The Sentinel (1977)

I find that New Yorkers have no sense for anything but sex and money. Troubled New York City model Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) decides to make some changes in her life. She breaks up with her boyfriend Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon) and after being advised by realtor Miss Logan (Ava Gardner) of an apartment in Brooklyn Heights moves into a brownstone with a great view of the city where the only other tenant is a withdrawn blind priest Father Halliran (John Carradine). Then she meets another neighbour Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) who invites her to his delightfully devilish cat’s birthday party and encounters there a lot of other neighbours not supposed to be in residence. After experiencing several strange occurrences she informs the slippery Michael who works with NYC police detectives Gatz (Eli Wallach) and Rizzo (Christopher Walken) to uncover the origins of these people.  Alison begins to realise why the holy man is there – the building has an evil presence that must be kept in check at all costs and it’s somebody else’s turn to keep the devils out ... It’s all right. Listen, listen. I know everything now. The Latin you saw in that book was an ancient warning from the angel Gabriel to the angel Uriel. Personally I always thought my old apartment was the gateway to Hell but that’s another story. All I can say is I wasn’t expecting Gerde’s (Sylvia Miles) galpal Sandra (Beverly D’Angelo) to masturbate fully clothed in front of her houseguest while awaiting afternoon tea. Not exactly good etiquette. Some Lesbians do ‘ave ’em, eh?! There’s a birthday party for a cat (hip hip hooray!), crazed Catholics,  demons, induced suicides – just your usual sociocultural cross-section in a city apartment block, all helpfully revealed by creepy Perry (William Hickey) who says, I just open doors. This is filled with those lovely women that seemed to be everywhere at a certain point in the late Seventies/early Eighties – Raffin, Raines, Miles and the stunning Gardner and it effectively rips off all the Satanic horrors to date, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist under the guise of property porn. And there’s Arthur Kennedy as Monsignor Franchino, an unholy priest and Jerry Orbach as a horrible director. And look out for Jeff Goldblum while even Richard Dreyfuss shows up on the sidewalk. Sigh. Nutty, derivative, terrible and horrible, a travesty, an insult to the God-fearing, a twist ending you could see coming – I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And no matter what, I am never asking Ava Gardner to be my realtor. Peak Seventies cult. Fabulous. Adapted from his novel by Jeffrey Konvitz with director Michael Winner. All killers, all dead. She went to a party with eight dead murderers

The L-Shaped Room (1962)

Everybody tells me how to get rid of it. Nobody tells me how to have it. 27-year old French woman Jane Fosset (Leslie Caron) moves into a seedy Ladbroke Grove boarding house and gets to know the other residents who are a motley crew of waifs and strays.  Toby (Tom Bell) is a lovelorn wannabe author;  Johnny (Brock Peters) is a black jazz musician  who hears everything in her living quarters through a paper-thin dividing wall; Mavis (Cicely Courtneidge) is an old unemployed actress who has hidden her Lesbian tendencies;  Sonia (Patricia Phoenix) is an ageing prostitute who runs her business from her basement room. When Jane starts a relationship with Toby, Johnny tells him she’s pregnant – she’s been in two minds about whether to keep the result of her sexual initiation with an actor from whom she’s split and she realises she loves Toby as she didn’t love the father of this baby and his departure prompts a crisis … As a child I was always in mourning. The novels of Lynne Reid Banks were something of a talisman for me and I would imagine for many other adolescent girls – and this adaptation of her key work does it justice, rooted in the kitchen sink realist style of the era. Bryan Forbes adapts and directs with some startling compositions (courtesy of Douglas Slocombe). Caron is wonderfully touching as the French woman (originally English) impregnated by her first ever lover; and while Bell wasn’t entirely my image of the Jewish writer created by Banks, he is nonetheless impressive. You believe their tentative friendship that blossoms into something else while their dealings with third parties hover at their shoulders. The whole ensemble embody their roles with real feeling. How fascinating to see the legendary Phoenix (Coronation Street‘s Elsie Tanner) while her long-time legendary love Tony Booth has a bit part (‘Youth in the street’). Nanette Newman aka Mrs Forbes plays the new girl in the L-shaped room at the end. There’s a credible jazz score by John Barry as well as some nicely chosen Brahms to enliven a sensitively told story, so very nicely played and staged in a ghastly London run by slum landlords, a few years before certain of its ‘burbs began to swing and before either legal abortion or the Pill were available. If you haven’t read the author, then for goodness’ sake do. She’s great – a proper Angry Young Woman capable of utterly unsentimental sentences about profoundly moving experiences. Don’t fall in love with me. You don’t know me

 

 

High-Rise (2016)

