Moviedrome

Clint Eastwood made three films with the Italian director Sergio Leone, and five with the American Don Siegel. He parted company with Leone in 1966 and with Siegel in the seventies, and since then has been pretty much his own director; though he leaves the actual director’s seat to someone else, he hangs on to the reins, so to speak, producing all the films in which he appears. Certain movies for certain reasons he directs himself: most of these show substantial debts to Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. Leone and Siegel were top-of-the-line action directors in their respective countries. Leone collaborated with Robert Aldrich on Sodom and Gomorrah and directed Eastwood in three millenial spaghetti westerns. Siegel, who had begun life as an editor, graduated to top-flight B-movies such as Riot in Cell Block 11 and The Killers.

Vamp is the perfect Moviedrome film. I don’t mean the perfect film artistically - Vamp is not a perfect film by any means. But it is the perfect Moviedrome film: a rarely seen cult exploitation movie with irrelevant actors, average direction, a daft script borrowing from other, equally daft movies, and guest appearances by such cult luminaries as Grace Jones and feminist body builder Lisa Lyon, plus original furniture by Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.

George Romero is, of course, the director of The Night of the Living Dead and its numerous sequels. This was his first non-horror film. Knightriders centres around a peculiarly horrible American phenomenon, that of the ‘renaissance fayre’. This is an opportunity for American anglophiles, of whom there are unfortunately many, to dress up in quasi-Elizabethan costumes, eat hamburgers, watch jousting, buy leather belts and engage in other supposedly medieval pursuits. In this case the jousting tournament takes place on Japanese motorcycles. Why not? Americans, coming from a very young country, seem extremely anxious to establish their place in history. Hence their interminable rambling about geneology, and their tendency to purchase spurious family trees and to build Tudor-style mansions in the Arizona desert and in Beverly Hills.

Jonathan Demme is an American director from the Corman School, a sort of work-study film programme run in Los Angeles by the benevolent entrepreneur and former film director Roger Corman. (Actually he’s not a former film director any more, having recently directed Frankenstein Unbound.) Other graduates of the Corman School were Joe Dante, Jack Nicholson, Francis Coppola and Monte Hellman. The Corman School produced very low-budget action and horror films. Demme directed several women-in-prison movies and Crazy Mamma before graduating from Corman’s august academy, and heading out to seek his fortune in what is sometimes called the Real World.

Carnival of Souls is about a cynical church organist who… I can’t tell you any more about the story. You have to see it for yourself. It’s really strange. It was directed by Herk Harvey in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1962, featuring himself and a number of his neighbours and friends. (Mr H. plays the head zombie.) The only professional performer is Candace Hilligoss, who plays the organist. It was Mr Harvey’s only venture into the exciting career of film director, unfortunately. Not only did he direct the film and act in it, he also paid for it. I think he ran a Chevy dealership. All the cars in the film appear to be Chevies, anyway. Lawrence, Kansas, is also the home of William Burroughs, author and adventurer.

Badlands is that near-impossible thing: a great American movie that was both an artistic triumph and a box-office success. It was the first starring feature role for Martin Sheen, an actor who up until then had been popular in TV movies but had little success in feature films.

Joseph Losey was born in 1909. He abandoned medical studies to work in the theatre, becoming a stage manager at Radio City Music Hall and later a director. In 1935 he attended film classes given by Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, and after serving his country in the Second World War he became friends with Bertolt Brecht and directed a famous stage production of Brecht’s Galileo, starring Charles Laughton.

Performance was made in Britain in 1968, immediately shelved by the studio that paid for it, then re-edited by seven different editors and released in 1970. It was co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg. Cammell also wrote the script; Roeg photographed it. Some say this film is the product of Roeg’s genius, others that it’s all down to Donald Cammell - as if it was some sort of contest rather than a collaboration. For the record, Donald Cammell has also directed the computer slasher movie Demon Seed and the cult slasher White of the Eye. Roeg has made too many great films to mention.

At Close Range is based on a true story, that of the Johnson Gang, who in the late seventies made a healthy business out of stealing tractors in Pennsylvania. It stars Sean and Christopher Penn, features an appearance by Kiefer Sutherland, and has a script written by Nicholas Kazan, who wrote the excellent courtroom drama Reversal of Fortune - all sons of the great and good in Hollywood, though this is of course pure coincidence. The younger Kazan actually steps in father’s footsteps here, by having his hero inform on his villainous dad to the Grand Jury. Nicholas’s father Elia, having busted several of his friends for being Communists, went on to make the popular On the Waterfront, whose proletarian hero undergoes a severe moral crisis before informing on a villainous racketeer.

