the film. Critics have employed startlingly polarised language in response to these stylistic issues, Richard Combs embarking upon the clearest mode of attack when he accuses De Palma of “leading his audience on with the gushy lyricism of a shampoo commercial before kicking them in the pants with the knife-wielding hysterics of the crudest Hammer horror” (1977: 4). Serafina Kent Bathrick is equally hostile, employing terms such as “fatuous”, “overstuffed” and “flashy”, describing the prom scene sequence as “the ultimate-moment of self-congratulation”. Eye-of-the-beholder critical evaluations come to the fore, however, when this same sequence is described by David Rosen as “De Palma’s stylistic high point” (38: 1977), and that the film’s excessive style is, as a whole, “lush” (37). Those who defend the films excesses do so by crediting the very significance of that excess: “Carrie…experiences everything with excessive intensity, and the film takes its purply style from her feelings”, says David Pirie (22: 1977), while for Kenneth MacKinnon, the issues are one of authorship; “De Palma’s announcement of his hand in the organisation and execution of the film may be resented by the spectator wishing to stay lodged in the security normally available to the viewer of dominant cinema” (132: 1990).

Then there’s the old “Hitchcock Knock-off” chestnut. Pirie describes Carrie’s shower scene as “an odd and fruitful progression from De Palma’s acknowledged mentor” (22), while Rosen notes a shared thematic concern between the two directors, suggesting De Palma “quite effectively exploits [shared themes]…satirizing them with a menacing Hitchcockian touch” (37). Robin Wood and Keith Ulhich dismiss accusations of plagiarism as ultimately irrelevant, Wood suggesting a high-brow hypocrisy active within this claims core: “When De Palma works his variations of Psycho (1960), this is imitation or plagiarism, whereas when Bob Fosse or Woody Allen imitates Fellini or Bergman this is somehow, mysteriously, evidence of his originality” (125: 2003). Ulhich is more diplomatic; “I like to view [it]…as a conversation between two filmmakers – one who has been absorbed into history and memory, and another who uses certain of the elder filmmaker’s techniques and themes as a prism through which he filters his own sensibilities”. On the flip side, we find Bathrick’s attack encased in a continuing tone of dismissive indirectness; “Carrie is a senior at Bates (ugh) High” (Bathrick), the style of Carrie’s house is “another clunky comment on Norman Bates’…more massive mausoleum”. Shelley Stamp Lindsay gives her concerns about the connection between the two directors a somewhat more serious tone, suggesting that De Palma’s attempts to mimic Hitchcock fundamentally fail on an ideological level. Again referencing Carrie’s shower scene; “Violence and sexuality are further confused in this sequence through overt parallels to Psycho’s shower scene … whereas the violence in Psycho is split between victim and attacker, between Marion and Norman Bates, here no such division exists” (282: 1996).

It is these ideological concerns that dominate discussion about Carrie. Bathrick’s attack on the film is not alone in its fundamental claims that De Palma “has developed his own brand of sexism”. She claims, “there is an urgency in his desire to prove the impossibility of community amongst women”, and that ultimately, “like all the women in the film…[Carrie] is punished for being a woman”. Lindsay shares a similarly negative view of the film in terms of its gender politics; “In charting Carrie’s path to mature womanhood, the film presents female sexuality as monstrous and constructs femininity as a subject position impossible to occupy” (281). Barbara Creed focused on this notion in The Monstrous-Feminine, approaching Carrie as, you guessed it, an example of the monstrous-feminine; “a particularly interesting representation of woman as witch and menstrual monster” (77: 1993) (with no Ginger Snaps around to take the now gratingly orthodox critical “flogging a menstrual horror horse”, many critics of this era had to make do with Carrie to fit the bill). Michelle Citron’s comparison of Carrie to The Marathon Man (1976) is also based on the connection between Carrie’s introduction to biological womanhood with her supernatural abilities; “To be a man is to become moral and courageous, to rise up victorious out of the evil of the world. To be a woman is to become that evil: uncontrolled and destructive” (1977). Michael Bliss shares this belief that Carrie’s telekinesis that “first manifests itself along with ‘the curse’ suggests that the power itself is a curse, a view supported by the film’s subsequent events” (53: 1983). For these two events – the onset of her first period and the awakening of her supernatural powers – to be fundamentally linked to De Palma’s misogyny is, again, dependent upon the critics subjective intent. De Palma himself defends the depiction of Carries’ “out of control” body simply: “I wanted to use it as an extension of her emotions”.

Misogyny arguments are primarily based on the assumption that because it is Carrie’s supernatural abilities that ultimately are a destructive force, it is this relationship between the onset of menstruation and those telekinetic powers that indicate that her womanhood is also a destructive force. But as Bruce Babington radically points out, the film never indicates that her telekinesis – and by association, her womanhood (gained through menstruation) – is a negative force as such in its own right. In fact, this is where the power of the film lies: our fundamental positioning as spectators with Carrie. The simplistic reading of her classmates violent attack in the opening shower scene where “period=abject/bad/ evil” are challenged by Babbington. The attack, he claims, stems from a larger social awkwardness at their own femaleness “their own self-hatred, of their own unconscious, culturally-developed fear of the female in themselves” (11). Their attack on Carrie is an attack on their own discomfort with their own response to their socially taboo menstruation. But to suggest that by virtue of exposing the other girls’ socially-conditioned and aggressive discomfort with their own menstruation, De Palma is himself responsible for creating the patriarchal attitudes that are responsible for such a phenomenon seems quite a leap, but one that is made by many of his detractors. This is the similar kind of rhetoric that surrounds much writing on rape-revenge film: does even the depiction of rape as a violent itself count as a symbolic act of violence , or is there a way that, by showing the horror of rape, some kind of message or lesson can be imparted? Does this act of “showing” in effect neutralise intent?

