The Sentinel (1977)

The Sentinel is a 1977 supernatural horror/occult thriller movie written and directed by Michael Winner. Or at least it might be supernatural horror, or it might not be.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table right at the start. I don’t care what anyone says I like Michael Winner as a director.

We start with a bunch of Catholic priests in Italy and they seem to be very concerned not just about evil in general but about some specific manifestation of evil.

Then the scene shifts to New York. Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a successful model. Her lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon) wants to marry her. They’ve been living together for two years. Alison says she needs space. She wants her own apartment.

She is troubled by a bizarre childhood memory. It involves her father, and possibly satanic influences.

She finds a nice apartment. Maybe she should have been suspicious when she found out that such a nice apartment was available for such a low rental but the real estate agent, Miss Logan (Ava Gardner), seems very reassuring.

Some of her new neighbours are a bit odd. Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) is a crazy old guy who lives with his cat and his parakeet but he’s very sweet and very friendly.

The two lesbians are more worrying. And the twins. Even fact all of the neighbours are worrying in various ways.

The noises from upstairs are disturbing.

Alison really starts to worry after she asks Miss Logan about the neighbours.

We might wonder a bit about that disturbing childhood memory. Is it a real memory? Could it be a false memory? Or just a dream? Or even a demonically inspired dream? Or is she remembering things that she misinterpreted at the time?

This is a “supernatural evil in the modern world” movie. But this is one of those movies that may or may not be actually about supernatural horror. Everything we see could have non-supernatural explanations. Somebody could be gaslighting Alison. Or Alison may in fact be crazy. That’s a possibility that will occur to us, and it occurs to Alison as well.

Alison goes to investigate those noises upstairs and she thinks she kills an old man. It might be her father. But her father died several weeks earlier. And the only blood the police find is Alison’s blood.

Detective Gatz (Eli Wallach) is worried by several things, principally by a case a few years earlier. A case that could have a link to these recent events.

Winner cleverly keeps things mysterious. He offers us nothing substantial that would back any of the theories we might have come up with to explain what is going on. He slowly builds an atmosphere of menace and paranoia but keeps it vague, which of course makes it all the more unsettling.

Alison is a really nice girl. She might be a really nice sane girl, or a really mad girl. Other characters are ambiguous as well.

And there’s still that niggling suspicion that supernatural evil might be at work.

I’m being deliberately very vague because I think this is a movie you’ll appreciate a lot more if you go into it not knowing what kind of movie it’s going to turn out to be.

Burgess Meredith gives the most memorable performance but all the cast members are fine. John Carradine is quite something as well. Cristina Raines and Chris Sarandon are effectively ambiguous. Look out for Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in small roles.

The unease mounts remorselessly. The ending really is worth the wait. This is a movie that delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

The Universal Blu-Ray is barebones but looks good.

The Monk (1972)

The Monk is a movie I’ve been searching for for quite a while. I was delighted to find it on DVD. Not the greatest transfer perhaps but it is in the correct aspect ratio at least. This is a movie that definitely needs a full restoration and a Blu-Ray release. It was a Franco-Italian-German co-production shot in English.

It’s based on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s 1796 gothic novel of the same name. This is one of the most notorious most outrageous novels of all time. If you’re telling yourself that a novel written in 1796 couldn’t possibly still be shocking today then think again. The Monk still packs a punch.

It’s necessary to keep in mind that anti-Catholic bigotry was a major strain in English culture (both high culture and pop culture) from the 16th century right through to the 20th century. Anti-Catholicism was a common theme in the first wave of gothic fiction which lasted from 1764 up to around 1820. It found its most spectacular flowering in Lewis’s The Monk.

The gothic fiction of that early period invariably has hints of the supernatural but it almost always turns out that nothing was actually involved. The Monk is unusual in that it has overt and explicit supernatural elements.

This movie certainly has some horror an exploitation elements but it has some definite art-house credentials as well. The script was co-written by Luis Buñuel no less (with Jean-Claude Carrière).

In fact Buñuel had been hoping to film the novel since the 1950s.

For various reasons Buñuel lost interest in directing and the assignment was given to Greek director Ado Kyrou. The script by Buñuel and Carrière was retained.

