A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS!

PART TWO: BEHIND THE SCENES: AT BRAY STUDIOS CANDID PHOTOGRAPHS : LEE AND CUSHING

PART TWO: 'The Art of Non Verbal Communication at Hammer Films, Bray Studios !' Behind the scenes with PC during the making of Frankenstein Created Woman with Mr Walters making his point.. and Christopher Lee during the making of Dracula, Prince of Darkness, demanding two sugars in his coffee, next time. As we all know, 'V' stands for victory...!

PART ONE: BEHIND THE SCENES : CUSHING AND LEE CLOWN FOR THE STILLS CAMERA MAN : PART ONE

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, taking a break from the serious business of making movies...

'A PARTNERSHIP IN DEADLY DEEDS' A TALENT TO TERRIFY: PART TWO BY TROY HOWARTH

 

A HEADS UP! A TALENT TO TERRIFY: PART TWO: 'A PARTNERSHIP IN DEADLY DEEDS' WILL BE POSTED HERE ON WEDNESDAY 18TH DECEMBER 2013

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A TALENT TO TERRIFY: PART ONE: TO START AT THE BEGINNING: BY TROY HOWARTH

For many viewers, the names Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are inextricably linked.  They would become one of the screen’s great duos – not quite in the same way as Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, perhaps, but definitely akin to Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi for the Technicolor generation.  Their styles would offer a strong contrast, both in acting technique and in public perception.  If Cushing was perceived as the heroic, kindly, avuncular type, then Lee was icy villainy embodied: cool (if not downright cold), detached and imposing.  Stories of Cushing’s generosity and warmth are many and varied; tales of Lee vary from the admiring to the damning.  You'll find hardly anybody who has a bad word to say about Cushing, either as a person or as an actor, but the same isn’t true of Lee: some critics have dismissed him as wooden and boring on screen, while some fans have found him arrogant and aloof in person.  Both actors would struggle before finally finding success – Cushing would find his initial acclaim on television, while Lee would rise to prominence essaying various monstrous and villainous character for Hammer Films.

Cushing would embrace his role as a genre icon, though he approached this with some reluctance and trepidation in the beginning; Lee would relish the opportunity to establish a name for himself, only to spend much of his later years trying to put some distance between himself and his initial successes.  Truth be told, it’s easy to appreciate the rationale behind both mentalities.  Cushing had established himself as actor of range and sensitivity, adept at the classics and in more contemporary subjects – to burden himself with the “baggage” of being a horror star would surely tarnish his reputation somewhat, but, as he rightly reasoned, it would provide stability and a cash flow which would enable him to support his ailing wife in the style he felt she deserved.

For Lee, finding success in this venue at a comparatively youthful age meant being eternally limited – it was easy enough to say “yes” to yet another Dracula picture, but as he rightly recognized, the part didn’t stretch his abilities and, worse still, would prevent him from achieving the types of roles in the types of films he openly craved.  Even so, the two men would cross paths at different points in their careers before finally becoming known as something of a “double act.”  Once they became linked, they would remain so for the remainder of their lives – fortunately, the two men were genuinely fond of each other and could make each other laugh in ways that would have seemed foreign to Karloff and Lugosi.



The first of their many collaborations would occur in 1948, courtesy of Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet.  Cushing had already impressed Olivier by a display of professional honesty: while undergoing a lean period of no work and grim prospects, Cushing had the chance to play a role in one of Olivier’s stage productions; sadly, the role required an actor capable of performing a convincing American accent.  Cushing told Olivier that he would let the play down rather badly on that front, and Olivier responded by telling the struggling actor that he would remember this display of honesty.  Cushing figured it was a nice way of saying “don’t call us, we’ll call you,” but lo and behold, Olivier remained true to his word.  In addition to giving Cushing a number of plum roles in his theatrical ventures, the actor-director also awarded Cushing with the supporting role of Osric in Hamlet.

The part would require Cushing to play it fey and broad and he responds with a larger than life performance; one can virtually smell the perfume emanating from the screen whenever he appears. Truth be told, this sort of broad comedy was never the actor’s strong suit and Hamlet is no exception. It’s interesting to see him in this context, but it’s not one of his more persuasive pieces of acting.

