Tired of lockdown? Take Torode’s tour of offbeat cinematic greats

During the first lockdown I worked my way through many of cinema’s mainline greats: Hollywood musicals; Biblical and other big budget epics; some masterly examples of Noir; classics of the New Wave; Ealing Studios comedies.

This time I am concentrating on my favourite off-beat movies. Many are unrecognised or undervalued. A number have simply fallen out of fashion. All are a bit cultish, though always gripping and entertaining. Some are funny, some weird. But none are pretentious. It’s not the right time for pretentions. Here are a few random examples which might help readers of TheArticle through this long dark Covid winter of the soul. (Film buffs might be pleased to know I have another dozen tips up my sleeve in case there is a third lockdown.)

Cheer yourself up with Billy Wilder’s utterly hilarious, but largely forgotten 1960s comedy, One Two Three. Wilder, a Jewish refugee, built the story around his native Berlin just before the Wall went up in 1961, when you could still cross easily from East to West. James Cagney is the loud-mouthed boss of Coca-Cola Germany, hoping to expand into the DDR. His naive Southern belle daughter falls in love with a Communist youth leader and defects. Chaos ensues. The film flopped for two reasons. The Wall went up soon after completion, making it immediately out of date — the ability to cross over the border was essential to the story. And, truth to tell, films about Germany seldom do well abroad — unless they feature Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. 

One recent exception is The Lives of Others. Another, less well known, is The Edukators, set in the glitzy, money mad Germany of the 1990s. The main characters are “protest artists” — two young men and a girl — who like to unsettle the rich by breaking into their homes and painting slogans — “Your money buys you fear”, for example. Or stacking ghastly, but expensively fashionable, rubbish works of art, ready for the garbage man. All a bit of an anarchist joke — until they accidently kidnap a manipulative captain of industry and have to decide whether to kill him or hold him hostage. It turns out that the industrialist was one of the 1968 student rebels’ leaders. Heroes to the three youngsters. Or so he claims, as he sets the boys fighting over sexual favours from the girl. “In our commune there was no jealousy. We shared.” It’s seriously German, but very funny too, and has a cracking final twist.

The Beast Must Die is Claude Chabrol’s chilling masterpiece. Beautifully filmed in Brittany, it covers the aftermath of the hit-and-run killing of a young boy. His obsessive father ignores the law and launches an unhinged hunt for the killer. He engineers the unrepentant brute’s demise, but in doing so wrecks the killer’s innocent family, and eventually destroys himself. Catholic friends tell me it is about the Church’s view of guilt, punishment, revenge and redemption. And rendering unto Caesar…

Noel Black’s Pretty Poison is set in 1968, when it was released, and is not to be confused with the 1996 remake. Tony Perkins plays a psychotic fantasist, just out of reform school, who teams up with an immature, apparently innocent, high-school cheerleader, a young Tuesday Weld. She believes his claim that he is a CIA agent on a mission. But is he manipulating the naive youngster or is it the other way round? Who is the real murderous nutcase? Brilliant acting in a gloriously photogenic New England township. Delightfully cynical twist at the end.

In Dog Day Afternoon (1972), Sidney Lumet directs a young Al Pacino in fine form in an amateur bank robbery gone wrong, during a Brooklyn heatwave. It is based pretty closely on real robbery. Engaging but unstable Pacino and his yet more batty colleague are holed up in the bank, holding hostages and trying to negotiate a way out. They end up demanding a plane to fly them to Algeria. They get it. It’s both funny and deadly serious. And you know from the beginning (no spoiler alert needed) that things are going to end badly. The excitement lies in how you get to that inevitable bloody ending.

Duel was made in 1971 on a shoestring by a young and inexperienced Steven Spielberg. It follows a salesman driving home across California. He is chased by a mysterious 40-ton truck which is trying to force him off the road to a gory death. We never see the truck driver — if there is one — and have no idea why the chase is taking place. That is the entire story. Until the explosive finale. Some cultists say there is a hidden message. If so, it is well hidden. But one thing is for sure: this is the equivalent of a book you can’t put down.

Targets (1968) was another early shoestring movie. Schlock movie producer Roger Corman gave the unknown young Peter Bogdanovich a fistful of dollars and told him to go away and make whatever film he wished. The only stipulations were that Boris Karloff owed Corman two days acting time — so Bogdanovich had to use him in order to provide a star name to sell the film — and he was to use scenes from the genuine Corman-owned, Karloff horror film, The Terror. The gripping mish-mash which resulted does indeed include scenes from The Terror, plus Karloff playing a rip-off of himself, as a star disgusted at a lifetime wasted playing in horror movies. His final film is about to be released. Then there is a young man driven by horror films and a gun-loving father into a mass shooting spree from the top of a drive-in movie screen. It is, surprise, surprise, showing the premiere of the Karloff character’s new horror movie. Madness, but it works.

Lolita. Stanley Kubrik’s original 1962 version, of course. (The 1997 remake is rubbish.) Peter Sellers plays a string of parts. James Mason is the tortured yet somehow honourable luster after innocent schoolgirls. Sue Lyon is the precocious, cynically experienced, child target he comes to love. Shelley Winters is her sad boozy mother. Nabokov was involved with the (brilliant) script. We all know the story. It’s wild. It’s funny. It is very sad. And it captures America.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another movie which must be seen in the original 1956 version. (Ignore the remakes, of which there are two this time.) It is directed by Don Siegel. Again we all know the story — vaguely. Aliens take over human bodies, driving out their humanity and individuality, creating a collectivist hell. The filming is superbly black and white noirish, set in small town California. A metaphor for paranoid fears of Communist subversion and mind control in mid-century America? Perhaps. All I can say is that it is the best sci-fi film I have seen. Thrilling and chilling.

It Happened Here. A labour of love, completed in 1964 by Kevin Brownlow (aged 18) and Andrew Mollo (16) for around £7,000. Yes, really. It is an alternative history of a Britain occupied by the Nazis. Astonishing use of real and faked newsreel footage, amateur actors, and interviews with neo-Nazis. And 7,000 amateur, unpaid extras, World War II re-enactors, in genuine, borrowed uniforms, playing German troops. Building on the French experience, it shows a puppet government, collaborators and Nazi sympathisers, as well as those who simply did not want to know. Of course, the resistance finally wins out. But we see that they were divided, and often corrupt and brutal, as well as heroic. Far more mature, realistic and grippingly professional than most of the many big budget British war films of the period.

Little Malcolm and his Struggle against the Eunuchs is another extraordinary, small budget British one-off. An Apple Film, produced by George Harrison from the play by David Halliwell, a big name in the early 1970s but now largely forgotten – as is the movie. It is what is known in the trade as “filmic”. Starkly beautiful visually. Shot in uncompromising black and white, in the streets of a bleak, snow-covered Lancashire town in winter, it references both the 1968 Hornsey College of Art occupation and the impoverished young Hitler’s failed attempt to become an art college student in Vienna. John Hurt is utterly brilliant as the scruffy, wildly unstable art student, Malcolm, who dreams of leading a revolt in his local art school — a coup involving the kidnapping and possible killing of the Director. He ends up first delivering a raving Hitlerian speech to his tiny handful of teenaged followers on a desolate wasteland, then conducting a grotesque parody of a Stalinesque purge trial of imaginary traitors in his tin-pot army. Grim but gripping.

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