The Duellists is the story of two French Hussars who engage in a series of affairs of honour at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was produced by David Puttnam, the man the Reader’s Digest called the father of British cinema, so naturally it stars two Americans, Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel, in the principal roles. It’s great to look at, as you might expect, because Scott - here directing his first feature film - was one of the so-called ‘Renaissance’ directors, a group of British TV commercial chaps who moved to Hollywood in the late seventies to make feature films. Other members of this august clan include Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and Ridley Scott’s equally talented brother, Tony.

Cape Fear is a film of some notoriety. When it came to Britain in 1962 the censor was aghast. He demanded six minutes of cuts before granting the film an ‘X’ certificate. The problem wasn’t with anything that happened on the screen so much as with the character played by Robert Mitchum, Max Cady. Cady is a sex offender who turns up in a small Florida town and proceeds to terrorize the local barrister (played by Gergory Peck), his wife (Polly Bergen), and their twelve-year-old daughter, who wears a push-up bra.

Ken Russell is, according to the conventional wisdom, the Baddest Boy of British Cinema. It is fashionable, among the critical and productorial élite, to deride Our Ken and treat him as a finished old madman from a bygone age. This in spite of the fact that just in the last two or three years he’s made at least four feature films. And in spite of the fact that any video shop you go into is bound to be a veritable trove of Russell films. The list of his important films is really long: The Devils, Tommy, Savage Messiah, Women in Love, The Boyfriend, Valentino. Even his bad films - principally Altered States - have pretty interesting stuff in them. And his more recent work in Salome’s Last Dance and The Lair of the White Worm show no significant dimming of Russell’s unique flair.

If you ever go out to the pictures, or even if you only watch television programmes about the pictures, you can hardly fail to have heard about a film called Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme. It’s the story of hideous but charming serial murderer named Dr Hannibal Lekter, played by Anthony Hopkins, and an FBI agent, played by Jodie Foster, who uses the incarcerated Lekter’s homicidal instincts to track down another serial killer currently at large.

The production manager and the director of photography of this biker movie, Paul Lewis and Laszlo (under the Anglicized pseudonym ‘Leslie’) Kovacs, went on with Jack Nicholson to make Easy Rider the following year. Easy Rider was directed by Dennis Hopper. It was the film that broke the conventional biker-movie mould - a mould set by Marlon Brando’s The Wild One in 1954.

While directing One from the Heart, Francis Coppola received a letter from a class of schoolchildren in the American Midwest. The children said, since he was such a good director (they had all enjoyed Apocalypse Now), would he please consider tackling their favourite literary work, a book called The Outsiders, by the children’s author S. E. Hinton. Coppola agreed. While shooting The Outsiders, Coppola decided to make a second film back-to-back with it - a smaller, more personal work. The result was called Rumble Fish, and it, too, is based on a book by S. E. Hinton.

The director Robert Aldrich has contributed more films to Moviedrome than anybody else. Baby Jane is the story of two sisters, the eponymous Baby Jane Hudson, a former child prodigy billed as the ‘diminuitive dancing duse from Duluth’, and the neglected sibling, Blanche. A ghastly accident has put an end to Blanche’s career and now she and Baby Jane inhabit a house somewhere in Hollywood, where the events herein described take place.

Solaris is a Russian science-fiction film, based on a novel by Stanislaw Lem, who was at that time the Soviet Union’s major science-fiction writer. It’s the story of a mission to the remote planet of Solaris, to find out what happened aboard a space station whose crew have disappeared - or almost disappeared, for there are a couple left: Snauth, a cybernetics expert who has turned to drink, and the biologist Dr Sartorius. Also on board the space station, it turns out, is the hero’s late wife, various dwarfs, and other eerie manifestations of a planet which is really a… ah, but that would be telling.

Mishima is in Japanese. It is not, however, a Japanese film. The distinction was made very clear at the Cannes Film Festival, where the celebrated Japanese director Oshima said: ‘I was told that this was a controversial film. It is not controversial. It is merely bad.’