A further complication in the misogyny debate is from Carol J. Clover, who uses the film as an example of her notion of cross-gender identification in the horror genre. “With its prom queens, menstrual periods, tampons, worries about clothes and makeup, Carrie would seem on the face of it the most feminine of stories” (3: 1993). But, she argues, this is clearly not the case: ‘If Carrie, whose story begins and ends with menstrual imagery and seems in general so painfully girlish… and if her target audience is any high school boy who has been pantsed or had his glasses messed with, then we are truly in a universe in which the sex of a character is no object” (20).

What is unendingly fascinating is the very insistence of so many critics to take such extreme, polarised positions within the misogyny and style debates themselves. This raises significant questions about the critical landscape upon which De Palma criticism takes place. It could be argued that critics have followed habit when attempting to read Carrie on the plane of polarised heroes and villains that the horror genre so frequently evokes, but in the process ironically reducing critical debates on Carrie to one that mirrors the very same divisions: De Palma is a villain/ De Palma is a hero. What is more curious is the often-blatant disregard for evidence provided by the film itself to support or deny these claims. As Babbington points out, “in order to sustain the views that Carrie is misogynistic and incoherent, it is necessary to cut off discussion that might be embarrassing” (16). Babbington offers the example of the minor but significant character Frieda – her position is vital, but he is the only critic I have found who even mentions her. And for Bliss to comment on what he describes as “the polarized world of Carrie, in which a Manichean struggle continually exists between good and evil” (15), he relies upon a deeply concerning dismissal of the many debates concerning the moral classification of characters such as Sue and Miss Collins.

There are alternate ways of reading Carrie: these either/or readings are not the only positions possible. William Paul’s examination of the film in his brilliant book Laughing, Screaming takes the dominant binaries of the horror film into account in his reading to dramatically enlightening effect, taking the daring step towards a moral reading of the film and stepping away from the done-and-re-done debates of mysoginy and Hitchcockism. He’s worth quoting at length:

Horror films generally operate in a Manichean universe to the extent that the monstrous and the human inscribe a world of polar opposites. Carrie seems to take over the Manichaeism of the horror film, but it ultimately challenges it as well… Carrie offers a radical shift by invoking this familiar opposition in order to collapse it. The human and the monstrous are not polar states in this film precisely because the human is the monstrous (366) … Carrie earns a sympathy that seems to confuse our willingness to designate her as monstrous. Yet since the film does finally insist on her monstrousness, it invokes a scheme of opposing monsters only to collapse it as much as it collapses its other oppositions. (367: 1994)

Paul’s book – amongst other things – is the closest to attempt what Vivian Sobchack invites in a footnote to her seminal essay, “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange” (1987), noting that critical attention needs to be given to connections between horror films like Carrie and “the contemporary teen revenge comedy” such as Revenge Of The Nerds (1984). Sobchack’s article also refuses to participate in the traditionally dominant either/or debates around Carrie, locating the film as a significant example in her analysis of the “problem child” figure in horror and other genres. And curiously, despite being referenced by both Creed and Lindsay in their positions on Carrie as fundamentally misogynistic, Sobchack has little interest in gender in regards to De Palma’s work, and instead weighs Carrie up against the far more problematic male protagonist in De Palma’s following film The Fury (1978).

Other interesting readings of Carrie do exist even if they hold less immediate appeal than the ready-made positions provided by traditional De Palma debates concerning style (Hitchcock!) and gender (pig!). Pauline Kael reads the film as “a satiric homage to exploitation film” (211: 1981), while MacKinnon views it as “a satire on fundamentalism” (136). Rosen agrees (39) also widening his critical scope to include in its thematic concerns “some very real and recognisable horrors of contemporary American life, chiefly and centrally the trauma of female adolescence when subjected to the… terrors of the anxiously conformist ambience of high school” (37). Dmetri Kakmi’s analysis of the film is noteworthy if only for its refreshing absence of any reference to Hitchcock at all, replacing it instead with comparisons to everything from William Blake to Jean-August Dominique Ingres to Hieronymus Bosch. While these arguments may be debated in their own right, their very value stems from their refusal to enter into the more pedestrian misogyny/Hitchcock debates. And there are still areas as yet untouched – while virtually all critics comment in one way or another is to the sympathetic character of Carrie, not enough attention has been given to the powerful and specific role of pathos in the film.

Few other directors so immediately polarise opinion like Brian De Palma, and a history of the critical treatment of Carrie suggests that this film is no exception. But regardless of your take on the film – even if just on an initial subjective, gut level – it seems only fitting that this film, so intent on collapsing the binary framework of heroes/villains and good/evil, has even critics themselves caught up in the inviting honeytrap of the Manichean in horror.