Showing posts with label les bowie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label les bowie. Show all posts

Sunday 21 January 2018

REMEMBERED IAN SCOONES: EFFECTS WIZARD AND CUSHING OBE


TO MANY IAN SCOONES is a name that would be associated with film and television special effects, working with the LES BOWIE Special Effects team and at the BBC. TV shows like the Hammer House of Horror show, Dr Who. Films like 1984, Thunderbirds working for Hammer films Bray studios, many films in which Peter Cushing appeared like, Frankenstein Created Woman, She, Night Creatures. Ian graduated from the Medway College of Art in 1960 and finding himself without employment, made some inquiries to Peter Cushing, who he had been a fan of, since he was a child. Cushing, in turn after meeting Ian, was instrumental in helping him gain employment with Les Bowie . . and the rest as they say, is history.


IT WAS SOMETHING THAT IAN NEVER FORGOT, that had Peter not helped him on his way, he may never have got a foot in the door, let alone employment, in such a competitive area. It was Ian's idea to sponsor the application, for Peter to be award an OBE, an 'Order of the British Empire' Medal, awarded by the Queen and government of the day, for services to the entertainment industry . . . Here for the first time on this page, is the actual letter that Ian received from the Prime Minister's office, telling him, that Peter Cushing was to be award the OBE . . . quite an achievement! Peter Cushing was extremely surprised and very humbled to receive the news of his award and Ian Scoones made all that possible! From 1994, Ian lived in retirement, first in Spain, then in Bulgaria, where he died on January 20th 2010, aged of 69. We remember Ian today, with thanks. . . 


REMEMBER! IF YOU LIKE what you see here at our website, you'll  love our daily themed posts at our PCAS FACEBOOK FAN PAGE.  Just click that blue LINK and click LIKE when you get there, and help us . . Keep The Memory Alive!. The Peter Cushing Appreciation Society website, facebook fan page and youtube channel are managed, edited and written by Marcus Brooks, PCAS coordinator since 1979. PCAS is based in the UK and USA   

Sunday 16 April 2017

#HAMMERFILMSATURDAY AND LAUREL AND HARDY!



ON COMPLETING his first Hollywood film with 'The Man In The Iron Mask' shot in 1939 with 'Frankenstein' director, James Whale, he learned that Hal Roach Studios required English actors for his latest Laurel and Hardy picture, A Chump At Oxford'. Cushing auditioned and was accepted to play the role of Oxford student Jones.


CUSHING worked with the legendary comedy duo for one week. Cushing was very lucky to appear in one of the duos funniest comedies. The film contains some priceless comedy moments. 'A Chump At Oxford' print was later extended for European release by adding a chaotic dinner-party scene during the opening of the film. This was in fact, a remaking of an early Laurel and Hardy silent short form 1928 called ' From Soup to Nuts!'. Sadly Cushing was not included in this addition footage. 

ARRIVING at the collage, they arrive by cab wearing ETON collars, much to the amusement of Cushing and the fellow students, 'But, you are wearing ETON collars' says one of them. 'Well, that's swell..' says Stan, '..We haven't EATEN since breakfast!'. It's noticeable that Cushing gets more lines than the fellow students, possibly because he was the only genuine English sounding actor there! He looks every inch a star, with his pencil mustache, waved hair and his rakish mortar board hat. CATCH A CHUMP AT OXFORD in co,our just uploaded to our PCAS YOUTUBE Channel!


#HAMMERFILMSATURDAY: TWO great peeps behind the scenes on Hammer films, 'Dracula Has Risen From The Grave' (68) Veronica Carlson up in the roof top set and Les Bowies, 'Dracula's Remains!'


IF YOU LIKE what you see here at our website, you'll  love our daily themed posts at our PCAS FACEBOOK FAN PAGE.  Just click that blue LINK and click LIKE when you get there, and help us reach our 30K following total for Peter Cushing BIRTHDAY on MAY 26th 2017 AND Help Keep The Memory Alive!

Sunday 15 September 2013

URSULA ANDRESS: TROY HOWARTH REVIEWS HAMMER FILMS 'SHE' WITH COLOUR TRANSPARENCY GALLERY


Intrepid adventurers Major Holly (Peter Cushing), Leo (John Richardson) and Job (Bernard Cribbins) are lead to the forbidden city, while is ruled over by the beautiful and eternal Ayesha (Ursula Andress)....


She: A History of Adventure was published in serial form between late 1886 and early 1887.  It was written by the prolific fantasy and adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard and, along with his Alan Quartermain adventures, it remains his most popular and oft-adapted book.  It has the distinction of influencing one of the earliest motion pictures, Georges Melies' La Colonne de feu (The Pillar of Fire), which was made in 1899.  Subsequent adaptations cropped up in 1911, 1916, and 1917 - and in 1925, Haggard himself worked on an adaptation which starred silent film star Betty Blythe in the title role.  The most lavish version emerged in 1935, courtesy of producer Merian C. Cooper.


