Film and television director -- via blog.saint.org. Here's the New York Times obit. A major architect of the imaginations of my generation, he made some of Hammer Film Production's best -- and campiest -- horror films. On TV, he worked on some of the best British series -- "The Avengers," "The Champions," "The Saint," "Danger UXB," "Fairly Secret Army" and "The Irish R.M." This analysis of his achievements is the best to date, written by Tom Vallance in the Independent.
His best-respected film is "A Night to Remember," a retelling of the sinking of the Titanic praised as far more faithful to fact than the maudlin "Titanic," released five years earlier . . . and the maudlin "Titanic" released 39 years later.
He was just getting started. He helmed the third Quatermass film -- the highly successful film series about a British professor who lucks repeatedly into foiling invasions from outer space.
"Quatermass and the Pit," aka "Five Millions Years to Earth," is genuinely disturbing, and sports strong performances from Andrew Keir, James Donald, Barbara Shelley, and Julian Glover:
[James Donald is one of the most underregarded of film actors. Known best as the chiding voice of reason in the war movies "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "The Great Escape," roles such as this and others like Winkle in "The Pickwick Papers" and Theo in "Lust for Life" show his range and depth.]
The poster is very clear: "Not for the mentally immature."
Then, his masterpiece: "The Vampire Lovers"! This first in the loose Carmilla trilogy by Hammer hits all the pleasure points -- vampires, forbidden sexuality, graphic violence, and those hard, bright colors that made watching a Hammer film much like going on an acid trip.
Ingrid Pitt, Peter Cushing, Kate O'Mara, and the immortal Pippa Steel!
Pippa Steel -- chaste above, naughty below. The perfect neo-Victorian fantasy figure.
Next, the delicious awfulness of "The Scars of Dracula": with the wonderful Christopher Lee and Patrick Troughton -- "No one can escape the all-encompassing evil of the humans that do his bidding!"
He moved on to Amicus, a no-budget rival to Hammer, and there diected several of their "horror portmanteau" films, which relied on the formula of telling several shorter tales within an overarching framework. "Asylum" is a decent little horror anthology with a script by Robert Bloch and a slew of talent, including Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, and Patrick Magee, and a very young Charlotte Rampling and Robert Powell. He also did for them "The Vault of Horror"
and "The Monster Club":
" -- And Now the Screaming Starts!" is a pleasant little disembodied-hand-out-for-revenge subgenre entry fro Baker and Amicus:
Meanwhile, Baker directed many of "The Avengers" 1968 episodes:
And followed with more distinguished BBC fare as his career continued. All in all, a very active and satisfying creative life. His film and television work is clear, effective and convincing, even on the silliest projects imaginable. Time and again, he gets great performances out of high-quality actors in absurd situations. He scared the pants off of my generation at the drive-in, in the balcony and on late-night TV. His lurid imagination, leavened with a droll wit, strongly informed my aesthetic sensibilities. Cheers!
So far, we’ve examined Hollywood perspectives on the French capital. These two anthology films provide a palate-cleansing transition to the Gallic sensibility – Parisian films made by Parisians.
In reverse chronological order:
Paris, Je T’Aime
2006
18 short films, 22 directors, including the Coens, Alfonso Cuaron, Alain Chomet, Olivier Assayas . . . . Remarkably, it’s good! Striking, taut vignettes that veer from the comic to the tragic and make good use of the different arrondisements both in terms of setting and mood. Besides, when are you ever going to see Alexander Payne play the ghost of Oscar Wilde again?
Six in Paris
1965
Much harder to find, and more problematic to watch. The six are Claude Chabrol, Jean Douchet, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer and Jean Rouch. According to Sean Axmaker’s introduction on tcm.com, the project was pushed forward by actor/producer/director Barbet Schroeder (who acts in one sequence here and shows up in a sequence of “Paris, Je T’Aime 40 years later). The technological revolution of 16mm cameras with direct sound allowed this sextet of New Wave artists to unlock the camera from the tripod and have some fun, resulting in short narratives that, once again, span the humorous and the tragic.
What distinguishes “Six in Paris” from its latter bookend is the lack of awe. In it, the locales serve the story, do not draw attention to themselves (save for a brief, searing remark that no one goes to the Arc D’Triomphe save for tourists and politicians). For native filmmakers, Paris is at once much more and much less than myth – it’s home.
After the German invasion of Paris on June 14, 1940, its perception via American movies changes forever. Paris ceases to exist as a real if faraway alternative to the humdrum lives of moviegoers. Paris is now a lost Eden, a bittersweet memory of beauty and pleasure and romance – a city violated by the Nazis and irretrievably tarnished.
Casablanca
Dir: Michael Curtiz
1942
In America’s greatest romantic drama, Paris symbolizes everything the central, estranged couple of Rick and Ilsa have lost – unreflecting love and doomed innocence. The long flashback that outlines their time together lets us see the chemistry between them (as well as a little fuller toupee for Bogie) and drives home the shock of Ilsa’s supposed betrayal of Rick, justifying his bitterness towards her and just about everything else.
