Hammer Films' Psychological Thrillers, 1950–1972
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Hammer Films’ Psychological Thrillers, 1950–1972 ALSO BY DAVID HUCKVALE The Occult Arts of Music: An Esoteric Survey from Pythagoras to Pop Culture (2013) Ancient Egypt in the Popular Imagination: Building a Fantasy in Film, Literature, Music and Art (2012) Visconti and the German Dream: Romanticism, Wagner and the Nazi Catastrophe in Film (2012) Touchstones of Gothic Horror: A Film Genealogy of Eleven Motifs and Images (2010) Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-Garde (2008) James Bernard, Composer to Count Dracula: A Critical Biography (2006; paperback 2012) Hammer Films’ Psychological Thrillers, 1950–1972 DAVID HUCKVALE McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Huckvale, David. Hammer films’ psychological thrillers, 1950–1972 / David Huckvale. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-7471-4 (softcover : acid free paper) ♾ ISBN 978-1-4766-0421-3 (ebook) 1. Thrillers (Motion pictures)—Great Britain—History— 20th century. 2. Motion pictures—Psychological aspects. 3. Hammer Film Productions. I. Title. PN1995.9.S87H73 2014 791.430941—dc23 2013047471 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE © 2014 David Huckvale. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Poster art for the 1961 Hammer film Scream of Fear (aka Taste of Fear) depicting actress Susan Strasberg (Columbia Pictures/Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com To Lionel Cummings This page intentionally left blank Table of Contents Introduction . 1 1 The Uncanny in Les Diaboliques (dir. Henri- Georges Clouzot, 1955) . 11 2 Echoes and Inspirations in Four Hitchcock Classics . 22 3 Houses in The Man in Black (dir. Francis Searle, 1950) . 41 4 Misogyny in Stolen Face (dir. Terence Fisher, 1952) . 48 5 Narcissism in The Snorkel (dir. Guy Green, 1958) . 55 6 Psychiatry in The Full Treatment (dir. Val Guest, 1961) . 67 7 The Gothic in Taste of Fear (dir. Seth Holt, 1961) . 73 8 Love and Landscape in Maniac (dir. Michael Carreras, 1963) . 87 9 Sex and the Dead in Paranoiac (dir. Freddie Francis, 1963) . 96 10 Loss and Deception in The Kiss of the Vampire (dir. Don Sharp, 1964) . 106 11 Dreams and Visions in Nightmare (dir. Freddie Francis, 1964) . 113 12 The Oedipus Complex in Fanatic (dir. Silvio Narizzano, 1965) . 122 13 Architecture in Hysteria (dir. Freddie Francis, 1965) . 128 vii Table of Contents 14 Domesticity and The Nanny (dir. Seth Holt, 1965) . 137 15 Homophobia in The Witches (dir. Cyril Frankel, 1966) . 147 16 Doppelgängers in Crescendo (dir. Alan Gibson, 1970) . 152 17 The Past in Fear in the Night (dir. Jimmy Sangster, 1972) . 160 18 Insanity, Incest and Christianity in Demons of the Mind (dir. Peter Sykes, 1972) . 167 19 Peter Pan in Straight on Till Morning (dir. Peter Collinson, 1972) . 175 Notes . 183 Bibliography . 188 Index . 191 viii Introduction The Psychological Gothic Hammer film productions are rightly famous for Gothic horror but, sandwiched between the company’s various vampires, menacing monsters and striking studies in the occult, it also produced a series of psychological thrillers, which Hammer’s managing director, Sir James Carreras, dubbed “mini–Hitchcocks.” This was an unfortunate sobri- quet, for though these films certainly reflect, if only in part, the example of Hollywood’s quintessential but nonetheless very British Master of Suspense, such a categorization suggests that they are mere imitations when, in fact, there is much more individuality and invention to them than that. However, without Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), Hammer’s Taste of Fear (dir. Seth Holt, 1960), Paranoiac (dir. Fred die Francis, 1963) and Maniac (dir. Michael Carreras, 1963), to name but three of the titles in this category, might never have existed. This was not so much because they were indebted to Hitchcock’s overall style and subject matter, as because Hitchcock’s Psy- cho was such a phenomenal success when it was first released in 1960. Made for only $800,000, it eventually earned over $40 million. Hammer, so often the purveyor of cin- ematic vampires, was a vampire itself, and it quite happily fed on the trends of the time. Sir James famously quipped he would make Strauss waltzes if the public wanted them,1 but it was Hitchcock, not Strauss, who provided the demand for suspense, and Hammer, ever on the lookout for what would appeal to the public, followed suit. But Sir James’ “mini–Hitchcocks” are just as much “mini–Clouzots,” rooted, as they are, in Henri- Georges Clouzot’s celebrated psychological thriller Les Diaboliques from 1955, which screenwriter Jimmy Sangster readily acknowledged as his inspiration for so many of the “mini–Hitchcock” screenplays he wrote for Hammer.2 Such admissions should not overlook the fact that Hammer provided