This CLASH BY NIGHT is a British "B" picture from 1964. And by "B" I really mean "W", or possibly "Y".

I didn't get much out of it except enjoying greatly the above shot, from right at the beginning. The guy in the foreground has just lost a heap of money on a dog race. The guy on the right is Stanley Meadows, playing a gangster here just as he did in Cammell and Roeg's seminal PERFORMANCE six years later. And he's equally impressive here -- a cool, crisp, naturally frightening actor who was terribly underused by British cinema. Plus he looks great in motorcycle goggles (his cunning disguise).

And I loved this shot -- Peter Sallis (Wallace from WALLACE AND GROMIT) in the role of halfwitted lunatic "Victor Lush", threatens everybody with a lit match in a paraffin-soaked barn.

That's basically the plot -- a coach full of of prisoners and their guards are imprisoned in said barn while a gang boss makes his getaway. Since all the jailbirds are required to do is sit put until dawn, there's not much suspense - -except that it's Guy Fawkes' Night and fireworks are flying hither and yon.

The transporter full of hardened stereotypes put me in mind of CON AIR, and made me wonder if there's another variation to be pulled on this appealing set-up. Apart from that, the film boasts an appearance by what appears to be future cheesemeister Ray Austen (VIRGIN WITCH) as the world's most inept sexual predator. "My husband will be home shortly," says Jennifer Jayne, whereupon he rips her blouse and is promptly socked to death by the returning hubby. Which is all just by way of illustrating that our appallingly stiff middle-class hero is AN INNOCENT MAN UNJUSTLY CONVICTED. Which turns out to have no bearing on anything, really.

CLASH BY NIGHT has an ability to just barely hold the attention by delivering unnecessary flashbacks, improbable coincidences, pathetic cop-outs and other narrative blunders at a rapid-fire pace. If it were any better it wouldn't really be any fun. Sadly, the only major character who DOESN'T get a flashback is the religious zealot who's been arrested for "trying to take brotherly love a bit too far." Even in the wake of VICTIM (1961) this film didn't feel able to go any deeper into THAT. Given the portrayal of Sallis' character -- is he insane? Is he mentally handicapped? Do they know there's a difference? -- it's unlikely the results would have been terribly illuminating.

Oh, and there's some quite fun X-rated cursing, or "pervasive language" as the MPAA would say. The actors can barely conceal their glee at being allowed to say big grown-up words like "bastard". My Dad once told me that he and his friends used to read Mickey Spillane "for the swearing", so they'd have dug this.

What on earth goes on at The Guardian? You can read more about this non story here. Or better yet... watch this trailer for Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg's masterful Performance (1970), a film I am glad Jagger decided on doing.

]]> http://srbissette.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/459/ Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:14:00 +0000 srbissette http://srbissette.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/459/

'Good Dog' by Mike Dooney, (c) 2006

There's more exciting Mario Bava DVD news on

which I urge you to pop right over to pronto if you've any interest at all in Bava's rarest of all films. I'll leave it to Tim to tell you about it...

But my mind wanders to something else -- I've unpacked my old LP collection and been spinning many of my favorite vinyls. Prominent among those is Performance, which I was spinning a fair amount before our move, for reasons I can neither articulate nor divine.

For some reason, the film and score have been much on my mind of late, in part due to my own struggling through a comics story I'm working out in my sketchbook that's clearly informed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's approach to Performance (a 'fragmented narrative' orientation that Roeg explored more adventurously than any other filmmaker, to my mind, and which I trace back to a fave film Roeg photographed but did not direct: Richard Lester's Petulia).

I first saw Performance on the expansive screen of Burlington, VT's Strong Theater (sadly, long gone now) with my best high school friend Bill Hunter; we were teenagers, and completely unprepared for the film and its impact on our tender teen psyches. Like the underground films (which we'd begun to sample, thanks to two competing underground film societies that sprang up in Burlington and on the UVM campus at the same time) and comix (thanks to my high school art teacher Bill Cathey, who could have lost his job for turning me on to Zap, which forever changed my life and made me want to draw comics forever) I was just beginning to explore, Performance completely demolished all previous modes of cinema I'd ever experienced. It quite literally blew my mind, as surely as any illegal substance I'd later dabble with ever did or would (I was not a stoner in high school, had never smoked a joint or even been drunk before graduating high school: in terms of body and brain chemistry, straight-arrow Boy Scout, that was me).