The setting is presumably Spain, probably in the 17th century. Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is a monk renowned for his piety and wisdom, and especially for his passionate belief in the vital importance of chastity. Ambrosio is admired by all.

He is becoming a little worried about Brother John. Brother John is in fact a gorgeous young woman, Mathilde (Nathalie Delon), masquerading as a man. We will later discover that her motives are less than innocent. Even wearing a cowl nobody could possibly mistake Mathilde for a man. This might of course be a deliberate touch, perhaps an attempt to capture the somewhat outlandish feel of the early gothic novels with unlikely coincidences and implausible disguises.

Mathilde has no trouble seducing Ambrosio. He is wracked by guilt but he can’t give her up.

Mathilde has clearly awakened Ambrosio’s interest in women. He becomes obsessed with a young girl, Antonia. Antoni’s mother is very ill. Ambrosio offers her spiritual comfort but he’d like to offer Antonia comfort of a more carnal nature. By this time Ambrosio has surrendered to the pleasures of the flesh but with the added spice of lots and lots of guilt.

Mathilde tells the wretched monk that there is a way he can have Antonia. Mathilde has commerce with demons. She can summon a demon who will deliver Antonia into his hands. Ambrosio is horrified but his lusts have now taken control of him.

The wealthy and debauched and incredibly wicked Duke of Talamur (Nicol Williamson) also has an interest in Antonia. The Duke is a noted philanthropist. He is always looking for ways to help the unfortunate, especially if the unfortunate happen to be very young girls.

Needless to say these wicked goings-on attract the attention of the Inquisition. It seems that nothing can save Ambrosio.

The cast is fine. Franco Nero did this sort of thing well. On the subject of the blending of art and exploitation in this movie it’s worth noting that is star, Franco Nero, was an actor who shuttled happily back and forth between art movies and exploitation movies and popular commercial movies. Nathalie Delon as Mathilde is suitably wicked. Nicol Williamson oozes corruption and evil and uber-creepiness from every pore.

This movie really needed Buñuel at the helm. Ado Kyrou clearly has no feel for the material. The sleaze and trashiness is there in the source material and the movie doesn’t back away from admitting that shocking things are going on but the style is dull and too arty. With Buñuel unavailable it might perhaps have been better to pick a director with more of an exploitation movie sensibility. It would have been interesting to see Jess Franco let loose on this material. Alice Arno as Mathilde could have been awesome.

This movie came out the same year as Ken Russell’s The Devils. That’s the kind of approach The Monk needed. The Monk definitely needed some visual flamboyance and outrageousness.

The ending is cringe. The Monk just doesn’t make it. The 70s was the time when a great adaptation of the novel could have been made but this film represents a misfire and a lost opportunity.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century (1977)

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century is a Canadian-Italian co-production and it’s very very obviously a King Kong rip-off. That’s A-OK by me. I love Italian rip-offs of Hollywood blockbusters.

This time it’s not a giant ape on a remote island but a yeti frozen for a million years in the ice in northern Canada. Now I know what you’re thinking. That’s a long way from the Himalayas. But what if yetis were found across the whole globe at one time?

Billionaire tycoon Morgan Hunnicut (Edoardo Faieta) has funded the expedition to retrieve the yeti. His pal, palaeontologist Professor Wassermann (John Stacy), thinks the yeti can be revived. And he’s right!

Hunnicut’s teenaged granddaughter Jane (Antonella Interlenghi) and her kid brother are on hand when the yeti is brought back from the north. Jane thinks the yeti is really sweet. OK, he’s thirty feet tall but she’s sure he’s just as gentle and friendly as her puppy dog Indio.

The yeti really is friendly but he’s easily frightened and when he’s frightened he can cuse mass destruction.

Hunnicut’s plan is to use the yeti as a publicity stunt for his business empire. What he doesn’t know is that there is a traitor in his company, a guy actually working for a competitor that wants the yeti put out of the way.

Of course the bad guy manages to engineer a situation in which the yeti seems to have killed some people so soon the Canadian cops are hunting down the poor yeti.