Cooper had already unleashed King Kong (1933) on a thrill-hungry depression-era audience, and he spared no expense in mounting this particular adaptation.  Helen Gahagan made for an appropriately glamorous Ayesha, with stolid Randolph Scott providing beefcake as Leo.  Future big screen Dr. Watson Nigel Bruce was cast as Major Holly in this version, which was co-directed by sometimes-character-actor Irving Pichel, whom horror buffs will remember as the creepy Sandor in Universal's Dracula's Daughter (1936).  The story would then go on something of a moratorium for a period of time, until Hammer Films unleashed their own version in 1964.  After that, the story would be overhauled as a trashy, post apocalyptic piece starring Sandhal Bergman in 1982.  The most recent film version came in 2001, as a direct to video release.


Inevitably, it is the Hammer version with which we concern ourselves here.  She was one of producer Michael Carreras' pet projects and offered a fine example of his vision for the company.  Carreras was never overly enamored of the gothic horror genre, and it was he who tried to push Hammer towards making David Lean-style spectaculars.  The problem was, Hammer simply didn't have access to Lean's resources.  As such, his attempts at making bigger, more ambitious films tended to result in pictures which, paradoxically, looked a bit cheaper than the smaller scale gothic fare for which the studio was best known.  In short, a story such a She, with its widescreen vistas and elaborate settings, represented a case of Hammer's reach exceeding its grasp.



The film is problematic on many levels.  First off, Robert Day was perhaps not the ideal director for such a project.  Day had directed Boris Karloff's two best 1950s vehicles - The Haunted Strangler (1957) and Corridors of Blood (1958) - and he also had ample experience directing for the small screen.  She was probably the biggest project of his career, and while he did the best job he could under the circumstances, he fails to capture the story's magic and sense of exotica.  Hammer's ace production designer, Bernard Robinson, was allowed to sit this one out for some reason - and in his place, the capable Robert Jones (who also worked as art director on Roger Corman's masterpiece Masque of the Red Death, 1964, before going on to design Hammer's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, 1971) does a professional if uninspired job.  The sets look solid enough, but they lack size and dimension.  For this reason, the production had to rely on a lot of matte work by the great Les Bowie - and while Bowie could sometimes create minor miracles, his matte work here is ill served by the film - it looks exactly like what it is: paintings.


There's also the casting to consider.  Ursula Andress was a hot ticket commodity based on her iconic appearance in the first of EON's James Bond adventures, Dr. No (1962), but the Swedish-born actress was still not comfortable in English and needed to be dubbed.  She was also, quite simply, not the most expressive of actresses.  She looks absolutely ravishing and fulfills the character's irresistible physical presence well enough, but she is unable to tap into the character's deeper nuances, resulting in a performance that is pure surface gloss.  John Richardson (Mario Bava's Black Sunday, 1960) was similarly wooden and superficial - his good looks ensured him a number of acting gigs (and rumor has it that he was at one point considered to play James Bond), but his performances were always flat and uninvolving - and despite being a native English speaker, he was regularly dubbed in his film roles, including this one.
 
 

The fact that these two pretty but vapid performers inhabit the center of what is supposed to be a passionate love story creates a vacuum from which the film simply cannot recover.  On the plus side, Hammer saw fit to enlist their top stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, to play juicy supporting roles. 



Cushing is a joy as the adventure-hungry Major Holly, and the scene wherein he explains the complex emotions inherent in love has a heartbreaking ring of truth to it - it was reportedly a speech the actor wrote himself, and given how truthful it is in a script which is otherwise efficient at best, one may well believe it.  Lee is required to wear a succession of garish and silly looking head gear as the stoic Billali, who helps to protect Ayesha while secretly plotting against her, but he gives a strong performance.  There's a marvelous scene between him and Cushing wherein Lee quietly but powerfully asserts himself that makes a viewing of this film almost mandatory for fans of these two marvelous actors.  Bernard Cribbins (Hitchcock's Frenzy, 1972) is effective as Cushing's comic sidekick/servant, while the wonderful Andre Morell (Hammer's Plague of the Zombies, 1966) is wasted in a nothing role - and to add insult to injury, the powers that be at Hammer clearly decided that his cultured voice wasn't exotic enough for the character he plays, so he was ultimately dubbed by another familiar Hammer veteran, George Pastell.  One wonders why they didn't simply cast Pastell in the first place.


The film also benefits from an achingly beautiful score by James Bernard.  Bernard loved scoring Hammer's blood and thunder horrors, but this gentle natured composer always had a yen to score a great love story - and She, for all its shortcomings, finally gave him that chance.  His central theme is one of the most beautiful and melodic of his career, while the various adventure and action oriented pieces are appropriately rousing.  Cinematographer Harry Waxman (The Wicker Man, 1973) provides some slick cinematography which helps to compensate for some of the film's less impressive production attributes.