And what of Lee?  What, indeed… Lee, who was at the very start of his acting career, has long maintained that he snuck on set, donned a uniform for one of the heavily armored spear carriers and soaked in all he could of Olivier at work.  Mind you, this is the same Lee who also claims to have refused to speak the lines in Dracula Prince of Darkness (there never were any). That said, in a few long shots involving this characters lingering in the background, there is an admittedly tall extra in evidence.  Is it Lee or is it just wishful thinking?  Hard to say, but his contribution – if legitimate – would of course go unnoticed and unbilled.  The film itself would become a major box office hit, netting Olivier Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor.  Cushing’s performance attracted some good notices and would help him in pursuing more theatrical and film work into the 1950s, before the burgeoning medium of television claimed him for its own – for a time.  For Lee, it was nothing more than anecdote to be told and retold, and he would spend the better part of a decade losing out on various acting jobs because he was “too tall” or “too foreign looking.”

In 1952, Cushing and Lee would find themselves in the same vehicle once again, when producer/director/all-around-maverick John Huston relocated to the UK to make Moulin Rouge.  This colorful and melodramatic account of the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (played by José Ferrer, in an Oscar-nominated performance) would also find favor at the box office and with critics.  It marked a change of pace for the normally action-oriented Huston and demonstrated that his abilities could extend to costume fare, as well.  Cushing, by virtue of his rising star power, would claim billing in the finished film despite having a minor role that is rather indifferently covered by Huston – indifferently in the sense that it doesn’t even grant him a close up, not that the role really called for one, anyway.

Lee, still unknown at this stage, would go without billing – but he gets the better part, playing the painter Georges Seurat, discussing life and art with Lautrec in a Paris café.  Lee would be awestruck by Huston, while Cushing never made much mention of the experience.  For the former, it was a feather in the cap – a film for one of the great Hollywood filmmakers, allowing him to share screen time with an Oscar winning actor – while for the latter it was a minor paycheck gig at a time when he was getting more and more accustomed to playing larger leading roles.  Little did either man realize just how dramatically things would change in a mere five years…


Part Two: A Partnership In Deadly Deeds! Look out for updates!

A Talent To Terrify: is written by Troy Howarth
with images and artwork by Marcus Brooks

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ON THIS DAY: CAMERA TURNED ON FIRST DAY OF PRODUCTION OF A VAMPIRE CLASSIC

Today, fifty six years ago, the camera turned on the first day of production of Hammer Films 'DRACULA' (US: HORROR OF DRACULA) at BRAY STUDIOS.

CAST:

Peter Cushing (Dr Van Helsing), Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), Michael Gough (Arthur Holmwood), John Van Eyssen (Jonathan Harker), Melissa Stribling (Mina Holmwood), Carol Marsh (Lucy Holmwood), Valerie Gaunt (Vampire Woman)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Terence Fisher, Screenplay – Jimmy Sangster, Based on the Novel by Bram Stoker, Producer – Anthony Hinds, Photography – Jack Asher, Music – James Bernard, Special Effects – Syd Pearson, Makeup – Phil Leaky, Art Direction – Bernard Robinson. Production Company – Hammer Films

SYNOPSIS:

Posing as a librarian, erstwhile vampire hunter Jonathan Harker travels to Castle Dracula where he is welcomed by the courtly Count Dracula. Harker attempts to kill Dracula and eliminate the vampire menace that Dracula spreads but the sun sets before he can do so. Jonathan’s body and diary are found by his friend Dr Van Helsing who stakes him and takes the sad news on to his fiancée Lucy Holmwood. There Van Helsing finds that Lucy has become Dracula’s prey. Joined by her brother Arthur, Van Helsing begins a search for Dracula, to stake and kill him before Lucy is fully claimed as a vampire.

COMMENTARY:

Dracula – usually better known under its American retitling, The Horror of Dracula – is the cornerstone of the Hammer Films legend. Although The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) the year before was beginning of Hammer’s success, The Horror of Dracula was the one that set Hammer on the map and marked the beginning of Hammer’s domination over the horror scene for the next fifteen years. The Horror of Dracula’s status, certainly in Anglo-horror fandom, is sacrosanct and its importance near mythic. The essence of what the Hammer film was all about is here – the darkly magnetic presence and aristocratic haughtiness of Christopher Lee; the commanding, straight-arrow rationalism of Peter Cushing; the florid shock hand of director Terence Fisher; the essential British repressions of sexuality and convention that Anglo-horror would pierce a stake right through; and the laughably dated shocked critical outcry.