Jane is determined to save her gentle gigantic snap-frozen friend. Much mayhem ensues.

So it’s all pretty close to the original King Kong.

This was clearly a low-budget effort but when Italians make a movie such as this you know that even if the special effects are cheap they’ll be fun. Italians in those days couldn’t make a dull movie if they tried.

There are some cool visual moments. The yeti locked in what looks like a giant red telephone box suspended from a helicopter is pretty cool.

Hunnicut isn’t really a villain. He wants to make money out of the yeti but he really does also want to help Professor Wassermann’s legitimate scientific research. And Hunnicut has no desire to see the yeti harmed. He has no desire to see anyone get hurt.

The acting in general is OK. There’s a nicely slimy villain.

Antonella Interlenghi as Jane is no Fay Wray (or Jessica Lange) but she’s likeable and cute.

I like Mimmo Crao as lot as the yeti. The makeup effects allow us to see his facial expressions and he does a fine job of conveying the yeti’s animal-like nature - a gentle timid creature but very easily spooked and inclined to lash out in fear. This movie needs a sympathetic monster and the yeti is very sympathetic indeed.

The major weakness is the lack of a really spectacular show-stopping visual set-piece.

The ending marks a significant departure from King Kong. It’s perhaps not entirely satisfactory but I think it works.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century is sentimental but it’s good-natured and enjoyable and has some pleasing goofiness. This is a pure beer and popcorn movie. Recommended.

Yeti Giant of the 20th Century looks terrific on Blu-Ray.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1974)

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is a 1974 Spanish giallo starring Paul Naschy. 

Early on there is perhaps some doubt about its genre categorisation but it does get more and more giallo-esque as it goes.

Naschy is Gilles, a drifter looking for a job. The suggestion is made that the three sisters who live in a big house on the outskirts of the village might employ him, although the way the suggestion is put could lead one to suspect that working for the sisters might not be the best of ideas. 

He gets the job anyway and it’s a live-in job.

The eldest sister Claude (Diana Lorys) has a badly disfigured arm as the result of an accident. She is convinced that men now find her repulsive. Her sister Ivette (Maria Perschy) is wheelchair-bound, presumably as the result of the same accident. And then there’s the man-hungry Nicole (Eva León).

The sisters all take note of Gilles’ manly physique when they see stripped to the waist chopping firewood. They like what they see. So now we have Gilles living in a house with three women. They all seek potentially dangerous. All three seem crazy. And, for very different reasons, Claude and Nicole are so sexually frustrated that they’re climbing the walls.

Gilles is by no means immune to their feminine charms.

Then the nurse arrives and there’s something about her that makes us wonder if she’s everything that she seems to be.

A guy suddenly turns up and tries to kill Gilles.

Three cute teenage backpackers arrive in the village. They’re looking for fun. These girls spell fun M-E-N.

Gilles has disturbing dreams, or perhaps they’re flashbacks.

There’s plenty of potential now for mayhem, and there’s a brutal murder. It won’t be the last murder.

There are at least half a dozen very plausible suspects. All of these people are either twisted in some way, or we suspect that they may be twisted in some way. Their motives might be rational or totally irrational.

As usual with his movies Paul Naschy wrote the screenplay and for the most part he plays fair with us. The resolution gets a bit wild and outrageous but it works. For me a successful mystery story is one in which I find the ending believable because the clues pointing in the right direction were there and it feels psychological plausible. That’s the case here. There’s a respect for the conventions of the mystery genre, and that’s not always the case with a giallo.

There is some gore and there are some disturbing moments.

There’s not much in the way of nudity and sex but there is an all-pervasive atmosphere of unhealthy eroticism, and that applies to both the male and the female characters.

Naschy’s performance is very good. He is able to convince us that GiIles is a decent good-natured guy and he’s also able to convince us that there’s at least the possibility of some inner darkness. All of the performances are solid with Diana Lorys and Maria Perschy being particularly good. And Eva León as Nicole oozes sex is a delightfully over-the-top way.

Carlos Aured was the director and co-writer and he worked with Naschy several times. He does a fine stylish imaginative job here. The house in which the three sisters live is a perfect setting for a giallo and Aured takes every advantage of it.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is a top-tier giallo. Highly recommended.