How do you adapt and replicate JG Ballard’s dyspeptic dystopian worldview when it’s so site- and time-specific? Screenwriter Amy Jump took his 1975 novel, a cautionary tale of the collective unconscious in a tower block for posh people, and left it there – in 1975, when the shock of the future was immanent.  Sick building syndrome wasn’t a thing then but anyone who’s ever lived in an apartment knows how much further consensus must reach in order not to descend quickly into chaos with fellow inhabitants – overflowing dustbins, thin walls, the smell of cooking, that neighbour who conducts noisy sex sesssions on their balcony, the drug dealer who calls the wrong door number at six in the morning with the come-down heroin for speeders. Yes, we’ve all sadly been there. Here the sickness is apparently part of the deep-seated anti-social need for anarchy rooted in the perfect design of the building itself, whose architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) lives on the top floor, apparently dictating things not so benignly, his wife riding around on a horse like a latterday Marie Antoinette. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is the physiologist (specialty:  peeling faces from skulls) who moves in and his neighbour documentary maker Wilder (Luke Evans) unravels and seems to contaminate everyone else. Laing has guilt about his treatment of a colleague (he jumps off the building, no diving board required) and the non-stop erotic parties turn into something mad and dark and murderous.  The descent into atavism is slick and fast and people are screwing each other, torturing rivals and giving into all sorts of debased derangement. There are so many cars in the huge carpark nobody can find their own. The trash isn’t collected. The electricity’s off. There are bodies in the swimming pool. We go back to where we entered this horror story,  eating a dog on the balcony. The names have a lot of meaning – Laing clearly harkens to that scourge of psychiatric voodoo RD Laing, Wilder says it all (this is a battle between id and superego) and Royal is the out of touch monarch whose plans for society are rampantly expunged as people become convinced that the higher the floor the happier they’ll be.  The plebs are closing in. A design for life. Capitalism rocks! Un film de Ben Wheatley.

Women of Twilight (1952)

Sylvia Rayman’s startling 1951 play about unmarried mothers became the first British film to receive the new ‘X’ certificate. Adapted by Anatole de Grunwald and directed by Gordon Parry, we enter with a very young and beauteous Jerry Nolan (Laurence Harvey) singing to his lady love fellow nightclub performer Vivianne Bruce (Rene Ray).  When she discovers she’s pregnant he’s arrested for murder and she finds herself looking for a home to sit things out during his court case. She winds up living under the sadistic Mrs Alistair  (Freda Jackson) who runs a somewhat sleazy Hampstead establishment which turns out to be a baby farm where she’s aided and abetted by a slovenly housemaid, Vida (Jessie Smithson). Vivianne rejects a newspaper offer of £500 for her story and is unable to deal with the illness accompanying her pregnancy. Vivianne’s only real friend is room mate Chris (Lois Maxwell) who supports her when Jerry is hanged, but whose child she neglects and he dies in her care when Chris is away for a few days to be reunited with her fiance.  The singular Ray  (later a novelist and the Countess of Midleton!) plays Vivianne half-distracted, half-deranged by grief. Then the half-wit kitchen girl confesses to her that she’s had a deformed child whom Mrs Alistair killed and buried in the garden behind the house. Mrs Alistair overhears Vivianne’s plans to tell the police and throws her down a staircase, bringing on the birth of Jerry’s illegitimate child … This was groundbreaking stuff and it boasts an array of very vivid performances, making this a thoroughly gripping experience. Harvey’s big scene before his death is really something but all the roles are so well written – including Dora Bryan as Olga, a streetwise ‘slut’ as Alistair calls her, Dorothy Gordon as Sally the mad one, and Joan Dowling as the giggler (she would commit suicide two years later when she found husband Harry Fowler was having an affair). Jackson really lets loose in her final scenes and Ray is so odd that she’s quite unforgettable. Extraordinary stuff.

Love Nest (1951)

June Haver and William Lundigan are the couple running a rundown apartment house she’s acquired while he’s been fighting WW2 in Paris. A variety of tenants pose problems and amusement, principally the mysterious Frank Fay who romances a widow but has an unaccountable resemblance to a Bluebeard character. Lundigan’s also promised accommodation to a colleague from Paris,who turns out to be the stunning WAC bombshell Bobby (Marilyn Monroe). Complications ensue as you might imagine, in this adaptation by IAL Diamond of a novel by Scott Corbett. Diamond would write probably the greatest Monroe film, Some Like It Hot. And this wasn’t the first time she’d encountered June Haver – her very first blink and you’ll miss her appearance was in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! Haver is terrific in this and she was being groomed to replace Betty Grable but never could and her days were already numbered when she made this. She married Fred MacMurray. And Marilyn? Well. She just draws the eye. We know what happened to her! This is lightly amusing fun, directed by Joseph Newman.