Not Showing at This Cinema

greenlit just before he died, was an adaptation of A PIN TO SEE THE NIGHT Walter Hamilton’s 1968 novel All the Little Animals, exploring the friendship between a boy and an THE PEEPSHOW CREATURES old man who patrols roads at night collecting the Dir: Robert Hamer 1949 Dir: Val Guest 1957 roadkill. Reeves prepared a treatment, locations Adaptation of a 1934 novel by F. Tennyson Jesse Robert Neville is the last man on earth after a were scouted and Arthur Lowe was to play the about a young woman wrongly convicted as an mysterious plague has turned the rest of the lead. Thirty years later the book was adapted for accomplice when her lover murders her husband; a population into vampires who swarm around his the screen and directed by Jeremy Thomas starring thinly fictionalised account of Edith Thompson and house every night, hungering for his blood. By day, John Hurt and Christian Bale. the Ilford Murder case of 1922. With Margaret he hunts out the vampires’ lairs and kills them Lockwood in the lead, this was something of a with stakes through the heart, while obsessively dream project that Robert Hamer tried to get off searching for an antidote and trying to work out the ground at Ealing. Despite a dazzling CV that the cause of his immunity. Richard Matheson wrote ISHTAR includes the masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets the screenplay for The Night Creatures for Hammer Dir: Donald Cammell 1971-73 (1949), Hamer was unable to persuade studio Films in 1957 based on his own hugely influential The co-director of Performance (1970), Cammell boss Michael Balcon to back the project. Hamer novel I am Legend. The film was to be directed only completed three further features before once said that his goal was to “make films about by the versatile and prolific British director Val committing suicide in 1996. His planned people in dark rooms doing beastly things to one Guest, who was well-versed in British Sci-Fi having follow-up to Performance was also due to another”, which was clearly at odds with the pre- just made The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) for feature Mick Jagger and was described vailing trends of the British film industry of the Hammer. However after submitting Matheson’s variously as a parody, a suspense thriller and 1940s and 1950s; it also placed him at odds with script to the BBFC, the censors made it clear that a movie within a movie. In the complicated Balcon whose goal was to make films “projecting a film of the screenplay would be rejected. The premise, the central character Nonus Britain and the British character”. Ealing’s rejection of MPAA in America also expressed concerns about Smith (Malcolm McDowell) is shooting a the project seems to have contributed to Hamer’s some of the gruesome material, which included reconstruction of the kidnapping of a decline into alcoholism and eventual death in 1963. an uncomfortable scene in which Neville conducts Supreme Court judge by a revolutionary Critic David Thomson has called this “the most tortuous experiments on a female vampire. Overall, (Jagger). Norman Mailer was rumoured serious miscarriage of talent” of the postwar years. the apocalyptic nature of the work was considered to be involved and the action was to take too violent for the time. Hammer, keen to keep place largely in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. NOT SHOWING the BBFC onside for future films, abandoned the Cammell wanted “lots of soldiers and THE MAYOR OF project, using the title for another film. helicopters speeding down the valley of Hades at night with huge lights”. Possible CASTERBRIDGE financiers were concerned about the Dir: Thorold Dickinson 1951 NO BAIL escalating budget, with the script’s heavy This Hardy adaptation was planned to coincide mythological elements also proving a turn-off. AT THIS CINEMA with the 1951 Festival of Britain, but various FOR THE JUDGE impediments stood in its way. For one thing, the Dir: Alfred Hitchcock 1958-1961 dark tragedy of the story didn’t suit the celebratory FAN TAN mood of the festival. More broadly, the Associated This adaptation of the thriller novel by former Dir: Donald Cammell 1978 British Corporation worried about the film’s viability judge Henry Cecil would have marked Another Cammell-helmed project, this was a in America, deeming it too highbrow and too Hitchcock’s return to London, but it was 1920s pirate adventure set on the South China expensive. For Gaslight’s Thorold Dickinson, this was not to be. Hitch was keen to cast Audrey seas. The plot concerned an overweight Looking beyond the British film industry’s cycle of symptomatic of wider problems in the industry: “It is Hepburn as the barrister who is assisted adventurer who is seduced by a beautiful the incomprehension