IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 6.6 by 2242. cinematizens.
Genre: Holmes.
Verdict: The moor!
The elder Baskerville dies out on the moor in peculiar circumstances, and his young heir arrives from Canada to assume the title. But Dr Mortimer has seen that footprint and goes to Sherlock Holmes for advice. This is a perfectly cast Holmes, though his attention to personal grooming is not Holmesian, but he crackles with intelligence and dominates proceedings even while off-camera.
The cast of characters is assembled in the rambling and slightly ramshackle mansion near the moor. The hound puts in a stunning, early appearance that stayed with me after I first saw this twenty years ago. The staging is great but the inserted dialogue is pathetic in compassion. Likewise the outdoor scenes on the moor are splendid but the accompanying dialogue is not, and too little of it comes from the original.
The villain is obvious, since he is the only one we get to know, the others are ciphers and might as well be CGI. Even the subplot with the butler and his wife is bleached into near nothingness. But the villain, played by Richard Grant, is magnificent. He switches on and off from maniacal to charming, from genial to menacing, from sincere to evil in a twinkle. Superb.
Richard Grant was brilliant.
The Jeremy Brett version was absolutely literal to Conan Doyle’s text and the poorer for it. It did not make use of the sight and sound to do what ink on the page could not do to generate an atmosphere. Ergo literary fidelity is not an end in itself, but in this 2002 version so many liberties are taken with the text that the air is let out of the plot.
Watson is made a credible figure in the dialogue, though the actor in the role is far from convincing. He seems like a little boy trying to act like a big boy, even his hat seems too big for him. Underneath Dr Mortimer’s beard, side burns, straggling hair, and moustache is Inspector Barnaby who would have made a far better Watson.
A casual search on the IMDb returns a dozen of more versions of the HotB, and there are others with altered titles. I have seen Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Christoper Lee, Jeremy Brett, and Ian Richardson each in turn battle that dog, as well as Benedict Cumberatch, and now (again) Richard Roxborough.
IMDB meta-data is 39 episodes of 24 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 984 cinematizens and then another fifty of 50 minutes each.
Genre: Adventure
Verdict: Go!
Before he became Prisoner Number Six, he was Danger Man or was that Dangerman, or even Secret Agent, roaming the world as either American, British, NATOist, or Irish. That is all part of the mystic. The initial opening credits show the US capitol dome and that has led most reviewers to conclude he was supposed to be American, but the earliest episodes occur in the ebbing British Empire and in the opening voice over the phrasing of the reference to NATO sounds like that is the one, while in later episodes he says he works for his country (whichever that might be), but then he also names NATO as his employer in another. He also says he is Irish-American. The man always has a cover story. By the way, NATO headquarters at the time was in Paris, not DC. Later he becomes British if not English.
The half-hour episodes zip along. The opening is a crime of some sort, and then our hero, Drake, John Drake, is dispatched to some obscure, exotic, distant locale to sort it out. The characters are set in motion without tedious backstories and get on with it. The narratives are models of construction, as opposed to the padded and wandering story lines that dominate bloated, wallowing films these days.
Some of the scripts are very clever. I particularly liked the seeing blind woman. In another, Drake’s contact on site is a woman who is in effect his boss during the mission. No fuss is made over that, it just is that way. Ditto when a woman is the CEO of an African Airline. Best might be Drake in a wheel chair. Never seen that done before or since. Although there are clangers, even in the earliest episodes, say when a banker absconds with a ton of gold and stores it in a really big and really heavy box, which no one notices for some time, or the Swedish school teacher stereotype who trips over everything.
Everyone smokes more or less constantly, even when lying in wait to ambush Drake, and no one is without a drink of alcohol in hand for more than two minutes. There are many tuxedos as Drake moves among the elite where there is the most opportunity for corruption. But then there is that leather pork pie hat he sports in some later episodes that takes the couture down to leagues club level. In early episodes he gets by on his wits and fists and audacity but as the series goes on more gadgets (cameras, microphones, drones, and other gizmos) and guns are added to the mix.