The transfer (in Shout! Factory’s Paul Naschy Collection Blu-Ray set) is in the 1.37 aspect ratio which is possibly incorrect but it looks OK.

I’ve reviewed Naschy’s other foray into the giallo genre, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (1975), and it’s very much worth seeing.

Truck Stop Women (1974)

Truck Stop Women might not be great cinema but it is great fun. 

I guess you could call this rednecksploitation, or maybe trucksploitation.

Anna (Lieux Dressler) runs a truck stop in New Mexico but she has a few sidelines going, such as a major truck hijacking racket. The muscle for her operation is provided by a bunch of cowboys. They’re fiercely loyal to Anna.

Anna’s truck stop is very popular because when a man has been driving his rig for days he needs a little relaxation. Anna’s girls provide that. They provide a full service.

Anna’s daughter Rose (Claudia Jennings) is running wild a bit and she’s going to cause some trouble.

The real trouble on the way is coming from a bunch of mobsters from out east. They represent a major syndicate. Anna has always kept her distance from the big boys of crime. Her truck hijacking racket and her brothel provide more than enough money to keep her happy. But maybe those big city mobsters are not going to leave her in peace.

She’s never had any problem with the local sheriff. He’s one of the brothel’s favourite customers.

There are actually two outsiders in town trying in different ways to muscle in on Anna’s territory. Smith and Rusty are vicious big city hoodlums and Smith is ambitious. They’re out-and-out bad guys.

Seago is also an out-of-town mobster. He’s on Anna’s side. Up to a point anyway. She does suspect that he may have plans to grab a sizeable chunk of her operation. Seago has a plan. Anna wants nothing to do with it because she has always avoided getting on the wrong side of the major syndicates but maybe she won’t have a choice.

The amusing thing is that the good guys (Anna and her cowboys and her whores) hardly qualify as good guys. Anna is after all running a small-scale organised crime operation. They’re not exactly solid citizens. But we’re immediately on their side because they’re the underdogs, they’re the little guy. And they love country music.

The acting is perfect for this type of movie. Nobody is taking this seriously as drama but they are doing their best to be fun. Lieux Dressler is magnificent. How did she not have a better career?

Claudia Jennings makes a splendid spoilt bad girl. It’s a finely judged subtle performance - she manages to keep us guessing until the end about which way Rose will end up jumping, and she manages to appear treacherous without overdoing it. Call me crazy if you like but based on this performance Claudia Jennings could have given acting lessons to some of the much bigger female stars of the time.

This is one of those movies that promises a bit more sleaze than it delivers but there’s still a healthy quantity of T&A.

And the music is great! This is real truck-driving music.

It’s easy to get smarmy about a movie like this but it’s an extremely well-crafted film. The pacing is perfect. The action scenes are excellent. There’s the right balance between a serious crime story and lighthearted trucking action and humour and titillation.

Trucksploitation was an actual genre and there were even big-studio productions. Truck Stop Women is a better film than any of the big-studio attempts. It delivers more entertainment value. And it makes no apologies for being a drive-in movie. Drive-in audiences liked trucks and they liked tits. This movie offers plenty of both but it also offers huge amounts of enjoyment.

On the audio commentary Kim Newman points out that the basic core plot is lifted straight from Mildred Pierce and he makes the daring suggestion that in some ways Truck Stop Women handles that core plot more effectively. I’m inclined to agree with him.

Truck Stop Women offers fistfights, gunfights, truck chases, boobs, laughs and country music. On one level it’s a lively enjoyable romp. But always lurking in the background is a serious human drama about mothers and daughters. It’s the performances of Claudia Jennings and Lieux Dressler that make this movie more than just a fun exploitation movie. It is a fun exploitation movie but it’s a rather good movie as well. And the ending is superbly done.

Truck Stop Women is highly recommended.

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

You’re making a Frankenstein movie in 1971 but you want to add something different, to make your film look less like a rip-off of Hammer’s Frankenstein movies. So what do you do? You give Baron Frankenstein a beautiful sexy daughter who is also a mad scientist. And you make her the focus of the story. That’s the basis for Lady Frankenstein.

