THE TUDOR TEA ROOMS:
A QUICK LOOK AROUND THE TUDOR TEA ROOMS, WHITSTABLE. IN THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS OF PETER'S LIFE MOST DAYS HE WOULD TAKE THE SHORT WALK TO HIS FAVOURITE HAUNT FOR HIS LUNCH.
HE ALWAYS SAT AT HIS RESERVED TABLE, WHERE TODAY A FRAMED PHOTOGRAPH AND PLAQUE BEARING THE INSCRIPTION: 'IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR DEAR PETER CUSHING. A SADLY MISSED FAMILY FRIEND'
Saturday 25 February 2012
Friday 24 February 2012
OUR FIRST WINNER! HAMMER FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAYS COMPETITIONS EVERY FORTNIGHT!
OUR FIRST WINNER! Here's a snap of our first winner in our fortnightly Horror Unlimited / Hammer Frankenstein Fridays Competitions! Colin Beardmore poses proudly here with his prize. A terrific still from Hammer Films 'Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell'.
'Having been the lucky winner and recipient of the competition at The UK Peter Cushing Appreciation, a few words to endorse what a... lovely surprise and what a fantastic photograph of Shane Briant and Peter Cushing from Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell . It is remarkably reproduced and I seen nothing like this before . Clear imagery which looks like 3 D! Especially the plate of brains in the photograph . Thank you to Marcus for a wonderful gift and for the opportunity to own it . Greatly appreciated!' Colin Beardmore.
We be announcing the WINNER TONIGHT of LAST WEEKS COMPETITION here at petercushing.org.uk. theblackboxclub.com and theukpetercushingappreciationsociety FACEBOOK PAGE.
Tuesday 21 February 2012
PETER CUSHING: 'TORTURE GARDEN' SOWING THE SEEDS! PROMOTION GIMMICKS!
THE TRAILER FOR AMICUS FILM PRODUCTIONS 'TORTURE GARDEN' IN 1967. A TIME WHEN CINEMA WAS FUN AND GIMMICKS TO PUT 'BOTTOMS ON SEATS' WAS PART OF THE GAME. HERE THE PAYING PUBLIC WERE PROMISED A PACKET OF 'SEEDS' TO GROW THEIR OWN 'TORTURE GARDEN'!
PETER CUSHING JACK PALANCE: 'TORTURE GARDEN' REVIEW AND GALLERY
PRODUCTION TEAM:
Director: Freddie Francis. Screenplay: Robert Bloch, Based on his Short Stories. Producers: Max J. Rosenberg & Milton Subotsky. Photography: Norman Warwick. Music: Don Banks & James Bernard. Makeup: Jill Carpenter. Art Direction: Don Mingaye & Scott Simon. Production Company: Amicus film Productions.
CAST:
Burgess Meredith : Dr Diablo. Enoch:- Michael Bryant: Colin Williams. Maurice Denham: Uncle Roger. Terror Over Hollywood:- Beverly Adams: Carla Hayes. Robert Hutton: Bruce Benton. John Phillips: Eddie Storm. David Bauer: Mike Charles. Bernard Kay: Dr Helm. Mr Steinway:- Barbara Ewing: Dorothy Endicott. John Standing: Leo. The Man Who Collected Poe:- Jack Palance: Ronald Wyatt. Peter Cushing: Lancelot Canning.
THE PLOT:
At a carnival exhibit, Dr Diablo takes five customers to a back room where he offers them glimpses of their futures. Enoch:- Colin Williams goes to stay with his uncle, determined to get hold of his fortune. He withholds his uncle’s medicine to force him to tell him where the money is, but instead the uncle dies. Afterwards, Colin meets a cat Balthazar that talks to him and demands that he conduct other killings in return for which it will show him where the fortune is. Terror Over Hollywood:- Aspiring actress Carla Hayes determinedly pursues a part in a film. Cast, she soon finds herself falling for her leading man, the enduring star Bruce Benton. But then she finds the secret of movie stars youthful longevity – that they are being replaced by robot doubles. Mr Steinway:- Journalist Dorothy Endicott goes to interview the introverted concert pianist Leo. They become romantically involved but when she tries to draw Leo away from his beloved grand piano Utopie, it becomes jealous. The Man Who Collected Poe:- Ronald Wyatt, a dedicated Edgar Allan Poe collector, goes to visit Lancelot Canning, one of the foremost Poe collectors in the world. Getting drunk, Canning shows him his secret collection of unpublished Poe works. Wyatt then makes the shocking discovery that Canning has brought Poe back to life to write new stories.