Where then to view The Horror of Dracula today? Hammer films, particularly the early ones, have not dated well. Today their pace seems slow; the shocks that caused such a critical outcry (and then quickly transformed into the expected mainstay of this particular genre) seem absurdly mannered, even laughable. The rich and floridly colourful sets seem flat and stagebound and James Bernard’s celebrated scores loud and unsubtle. Yet The Horror of Dracula holds undeniable effect. One must understand exactly what it represented to audiences back then. To an audience raised on the Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931) and the cardboard, melodramatic figure that Dracula became among the Universal monsters line-up in the 1940s, The Horror of Dracula must have had an incredible shock value. For one, it was in colour – which meant that one could see the blood in its rich, overripe scarlet detail – and that alone made it an immediately different film to the Bela Lugosi version. For another, it was not as stagebound as the Lugosi version – Terence Fisher’s camera is kinetic and alive, always on the move.

As an attempt at adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), The Horror of Dracula is never any better or worse than any other version. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster liberally sacrifices parts here and there for the economy of plot and budget – out go Renfield and the asylum (although these later appeared in Hammer’s Dracula – Prince of Darkness [1966]). Gone too is the magnificently ambient opening journey to Castle Dracula, the pursuit climax and set-pieces like the crashing of the Demeter. Gone too is Dracula as a supernatural being – “It is a common fallacy,” says Van Helsing, “that vampires can change into bats and wolves,” which conveniently does away with having to create costly effects sequences. (Although said fallacy seemed to have been disproven by the time of later sequels). Despite the liberties he takes with Bram Stoker, Jimmy Sangster nevertheless preserves the essence of the book.

The remarkable sexual element present in the Bram Stoker book (wherein Dracula essentially became a sexual predator, plundering the prim, virginal heroines and turning them into sexually aggressive and irresistible creatures), which was only fleetingly touched on in the Lugosi Dracula, is clearly brought out here – Mina sits up in bed in a V-neck nightgown that does a remarkable job of holding in more than one would ever think possible with her window open waiting for Dracula, and at other points the women invitingly tilt their necks up in anticipation. “It is established victims consciously resent being dominated by vampirism but are unable to resist the practice,” Van Helsing states. The Bela Lugosi version bled the film and its women dry of any sexual vitality but here Dracula had well and truly emerged from the Victorian closet. Part of the shock value that The Horror of Dracula had was its very wantonness in this regard.

In person, Dracula was 6’5” Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee incarnated Dracula as a haughty, imposing nobleman (in real life Lee traces his ancestry back to the Emperor Charlemagne). Bela Lugosi was a puffed-up ham, all stuffed-shirt menace; Christopher Lee, going back to the Stoker book, is introduced as a perfect gentleman who with shock rapidity turns into a ravening animal. When this Dracula is enraged, he is an animal, hissing, his eyes turning scarlet red. Not even Bram Stoker managed to show Dracula with this kind of raw lasciviousness. On the side of good was Peter Cushing who makes the definitive Van Helsing. Thankfully gone is the Dutch accent that Stoker gave Van Helsing and Peter Cushing is able to bring his customary genteel and commanding authority to the role. There is no greater sense in cinematic vampire mythology of Van Helsing as a man of reason who sits astride both science and religion with equal ease, holding society safe against primal forces than there is in Peter Cushing’s performance.

Most of all, The Horror of Dracula belongs to Terence Fisher who subsequently became Hammer’s most prominent director and developed a considerable critical cult within genre fandom. Fisher has no time for Bram Stoker’s Romantic imagery (or even subtlety) and heads straight for shock effect with all guns blazing. There is a shock scene where Valerie Gaunt tries to sink her teeth into Jonathan’s neck as he comforts her, only to be interrupted as Christopher Lee bursts in through a door – in this moment, Terence Fisher shock-cuts to a closeup of Lee’s face, eyes wide-open, blazing blood red and two trails of blood dripping from his fangs, and then has him leap across a table to throw both of them aside. The climax offers a stunning battle between the forces of light and darkness and is an indelible image in horror film – Van Helsing pursues Dracula into the library and leaps across a table to rip the curtains open, exposing an area of sunlight, then jumps on a table and grabs two candelabra to form a cross, which he uses to drive Dracula into the beam of sunlight, causing him to crumble into dust that is then blown away by a mysterious gust of wind as the end credits roll. It is a set-piece that even outstrips the climax in the book.

