Lights, Camera, Chaos!: Nigel Kneale’s “The Dummy”

Now Playing: "The Dummy," (Episode of the UK TV series Beasts, originally broadcast November 20, 1976)

Pros: Nigel Kneale's teleplay is a wrily humorous send-up of Hammer Studios; Features an off-the-wall creation of a peculiar monster
Cons: Plausibility is sacrificed for the convenience of the plot

Yes, I know that the blog title is FILMS From Beyond the Time Barrier, but every once in a while, when the stars and planets are in perfect alignment and broadcast reception is crystal clear, I like to write about the classic TV that has entertained me over the years. Besides which, it’s time for another installment of Terence Canote’s Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon over at A Shroud of Thoughts. You’ll want to adjust your antenna in order to tune in all the great posts that Terence is hosting this year.

Where would the movies be without that great 20th century innovation known as method acting? We might never have thrilled to Marlon Brando’s signature, anguished cry of Stellaaaa! in his sweaty t-shirt. The only Dean in our collective memory might be that guy named Jimmy who sold sausages on TV, instead of the late, great James Dean. Worst of all, we might never have gotten to know that bottomless well of feelings that is Shia LaBeouf.

From its origins in early 20th century Russian theater, the technique’s creator, Konstantin Stanislavski, could scarcely have imagined how popular it would become thousands of miles away and many years later in America, thanks to the tireless efforts of Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. 

In the hands of Hollywood, this method of fully inhabiting a character’s head has sometimes allowed actors to soar to sublime heights, and almost as often to plumb the depths of ridiculous excess.

One of the most notorious adherents of method acting, Dustin Hoffman, has done both. While making Marathon Man (1976), in which he portrays a NY graduate student caught up in a conspiracy involving Nazi war criminals and smuggled diamonds, Hoffman decided to inhabit his role as completely as possible.

The story goes that when co-star Laurence Olivier asked Hoffman how filming had gone for a scene in which his character was sleep-deprived for days, Hoffman admitted that he had made himself stay up for 72 hours in preparation. To which the classically-trained actor replied, “Why don’t you just try acting?” 

A few years later on the set of Kramer vs. Kramer (1981), Hoffman would take it upon himself to make co-star Meryl Streep suffer for her art too. His tactics included abruptly smashing a wine glass to get an unrehearsed reaction, slapping her between takes to increase the tension between their two characters, and reminding Streep of the recent death of her boyfriend to up the emotional intensity of her scenes. 

Streep won her first Oscar for the role, and Hoffman was the first person she thanked in her acceptance speech, but it does call into question the ethics of involving others involuntarily in the madness of your method. (Not to mention, smashing wine glasses without warning could put somebody’s eye out.)

"Is it safe?" With Dustin Hoffman on the set, maybe not.

Speaking of madness in the method, the protagonist of today’s featured episode, the titular “Dummy,” plumbs those depths and then some. In this cleverly constructed story centered on a B movie production, actor Clyde Boyd (Bernard Horsfall), aka “The Dummy,” is having a very bad day on the set of the latest entry in the long running Dummy horror franchise.

It’s bad enough that Clyde has to wear a heavy, cumbersome and stiflingly hot monster suit, but in the middle of an important take, he sees his arch nemesis, actor Peter Wager (Simon Oakes) hanging around the set.

It seems that during a time when Clyde was despairing over his stalled career, Wager started wooing Clyde’s attractive wife, and before long she had left him for the slimy lothario, taking their young daughter with her.

Clyde’s friend, producer “Bunny” Nettleton (Clive Swift), had managed to get financing for yet another Dummy picture, saving Clyde from destitution, but unwittingly also hired the very man who Clyde blamed for stealing his family.

With Wager hanging around, Clyde keeps freezing up and blowing the takes. The pressure is on, because a crucial supporting actor, Sir Ramsey (Thorley Walters), is insisting that after the day’s shooting he’s off to a vacation in the sunny Caribbean, and if the scenes aren’t completed, tough luck.

The problematic graveyard scene in the fictional B movie production, Revenge of the Dummy.

Bunny is caught in a triangular dilemma with his lead actor having a nervous breakdown, the cause of the breakdown refusing to bow out for the good of the production, and another pompous, selfish supporting actor ready to blow this pop stand to stick his toes in a sandy beach.

When Clyde retreats to his dressing room to start hitting the bottle, Bunny, desperate to get the picture in the can, has to give him the pep talk of his life:

“[Y]ou’re something different Clyde. I don’t think you’ve ever known yourself. You work in another dimension altogether. We never thought about it, we just let it happen. We never talked about it, but we felt it... So did all those other people, all over the world. You don’t need lines written down by other men, other people’s thoughts to repeat… it happens deep down, like going down to the sea, where words don’t function anymore. The rules are different… pressure… perceptivity… awareness… on that level, you reach us.”

Then, when Clyde is ready to once again don the Dummy’s monster mask,

“It’s starting Clyde, can’t you feel it? The power in you? This is it, this is the part I can hardly watch. Oh my god I never wanted to see this, I never wanted to be in this room when you… [pausing for dramatic effect] become the Dummy! I can feel it, I can feel it taking over!”

