All Slights Deserved

About eight years ago I picked up a copy of a film called ‘MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY AND GIRLY’ (1970), a curious horror comedy about a dysfunctional family with a penchant for macabre games. Although she didn’t receive top billing it was the pretty, vivacious young actress playing the eponymous Girly who really made the piece. Her name was Vanessa Howard and she had the aura of a star. Howard was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, on 10th October 1948. Originally named Vanessa Tolhurst she was orphaned by the age of three and she and her older sister were raised by adoptive parents . Both girls were keen performers and for a time Vanessa attended the Phildene Stage School in London. According to later press sources this led her screen debut in Judy Garland's last picture, I COULD GO ON SINGING (1963), although I've never been able to conclusively identify her in the released version. Leaving school at fifteen she declined the opportunity to join her sister at the Guildhall ...

Commercial shipping is for most people an unknown behemoth, out of sight and out of mind, despite its intrinsic role in global trade. It’s due in no small part to the maritime industry’s exceptionally high safety standards; as with aviation major incidents are relatively few and far between.  For another industry, one geared towards more vicarious pleasures, such benign subject matter usually doesn’t hold much appeal.   That was until 2009 when an American ship, the Maersk Alabama , was hijacked off the coast of Somalia, bringing the issue of modern-day piracy into public consciousness. The story of that incident is due to be recounted in Paul Greengrass’s forthcoming Captain Phillips later this year, with Tom Hanks in the eponymous role.  Before that there's Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking , a modest yet thoughtful Danish production  which largely eschews action for a claustrophobic psychological drama. If you’re drawn into imagining scenes of trapped, ...

Had it been made later in his career one surmises that Fellini's The White Sheik might have more closely resembled the picture it partially inspired: Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo (1984). Both films share a common theme of an unassuming woman being fleetingly transported into a fantasy world of romance and adventure before an inevitable withdrawal back to reality. As it is this is a fairly restrained directorial debut from the Maestro, albeit with plenty of hints of what was to come. The story centres around newlywed couple Wanda (Brunella Bovo) and Ivan Cavalli ( Leopoldo Trieste ), who have arrived at a hotel in Rome for their honeymoon. Whilst the punctilious, petit-bourgois Ivan enthuses about their packed itinerary and meeting with his relatives, Wanda is more concerned with the opportunity to meet try and the star of her favourite Arabian Nights -inspired fumetti* - the eponymous 'White Sheik' - and promptly absconds in pursuit of her idol. No sooner...

Most people with a passing awareness of film history will have at least heard of Frank Capra, but perhaps not all will appreciate just what an exalted status the director had in 1930's Hollywood. Before the likes of Welles, Hitchcock or Sturges had truly emerged, and long before film writers began scrutinising the output of Howard Hawks and John Ford, Capra enjoyed a standing unseen since the heyday of DW Griffith. This was due in no small part to the enormous success of his seminal screwball comedy It Happened One Night , the top grossing film of 1934 and the first to ever pick up all five major Oscars. It swelled Capra's pockets and his ego, allowing him unprecedented leverage with his studio Columbia (hereafter his name would appear above the title), but with the expectation he could deliver more of the same. For their follow-up Capra and his regular collaborator Robert Riskin eventually settled on a serialised story called Opera Hat, by the prolific author  C...

The other day I received a message from a young friend. She's an inquisitive girl a penchant for controversial material; be it Charles Manson's curtailed music career, accounts of the  Brooklyn Vampire  or the writings of Satanic supercrank Anton Lavey. Anyway, she sent me a link to the short film I've embedded above and wanted my impressions. Being an egotist who hides behind a facade of false modesty I was of course happy to oblige. I'll confess that beforehand I'd never heard of Rémy Couture, the French Canadian filmmaker and special effects artist who was arrested in 2009 on charges of obscenity relating to a series of extreme horror shorts he'd made a few years before and made available on his website innerdepravity.com. His trial has already been adjourned a number of times but is currently scheduled to start in December 2012. Couture's oeuvre, so to speak, explores the transgression of taboos. He's steeped in horror...

Well, it finally happened: I got to see a Johannes Roberts film at my local cinema. If somebody had told me this when I sat shaking my head in dismay at the singular incompetence of Sanitarium I wouldn't have credited it. Hopefully it's not the end of the journey but he appears to have arrived somewhere. Storage 24 is a nuts and bolts sci-fi exploitation movie. The premise is a simple one: a US cargo plane has crashed somewhere in London, possibly shot down, for reasons unknown. Part of the wreckage has landed in the grounds of the titular secure storage warehouse, including a mysterious container which has broken open, releasing a nasty monster which seeks refuge in the building. It also causes a power failure, meaning that those who happen to venture inside - including Noel Clarke, the girlfriend he's just acrimoniously split from and attendant friends - find themselves trapped in there with the beast. We've seen it all many times before of course, from T...

Sometimes you want to go right back to the beginning; before it became complicated, before all the doubts, disappointments and cynicism. When every day felt new and different yet comfortingly the same. Although I was born in London my earliest memories are of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. I can just about recall standing with my mum beside my sister's cot when I was two years old, nearly three. Gradually the impressions grow more substantial; Christmases and birthdays, my first day at school (what a miserable old git that headmaster was), climbing to the top of the apple tree in our back garden, finishing third in a race on sports day because, while in the lead, I'd stopped to watch my fellow competitors! It feels so vivid and real compared to later years and perhaps a part of me died when we moved away the summer before I turned eight. I know I'd never feel quite so sure of myself again.  Maybe that's why I've felt the urge to revisit it a couple of times in...