By film’s end, after the former lovers have shared one more night of passion, Rick has decided to do the noble thing and send Ilsa off with her husband (of course, our hero gets to have his cake and leave it too). “We’ll always have Paris,” he tells Ilsa. “We didn't have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.” Paradise is regained, at least as a sustainable memory.
The Razor’s Edge
Dir: Edmund Goulding
1946
Nasty, dirty old Paris, destroyer of dreams. It took a while for the tales of the Lost Generation to reach the screen. This adaptation of Maugham’s novel is the Paris of pimps, boites, apache dances and that damned accordion music. Here Sophie, played by Anne Baxter in an Oscar-winning performance, runs into her old friends, who are slumming, after she’s tumbled off the wagon and into a Gallic cesspit of sin and despair:
An American in Paris
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
1951
1951’s Best Picture is an over-the-top frothy concoction crammed with lush color, shape, movement, whimsy, and full palette of preconceptions about Paris as playground. Gene Kelly rules the fake streets of the city, and Minnelli whips up his most exuberant outing ever – even if it doesn’t have much of a story behind it. Here Paris is a postwar fever dream. The Americans IN Paris in 1945 liberated the city and laid claim to it, made it, in a sense, a province of the American imagination.
An anomaly -- an honest attempt to do more than a standard biopic, this life of Toulouse-Lautrec tries to capture not just the historical period, but to replicate the painter’s style onscreen. Color, line, atmosphere and form are carefully chosen. The result, while not the most gripping life story ever told on film, is one of the most faithful to the spirit of its subject.
Four of the next five films concern themselves primarily with the romantic alliance of an older man and a younger woman. Three times, that woman is Audrey Hepburn. Huh?
This plot is so strongly on the mind of filmmakers of the period, especially Stanley Donen. It’s perhaps symptomatic of a postwar male nostalgia, a not-so-hidden fantasy of middle-aged men to conquer an innocent, charming beauty in the most romantic place possible – proving that when it comes to vanity and wistfulness, men are woefully underestimated. Call these “The Bridges of the 4th Arrondissement.”
Funny Face
Dir: Stanley Donen
1957
Love in the Afternoon
Dir: Billy Wilder
1957
Gigi
Dir: Vincente Minnelli
1958
Charade
Dir: Stanley Donen
1963
Gay Purr-ee
Dir: Abe Levitow
1962
Sigh. What makes a film a family classic that endures for all time and spawns several lucrative sequels? That quality eluded the makers of “Gay Purr-ee.”
Why? It has all the right people working on it – Chuck Jones supervised it, Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg wrote the music and lyrics. It uses the voices of Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Red Buttons, Mel Blanc, and Hermione Gingold. It’s an adequate time-passer for kids, but it doesn’t have the ineffable something of even a Silver Age Disney production. Somehow, Warner Brothers, as brilliant as it was with its cartoon shorts, could never really pull off a full-length animated film.
Paris fades out as a locale of focus during the New Hollywood era. Everyone was using the American landscape as a canvas for its art films, and the Yanks caught up with Europe filmically, at least in pretension. When the power of the rebel generation of American directors faded, and the Era of the Blockbuster came in, Paris returned, but only as a kitschy, self-conscious reference point. At its most elemental level, it became just another urban area that was a great setting for a car chase.
The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers
Dir: Richard Lester
1973/1974
Another title that has been made into film countless times, for better and for worse. This version, by far my favorite, adheres to the novel with surprising faithfulness, right down to the sprightly, offhand tone with which Dumas imbued it (having George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the “Flashman” novels, writing the adaptation helps quite a bit). The filming took place of course, not in France at all (lesson: want 17th-century Paris? Go to Madrid). But it FEELS French – Lester and his cohorts have whipped up a palpable fantasy of action and romance and wit and style, peppered with the countless small details and bits of business that Lester uses in his films to create one teeming, Brueghelian set piece after another.
Lester’s crowning achievement also led to the abrupt end of his career. First, the producers made two films out of one set of performances, and triggered a bunch of lawsuits. When the third film in the trilogy, “The Return of the Musketeers,” was made in 1989, superb comic and character actor Roy Kinnear was killed in an equine accident during shooting. This incident seemed to destroy Lester’s desire to make more films.
The Moderns
Dir: Alan Rudolph
1988
Another anomaly. Rudolph’s quirky style is aptly served by this shaggy-dog story about art and intrigue, and except for a couple of canned shots of Paris, this was all shot in Montreal.
Ronin
Dir: John Frankenheimer
1998
City as obstacle course. Frankenheimer decided to film the ultimate car chases, and he did – one of them intricately choreographed in Paris.
Moulin Rouge!
Dir: Baz Luhrmann
2001
The Bourne Identity
Dir: Doug Liman
2002
Before Sunset
Dir: Richard Linklater
2004
Ratatouille
Dir: Brad Bird
2007
Inglourious Basterds
Dir: Quentin Tarentino
2009
Now that we’ve thumbed through Hollywood’s take on Paris, we can move on to the real deal – French filmmakers and their use of the city. We’ll make the transition in the next chapter, through a short entr’acte that looks at two compilation films – 24 views of Paris in 213 minutes.
.jpg)