It’s a rousing halftime football speech and method acting master class rolled into one. Stanislavski couldn’t have done better himself. But unfortunately for Bunny and everyone else on the set, the speech works too well. Powered by a vast reserve of pent-up emotional pain, Clyde actually becomes one with The Dummy, and embarks on a rampage that would make even Dustin Hoffman recoil in horror.

Bunny channels Stanislavski for the benefit of his faltering star.

Before it’s all played out, a cast member is choked, the police called in, and Clyde’s wife summoned to try to talk him down. And as if things couldn’t get any worse, arch-nemesis Wager is lurking around, itching to use the shotgun he’s retrieved from his car. Can Bunny corral the monster he’s created before someone else gets hurt?

"The Dummy" was one of 6 episodes in an anthology series, Beasts, broadcast in the UK by ITV in 1976. The series was the brainchild of writer Nigel Kneale, a master of sci-fantasy, horror and the macabre. (Mr. Kneale is no stranger to Films From Beyond -- see my reviews of two Hammer film adaptations of his work, The Abominable Snowman and Quatermass 2, and his fascinatingly prophetic dystopian teleplay, "The Year of the Sex Olympics.")

Kneale is best known for his creation Dr. Bernard Quatermass, the crustily courageous scientist whose exploits in several BBC series of the ‘50s thrilled large and enthusiastic UK audiences, and who became even more popular with the Hammer film adaptations (The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass and the Pit in addition to Quatermass 2).

In spite of creating some of the BBC’s most watched series up to that time, all good collaborations must eventually come to an end, and by the mid-'70s Kneale and the BBC had parted ways due to a combination of personal and creative differences.

The year before Beasts, Kneale had scored a success with the ATV production company, penning a creepy folk horror episode, “Murrain” (1975), for their anthology series Against the Crowd. ATV approached him with the idea of writing a whole set of episodes for a thematic anthology series. Kneale proposed exploring the dark, bestial side of humanity through its various relationships with the animal kingdom, and Beasts was born.

As Kneale biographer Andy Murray relates,

“The decision was taken that few animals would actually be seen in the new plays. They would simply be heard, or their presence and influence would be felt, a latent, invisible force. The key to the project, though, was that there would be a great deal of variety between the six plays. ‘That was the first thing that [ATV producer] Nick Palmer and I agreed on,’ Kneale recalls, ‘to make them as different as possible from one another: one would be a funny one, another one horrifying, another one more ordinary.’” [Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale, Headpress, 2006, p. 126]

Illustrating this variety, in addition to "The Dummy," fan favorites from the series include “Baby,” about a rural veterinarian dealing with superstitious locals who believe that the mummified body of an unidentified animal found in a farmhouse is a witch’s familiar, and “During Barty’s Party,” about a middle-aged couple trapped in their home by a pack of super-intelligent rats.

The animal connection is less direct in “The Dummy,” although the creature suit that Clyde wears is definitely animalistic (not to mention cheap-looking even for a B movie), bringing out his simmering bestial nature at a very inopportune time.

The Dummy gets a final going-over before his big scene.

While the episode isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, there are farcical elements throughout that elicit the occasional knowing grin. “The Dummy” seems like a comically inappropriate name for a 7-foot-tall monster that is supposed to thrill and terrify audiences, but the character is literally dumb (as in mute), and the actor who animates it has also lost his voice, as it were, through a series of traumatic life set-backs.

Then there’s the duo of Joan Eastgate (Lillias Walker), a journalist covering the making of the latest Dummy movie, and Mike (Ian Thompson), the put-upon studio publicist who tries in vain to prevent Joan from glomming on to the production’s many glitches, foremost of which is the star’s incipient meltdown.

At one point Mike, with barely concealed boredom, rattles off all the films in the Dummy series (which seems to be Kneale's dig at the Hammer horror film cycle that had finally played itself out in the mid-'70s). It’s also a knowing-grin moment for anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the film industry's love of sequels:

Joan: “How many have there been?”
Mike: “Dummy films? Six. (Counting on his fingers) Dummy, Horror of the Dummy, Death of the Dummy, Return of the Dummy, and, uh, Dummy and the Devil, Dread of the Dummy, and this one’s a Revenge… a touch obvious in my view…”

Mike almost runs out of fingers trying to count all the Dummy movies.

Later on, in a conversation with Bunny, Joan becomes a sort of one-woman Greek chorus foreshadowing doom, as she likens Clyde to a ritual dancer wearing a ceremonial mask.

Joan: “It’s not a disguise, they [the tribe] know the man’s inside, but it doesn’t matter. They believe the mask itself is alive, always, all the time, the man is just helping… very deep stuff…”

On the other end of the intellectual spectrum are the other “dummies,” the hopelessly narcissistic supporting actors Wager and Sir Ramsey. Simon Oates does a great job with his deplorable Wager character, oozing contempt for Clyde at every opportunity, while at the same time disingenuously protesting to Bunny that it wasn’t his fault that the man’s wife got fed up with him.

Thorley Walters as Sir Ramsey is the very picture of pompous self-regard, making only the feeblest efforts to appear concerned after a man has been killed and the set is in chaos; you can almost see the wheels turning in his head trying to figure out if the tragedy will affect his vacation plans.

