How'd we get on this John Mills kick, anyway? I mean, before it started, I hadn't really given him that much thought. I'd seen him in a few movies, but knew him mostly as the father of Haley Mills, the huge Disney star of the early 60s who became famous with "The Parent Trap". His other daughter is Juliet Mills, the Nanny of "Nanny and the Professor", a TV show that ran for a couple seasons in the early 70s. But Mills himself? All I really knew was that he'd been knighted for his acting work, and was especially well regarded in England.
In looking at my movie list, I see that Mills first caught our attention in "Tiger Bay", which we saw a couple of months ago. He actually co-starred with Haley in that one, playing a detective to her street urchin who witnesses a murder. That was a very good film, mostly for Haley's performance. But then we saw Sir John in "We Dive at Dawn", in which he played a submarine captain, and I think that was the picture that did it. I remember writing that his performance was so authentic that you felt as if you were there in the sub, as part of the crew.
So yeah, that was how it happened. We got warmed up with "Tiger Bay", then saw JM in a standout role in"Dive", and we thought "this guy is awesome", and we went from there. Then it became a "thing" to see how many of his movies we could find. And we've found quite a few, I must say.
We're still going, and tonight we went all the way back to the second film of his career : "Britannia of Billingsgate"(1933), a hijinx comedy about a Cockney woman who becomes a movie star by accident. Violet Loraine stars as "Bessie Bolton", the owner of a London fish and chips restaurant who likes to sing while she works. A movie is being shot on her street, and by chance, her voice is recorded by the sound crew. The movie's director, a frenetic Italian artiste, is so upset by the lack of passion from his leads, that he decides to scrap his film's initial romantic plot in favor of making a musical starring the owner of the elusive singing voice. "Find me that woman"!, he demands of his crew.
She signs a contract and is promoted as the Next Big Thing, even before her movie comes out. Her husband (Gordon Harker, a freaking riot), formerly a fishmonger, now aspires to become a studio bigshot. He's got the motion picture business all figured out. As for John Mills, he's Bessie's son, an amateur motorcycle racer.
The Britspeak jabbering in this flick was so fast and furious that I couldn't understand half of it, but it didn't matter too much. The story is thin, but the actors are very funny. What plot there is revolves around Bessie at first becoming a diva, but then returning to her roots as a working class mother when her family gets out of hand over her fame. Her husband does indeed become a honcho and spends the rest of the movie hammered. Her daughter's had a crush on the star of the original picture, one "Harold Hogarth" (Walter Sondes). She sneaks into his hotel room in hopes of a romantic "encounter", which escalates the screwy situation. And John Mills is at home, laid up with a bad knee. He's depressed at having to miss an important race, but Bessie doesn't want him riding motorcycles anyway. Of course he ends up racing anyhow, and this sequence was interesting because it showed an actual dirt track motorcycle race in 1933. It looked just like the motocross of today (with more primitive bikes), and I was surprised because I didn't know there was such a thing back then.
Anyhow, this is decidedly a B-movie, with hard-to-understand dialogue and a Depression-era look. But it's great fun, only runs 74 minutes and moves fast. You definitely won't be bored. John Mills' part is small, so the main draw here is Violet Loraine, who according to Wiki was a music hall star of the early 20th century. She only made two movies, but she's got silver screen charisma to burn, and again, Gordon Harker, the actor playing her husband, is laugh out loud funny. The two of them are more than enough reason to watch, and you get Mills the Motocross Racer as a bonus. Oh yeah, and the Italian movie director is a riot also. For these reasons, "Britannia of Billingsgate" gets Two Solid Thumbs Up and a strong recommendation. ////
The previous night I had to do some serious searching before I found a Mills Film, and though I didn't have high hopes for "A Black Veil for Lisa"(1968), it turned out much better than I expected. I don't usually go for Italian attempts to interpret commercial genres. I don't like Spaghetti Westerns, and most Italian horror is just boobs and blood. The acting is usually stiff and the dubbing atrocious. I feared this might be the case tonight with what looked to be a Hollywood-style crime flick, but because it starred John Mills I stuck with it.
At first I was confused as to the location and the nationalities of the characters. There was a police chief with a heavy Russian accent but a German name, who was played by an Italian actor. Mills' detective also has a German name, but the subordinate police characters are obviously Italian (their names aren't given), so I thought I was watching a movie set in Rome, about Italian drug smugglers. The movie starts off with Mills trying to solve a series of murders involving cocaine.
Then we see a map of Hamburg in his office, and there's a location shot of a strip club called Moulin Rouge, so now I knew we were on the Reeperbahn made famous by the Beatles. After you watch the movie, Google a photo of the Moulin Rouge marquee, and you'll see it's the same place. At any rate, by that point I knew I wasn't watching a typical Italian exploitation flick.
The movie changes gears, however, when the focus moves from the murders to a scrutiny of Mills' relationship with his much younger wife, whom he suspects is cheating on him. After arresting a suspect in the drug murders, he offers the man a deal : he can go free if he kills her. The suspect is played by an Austrian actor named Robert Hoffmann, who looks like a cross between Richard Chamberlain and David Bowie. The guy is too handsome for his own good, so you can guess what happens when he goes to the house to carry out the murder - he meets Mills' wife (the also highly attractive Luciana Paluzzi, a former Bond Girl), and a tryst breaks out. John Mills finds out about it, and now he's doubly pissed off, first because his suspicions about his wife were correct, and secondly because his murder suspect didn't kill her. And now, the guy has blackmail on Mills, because Mills has not only let him go in the drug murders, but contracted him to get rid of his wife.
So Mills starts following the hot n' heavy couple, trying to plot his way out of the jam he's in. He's pounding the scotch by now and is ready for a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Robert Hoffmann is makin' the scene with his wife, and the movie becomes a psychological study of Mills' character. We're talkin' Middle Aged Mills now, where his marital crisis is causing him to throw away his whole life, and JM gets to show off some serious acting chops here. I was surprised at how well directed the movie was, and apparently there is a term for this genre as it pertains to Italian crime thrillers. Have you ever heard of Giallo? I had not, but the style has all the hallmarks of classic Hollywood filmmaking. While the production values weren't as high in this particular movie, it still looked slick. The color photography was excellent and the lead actors all gave realistic, 1970s style performances, John Mills especially as the distraught, emasculated detective. In fact it was one of his best roles so far, really showing off his range.
I won't go so far as to call "A Black Veil for Lisa" a Crime Classic. If you're looking for European entries in that category, look to French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville or Claude Chabrol. But Mr. Dallamano did a good job with this example of Giallo, so let's give it Two Big Thumbs Up to be generous, and to encourage us to look for more.
That's all I know for today. I'm back home and have a few dvds I need to watch before they're due at the library, so we might be taking a break here and there in our Mills Fest, which has anyhow become more of a Mills Quest, as we're down to searching far and wide for unseen films. But we're not done with JM just yet. I know of at least two more available flicks, and we'll get to 'em in short order so stay tuned.
Have a wonderful evening, and a Happy Ritchie Blackmore's Birthday tomorrow.
Tons of love as always! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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