Patrick McGoohan was more Roman Catholic than the Pope and made it part of his contract that the character would not bed women nor do anything immoral, like assassinate a target. While Drake is often compared to James Bond, the similarities end there.
The first two seasons were not a great success, but then Dr No created a demand for spy entertainment, and Danger Man was rejuvenated, re-newed, re-titled to Secret Agent, and extended to an hour. To lure McGoohan back the episodes were expanded to one hour and he was given considerable creative input, often under pseudonyms. In these longer episodes he is clearly British right down to the Austin Cooper.
The hour long scripts are repetitive and preachy all too often as Drake has become a more or less self-appointed, self-righteous, and cosmopolitan do-gooder. He spares no one his sermons, not even his superiors whom he takes to task regularly even as they sign the pay cheques. He is altogether insufferable. It is easy to see why he went to the Village.
In the wake of Dr No there are also even more guns, girls, and gadgets.
The hour long episodes are hard to watch and I find myself tuning out in a way that I did not do with the shorter ones, where to blink was to miss the action where Drake outsmarted is opponents rather than berated his superiors.
It is chance to see a host of performers in earlier days from Derren Nesbitt, Lois Maxwell, Donald Pleasance, Hazel Court, John Le Mesurier, Charles Gray, Mai Zetterling, Honor Blackman, Nigel Green, Ron Fraser, Burt Kwok, Sylvia Sims, and the list goes on and on. Most, but not all episodes can be found on You Tube or Daily Motion and the DVDs are available from Amazon.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 5.3 by 89 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Slow but ahead of its time.
Two middle age, middle class women die without any apparent case of death after attending a séance with a professional medium. For reasons not at all clear to this viewer the decision is to assign a female officer to investigate. Ah, but there are no female investigating officers so the senior, female traffic warden, Mrs Pym, is summoned, and offered the assignment with the temporary promotion to inspector. She agrees with an alacrity that surprises all.
A male offsider is assigned to assistant and also to keep an eye on her. Nudge, nudge, wink. In fact, he quickly subordinates himself to her.
She changes out of uniform and sets off. First she tries to figure out the (ingenious and fantastic) means of murder, because it is murder! Now I realise the suspicion that dogs have of vacuum cleaners is warranted. She also starts trying to identify, provoke, and trap the murderer. She makes mistakes but keeps going. The plot is thickened because….SPOILER…there were two villains working on different agendas. (Admission, I forget the details and it was just last night.)
Mary Clare (1892-1970) was Mrs Pym. Most of her theatrical career was on the stage with a few supporting roles in films likeThe Clairvoyant (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Oliver Twist (1948). This title was her only lead. Her later work was in television. I had rather hoped this was the first of a series, but not so.
It was released on 13 April 1940 just before the Phoney War got real.
IMDb meta-data is seven episodes of 30 minutes each, rated 6.7 by fifty-two cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: [Zzzzzzz]
Des Kinvig is the work-shy proprietor of a 1970s electrical repair shop on the high street in a working class town of the English midlands. Together with his layabout pal, he dreams of ETs, UFOs, and BEMs. Then one day the Queen of Mercury appears (or does she?).
Sounds better than it is. Nigel Kneale is credited as the writer of all seven episodes, and he is in the first rank of screenwriters for sure, but here he tried his hand at comedy, trusted to arthritic directors, with low-rent players, and canned laughter. Not all seven episodes were aired; such was the audience reaction. The rating above is nostalgia inflated by about a factor of ten.
It must be one of the most difficult to watch Sy Fy series ever (partly) aired. It makes Star Maidens look good, difficult though that is to believe.
IMDb 1 hour and 12 minutes (it seemed longer), rated 6.3 by 390 cinematizens.
That Hammer master of horror, Peter Cushing returns to Holmes twenty-seven years after he last donned the deerstalker in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) with John Mills (between the forest sideburns), the eternal Scotsman Gordon Jackson, a miscast Ann Baxter, a catatonic Ray Milland straight from Madame Tussaud’s, and Anton Diffring, as always the villain, in a 1913 London when war clouds gather.