Ramsey and Wager yuck it up as the set of Revenge of the Dummy devolves into chaos.

Kneale, with dozens of TV and movie projects under his belt by this point, wanted to capture his film industry experience via "The Dummy" episode. Biographer Murray again:

“With a generous helping of barbed humour, Kneale -- who’d always been fond of backstage drama -- was using his own experiences at Bray Studios to satirise the glory days of Hammer. ‘It was staged just like a Hammer film. I’d watched them at it. They were so cosy, these pictures, there was never anything less horrific! But if it had been real and somebody had got accidentally killed, well, that would be a different thing entirely. Not something you’d bargained for.’” [Murray, p. 130]

There are some things about Kneale’s fictional Hammer-lite studio that don’t quite ring true. Clyde has been the man in the monster suit for all the Dummy films, and characters at various times talk about his star quality, but it’s really the suit that’s the star, and seemingly any competent extra could wear the thing. At one point, as Clyde is having his breakdown, Bunny and the director talk about the possibility of replacing him, but dismiss it -- somehow, it wouldn’t be the same without Clyde in the suit. With so much on the line, it doesn’t make much sense.

Regardless, Kneale, with his tongue firmly in cheek, suggests that the so-called “primitive” dancer becoming one with the spirits in his ceremonial mask is not so different from the modern method actor parading around a movie set in his monster suit.

Even if the idea of method actors as shamans seems absurd, “The Dummy” is worth a look, if only for Bunny’s impromptu pep talk. It’s one of the most off-the-wall scenes of a monster being created that you’ll ever see.

Behold, the Dummy!

Where to find it: Streaming | Complete series

Fabulous Faceless Foes of Fifties Sci-Fi: Special CMBA ‘50s Blogathon Edition

Note to my readers: This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association's (CMBA) Fabulous Films of the Fifties blogathon, running May 22 - 26. Check it out for some truly fabulous films covered by a group of very talented bloggers (there are even a couple more sci-fi entries besides this one).

Here we are at the beginning of summer 2014, and to quote one of the great boys of summer, Yogi Berra, “it’s deja vu all over again!” As temperatures heat up, here comes another Cold War front, blowing from West to East and back again, chilling relations between the world’s singular hyperpower and new-old rivals who are reluctant to take orders from Uncle Sam.

Even as his own house is falling down around his ears, the old red, white and blue coot apparently can think of nothing better to do than to grab a pointy stick and go looking for Russian bears and Chinese dragons to poke in their lairs. It’s not enough for the old man to clench his teeth, shake his fist and yell at the rest of the world to stay off his lawn. He insists on telling the rest of world how to tend their own lawns.

It’s gotten me thinking about the ‘50s again, and the sense of deja vu is overwhelming. It’s been a long time since I worried about The Bomb, but now visions of shelters and duck-and-cover drills have come flooding back into my sleep-deprived brain. I’ve been eyeing my backyard -- being mostly cement deck and landscaping rock, it doesn’t seem like a good candidate for a homemade bomb shelter (and I think the neighborhood association would look askance at that as well).  Maybe the better course would be to put in a hot tub to give us the option of one last, comforting soak before the ICBMs strike.

I don’t know about you, but today’s Cold War redux makes me doubly nostalgic for the ‘50s, when at least we had reasonably competent adults in government who knew the horrors of war and could respond to crises without constantly barking about military action. Ike, we miss you!

So here we are -- everything old has become new again. The films covered here mirror the public angst occasioned by the burgeoning atomic/space age, when it was hard to avoid visions of mushroom clouds and missiles raining down on defenseless cities. Some ‘50s sci-fi dealt directly with atomic war: Five (1951), World Without End (1956), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), to name a few. Others, like the films below, presented the challenges of out-of-control science and politics more obliquely, with atomic-age threats that were faceless and amorphous, and all the more terrifying for it.

In today’s neo-Atomic, hair-trigger world, there are more apocalyptic TV series and movies than you can shake a pointy stick at. Lately zombies have been the preponderant pop culture stand-ins for decline and disintegration, but with the success of the recent Godzilla reboot, it seems the time is ripe for bringing back old familiar faces from the first atomic age. So, is the time also ripe for bringing back faceless, radioactive blobs? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Now Playing: X: the Unknown (1956)

Pros: Dark, imaginative, and well-acted, especially by American Dean Jagger
Cons: Hammer's early black and white sci-fi offerings should be more widely available on video or online

In brief: During an army training exercise in the Scottish hinterlands, a fissure violently opens up in the earth, wounding two soldiers. Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), a scientist with the nearby Atomic Energy lab is brought in to investigate, and immediately recognizes the soldiers’ wounds as radiation burns.

A short while later, two local boys are hiking through the woods at night. One of them sees something that terrorizes him as his companion flees. He’s brought in to the hospital with severe radiation poisoning and burns, and soon dies. Police inspector McGill (Leo McKern) joins Royston in investigating the mysterious radiation plague.

The mysterious force soon ups the ante. A hospital radiation lab technician is melted by the thing right in front of his girlfriend, and two more army sentries fall prey to it. A brave volunteer rappels down into the fissure and is pulled out just in the nick of time, but not before he catches sight of something utterly unearthly and terrible.