Of course you’ll need the right actress. How about Rosalba Neri? She’s sexy, glamorous, classy, she can act and she has the ability to be equally convincing as a heroine or a villainess. She turned out to be an inspired choice.

Joseph Cotten gets top billing but he actually has only a supporting role. This is totally a star vehicle for Rosalba Neri. She has to carry the film. And she does so with ease.

The setting is supposed to be England but it looks more like the Central Europe of Hammer’s gothic horror movies. In fact the whole visual style of this movie owes quite a lot to Hammer.

Lady Frankenstein adds some sleaze and some hints of sexual perversity. That was very much the trend in European horror at the time and Hammer were moving, a bit tentatively, in that direction. Lady Frankenstein goes a bit further than Hammer would dare to go.

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant Dr Charles Marshall (Paul Muller) are on the verge of the final successful breakthrough in their attempts to create a living man out of dead tissue.

The problem is that the brain they are using comes from a hanged murderer and this brain has a few malfunctions. They create a man-monster and bring him to life but they can’t control him and Baron Frankenstein pays the price for his error of judgment.

In the 1931 Frankenstein there is of course a famous scene involving the monster, a child and a pond. In Lady Frankenstein this scene is a little different - the monster hurls a naked young woman into a lake, having surprised her having sex on the lakeshore with her young man. This is the monster’s first killing but there will be plenty more.

Baron Frankenstein’s daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) vows to continue her father’s work, which Dr Marshall’s assistance. This is where the movie gets interesting. Tania Frankenstein is not a mere simplistic evil mad scientist. She has a number of simultaneous motivations. Ambition is one motivation but she is also driven by both lust and love. Tania has a woman’s emotional needs and a woman’s physical needs. Dr Marshall can satisfy the former and she is attracted by his mind but his weedy middle-ged body does not set her pulses racing. Maybe Tommy, her servant, can satisfy her sexual needs? He has a strong masculine body. Unfortunately he is a halfwit. Tania needs a man with both an exciting mind and an exciting body. If only the dumb-as-a-rock but hunky Tommy had Dr Marshall’s brain!

It’s always difficult to judge acting performances when they’re dubbed, but Rosalba Neri smoulders when she needs to smoulder and she’s convincingly depraved. Joseph Cotten is very good - he did quite a few exploitation movies in Italy around this time but in this instance at least he is not just phoning it in.

Mel Welles directs. He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a director but here he is at least competent. It’s visually reasonably impressive with a fairly cool mad scientist’s laboratory (which was re-used in several other movies) and manages not to look cheap.

The big problem is the very lame monster. It’s not a fatal flaw because the focus is very much on Tania Frankenstein and her romantic and erotic entanglements that lead her to become a fully-fledged evil mad scientist. But the monster is seriously lame.

Lady Frankenstein doesn’t push things very far on the gore front. There is however a fair bit of nudity and sex. The movie’s selling point was clearly going to be the sexy lady mad scientist.

The movie was shot in Italy and partly financed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. The version released in the States was cut, apparently not so much to remove sex and violence as to get the running time down to the length Corman wanted. With the cut scenes restored the plot makes a lot more sense and the motivations of the characters are a lot clearer.

Lady Frankenstein isn’t one of the gothic horror greats but it offers plenty of enjoyment. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Volume 1 Blu-Ray boxed set and it gets a lovely transfer. There’s an audio commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman which, as you would expect from those two, is both illuminating and entertaining. And there’s a second audio commentary and other extras as well.

Sex and Fury (1973)

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The Night Porter (1974)

Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter was released in 1974 and ignited a firestorm of controversy. It dealt with forbidden and disturbing topics. It retains its power to shock, but interestingly enough not for quite the same reasons.

It is Vienna in 1957. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is the night porter in a luxury hotel. He had been a concentration camp guard during the war and had done some terrible things. He is on the list of wanted war criminals but he is considered to be too unimportant to make tracking him down worthwhile.