COMMENTARY:
Amicus Films had had great success with the portmanteau anthology Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964). They returned with Torture Garden, reuniting director Freddie Francis and star Peter Cushing. Burgess Meredith, in an appallingly fake-looking beard, is clearly cast in the same mold as Peter Cushing’s Dr Schreck in Dr Terror, as a sinister figure introducing the segments on the pretext of showing people their future. On script, Amicus imported American horror author Robert Bloch who was then in the public eye as a result of Alfred Hitchcock’s wildly successful adaptation of his novel Psycho (1960). For Torture Garden, Robert Bloch adapted several of his own short stories published in the 1950s into a script. Bloch later went on to become a mainstay of Amicus, contributing to several other anthologies such as The House That Dripped Blood (1970) and Asylum (1972) and original films like The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966) and The Deadly Bees (1967).
Torture Garden is one of the lesser among Amicus’s mostly worthwhile anthologies. The first two stories are flat, Terror Over Hollywood being the especially weak link in the chain. But the next two are sharp and original – compare them to Dr Terror’s humdrum revamping of standard B-movie themes and it becomes clear just what Bloch manages to bring to the party. Freddie Francis brings his customary stylism and sharp pictorial contrasts between fore– and background. Memorable images abound such as Barbara Ewing being chased about the house by a grand piano. The Edgar Allan Poe segment works the best where Jack Palance and Peter Cushing are clearly enjoying themselves. The linking segment is slight. One might also note that, despite the title, the film features no torture, nor any gardens. For that matter, despite the title Terror Over Hollywood, the segment is actually set in an English studio. Much better anthologies would emerge from Amicus – see Tales from the Crypt (1972), From Beyond the Grave (1973) and the aforementioned Bloch titles.
Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks
Sunday 19 February 2012
Saturday 18 February 2012
PETER CUSHING AND THE RETURN OF THE CYBERNAUTS: THE AVENGERS TV SERIES
50 years ago the very first episode of The Avengers was transmitted. Hot Snow, shown on the 7 December 1961 and introducing Ian Hendry as Dr. Keel and Patrick Macnee as John Steed, doesn't really give much of an indication as to how The Avengers would become the ultimate expression of Sixties pop culture and a global television phenomenon.
Those early episodes are gritty, hard-nosed thrillers and I've already covered Optimum's DVD box set releases of Series Three and Series Four back in 2010 and 2009, charting how this black and white thriller blossomed as the decade moved on, and how, as James Chapman noted in his essay in Windows on the Sixties, "The Avengers both defines and is defined by the 1960s [and reflects] the social changes taking place in Britain during the period" and is a barometer of the "the technological changes that occurred in the television industry moving from 'live' performance to film, and from black-and-white to colour."And with Series 5 we do indeed move into colour, heralded with a caption card 'The Avengers in Color' on each episode as required by the American network ABC who had paid the then-unheard of sum of $2 million for the first 26 episodes and made the series one of the first, if not the first, British series to be aired on prime time U.S. television.
Series 5 takes the fantasy elements prominent in the first Rigg series and exaggerates them with the use of full colour, high-fashion elements (including costumes for Rigg and Macnee designed by Alun Hughes and Pierre Cardin), a bevvy of prominent British character actors playing a wealth of eccentrics and diabolical masterminds and a knowingness about the relationship between the television audience and the programme itself.This knowingness is present both in the number of attempts to break the fourth wall by the leading actors, with asides and direct looks down the lens, to the manipulation of artifice and surface, in set design and narratives that pull apart and glorify the very idea of making films and television programmes. It's very much Clemens and his production team emulating the progress that a director like Federico Fellini was making in his own work in the late 1960s. The Fellinesque qualities of stories such as Epic, Escape in Time and Something Nasty in the Nursery suggest a pop-art style married to increasingly metatextual narratives that comment on the art of storytelling and film-making within the contrived nature of 'Avengersland'.
'Avengersland' is a construction that Fellini would have been proud of and depicts an England of the mind, of the imagination, where increasingly during Series 5 the threats to Steed and Emma become more and more artificially generated. As I discussed in my review of Spirits of the Dead, Fellini's section of that film is about the audience understanding that Terence Stamp's character exists in a knowingly artificial world. Much the same occurs in Brian Clemens concept of The Avengers.
'Avengersland' is a construction that Fellini would have been proud of and depicts an England of the mind, of the imagination, where increasingly during Series 5 the threats to Steed and Emma become more and more artificially generated. As I discussed in my review of Spirits of the Dead, Fellini's section of that film is about the audience understanding that Terence Stamp's character exists in a knowingly artificial world. Much the same occurs in Brian Clemens concept of The Avengers.
'Avengersland' is therefore postmodernist in nature, and Christopher Sharrett, in commenting on Fellini's work from Spirits of the Dead on-wards has called this effect "the sum and substance of post-modernity [where] the piling up of 'signifiers' merely creates new attractions and commodities" and where, by extension, the colour episodes of Avengerland are created "by removing [them] from all social/political/economic context."