The army’s solution is to bomb the thing and seal up the chasm, but Royston realizes that conventional military action won’t stop something that can change its shape and grow ever bigger and more powerful as it gobbles up every radiation source it can find. Royston sets an elaborate scientific trap for the thing before it can get much farther in its quest for larger atomic installations to eat.

X: The Unknown is dark, atmospheric, and a great example of how, even with a limited budget, you can create mounting suspense by keeping your monster in the shadows and letting your viewer’s imagination do the work. This British version of the blob predated the Steve McQueen classic by a couple of years.


Key Cold War Confrontation: “American Joseph Losey, [then a] resident in Britain after being labelled a possible Communist sympathizer by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, was hired to direct. (Losey was possibly attracted to the script’s ‘ban the bomb’ ethos, most explicit in the scene where Royston is told: ‘you meddle with things that kill!’) Under the pseudonym Joe Walton, Losey supervised casting and set construction, only to contract pneumonia while location scouting (conveniently, given that his presence riled McCarthyite Dean Jagger and jeopardized American distribution prospects). Days before filming commenced, Anthony Hinds found a last-minute replacement in Leslie Norman…” [Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, Titan Books, 2007]

Key screenwriter: Beginning in 1949, Jimmy Sangster worked his way up the ladder at Exclusive/Hammer films from assistant director to production manager to hot-shot screenwriter. X: The Unknown was his first sci-fi/horror script for Hammer, and its success led to the career-changing gig writing Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which made Hammer’s worldwide reputation. He would contribute many more classic scripts to Hammer, including Horror of Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960) and Paranoiac (1963), among others.

"The menace that can kill, but cannot be killed!"

Now Playing: Quatermass II: Enemy from Space (1957)

Pros: Thoughtful, suspenseful adaptation that combines alien infiltration with a creepy, mostly unseen monster
Cons: Ditto: Hard to find on video or online

In brief: Undaunted by the dramatic failure of his first piloted space mission (The Quatermass Xperiment, 1955), the irrepressible Prof. Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is busy planning to build a colony on the moon. Informed by higher-ups that the project has been canceled, his attention is diverted by reports of meteorites falling in the vicinity of the rural town of Winnerden Flats. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh (Bryan Forbes) drive out to a bluff overlooking the remote area. Below is a newly-built complex that looks suspiciously like Quatermass’ moonbase. Embedded in the ground all around them are mysterious rocks that look like recent arrivals.

March digs one out and it fractures, blowing something into his face as he collapses. Armed soldiers drive up and quickly surround the scientists. As the soldiers carry Marsh away over Quatermass’ strident objections, he notices that both Marsh and one of the soldiers have odd V-shaped marks on their faces.

Quatermass can’t get any help or information about the facility from the close-mouthed locals. Quatermass deduces that the aerodynamic meteorites are containers designed to harbor something living, something that breathes a completely different atmosphere.

Quatermass learns from Scotland Yard that the facility houses a secret government project to produce synthetic food. The rocket scientist persuades a curious MP, Vincent Broadhead (Tom Chatto), to allow him to join a group of government officials for a tour of the project.

At the facility, Quatermass and Broadhead peel off from the group to look for Marsh. Broadhead manages to get inside a containment dome at the cost of his life-- he comes stumbling out covered in a burning, acidic black slime. Quatermass manages to escape by the skin of his teeth.

Quatermass raises the alarm with Scotland Yard and whoever else will listen. But it quickly becomes evident that an alien intelligence has captured the minds of many police and government officials who are covering up the real purpose of the supposed synthetic food factory. Quatermass himself manages to steal a peek at a gigantic, pulsating protoplasmic thing housed in one of the containment domes.

An angry mob of locals storms the alien-run facility -- a human counter-revolution. But there’s also the original source of the alien contamination to deal with -- an asteroid in close earth orbit. Perhaps Quatermass’ moon rocket can be repurposed to deal with the threat…

Based on Nigel Kneale’s hit six part series for the BBC, Quatermass II is considered by many to be superior to Hammer’s first Quatermass adaptation, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), and one of the very best films in the Studio’s entire catalog. Like X: The Unknown, it excels at creeping out audiences with the suggested and the unseen, while adding an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like layer of alien infiltration and conspiracy.

One scene in particular, where alien-controlled humans use their non-infected brethren to stop the flow of deadly oxygen to the alien domiciles, uses the viewer’s imagination, rather than gore, to great effect.

Key Player: Depending upon who you ask, American Brian Donlevy was either the worst thing that ever happened to the Quatermass movies, or he was down-to-earth and a delight to work with. The American distributor insisted on a recognizable American name to help market the films in the States, so Donlevy was brought in to play the lead in the first two adaptations.

Writer Nigel Kneale hated, hated, HATED Donlevy in the role of his cherished Prof. Quatermass: “He really was very drunk indeed. He used to take a liquid lunch up in the village, and when he got back he’d sunken half a bottle of whiskey. They had to tell him the name of the film, the scene he was in and then raise the ‘idiot board’ so he could read off it.” [Quoted in Hearn and Barnes, The Hammer Story]

Director Val Guest, on the other hand, had nothing but kind words for his star: “[W]ho could be more down-to-earth than the Oscar-nominated Brian Donlevy? Brian had been-there-done-that and, he told us proudly, ours would be his 57th motion picture. What’s more he was a delight to work with, being sure enough of his trade to realise, unlike so many other ‘names,’ that he didn’t have to be difficult to hide his insecurity.