He belongs to an organisation of former SS officers. They protect each other by destroying incriminating evidence and occasionally eliminating witnesses. They conduct mock trials as a way of trying to exorcise their guilt feelings although at the same time that they try to deny those feelings. Max thinks they’re fools. The war was a long time ago. He just wants to live a quiet anonymous life. It’s not that he feels no guilt. He simply doesn’t see anything to be gained by dwelling on the past.

Then he runs into Lucia (Charlotte Rampling). They recognise each other. They knew each other very well during the war. Lucia was a prisoner at one of the camps. Max was a guard.

One thing that should be noted is that Lucia is not Jewish. She was sent to a concentration camp because she was the daughter of a communist and she was considered to be politically suspect. Liliana Cavani was inspired to make this movie after interviewing female camp survivors for a documentary. The women she interviewed had all been sent to the camps for being communists. Cavani clearly wanted her protagonist to be such a woman.

It’s perhaps worth noting that had Lucia been Jewish the film would have had zero chance of being released. The subject matter was already touchy enough.

Lucia is married to an orchestra conductor. But the wartime relationship between Max and Lucia cannot be left in the past. They rekindle the relationship which is, for various reasons, a very dangerous thing to do. Max’s old wartime comrades may well now decide to hunt down Max and Lucia.

The story in broad outline could have been made into a safe conventional politically acceptable movie but Cavani consistently choose bold options rather than safe options. She presumably had no interest in telling the kind of story that had already been told countless times.

The events during the war are told in brief flashbacks scattered throughout the movie.

The first safe option would have been to make it absolutely explicit that Lucia was forced into her wartime relationship with Max. But Cavani does not do this. Of course Lucia would have been under immense pressure but the matter is left uncertain.

That wartime relationship was complex. Max fell hopelessly in love with Lucia. Lucia’s emotions are left ambiguous but was is made quite explicit is that she was intensely sexually attracted to Max.

When the relationship is revived Max falls in love with Lucia all over again. This time it is obvious that Lucia is in love with him. And her sexual hunger for him is breathtaking.

It is also obvious that Lucia is now a very willing participant indeed. She leaves her husband to move in with Max.

The success of the movie depends to a huge degree on the ability of the two leads to sell this story to us. Dirk Bogarde is perfectly cast. He was superb at playing contradictory and ambiguous characters. The audience has to be able to see Lucia’s attraction to Max as plausible. Bogarde has the good looks, charm and self-confidence to do this. A young woman might well find such a man very very appealing. Bogarde also conveys to us Max’s dark side. He is a sadist. That’s why he excites Lucia so much. That’s something that Lucia likes in a man.

Rampling is superb. She easily convinces us of Lucia’s lust for Max but she keeps Lucia’s emotions just mysterious enough to keep us interested. Could she truly be madly in love with Max or is it just her sexual hunger? These are things that need to remain uncertain as long as possible.

This movie contains of the great cinematic sex scenes. It’s not graphic and it’s not erotic but it’s unbelievably intense.

In my view the wartime events are not in themselves a major focus except insofar as they represent lives lived in darkness. Cavani has said that Max and Lucia are two people trying to escape from the darkness into the light. Of course there is the darkness within them as well. Perhaps love can redeem them. Perhaps even Max can be redeemed by love. The idea of a war criminal being redeemed by love was certainly going tp push people’s buttons in 1974.

Max is a hunted man and he’s a man in love, and he’s a man in love. An audience is always going to be inclined to be at least a little sympathetic to such a character. On the other hand we know some of the things that Max has done. Our feelings about him are going to be a little conflicted, which one assumes was precisely what Cavani was aiming for.

There’s also the the fact that Lucia cannot be considered as a straightforward victim. Perhaps not a victim at all. Perhaps party a victim. Perhaps partly guilty. She knows the things that Max did during the war. Again we’re going to feel conflicted about this character.

1974 was about the time that Stockholm Syndrome was first identified and there is perhaps a touch of that here.

The Night Porter is confronting and provocative but we need confronting and provocative movies. Highly recommended.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

The Other Side of the Mirror (Al otro lado del espejo) is an odd Jess Franco movie. What’s odd about it is the lack of weird crazy elements. It’s very low-key and very restrained. This is one of those cases when it’s almost impossible not to use the very clichéd term slowburn. This one burns very slowly indeed.