This self-evident awareness of its own construction, of the tropes that it uses, marks out the first colour series of The Avengers and is later developed into the Thorson series. Where the previous Rigg series had been 'Britain versus the world' it is worth noting that by 1967 this had shifted to 'Britain is the world' in the colour episodes and was very much in line with London being regarded as the epicentre of the late 1960s explosion of pop, architecture, fashion and design and The Avengers own nostalgia for a non-existent version of England where the troubles of the modern world are eradicated by a desire to recreate Edwardiana via glossy Hollywood pastiche.
Science fiction and fantasy rub shoulders with the series's own comedy of manners and sense of British fair-play, epitomised in everything from the tag sequences, the 'Mrs. Peel We're Needed' introductions and the witty captions that summarise each episode to the gaggle of malcontent British scientists, astronomers, executives, aristocrats, ministers and secret agents who believe they have been treated unfairly in the rush to embrace the 'swinging sixties' modernisation of the nation.
Personally, from Series 5, I would single out:
From Venus With Love - its obsessions about alien invasion from Venus and the deadly threat of laser weapons jostle with a comedy turn from Jon Pertwee and a stylish cameo from Barbara Shelley.
Escape In Time - an utterly surreal story about a man who provides a service to criminals that allows them to escape from the authorities into any part of past history. Superb guest cameo from Peter Bowles and filled with massive chunks of gaudy, dream-like visual/physical comedy that divorces the series entirely from any reality. Looks stunning in its restored format here.
The Winged Avenger - a clever mix of thriller, comic book (the legendary Frank Bellamy supplied the comic strips for the episode) and a tongue in cheek and metatextual nod to the Adam West Batman series in Steed's showdown with the villain where he clouts him over the head with Roy Lichtenstein inspired pop-artwork declaring 'Pow!' 'Blam! and 'Splat!' Another sequence where live action flips back and forth with comic book recreations was way ahead of its time.
Never, Never Say Die - a pastiche of the Frankenstein story with a great guest performance from Christopher Lee.
Epic - stunningly restored here and a wonderfully surreal blend of Sunset Boulevard and Fellini's 8½, thoroughly divorced from realism and driven by completely glorious performances from the triumvirate of Peter Wyngarde, Kenneth Warren and Isa Miranda.
Something Nasty in the Nursery - more surreal and nightmarish imagery that twists childhood memories completely out of shape. It's a very knowing episode that allows the audience in on the artificiality of the storytelling.
Who's Who? - great fun in that it allows Macnee and Rigg to stretch and play against their characters and it features an equally sensational double-act in Freddie Jones and Patricia Haynes as the agents they swap bodies with. The ad-breaks are structured to feature a very tongue-in-cheek recap for the audiences as to who is exactly whom as the story continues.
Return of the Cybernauts - Peter Cushing is sublime as the villainous Paul Beresford, and the story is unusual in that he is actually a friend of Steed and Emma's and there are undercurrents of jealousy from Steed when Paul gets very enamoured of Emma.
Dead Man's Treasure - glorious romp combining a treasure hunt, a cross-country car chase that showcases the English countryside at its most beautiful, a deadly racing-car simulator and Laurie Johnson's bouncy incidental music.
The Positive-Negative Man - more surreal, comic strip inspired material successfully blended with an espionage thriller and featuring Ray McAnally at roughly the same time he went on to make the sublime Spindoe for Granada.
The quality of the image here is again very good and with many episodes it is truly sensational, with vibrant and exceptional colour and contrast that show off the gorgeous sets and location shooting and often revealing fine detail in faces and costumes.
These are blemish free digital masters, exquisitely restored but there is a noticeable shift in the quality of cinematography between the earlier and later episodes in the production run. Certainly the contrast and colour fidelity isn't as robust in The Fear Merchants for example but I would put that down to the way it was shot rather than a fault of the restoration.
The restoration is of such good quality that it simply begs for a Blu-Ray release in high definition and I hope that Optimum will be looking to achieve this in the next year as I think these will look particularly stunning in HD.
The highly effective and memorable music from Laurie Johnson is well represented on the soundtrack but alas, there does seem to be a problem with the sound mix. It is obvious that the vocal track is slightly speeded up and is particularly noticeable with male voices, especially Steed's, which are pitched slightly too high. Optimum have already been made aware of this and are offering replacement discs for this set. A real shame that problems like this are not being identified by the company's own quality control department. It's a blemish on an otherwise fantastic DVD set.
The commentary to The Winged Avenger, moderated effectively by Jaz Wiseman, covers writer Richard Harris's contribution to the original black and white series of The Avengers and the comic book influences that went into the creation of his script for the colour Rigg series. The chat is interesting and informative and very much focuses on his career as a writer, including his work on the Hancock scripts for ATV and developing Man in a Suitcase.