Dead men without a mark start popping out the sewers. Taking Scotland Yard literally, Scotsman Gordo drags the scent across Holmes’s nose and stands back. The action is, well, by the numbers with a red whale, rather than a red herring, a gratuitous appearance of The Woman played by the dowager Baxter. There is some verbal sparing with The Woman, and one nice action scene when Watson dispatches a hooligan very economically on a moving train. Holmes’s major insight is that someone is lying.
Spoiler. The Aryan Anton, despite innocent appearances, has secretly been making poison gas down below so that when the war begins he can release it into the town gas that illuminated London. The dead men were production accidents.
The print I found on You Tube was terrible and that may partly explain why I found it boring.
Some time during my You Tube browsing, lately after three hours of physiotherapy, I came across DUST, a You Tube channel. Recommended. It features science fiction short films from five minutes to twenty-five minutes or so. Some are quite good, but not all.
The good ones have a story to tell and use some of the conventions of SciFi to do so. Some of the stories are imaginative, though not all. In the imaginative ones the SciFi element is central to the situation, the conflict, the paradox, …whatever.
I have scanned a lot of them, sometimes with the mute on without keeping track of the titles. But some of the good ones were these.
One concerned Nikolas Tesla’s discovery of time travel in nine minutes. Very amusing with the punch line at the very end. There are many films on DUST with Tesla so it will be hard to find. Found it : Room 88.
A second concerned an interminable traffic jam which executes population reduction without discrimination by random harvesting of motorists. Think of the Spit Bridge without warning raising at random times and all the cars and occupants on it are vaporised and you have it. This one I think was Danish. The Bridge?
Third, while most of the shorts are serious, some dead serious, and others worse, I came across one that was humorous, Alientologists. with tap dancing blue aliens. Great fun.
Four, Hashtag about the ephemeral nature of celebrity on social media. This one cuts to the bone.
Finally one concerned two astronauts exploring a dead world only to find skulls. Slowly we come to realise this desolate planet is in fact the Earth and the astronauts, despite the biped appearance and easy banter, are not human. The title is Unearthed.
All of these and many others are far superior to the overblown, CGI trash, incomprehensible, deafening, and pretentious marathons that come from Hollywood starring the same handful of actors. Yes, I am thinking of Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre. Among others.
Most of the dozens of shorts I have scanned lack a story. Many are shoot-em ups of one kind or another, and others are just talk, talk, talk, and more talk. They have the cinematography and the CGI down pat, but they have nothing to communicate except to display the technical ability of the producer. Perhaps they are film school projects. In any event, they are all form and no content, leaving it to viewers to interpret. Beyond the gates of film schools most viewers want the film to do the work of imagination.
Length is irrelevant some of the five minute ones have a story and some of the twenty-five minutes do not. Then there are the two and half hour flightless turkeys from Hollywood. More is no indicator of better.
DUST has an extensive web site for those interested.
IDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 44 minutes rated 7.0 by 8882.
Genre: Pastiche.
Verdict: Whoosh!
Fantômas is a supervillain with a vast criminal organisation headquartered in an underground lair equipped with all mod villainy cons of 1964: intercoms, sliding doors, closed circuit TV, ear-popping elevators, hot and cold-running thugs, a dungeon, and the mandatory femme fatale. He only leaves home to pull off spectacular heists. Oh, he is also a man of a thousand faces, but when relaxing at home torturing victims he looks like a bald, blue alien. That look is never explained.
Fantômas is very concerned about his public image and beats up a journalist whose reports on his doings have been disrespectful. Ouch. He doubles down on Journalist by kidnapping his girlfriend and committing an audacious crime disguised as Journalist. Energetic Inspector Clouseau puts un et une together and pursues Journalist because he IS Fantômas. The last hour is all chase.
In the end Journalist is exonerated and girlfriend rescued, but Fantômas gets away. In an explicit parody of the last scene in Dr No (1962) Journalist and Inspector are floating away in a rubber raft bickering with each other.