its own ancestor to such films back in the company’s early days with Francis Searle’s 1950 film based on the BBC’s hit radio series The Man in Black. Hammer’s terror thrillers are very different from the company’s more lurid Gothic shockers, and they are not always immediately recognizable as what most fans would now - adays regard as typical Hammer product. They have Gothic elements, to be sure, but they 1 Introduction are predominantly set in the time they were made. They are also quite different in style (even though some of the directors who worked on them also directed Hammer’s Gothic fare), and their subject matter is not lurid horror or the supernatural (though horrific things might be done, and the supernatural might be implied before being dispelled). Just as Donald Spoto can claim that Psycho is more than a horror film, being an exploration of the past over the present, “an indictment of the viewer’s capacity for voyeurism and his own potential for depravity” (surely something that applies to most horror films, in fact), as well as a “statement of the American dream turned nightmare,”3 so Hammer’s psychological thrillers can also be interpreted as more than catchpenny essays in suspense. They encompass many of the issues of the 1960s, such as greater affluence, material aspiration and social mobility, the family, domesticity, and what it meant to be British at that time, alongside more timeless psychological issues. As the titles of the films so blatantly proclaim, they are about paranoia, hysteria, fanaticism, fear, and the way in which such terrors often come to a crescendo in our nightmares. They address schizophrenia, duality, sadism, narcissism, isolation, insecurity, claustro- phobia and agoraphobia and, like Psycho, the power of the past upon the present. Robert Murphy has analyzed British fantastic- supernatural films of the 1960s accord- ing to Tzvetan Todorov’s distinction between three distinct but related categories: the uncanny, the marvelous and the fantastic: In the uncanny, “events are related which may be readily accounted for by the laws of rea- son, but which are, in one way or another, incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or unexpected.… It is uniquely linked to the sentiments of the characters and not to a material event defying reason.” In the marvelous, events which we would think of as impossible (a man being made from dismembered corpses, a creature that sucks human blood and can only die by having a wooden stake driven into its heart) are accepted as part of the normal order of things. Thus [director Terrence] Fisher’s films, where zom- bies, vampires and werewolves exist and only unenlightened fools question that brains and even souls can be transferred from body to body, can be classed as marvelous, and the Sangster- scripted thrillers like Taste of Fear and Nightmare as uncanny. Todorov’s third category, the fantastic, poised uneasily between the marvelous and the uncanny, precisely describes Jacques Tourneur’s 1940s films Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. Here it is impossible to determine whether the bizarre events which occur are figments of a fevered imagination of manifestations of the supernatural.4 This tripartite categorization is useful as a means of distinguishing the various subgenres within British fantasy films of the 1960s, but I will also be referring to Freud’s more spe - cific use of the term “uncanny” with regard to the kind of films Murphy calls “uncanny” along Todorov’s lines. Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts If murder, as Thomas De Quincey once suggested, is one of the fine arts, conscience is surely its fiercest critic. As Hamlet knew all too well, conscience makes cowards us of 2 Introduction all, and society is out to catch it. In a more popular arena, though still one based on Shakespeare (the film is loosely based on The Tempest), Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1956) has Commander J.J. Adams (played by Leslie Nielsen) point out to Walter Pidgeon’s Dr. Morbius that we are all potential monsters. “That’s why we have laws and religion,” Nielsen says. It is also why we are allowed to indulge our fantasies through art—to let out Mr. Hyde in a safe place and know that we can lock him back again in our subconscious as soon as the fantasy is over. The safest and yet most visceral place to do this is in the cinema, where cocooned in anonymous, erotic darkness, and surrounded by light and sound, we have nothing to fear but what we discover about ourselves. As all the films we are about to discuss are in one way or another about murder, we need first to work out why such a heinous crime has proved to be such a perennial money spinner—for there is no doubt that human beings are fasci- nated by murder while simul- taneously preserving a cen - sorious attitude towards it.