In fact, the only trouble I had with Donlevy was trying to keep his toupee on, or as he used call it, his ‘rug.’ … Twice Brian’s ‘rugs’ had taken off into the dust-filled yonder and we were now down to the last one hairdressing had with them on location. ‘Whatever you do,’ I instructed Brian, ‘keep facing the propellers and we’ll be okay.’ He did just what he was told and we got one of the best shots of the day. ‘Great. Cut. Print. We got it!’ Whereupon a jubilant Brian turned to grin at me and away went his last rug!” [So You Want to Be In Pictures: The Autobiography of Val Guest, Reynolds & Hearn, 2001]

"If you ever hear a sound like this, run for your life!"

Now Playing: The Flame Barrier (1958)

Pros: B veterans Kathleen Crowley and Arthur Franz generate some sparks
Cons: Confusing mash-up of jungle adventure and sci-fi; Obviously rushed into production to take advantage of Sputnik headlines; Also hard to find a reliable copy

In brief: It’s the dawn of the space age, and America has just launched its latest wonder, the X117 satellite. Even with the most powerful rockets, the X117 proves the old adage that what goes up must come down as it encounters what the film’s grim narrator calls the “flame barrier” -- the fictional boundary where the last of earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space meet, supposedly preventing man-made objects from completely escaping the earth. Back in the ‘50s, if it wasn’t jealous aliens, it was flame barriers that were going to kick us in the pants if we tried to reach for the stars.

Cut to beautiful, feisty Carol Dahlmann (Kathleen Crowley), wife of a wealthy industrialist and amateur satellite tracker who has disappeared in the Mexican Yucatan jungle trying to find the downed spacecraft. Carol is determined to find her husband, and has been given the name of American expatriate, entrepreneur and handy jungle guide, Dave Hollister (Arthur Franz) to help her in her quest.

In a remote Mexican village on the edge of the jungle, Carol first runs into Dave’s younger, free-spirited (and seemingly alcoholic) brother Matt (Robert Brown). Matt takes an immediate shine to the attractive but earnest blonde -- not so older brother Dave, who gruffly spurns Carol’s offer to pay him handsomely for help in searching the jungle for her missing husband.

Dave, a cynic to the core, tells Carol that he thinks she’s more interested in finding hubby dead so she can inherit his fortune. After getting slapped, he coolly negotiates a deal wherein he gets a big cut if they find the industrialist alive, and even more if they can prove he’s dead.

As they set out into the jungle, Dave callously hones in on all of Carol’s pampered ways and naivete. But as she perseveres despite encounters with tarantulas, poisonous snakes, iguanas, creepy skeletons, and panicked Indian guides, he develops a grudging respect for the plucky woman.

An awkward triangle develops between the brothers and Carol, which is quickly set aside when they stumble upon Dahlmann’s abandoned camp. In a nearby cave, they find the X117 satellite and Dahlmann’s corpse enveloped in a mysterious, gelatin-like mass. Bad enough, but the mass seems to be generating a deadly energy field that doubles in size every several hours. If they let it go, it could potentially envelop the world!

This spherical hunk of metal was directly responsible
for giving us The Flame Barrier!

The Flame Barrier plays like a mundane jungle action-adventure yarn that had space-age/sci-fi elements tacked onto it at the last minute to take advantage of the day’s headlines. (Indeed, it was released just several months after the Soviets launched the first orbital satellite Sputnik, rattling America’s confidence in its technological superiority.)

The few critics who’ve paid attention to Flame Barrier over the years have been hard on it, decrying the lame love triangle that takes up so much of the movie, and the crazy pseudo-scientific premise that generates confusion rather than suspense at the climax. The best thing Flame Barrier has going for it is Kathleen Crowley, who lends a lot of life and determination to her character. In spite of all the humiliations and frights courtesy of Dave and the jungle, she sees her mission through and emerges all the stronger.

Key player: Energetic, attractive Kathleen Crowley started in TV at the beginning of the ‘50s. Her other notable sci-fi/horror credits include Target Earth (1954) and Curse of the Undead (1959; featuring a vampire gun-fighter). By the 1960s she was almost exclusively doing television, including a stint in the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller series.

Key writer: George Worthing Yates, credited with the story, was the nephew of the legendary founder of Republic Pictures, Herbert J. Yates. George lent his prodigious imagination to some of the iconic sci-fi films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including Them! (1954), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958). He also penned another obscure but highly original faceless foe pic, Space Master X-7 (1958). But that wasn’t all. His story “King Kong vs. Prometheus” inspired the Toho super-hit King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962).