Ultimately, one doesn't wish to be too hard on She.  It's not a bad film, and it certainly looks very fine when compared to Hammer's pointless (and quite inept) sequel The Vengeance of She (1967 - with Richardson and Morell being the only cast members to return; Morell got to keep his voice in that one, at least), but it doesn't quite capture the flavor and mystique of its titular character.


Images: Marcus Brooks.
 

Monday 19 August 2013

THE BARON REBOOTED: THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN : HAMMER FILMS 1964


CAST:
Peter Cushing (Baron Frankenstein), Peter Woodthorpe (Zoltan), Sandor Eles (Hans), Kiwi Kingston (The Monster), Katy Wild (Rena)

PRODUCTION:
Director – Freddie Francis, Screenplay – John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Producer – Anthony Hinds, Photography – John Wilcox, Music – Don Banks, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Art Direction – Don Mingaye. Production Company – Hammer.


SYNOPSIS:
Forced to leave town because of their experiments, Frankenstein and Hans return to Frankenstein’s hometown Karlstad and set up laboratory in the abandoned Frankenstein chateau. Frankenstein then finds his original creation frozen inside a glacier and restores it to life. Only it will not respond to his commands. And so Frankenstein comes up with the idea of obtaining the services of Zoltan, a disreputable carnival hypnotist, to hypnotize the monster into obeying him. Zoltan is successful but has less than scientific interests at heart. With the monster responding only to his commands, Zoltan uses it to rob and take revenge upon the town authorities.


COMMENTARY:
General opinion holds The Evil of Frankenstein, the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films, to be one of the duds of the series. One is at a loss to understand why. I, to the contrary, hold The Evil of Frankenstein to be one of the best of the series. With the preceding two entries, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Hammer had kept the same essential creative team – director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and star Peter Cushing – in place. For The Evil of Frankenstein, Hammer producer Anthony Hinds replaced Sangster on script, while Freddie Francis inherited the director’s chair. Freddie Francis was an up and coming director who had worked as an award-winning cinematographer in the previous decade, had made his genre debut with Vengeance/The Brain (1962), followed with a couple of Hammer’s psycho-thrillers, Paranoiac (1962) and Nightmare (1963), and then attained some success with the first of Hammer rival Amicus’s anthology films Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964) just prior to this. Francis, whose output to the Anglo-horror cycle has been underrated, would go on to become its next most prolific director to Fisher. (See below for Freddie Francis’s other films).


It is not clear why The Evil of Frankenstein is almost universally regarded as such a dog in the Hammer pantheon. Just look at the opening scenes that hit one with the fervid intensity of something out of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare brought to life – a little girl sees a body being stolen from a hut in the forest in the middle of the night and calls a priest. The body is taken to Frankenstein who removes the heart before the paling body snatcher, dismissing his queasiness with a curt, “He won’t need it anymore,” before the priest bursts in, cursing Frankenstein’s abominable experiments and smashing the lab equipment. It’s a sequence lit with such a feverishly eerie intensity that it attains a genuinely nightmare atmosphere of dread chill. Nothing else in the film quite manages to match it. Certainly, there are a number of images littered throughout that have a lingering memorability – the deaf-mute beggar girl and her strange relationship with the monster; the monster found buried in the side of the glacier; and one especially memorable scene where the monster gets up and begins to agonizingly shuffle around the lab while Frankenstein looks on, coldly clinically taking notes.


The Evil of Frankenstein presents some confusion to the continuity of the Hammer Frankenstein series. For some reason, Freddie Francis conducts a flashback that offers a potted retelling all the essentials of The Curse of Frankenstein anew. However, this makes changes to continuity – Frankenstein now appears to have merely been driven out of town, not executed. Where the events of The Revenge of Frankenstein fit in becomes somewhat confusing – the Hans character is carried over from Revenge, but Frankenstein’s new body and his escape from the gallows is forgotten about. It’s a puzzle as to why the film creates the flashback – some of this is to set up plot points for later on – although without much rewriting this could all have been made to carry over from Revenge. What tended to lose many people was the addition of the Zoltan character, which takes the story considerably away from the Frankenstein mythos. Indeed, you could almost see this as Hammer’s attempt to craft their own variant on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).


With The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer did not have the copyright to use the Jack Pierce designs for the Boris Karloff monster makeup from Frankenstein (1931) and so Phil Leakey came up with his own original designs. Apparently Universal has relaxed their copyright restrictions by the time of The Evil of Frankenstein and the makeup on Kiwi Kingston’s monster is closely modelled on the Pierce designs, the only time the Hammer Frankenstein’s came close to resembling the Universal originals. Production designer Don Mingaye and special effects man Les Bowie collaborate to come up with not one but two of the series very best creation sequences, with lightning bolts and generator coils crashing in the best Kenneth Strickfaden tradition. And on the whole, The Evil of Frankenstein is a Hammer Frankenstein entry that is well worth re-evaluation. 


The other Hammer Frankenstein films are:– The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973).


Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1962), Nightmare (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), The Vampire Happening (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Tales That Witness Madness (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987).


Review: Richard Scheib
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