Hammer’s other Dracula films are:– The Brides of Dracula (1960), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1971), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula/Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires/The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (1974). Christopher Lee appears in all except Brides of Dracula and Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Peter Cushing plays Van Helsing again in Brides of Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972, Satanic Rites of Dracula and Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Countess Dracula (1970) is a Hammer film but not a Dracula film and in fact tells the legend of Countess Elizabeth Bathory.

Other adaptations of Dracula are:– the silent classic Nosferatu (1922); Dracula (1931); Count Dracula (1970) a continental production that also featured Christopher Lee; Dracula (1974), a tv movie starring Jack Palance; Count Dracula (1977), a BBC tv mini-series featuring Louis Jourdan; Dracula (1979), a lush remake starring Frank Langella; Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) with Klaus Kinski; Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), featuring Gary Oldman; the Italian-German modernized adaptation Dracula (2002) starring Patrick Bergin; Guy Maddin’s silent ballet adaptation Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002); Dracula (2006), the BBC tv adaptation starring Marc Warren; the low-budget modernised Dracula (2009); and Dario Argento’s Dracula (2012) with Thomas Kretschmann as Dracula.

Terence Fisher’s other genre films are:– the sf films The Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and Spaceways (1953), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973), all for Hammer. Outside of Hammer, Fisher has made the Old Dark House comedy The Horror of It All (1964) and the alien invasion films The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967).

Jimmy Sangster’s other genre scripts are:– X the Unknown (1956), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), the psycho-thrillers A Taste of Fear/Scream of Fear (1961), Paranoiac (1962), Maniac (1963), Nightmare (1963), Hysteria (1965) The Nanny (1965) and Crescendo (1970), and Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), all for Hammer. Sangster’s non-Hammer scripts are the medical vampire film Blood of the Vampire (1958), the alien invasion film The Trollenberg Terror/The Crawling Eye (1958), Jack the Ripper (1959), the Grand Guignol psycho-thriller Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1971), the tv movie psycho-thrillers A Taste of Evil (1971) and Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973), the occult tv movie Good Against Evil (1977), the occult film The Legacy (1979), the spy tv movies Billion Dollar Threat (1979) and Once Upon a Spy (1980), the psycho-thriller Phobia (1980) and the story for Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin (1981). As director, Sangster made three films:– The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), the lesbian vampire film Lust for a Vampire (1971) and the psycho-thriller Fear in the Night (1972), all at Hammer 

Written By Richard Scheib

Images and Banner: Marcus Brooks 

FIFTY SIX YEARS AGO THIS WEEK: HAMMER FILMS 'DRACULA'

FIFTY SIX years ago this week, on 11th November Hammer Films started production on 'DRACULA/ HORROR OF DRACULA' at Bray Studios, starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling and Valerie Gaunt... After 58 years is it still our favourite Hammer Dracula film?

THIS WEEK we start a new series of features 'A TALENT TO TERRIFY: THE 22 FILMS OF PETER CUSHING AND CHRISTOPHER LEE' Look out for promos posts.

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN : HAMMER FILMS ANNOUNCE REMAKE : REVIEW AND GALLERY OF THE CUSHING CLASSIC

In 1953, Nigel Kneale changed the face of television with his serial The Quatermass Experiment.  The play, broadcast live on British television, was a huge hit with the public, establishing Kneale as a force to be reckoned with in the science fiction and fantasy genres.  He would hit a nerve in 1954 with his adaptation of George Orwell's political allegory, 1984.

The teleplay starred Peter Cushing and it would help to make him into the country's first bona-fide TV star.  A reteaming seemed inevitable, and in 1955 they united for The Creature.  The play told of an expedition which sets out to prove the existence of the so-called Yeti, or abominable snowman, and of the in-fighting and conflicts within the group which lead to their eventual destruction.  It was yet another hit, though sadly the BBC couldn't be bothered to make a recording of it.  Thus, the original version of Kneale's thoughtful sci-fi adventure is lost to the mists of time, along with the performances of Cushing and Stanley Baker, cast in the opposing roles of kindly scientists Dr. Rollason and crassly commercial Tom Friend.

Around this same time, Hammer Films had optioned Kneale's first Quatermass adventure for the cinema - the resulting film, The Quatermass Xperiment (the "X" serving to emphasize the "adult" nature of the material), would become a hit for the company, thus steering them in the direction of sci-fi and horror.  Following the success of The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, Hammer continued with more Kneale adaptations, bringing their own versions of the 1955 Quatermass 2 and The Creature to the screen; the latter would be rechristened as The Abominable Snowman or The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, depending on the print.