Nigel Kneale: The Oracle of British Television

Now Playing: The Year of the Sex Olympics (BBC2 Theatre 625 series, 1968)

Pros: A 40+ year-old teleplay that is as relevant now as it was when it was aired; Clever construction of a future world on a TV movie budget
Con: Only surviving print of this color TV movie is black and white

I know what you're thinking-- he's so desperate for attention and readers that he's taken to writing about pornography! Well, you're WRONG!! With the summer Olympics being held in London this year, I thought I'd capitalize on all the hype to showcase a son of Britain who set some records of his own in the great "sport" of television and entertainment. If they gave out gold medals to TV writers, he would have amassed quite a collection in his distinguished career. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that one of Nigel Kneale's more interesting and prophetic teleplays has both 'sex' and 'Olympics' in the title. Anyway, read on, it's not what you think…)

Speaking of the Olympics, I have a confession to make. I'm just not into them any more. They're boring and irritating. They're the epitome of wretched excess. Every four years, the host city uses troops and police to sweep the area clean of "undesirables." Money that could and should be used for health, education and basic infrastructure is used to construct elaborate stadiums and and other athletic venues, many of which are left to rot after the circus moves on. A huge chunk of change is spent on the opening and closing ceremonies alone, with each host and set of sponsors desperately trying to upstage the last. The results look like someone gave a group of demented, spoiled 12-year-olds a billion dollars to spend on the biggest, craziest, "awesomest" spectacle their little brains could come up with. The games themselves have expanded to the point of absurdity, and the inclusion of professional athletes has greatly diminished whatever noble luster the Olympics may once have had. The U.S. basketball "dream" team's recent massacre of Nigeria was an embarrassment and an insult to the very idea of "competitive athletics."  The final nail in the coffin as far as my interest goes is the stench of corruption and money that follows the thing around year after year. From the International Olympic Committee scandals to the frequent revelations of cheating and doping on the part of athletes (not to mention revelations of their sex lives… from their mothers!!), I've seen way too much of how this particular "sausage" gets made, and I've lost my appetite for it.

The sample audience seems to like what they're seeing.

Speaking of appetites, Nigel Kneale's The Year of the Sex Olympics features a dystopian future where normal human appetites for sex and food are considered problematic by elites who want to control population in a world of dwindling resources. The world is divided into a tiny minority of "high drive" people, selected via genetic screening to run things and to breed more high-drivers, and everyone else... aka, the low drive proles who need to be kept placid and dull and content with their meager lives. In this Brave New World, the drug of choice is television. The masses are fed a steady TV diet of mind numbing, repetitive sex and food fights, the better to suppress their appetites for both. The first commandment of this society is to "Watch, not do." The masses are to live their lives vicariously through the images on their TV screens. Not only has war been banished, but any form of tension is considered bad -- sit back, relax, and let the high-drives do the driving (of society) for you.

But the high-drive life is not a bed of roses, as Nat Mender (Tony Vogel) finds out over the 103 minute running time of the teleplay. Nat is the producer of the highest rated show in the land, "Sportsex." Although the show is auditioning couples on the air to compete in the Sex Olympics, the sample audiences (who are monitored 24/7 by video) are not responding well. The pressure is on to keep them glued to their TVs and satiated. But Nat himself is feeling restless and unsatisfied. He has a 9 year-old daughter with another network employee, Deanie (Suzanne Neve), but hasn't seen her since birth (children are raised by the state, not their parents). He gets a pep talk from the network co-ordinator (Leonard Rossiter) about how important he and his job are, how vital it is to serve up vicarious, televised experience to the masses -- "apathy control" -- to keep them docile and content: "Cool the audience, cool the world."

Nat's disgruntlement takes a new turn when Deanie introduces him to her friend and fellow employee Kin Hodder (Martin Potter), who designs and hangs drapes on the set of "Artsex." Kin is seriously depressed. He sees no use in what he does. He wants to be a real artist, one who makes pictures that "stay" (drawings, paintings), not the abstract, animated graphics that are supposed to calm audiences between show segments. Nat agrees to look at Kin's pictures. (See the clip below.)

Kin's pictures are nightmarish collection of distorted, agonized faces. Deanie is disturbed by the pictures ("They make me shudder!"), but Nat can't take his eyes off them. In spite of himself, Nat tries to help the deeply disturbed Kin show his pictures on the air. When Kin tries to fend off network security to show his pictures on live TV, he falls from a scaffolding and is killed. At that point both Nat and the network producers have an epiphany. Nat finds his humanity, while the network finds a new ratings sensation. It seems the sample audiences responded very, very well to Kin's on-air tumble. Nat's associate, Lasar Opie (Brian Cox) marvels, "They can take tension… they want tension!"

Nat Mender and family realize that "Live-Life"
is nothing like a studio.