It starts out giving the appearance of being a straightforward domestic melodrama. Not a psycho-sexual melodrama, but just a very ordinary story about a young woman dealing with rather ordinary problems. Even when something fairly startling happens there’s nothing bizarre about it.

Ana (Emma Cohen) lives on the island of Madeira with her father, a very respectable archaeologist (played by Howard Vernon). He’s a widower. Ana is his only child. They seem quite close, but not in a weird way. When Ana announces that she is getting married her father seems a bit upset but that’s normal and understandable. It will obviously be rather lonely living in a big house alone after his daughter moves out.

The first very subtle sign of oddness is her father’s reaction to her impending marriage. He hangs himself. It’s a shocking to do but there’s nothing inherently bizarre about it. A man in his position might well feel that without his daughter his life will be empty and meaningless. He has built his life around her. Which may not be healthy if taken to excess but again it’s the sort of thing that does happen.

We have already had indications that even before Ana’s marriage announcement her father was bored by life. Boredom is a key theme that runs throughout this movie.

Ana leaves Madeira, moves to a big city and builds a new life as a jazz singer. There’s a burgeoning love affair between Ana and jazz musician Bill (Robert Woods). Ana seems to be reluctant to let things move too quickly.

Everything about this movie is very subtle. We just get tiny clues that something might be amiss. Ana has dreams. We assume they’re just dreams. Things that happen in her dreams happen in real life. Whether her dreams predict the future or whether something stranger is going on remains ambiguous.

She begins another love affair, with theatrical producer Miguel (Ramiro Oliveros).

She ends up back on Madeira. She hangs out with a circle of idle rich people.

Carla (Françoise Brion) and Pipo (Philippe Lemaire) have an open marriage. Maybe it’s becoming a bit too open for Carla’s liking. Maybe the middle-aged Pipo is a bit too interested in Ana. This little circle also includes Tina (Alice Arno).

Several murders occur. This is starting to feel like a giallo. There’s certainly an atmosphere of decadence.

There are however hints that there is something else happening. Perhaps Ana is psychologically haunted by her past. Or perhaps she is being literally haunted. Perhaps her father is reaching out for her from the grave. At the end we find out if there is really a supernatural element at work.

What’s really interesting is the very low level of erotic content and the almost total absence of any kind of sexual perversity. There is no indication of any incestuous relationship between Ana and her father. There is not even any indication of incestuous desires on the part of either father or daughter.

At this point we need to address the question of the multiple versions of this movie. The Other Side of the Mirror was a Franco-Spanish co-production. There were three different versions released - The Spanish, French and Italian versions. What’s really fascinating is that the French version was an entirely different cut with a lot of extra material, with one of the main characters eliminated and an additional main character (played by Lina Romay) added, although utilising about three-quarters of the original Spanish film. This French version, Le miroir obscène, was apparently so different that it was in effect a totally different movie dealing with totally different themes. But the extra material was apparently all shot by Franco.

And apparently the Italian release is yet another rather different cut.

Censorship was still fairly strict in Spain and the Mondo Macabro Blu-Ray offers only the Spanish cut. One might suspect that, given the much looser censorship in France, the French version might develop a theme of father-daughter incest that Franco could not address in the Spanish version. But apparently the French version switches the focus entirely away from the father and onto Ana’s relationship with her sister (in the Spanish version she has no sister).

So my suspicion is that Franco did not see the father-daughter relationship as incestuous at all. The real link between Ana and her father is boredom, and a mutual fear of abandonment. They both feel lonely and disconnected from other people, and adrift.

It’s also possible that this movie is one of Franco’s occasional attempts to do something more mainstream. It got rave reviews from Spanish critics.

Given Franco’s obsessive love for jazz it’s likely that the idea of doing a totally different arrangement of the same basic material to create a kind of improvised variation would have appealed to him immensely.

The Other Side of the Mirror is an oddity in Franco’s filmography but it is an interesting oddity. Recommended.

It’s perhaps worth noting than in 1970 Alain Robbe-Grillet had done more or less the same thing, using mostly the same footage edited in a different way to create two totally different movies, Eden and After (1970) and N. Took the Dice (1971).