Hammer enlisted Kneale to write the screenplay, as the writer had been extremely vocal of his criticism of the changes made by director Val Guest on The Quatermass Xperiment, and also saw fit to retain Cushing as one of the leads.  Sadly, they elected to go the "American name" route in casting Tom Friend, however, thus leaving Stanley Baker out of the picture.  Happily, the actor they cast to replace him proved quite capable: Forest Tucker.  The imposing and very brash character actor may have seemed an odd choice for Hammer Horror territory, but he brings just the right attributes to the role of Friend.  He's loud, he's aggressive, he's patently phony in his desire to help further "science," and he plays beautifully off of Cushing's English reserve and sensitivity.

Despite Kneale's issues with his handling of The Quatermass Xperiment (and Quatermass 2, which Kneale was more closely involved in bringing to the screen), Hammer brought Val Guest in to direct.  Guest broke into films quite by chance after slagging Chandu the Magician (1932) in a print interview and boasting that he could write a better film himself; the film's director took him up on the challenge and Guest took to screenwriting like a duck to water.  He would begin directing unassuming programmers but would go on to direct some eclectic and very interesting pictures.  He was precisely the kind of director Hammer liked: strong and authoritative on set, but capable of bringing in the film on budget without succumbing to hubris and excess.  Guest would later describe The Abominable Snowman as a disappointment, citing Hammer's unwillingness to allow him to film on location, but the end product is very well crafted and continued Kneale's trend towards thoughtful, low-key sci-fi with much emphasis on characterization.

The entire cast does a fine job, notably Arnold Marle as the wizened Dalai Lama figure who seems to hold some key to the mystery of the Yeti, but the emphasis is very much on the clash between Cushing's idealist and Tucker's showman.  The two actors do a magnificent job of playing off one another, with Cushing adding depth and nuance to what could have been another stock character.  Cushing's fondness for improvising with props  led director Guest to dub him "props Peter," while his concern over realism prompted him to question Guest as to whether or not one could actually light a cigarette at such a high altitude; Tucker's reply was along the lines of, "I don't care if you really could or not; I'm smoking anyway, so you may as well, too."  Both actors thus take time to visit flavor country while stressing out over the severity of their situation.

Despite Guest's protestations of penny pinching, the film looks impressive.  Arthur Grant would later become Hammer's DP of choice when Jack Asher's meticulous methods made him too expensive for the company, and his later work tended to be functional but uninspired.  For whatever reason, however, he did splendid work in widescreen and black and white: thus, The Abominable Snowman joins Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned and Freddie Francis' Paranoiac as one of the best-looking films he photographed.  The mood is highlighted by a spare, ominous soundtrack by Humphrey Searle, who did far too little work for Hammer.  It may lack the "star value" of Hammer's better-known monster figures, but The Abominable Snowman is an unappreciated gem in their overall body of work and shows once again why Guest was the company's best director of science fiction properties.

Text: Troy Howarth
Banner and Images: Marcus Brooks

THE DAILY CINEMA: DR WHO AND THE DALEKS TRADE PROMOTION

 

A rarely seen full page ad in cinema trade paper 'The Daily Cinema' from 1965 'Dr Who and the Daleks'. Queues around the block to see Peter Cushing as Dr Who and the start of Dalekmania. And all from a time when Dr Who wasn't quite so complicated . . .

You can read Troy Howarth's review with our PCASUK gallery here:

 http://petercushingblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/troy-howarth-reviews-dr-who-and-daleks.html

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PETER CUSHING : HAVE BIKE. WILL TRAVEL!

The ring of a bell, the rattle of a chain and deer stalker on head, Sherlock Holmes? Who could this be, out on their bicycle this fresh and windy morning in Whitstable in 1988?

Peter Cushing loved his bike and locals loved to see him out and about town on it. He purchased it from the Herberts Bicycle shop in Whitstable. (see photo)  After he retired this was Cushing's main mode of transport for getting around town and his trips to the Tudor Tea rooms for his lunch. Often spotted, he whisked around the alleyways and streets of the town, only giving up his bike when he had a nasty fall in the Whitstable High Street trying to avoid a dog in the road. This resulted in a broken hip. It happened on the same day as Cushing was given the news of his O.B.E from The Queen! A day of mixed blessings indeed..