Jean Marais stars as both Journalist and beneath the make-up Fantômas. By train, motorbike, helicopter, automobile, submarine, speed boat he pursues himself who is always one step ahead of him. Is this post-modern or what?
The End.
It is high octane and totally silly as they zoom around Paris, the Ile France, and the Med. The humour is broader than in Dr No and the pace is faster.
I also watched Fantômas Unleashed (1965) and Fantômas against Scotland Yard (1967). More slapstick, more chase, and ever more make-up.
Prior to World War I two journalists, Marcel Alain and Pierre Souvestre, cranked out thirty-two books featuring the ruthless, murderous, diabolical arch-villain Fantômas. They were snapped up by the nascent film industry and rendered as Gothic horror films wherein Fantômas was portrayed as a shadowy figure with arms stretched overhead about to swoop on a victim. Both the books and the films were very popular. They are much darker and more macabre than these 1960s films.
Marais was a writer, sculptor, stuntman, and actor who was Beast in Jean Cocteau’s ethereal Beauty and the Beast (1946). He is completely without ego in his willingness to act in concealing make-up as Beast or Fantômas. No Hollywood A-lister would have done that.
IMDb meta-data is ten episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.9 by 229 viewers.
Genre: Documentary.
Verdict: Addictive.
Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank set off on a five-month journey around the world to bring to viewers’ attention eighty treasures that define epochs, cultures, and civilisations. Singularly and collectively they represent instances of the highest achievements of our species. The itinerary went through thirty-four countries on all of the inhabited continents, considering about 400 objects for inclusion in the top 80. They ranged from massive buildings to vast irrigation schemes to buildings to intricate carved miniatures to manufactured goods to symbolic gestures to practical engineering.
The choices are in some cases, obvious, like the Taj Mahal, and others at the end of a long bow, like the Colt-45. But each of the candidates is interesting and the research, explanation, photography, and travelogue to put them into context are engrossing. There is no doubt that each of the candidates are themselves treasures, but, perhaps as a boy, inspired by Jules Verne, Cruickshank limited himself to eighty. The time constraints, the budget constraints, viewers’ attention spans, the limitation to eighty, combine to produce focus and discipline.
Other among the eighty are the Incan Salt Pans, Nazca Lines, Monticello, St James Church, Kakadu Rock Art, Ankor Wat, samurai sword, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Giant Buddha, Jantar Mantar Observatory, Lalibela, Samarkand tiles, Petra, Dogon Mask, Tuankhamun’s death mask, Hagia Sophia, VW Beetle, Guernica, and more. As the list indicates, many are religious in one way or another. The Wikipedia entry lists them, and the DVDs are still available.
At fifty-six years of age, Cruikshank is intrepid, abseiling up rock faces, descending in a crouch for hundreds of meters down damp, slippery, and poorly lite shafts, ascending rocky scree for hundreds of metres in the Sahara heat to reach a treasure. Of course the unseen and unacknowledged camera operator and sound engineer always go first. Always Dan has a notebook in hand to record the details, always sports a neck bandana, and always whispers.
Like many others I find the whispering annoying when it is not done out of consideration of the environment. To whisper while observing a religious ritual is appropriate, but not when standing in an isolated locale talking about rock art. But whisper often he does, reminding me an Australian celebrity academic who always whispered, a technique to make the audience to lean forward and listen to his priceless banalities. I had the misfortune a few times to share a conference panel with this poseur.
At times, Cruikshank seems to go off script with visits to local bazaars and haggling over the price of hat or a meal. More exposition of the candidates and less beating down the locals in price would have been better.
We watched these in 2009 and reviewed them again recently.
The pompous, opinionated, and ignorant troll criticisms on IMDb attack his clothes, his accent, his inflection, his explanations, his choices, his hat, the bandana, the whole project and in some cases all of the above and more. Armchair trolls indeed.
IMDB meta-data is 13 episodes of 30 minutes, rated 6.5 by 163 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
Verdict: A winner (see the last paragraph below before ordering).