It forever altered not only how I experienced movies, but how I saw and experienced life. Bill, I recall, loathed the film, so I drove myself back to the Strong the very next night to see Performance again, both shows, back-to-back. Remember, this was the pre-home-video era, and I feared I might never, ever get to see the film again. I had to experience it anew, plunge into its maze and sort out what I could from its strange multi-tier layering.

Like almost every film I loved from that period in my life, the American critics reviled the film; if memory serves, John Simon scribed the single most scathing review, treating the movie as an infectious viral aberration. That it was, but like so many other films of the time, I was glad to have caught the contagion.

In that pre-video era, too, the only artifact most films offered that one could take home to preserve memories and/or further explore the experience were paltry and few. Some films had paperback adaptations, some had comic book adaptations -- neither a reliable companion to the cinematic experience, though still treasured -- but many had soundtrack LPS, and Performance's was a doozy. Given the limited time I have this morning, I can't come close to the eloquence of

but I have to stress my experience was quite different from Tim's, in that I'd seen the film, three times, before bringing the LP home.

Still, Tim's post rings lots of bells for me, as that album has been a key one in my collection since I first picked it up back in '71, days after seeing the movie. Jack Nietsche's score -- and the album -- are among the best ever wed to a film, and that record turned me on to Randy Newman, The Last Poets, Ry Cooder and, natch, Nietsche. Too bad he scored so few films; one of my (and Tim's) favorite cuts on the album, "Harry Flowers," has another association for me: it anticipates the lovely concluding passage of Nietsche's fantastic score for Robert Downey's Greaser's Palace (a score never released on LP or CD, to my knowledge), another of my favorite '70s movies (and a viewing experience which I'll rhapsodize over another time).

I'm glad I caught Performance three times in its original X-rated run at the Strong (no, I wasn't 17; the Strong always accepted my ticket money, whatever the rating of the film showing) because here in the US, the film never, ever unreeled in that complete a state again. I know, I've screened it many times since: the film was re-rated 'R' in every incarnation since (a fact Tim seems to misremember).

I showed it on 16mm at Johnson State College to kick off our Nicolas Roeg retrospective, heartsick at the minor cuts and missing bits of vital tissue; it was among the first videocassettes I ever rented, or purchased, though the video version was even more truncated than the 16mm print I'd projected onto the Dibden Theater screen -- and the cuts were odd: plucked piecemeal hither and thither, like tiles chipped from a fresco with no discernable reasoning (note that Ken Russell's The Devils -- also first seen by this sick puppy at the Strong! -- suffered the identical fate: someone, or someones, at Warner Bros. had it in for their most daring 1971 films). A few years ago, a British fan of my comics work helped me secure a copy of the UK video release, and despite the inevitable degeneration of even the best available transfer (from PAL to vhs), that release was closest to the film I'd seen back in '71.

Thankfully,

and I'll be picking up my copy later today when I visit my old day-job digs at First Run Video in Brattleboro, after speaking to two sessions of the Center for Digital Art filmmaking class.

I'm eager to pop Performance into the player and savor the first near-complete (note Tim's picking up one inexplicably dropped line from the opener of the unforgettable "Memo from Turner" sequence), and once again split my skull for love of cinema.

I'll just remember to personally lip-synch Mick's "Here's to Olde England!" toast at the appropriate moment.

Away down in Massachusetts, in the land of Mirage Studios, lives one hell of an artist (among many) named Michael Dooney, who I've now known for some twenty-odd years. Mike's got a great site up posting his "sketchbook paintings," which habitually knock my best paintings in the dirt.
The man's got the touch, as these portraits should demonstrate, and you can see more

Lest you think these exquisite portraits are solely representative of Mike's abilities and vision, pop on over to

you won't be disappointed!

There's also

and both Mike and Eric have mucho links to other fine cartoonist and artist sites to share. Check 'em out!

OK, I really, really have to run.

See ya later in the week...