of these men, who hold us all by a gentleman thief in defending her father female pirate into stealing silver from a enmeshed in their bank balances, which inhibits and when he is accused of murdering a prostitute. British ship. Marlon Brando paid Cammell boom and bust, it is possible to imagine an alternative imprisons the artists and strangles ideas at birth”. The screenplay included a scene, not in the to write the screenplay for him, which the original novel, where the heroine disguises studio loved. However, Brando changed herself as a prostitute and has to fend off his mind and insisted the story be first history, an unrealised catalogue of British cinema a rapist in Hyde Park. A newly-pregnant published as an epic novel which could Hepburn apparently left the film partly become a bestseller and allow them to because of this scene. Without his “cool produce the film independently. The pair spent that is only viewable in the mind’s eye. brunette”, Hitchcock lost interest in the project eight months rewriting the material as and told Paramount Pictures it was better to a novel only for Brando, bored and write off the $200,000 already spent, than to depressed, to pull out completely. The novel waste another $3 million on a film he had no was eventually published posthumously in intention of finishing. 2005. Fan Tan was one of many planned NOT We invite you to peruse this speculative programme prematurely announced “soon to be a major film” collaborations between Brando and Cammell. for Not Showing At This Cinema, a festival of and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong still awaits a cinema THE ADVENTURES The director spent the best part of two “never-mades”, films that were left incomplete, adaptation. decades trying to capture “that performance OF HARRY DICKSON from Brando to see him bare his soul for once”. rejected, not-yet-made or never-will-be. They have Dir: Alain Resnais 1952-1966 As a twelve-year-old, Resnais became fascinated fallen prey to the vagaries of time, money, ego, and Not Showing At This Cinema focuses on post-1945, by a series of books by Flemish surrealist Jean Ray fate or were left to rot in development hell. They might so there is no room for one of the most famous of featuring “Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes”. In a kind of parallel universe, Dickson also have been a director’s dream project, a lost master- all unfinished British films, I, Claudius, Josef von lived in Baker Street, but his adversaries included piece, or a folly, but all share the enigmatic quality of Sternberg’s 1936 production starring Charles a hypnotising octopus, zombies, a flame-throwing automaton and a vampiric Buddha. Resnais was being frozen in a state of suspended imagination. Laughton, which was abandoned after two reels of determined to shoot in a fog-bound, dark and film were shot. Inevitably, the definition of “British” is rainy London, as he felt it had the vital surreal KALEIDOSCOPE screen presence, planning to shoot in 70mm colour Dir: Alfred Hitchcock 1964-67 British cinema has produced an intriguing collection always subject to debate, but we follow the current that would gradually evolve into monochrome. Set to be Hitchcock’s darkest film, the story of these phantom films, with many high-profile cultural test applied for tax relief in which points are Surrealist André Delvaux was to design the sets concerns a young bodybuilder in New York and Stockhausen to write the score. For Harry who is a serial killer and rapist, luring young examples, including Harold Pinter’s Proust screenplay awarded for a range of factors including British cast Dickson, Resnais considered Basil Rathbone (who women to their deaths. In a bold move, for Joseph Losey, David Lean’s Nostromo and Joe and crew, locations, and subject matter. first played Sherlock Holmes on film in 1939) but the film was to be shown entirely from the his first choice was Laurence Olivier. However, the perspective of the killer. Hitchcock planned Orton’s Beatles project Up Against It. Michael Powell’s formation of the National Theatre in 1963 coincided to experiment with hand-held filming and lost films range from The Tempest to a musical about Of course no claims can be made for their quality; with a planned start date, and Olivier couldn’t the use of natural light. A glimpse of this commit to 17 weeks filming. To cut the escalating proposed new vérité style exists on an hour- the life of Richard Strauss, Derek Jarman’s from this is not a top 50 best never-made British films but production costs, the 3 and a half hour script was long tape of experimental colour rushes. Akhenaten to The Space Gospel, Alfred Hitchcock’s rather a tantalising glimpse of an alternative history.

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