When the network realizes that showing people at risk will keep the masses glued to their TVs, they develop a new series, the "Live-Life Show," wherein a family is plopped down in the middle of a desolate, deserted island to fend for themselves with only the basics: shelter, fire, a few warm clothes, and a limited supply of food. If they run out of food and can't find any more, they starve. If they get sick and can't heal themselves, they die. No outsiders, or the network, will come to their aid. Nat jumps at the chance to reconnect with himself and his family, and talks Deanie into taking their daughter to the island to be the first "Live-Life" family. We come to realize just how sheltered their civilization is when, on their first day on the island, Nat and Deanie marvel at how the air flows around their bodies (they apparently have no word for wind!) As they marvel at little things like matches, and bigger things like sheep (they've never seen one), the network is plotting to boost ratings by introducing another person to the supposedly deserted island… a person who will soon uproot their lives in dramatic fashion…

The Year of the Sex Olympics packs a lot of ideas, and some dead-on prophecy, into a relatively modest television production. It's full of little touches that make this fictional world seem both familiar and surreal: the characters speak in a clipped, abbreviated dialect, as if even speaking was too taxing for the inhabitants of a post-literate world; when not speaking, the characters are sucking on energy "popsicles" (something like 5-hour energy shots in our own world); while waiting for Deanie, Kin tries to kill time by watching an "Auto-Chess" game play against itself (only machines play chess, since humans are too distracted); the network performers, with their gaudy body jewelry and face paint, would fit right in at any upscale urban night club in 2012. And of course, the "Live-Life Show" has a lot in common with Survivor and its ilk (although I don't think anyone's died on Survivor yet, as much as today's audiences might be rooting for such an outcome).

Year's titles start with a very simple declaration: "sooner than you think…" which then dissolves into the Olympic rings made of male and female symbols. Also notable is that writer Nigel Kneale is given top billing ("By Nigel Kneale"). By this time, Kneale was a rock star of British television and entertainment, having created the monstrously popular Quatermass series and contributed screenplays to such films as Damn the Defiant! (1962), First Men in the Moon (1964), and Hammer's The Witches (1966) and 1967's Five Million Years to Earth (based on his 1958-59 Quatermass and the Pit TV series; see also my post on another Kneale-scripted Hammer production, The Abominable Snowman, 1957). According to Kneale biographer Andy Murray, the teleplay almost didn't get made:

"The first hurdle was the formidable Mary Whitehouse, president of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, and the self-appointed watchdog of morality on British television. 'She somehow got hold of the script,' Kneale remembers. 'There was always some little spy ready to slip her things. I don't think she'd read anything but the title and said 'this must not be put on! I will have the producer sacked!' She went after the producer, Ronald Tavers, who was a nice, rather quiet, self-effacing man, and she did her damnedest to get him booted out of his job. However, she was overruled."  (Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale, Headpress, 2006)

Producer Lasar Opie (Brian Cox) can't take his eyes
off his own creation, the "Live-Life Show."

"Censorship" of another form ultimately did strike the production. The original color recording was wiped by the BBC as a money-saving move. With no sense that these teleplays should be preserved for future generations, standard practice at the time was to re-use the tapes. At any rate, a decent black and white copy on 16mm eventually surfaced. According to one reviewer, a lot was lost:

"[A]ccording to Nancy Banks-Smith's review, viewers today aren't really seeing it. It lacks the colour designs which were, ironically, an integral part of the effect. The world of the play is intentionally garish and strident, a barrage of reds, greens -- and even gold face make-up. The existing monochrome versions present a grey world, which rather spoils the effect." (Ibid.)

Even without color, Year is worth seeing for Kneale's unique, prophetic vision and some top-notch acting (including Brian Cox in an early role). You can get a DVD-R copy from Sinister Cinema.

Disgruntled network employee Kin Hodder (Martin Potter) wants to be a real artist, and tries to enlist the aid of Nat Mender (Tony Vogel) to show his work on the air:

All Creatures Great and Tall

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Ever since seeing the creepy docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek in the mid-70s, I've been intrigued with the idea of Bigfoot and other crypto-zoological mysteries. Considering that no "civilized" westerner set eyes on a live gorilla until the mid-nineteenth century, I'd like to think that there's at least a small chance that some bipedal remnant of an unknown evolutionary path still survives in the ever-dwindling, unexplored wild places of the globe.

I'm not alone, since interest in Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Yeti, and other legendary variations seems to be at an all-time high in spite of (or perhaps because of) the continuing lack of any credible evidence. It's hard to channel-surf these days without coming across some Bigfoot pseudo-documentary with fringe academics speculating about the distribution, diet, and habits of the elusive creatures, and men outfitted in camouflage, night-vision goggles, and other tech-toys tramping around the woods of the Pacific northwest desperately trying to record a sighting.

And then there's the hilarious Jack Link's Beef Jerky "Messin' With Sasquatch" series, where a poor, trusting reject from Harry and the Hendersons is the perpetual butt of 20-something hipsters' practical jokes (although the beast always gets the last "word" in various and hilarious ways). We might look at such humor as society's ultimate acceptance of a myth like Sasquatch. (Similarly, we might make a case that Frankenstein didn't truly become a household name and the prototypical poster child for the consequences of scientific arrogance until he met Abbott and Costello in 1948.)

Whatever the status of the Bigfoot myth in the 21st century, there's no denying the enduring popularity of shaggy, elusive, often homicidal hominids in popular film. The first wave of such films in the 1950s focused on the Yeti and his exotic locale of the Himalayas. Some credit W. Lee Wilder's Snow Creature (1954) as the first feature-length fictional account of the Yeti. Toho and Ishiro Honda (of Godzilla/Gojira fame) followed quickly with Jû jin yuki otoko in 1955. (It would be released in the U.S. a couple years later as Half Human, cut down to 63 minutes, with American scenes added. Sadly, the original highly-rated Japanese version was never released in the U.S., and Toho withdrew it from their catalog for legal reasons.) Schlockmeister Jerry Warren did his take, Man Beast in 1956. 1977's Snowbeast with Yvette Mimieux would transplant the Yeti to a Colorado ski resort.