Thanks to the physics of script writing a distant planet shifts into the solar system. Astronomers notice this aberration and squint into lens. This planet is Medusa which is ruled by women who regard men as noisome necessities to kept in their places as stronger and bigger but less intelligent, less rational, less stable, less disciplined, and less creative than women are. All of this is made clear from the many condescending, patronising, and sexist remarks the women make about men as dumb, flighty, unstable, vain, inattentive, hysterical and so on, applying to men all the stupid and sexist remark contemporary men applied to women. Though absent are the sexual innuendo and double entrendre common to the era.
Medusa’s women wear Sylvia Anderson styles (though she is not credited the wardrobe and sets shout her name) with clear visors, thigh-length boots, six-inch high heels, floor-length hair, elbow gloves, face studs, glitter, sparkle, and hot pants — all in primary colours: All 1970s.
By the osmosis of the script, word passes among the kept, domestic pet-men of Medusa that Earth is ruled by men! Psst, pass it on. An underground Mens Liberation Front takes form, led by Gareth Thomas, and Pierre Brice who decide to escape from their feathered life and steal a spaceship. They land on Earth and bumble around.
Can’t have uppity men stealing and leaving – never quite sure which was the more important crime: leaving or stealing – and so two women set off in slow pursuit and thus the two worlds come into contact. Each society changes a bit as a result. The end.
I may have missed some of the subtlety because at times I engaged the mute during some episodes.
Star Maidens was an Anglo-German production. The German actors, some of whom are Swedish, all speak nearly accent-free English, diluting any exotic element.
Men are such pains!
It is all played deadpan with awkward scenes, inconsistent characterisations, black holes in the plot, and timidity in the basic idea of gender role reversals. On this point more below. Along with the clothing fashions, the model work of space ships and alien cities – Sylvia again, I suppose – intrudes.
On the credit side, Medusa is not trivialised into either a paradise or a hell. Beneath the matriarchy normal emotional relations exist, just as they do within the Earth’s patriarchy. Though no children are ever seen on either planet. Hmm. There are no villains but collisions among differing ways of life. No shoot ‘em ups, no flames in space, no usual SyFy nonsense. It is all very low key for the most part and when that is combined with pedestrian writing, distracted acting, leaden direction, and butchered editing it is no wonder it died on release.
There are some nice, if heavy handed, role reversal moments. As when the hairy-chested Medusan runaway Brice on Earth has a coffee klatch with neighbourhood wives and shares recipes he got from his father and grandfather. Indeed most episodes are variations of the battle of sexes with nary a hint of science fiction. There are two exceptions, one involving self-conscious computer AI and another about time stopping. In addition, a promising idea set out at the start disappears, namely why the surface of Medusa is uninhabitable. It was implied in episode one, I seem to recall, that the surface was rendered uninhabitable by human action, though the opening background under the credit belies that. Oh, and by the way, recalcitrant men are assigned to work on the horrible surface though what they are doing there apart from whinging is never made clear.
Sylvia styles.
Certainly the gender role reversal motif was daring at the time but the execution is half-hearted. After all it must still be the women on Medusa who bear children and somehow that is elided. There is nothing about domestic violence, unwanted children, child care, sexual abuse of children, abortion, slave labour, rape (in marriage), or any of the unpleasant reality of permanent domination. Entrenched matriarchy is likely to produce such corruptions as entrenched patriarchy, but in the 1970s these realities were far beyond the outer limits.
Gareth found fame later in the seldom seen Blake’s Seven. This seems to be Brice’s only credit in English, but he was Winnetou in eleven German western feature films of the 1960s based of Karl May’s books which I have noted elsewhere on this blog. Thomas is perfectly cast as a dolt, and does it convincingly. Brice frequently looks like he wants a stern word with his agent. In one episode the larger than life Terence Alexander is woefully miscast as a Soviet spy in a three-piece pin-stripped suit with a Scots accent.
The IMDb rumour mill has it that the episodes were originally prepared as 50-minute programs, but no one would pay or run them for that length, and so each episode was re-edited and cut to 25-minutes. It shows. The result is cryptic to say the least.