Home Before Midnight (1979)

Some people see Home Before Midnight, made in 1978 and released in 1979, as an oddity in Pete Walker’s career as a director. If however you’re familiar with his early films such as Cool It, Carol! as well as his blood-drenched 70s horror films it doesn’t seem like such an outlier.

The tail end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s was a fascinating period in British cinema. The draconian censorship was starting to loosen up a little. British filmmakers were, very nervously, exploring the possibilities of making honest grown-up movies about sexual subjects.

Home Before Midnight came out in 1979 but it is a late entry in this intriguing cycle of British films. It was controversial at the time. Today it would have critics heading for the fainting couch.

Mike Beresford (James Aubrey) is the lyricist for a rock band. He’s 28. Despite his profession he’s a pretty ordinary pretty decent sort of guy. He picks up a pretty hitchhiker. Her name is Ginny (Alison Elliott). She tells him studying fashion design. They have sex but from the start it’s obvious that their attraction goes beyond the sexual. They fall head over heels in love very quickly.

Their relationship blossoms.

Then Mike finds Ginny’s bracelet. It was a birthday present. It has her birth date on it. She’s 14.

Up to this point Mike has had not the slightest reason even to think about her age. She looks maybe 19. She behaves like a girl of that age. She’s quite sophisticated and quite poised. She is obviously sexually very experienced. It worth pointing out that Alison Elliott, who plays Ginny, was indeed 19 at the time. And she looks 21 at least.

Of course it’s all going to become very messy. The police become involved. Mike is charged with things he did do and a whole bunch of things he didn’t do. There are betrayals.

It’s important to note the class angle. Mike is working class. Ginny is very middle-class. Her school is concerned only with its own reputation. Ginny’s father is horrified at the threat to the family’s middle-class respectability. He is incapable of understanding that Ginny has in fact been very sexually active for quite some time. He prefers to think that some awful working-class yob has corrupted his pure innocent little girl.

Clearly Walker had a few things to say in this film. The law has nothing to do with justice. The law is a blunt instrument. Even when wielded with good intentions it crushes people, and the police and the courts do not have good intentions.

Love does not conquer all. If there’s a conflict between love and the desire for social approval then love goes out the window. Mike’s problem is that he is the babe in the woods. He is amazed when he feels the metaphorical knife plunged into his back.

It’s interesting that some reviews criticise this movie for mixing a serious approach to a sensitive subject with exploitation content. I think this is a very wrong-headed attitude but it is alas very common - the assumption that sexual content is automatically exploitation content. I think that’s nonsense.

And it’s certainly nonsense in the case of this film. There’s nudity and there are some steamy sex scenes. They’re absolutely necessary. We have to understand that this is more than a sexual relationship, but it is a sexual relationship. We also need to understand that this is a case of very strong mutual sexual attraction. Ginny is not being pressured into anything. She is hot for Mike and she enjoys the sex very much. You might not approve of their relationship but if you’re going to get anything out of the movie you do need to understand the nature of the relationship. And the fact Ginny is not merely willing but eager to have sex becomes crucially important in plot terms.

And Walker approaches the sex scenes in a very sensitive way. They’re passionate but they’re not the least bit crass.

Perhaps the thing that will shock modern viewers the most is the movie’s assumption that the line between victim and villain is not clear-cut.

James Aubrey is very good as Mike. He plays him like a deer caught in the headlights and it works. Alison Elliott handles Ginny’s teenage girl wild unpredictability well. As for the age thing, whether she was a good casting choice is harder to say. She is totally unconvincing as a 14-year-old but in some ways that makes her the right choice since so much hinges on the fact that Mike does not even suspect Ginny’s real age. An actress who looked younger would have made this a completely different movie.

This is an intelligent provocative movie and it’s highly recommended.

I also very highly recommend Pete Walker’s earlier Cool It, Carol! (1970) which also deals intelligently with sex.

Other British movies of around this time that also try to deal intelligently with sex are All the Right Noises (1970), Baby Love (1969) and especially the superb I Start Counting (1969).