Over the years, with the impact of unexpected low-budget hits like Boggy Creek, the film industry's interest in hairy hominids shifted to North America and Bigfoot/Sasquatch. One oddball measure of the enduring popularity of backwoods beasts is the presence of character actor-extraordinaire Lance Henriksen in three (count 'em!) Bigfoot flicks in the space of five years: The Untold (aka Sasquatch; 2002), Abominable (2006), and Sasquatch Mountain (2006). (The perfectly mediocre Sasquatch Mountain, a Sci-Fi channel original, started out life as Devil on the Mountain, and was slated for location shooting around my hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona. Regrettably, local red-tape pushed the production 40 miles to the west, to the small town of Williams. I would have loved to run into Lance in downtown Flagstaff!)

Predictably, recent Bigfoot film appearances have featured slavering, unthinking, homicidal beasts, instead of the shy, elusive, canny creatures that more thoughtful Bigfoot fans prefer to believe in. No gory special effects have been spared--  Bigfoot in 21st century film is Mother Nature's hit man, punishing city folk in all kinds of bloody ways for trespassing on her territory.

Thoughtful fictional treatments of Bigfoot and  the Yeti are as rare as sightings of the creatures themselves. The most thoughtful, intelligent treatment of all is Hammer's The Abominable Snowman (1957). This elegant black-and-white production was released around the same time as Hammer's wildly popular color hits Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula, and was promptly lost in the gothic horror wave.  While not perfect -- Snowman is talky and set bound -- it's worth a look for its unusually intelligent use of science fiction to comment on the human condition.

Botanist John Rollason (Peter Cushing), and his wife Helen (Maureen Connell) are staying at a remote monastery in the Himalayas to study native plants. A brash, ambitious American explorer, Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) arrives with a group and seduces Rollason into accompanying him on his quest to track down the elusive Yeti. Rollason had been on an earlier ill-fated expedition looking for the snowman, but his scientific curiosity gets the better of him and he sets aside his reservations. Helen and the monastery's High Lama try to talk him out of joining Friend's expedition, to no avail. Another member of Friend's group, Andrew McNee (Michael Brill), is haunted by his previous experience of having actually seen the creature. As the expedition makes its way up the Himalayas, the high-strung McNee struggles with the ascent, but at the same time seems to almost sense the presence of the Yeti. At one point, he becomes convinced that he sees something among the rocks and crags. Chasing after it, he falls to his death.

In the midst of the chaos and tension, Rollason discovers that Friend's motives are less than pure or scientific-- he wants to be the first to bring back a Yeti, dead or alive, for exhibition. As luck would have it, the expedition stumbles upon one of the creatures and shoots it dead. As the group tries to take its prize back to civilization, they soon discover that the creature was not alone, and its companions want it back. With the exception of Rollason, the remaining expedition members fall prey to the cunning of the otherworldly creatures, and ultimately to their own fears.

Monster, or member of an ancient, wise race?

The screenplay by the brilliant Nigel Kneale (based on his teleplay "The Creature") inverts the typical Yeti story and makes Man into the unreasoning, monstrous brute. As the surviving expedition members hole up in a cave with the creature's body, Rollason remarks on the gentle, anciently-wise features of the snowman. He wonders aloud to the uncomprehending Tom Friend if perhaps the Yeti aren't the wiser, superior race waiting in the remote regions of the Himalayas for brutish mankind to die out.

Snowman marked the third (and last) Hammer film pairing of Kneale's thoughtful ideas with Val Guest's talented direction. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) was a lean, effective adaptation of Kneale's BBC mini-series The Quatermass Experiment. It's success led quickly to Quatermass II: Enemy from Space in 1957. Kneale adapted the screenplay from his own teleplay. Much to the chagrin of Kneale, both featured American tough guy Brian Donlevy as Prof. Bernard Quatermass (Donlevy's participation was strictly to grease the wheels for American distribution). Years later, Kneale would be much happier with Scotsman Andrew Keir's portrayal of Quatermass in Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit; 1967).  Kneale's Hammer thrillers all share a theme: man as his own worst enemy in the face of forces he only dimly understands.

While the pairing of urbane Peter Cushing with rough Forrest Tucker of F-Troop fame might seem like casting decision made after a 4 martini lunch, the two very neatly represent Kneale's dichotomies of scientific curiosity vs. greed and empathy vs. fear. Tucker, like Donlevy, lent his modest talents and somewhat bankable name to a couple of other UK sci-fi thrillers: The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror; 1958), and The Strange World of Planet X (aka the Cosmic Monsters; 1958).

Nigel Kneale's thoughtful science fiction deserves a revival. America's leaders, committed to endless war and endless foreign quests in search of monsters to destroy, might do well to heed Kneale's admonition, voiced by the empathetic, rational Rollason:

It isn't what's out there that's dangerous, as much as what's in us.

"The world's most shocking monster! No one's ever lived who's seen him!"