Among the cognoscenti rages an argument over which is the worst ever Brit SyFy television series. True, SyFy offerings are few — leaving aside the good Doctor (Who) — from within that small number there are many candidates for this accolade. Blake’s Seven springs immediately to mind only to be displaced by Space 1999 (1975), but then what of UFO (1970)? Indeed, what of it? And there is the reigning champion, Starlost (1973). But Star Maidens might give it nudge. Whatever its intentions the result is serial inanity. Needless to say some viewers think it is great. Indeed, one user’s review on IMDb takes the whole thing as ironic, showing how terrible a woman’s world would be.
The Case of the Ancient Astronauts, BBC Horizon (1977) and PBS Nova (1978).
IMDb meta-data is 50 minutes, unrated.
Genre: Documentary
Verdict: Gravity is not a matter of opinion.
This episode offers a root and branch refutation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Researchers for the production company visited each of the places and sites EvD asserted as evidence of mysteries that could only be explained by alien intervention and refuted his childish claims point by point. Accomplishments that were beyond ‘these primitive people’ (a favourite EvD phrase) were readily and easily explained. Throughout his main argument is: ‘What other explanation could there be?’ To find out what other explanations there were the producers went to those sites and showed how it was done. Building pyramids required a stick and string to make a false horizon, water (hot and cold), mallets, and pegs to quarry stones, sand dunes, well organised work gangs with incentives (but not Cecil B. DeMille’s whips), and a broad social commitment. These combined with the close observation of nature to equip those so-called primitive people to do the work.
The Nazca lines, Easter Island Moai, Palenque slab, and more are considered, including interviews with scholars who have made each subject a life’s work. Every time they found that the unfathomable mysteries that EvD attributes to aliens arose from human ingenuity and social organisation, and sometimes compounded by the megalomania of a ruler and ruling class.
The Nazca lines, for example, expressed the ambition of the ruler to placate the gods with the images, as many other rulers have done with animal and human sacrifices. In other words, he had it done because he could. Sound familiar?
Such was EvD’s confidence in the gullibility of his audience that he agreed to take part in this program. When confronted with simple alternative explanations he declared them to be beside the point, the term ‘fake news’ had not yet been coined. He simply asserted that it was not done that way, as though he were an eye witness. When he pointed to an object as evidence of alien artefacts, the Horizon researchers produced the local artisan who had made the very exhibit that EvD used, which he then dismissed as an example. His confidence in the credulity of the audience is, well, incredible. And, accurate.
But he was right, was he not, i.e., about the credulity of the audience? Remember that Time-Life promoted The Chariots of the Gods (1970), and published the companion books that were sold in supermarkets far and wide, one source puts the sales in the 1970s as eight million. No doubt many more millions have been sold since. For the current state of play see the Wikipedia entry which is edited almost daily in a low-level Wiki war.
Others have since also tried a hand at refuting this nonsense.
Love the first two titles.
As late as 2018 EvD was dining on the credulity trail, speaking at conferences on aliens, and signing his books. In Pasadena three thousand people paid to hear him lie to them. Meanwhile, Season 13 of Ancient Aliens was aired in that year, and is available on Amazon Prime. He collects royalties from this series; he is proud to say.
There are many You Tube videos about EvD, and reading the comments they elicit is depressing. There is so much idiocy, despite more than a century of free public education, it is quite impossible either to correct, disabuse, or fathom. Alas, stupidity seems to be a virus that is ineradicable.
I came across my copy of this video (which I acquired decades ago thanks to the diligence of a librarian) on the office shelf when looking for something else, and watched it again while munching lunch. The quality of the video I have is terrible but I noticed that it is available on Amazon Prime in the USA (in what I hope would be a better video quality) by Nova on PBS but not here. Tant pis for me.
I fear that the effort the librarian put into finding this obscure film for me was at the expense of the KPIs, which would not have included investing so much time on one customer’s inquiry when there were so many meetings to attend about customer service.