Perhaps the stand-out commentary on this set has to be from the legendary Peter Wyngarde on the episode Epic. Wyngarde is clearly not that concerned about remembering the more intricate details of the episode (although he dedicates it to colleagues James Hill, Isa Miranda, Kenneth Warren and Albert Fennell) but goes on to regale us with tons of anecdotes about his theatrical career, working with Ralph Richardson, and breaks off to put in a performance as George Sanders and later recites various songs and poems. A true 'luvvie', bless him.
Stunt artist Cyd Childs and writer/producer Brian Clemens also offer interesting stories and anecdotes on their own commentaries for, respectively, Return of the Cybernauts and Murdersville.
Once again there is a massive amount of supplementary material on the DVD set:
- Archive German TV interview with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg
- Episode trims from The Fear Merchants, Escape In Time, From Venus With Love and The See-Through Man
- The Avengers – A Retrospective (documentary produced for the Lumiere VHS releases)
- ATV newsreel footage (Diana Rigg receives TV Award)
- The Avengers – “They’re Back” archive trailer
- Filmed episode intros by Brian Clemens to The Bird Who Knew Too Much, The Living Dead, Epic, The Correct Way To Kill, The Superlative Seven, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Station, The Joker and Murdersville
- Granada + points for each episode
- Episode Reconstructions for lost Series 1 episodes One For The Mortuary, Death on The Slipway, Tunnel of Fear and Dragonsfield
- 1960s German Titles
- Insert reprint of series 5 promotional brochure
- Stills gallery for featured episodes (literally hundreds of images)
- PDF material including shooting scripts, TV Times and more
An essential purchase but marred by that sound fault so proceed with caution and check that Optimum are still replacing the erroneous discs and replacing stock in stores.
The Avengers
Digitally Restored Special Edition: The Complete Series 5 / 1966-67
Released 25 October 2010 / Optimum Releasing / OPTD1751 / Region 2 / Cert PG / Running time: 1,127 mins / 4:3
Review: Frank Collins
Images: Marcus Brooks
VINCENT PRICE AND PETER CUSHING: PRESS BOOK MADHOUSE (1974)
GREAT EXAMPLE OF 'MADHOUSE' PROMOTION BACK IN 1974
SUSAN DENBERG, PETER CUSHING AND OTHER HAMMER FILM FACES BEHIND THE SCENES ON 'FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN' HAMMER FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAY
SUSAN DENBERG POSES WITH HER CO STAR AND
FRANKENSTEIN'S ASSISTANT THORLEY WALTERS
EVERYONE POSES FOR THE CAMERA! PETER HAS A LAUGH AT
PRODUCER ANTHONY NELSON KEYS, WEARING HIS TOP HAT!
THE TEAM: PETER CUSHING, SUSAN DENBERG, PRODUCER ANTHONY NELSON
KEYS AND DIRECTOR TERENCE FISHER POSE FOR THE CAMERA AT FRENSHAM
PONDS, THE LOCATION FOR THE GUILLOTINE SCENES IN 'FRANKENSTEIN
CREATED WOMAN'
SUSAN DENBERG AND PRODUCER ANTHONY NELSON KEYS SHELTER
UNDER A BROLLY BESIDE A PROP ROAD SIGN BEARING THE NAMES
OF TWO FAMILAUR HAMMER FILM TOWNS :
KARLSBAD AND INNSBAD.
THE BROLLY BECOMES A HANDY PROP AS BOTH PETER AND
SUSAN DENBERG TAKE A STROLL AROUND BRAY STUDIOS, HOME TO
HAMMER FILMS AND SO MANY OF THERE BEST MOTION PICTURES.
MORE POSING FOR THE STILLS MAN
NOTE THE SCRIPT UNDER PETER'S ARM IN THIS SHOT. PENS PENCILS AND
RUBBER BANDS. PETER WAS WELL KNOWN FOR HIS NOTE TAKING AND
SCRIBBLES IN THE MARGINS OF HIS SCRIPTS. POINTERS TO DIALOGUE,
REMINDERS AND ALSO DOODLINGS. PETER LOVED TO DOODLE
WHILST WAITING, SOMETIMES LONG HOURS ON A SET.
AND THE SHOOT WRAPS WITH ONE OF PETER'S SIGNATURE
KISSES TO HIS CO STAR, SUSAN DENBERG
Friday 17 February 2012
FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN: THE CLASSIC POSE AND ONE OF THE FIRST PLACES IT APPEARED!
FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN: THE CLASSIC POSE AND ONE
OF THE FIRST PLACES IT APPEARED!
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