Last night's British crime flick was "The Break"(1962), and as the title implies, convict "Jacko Thomas" (William Lucas), serving a ten year sentence for bink ribbery, breaks free of custody while being transferred between prisons. He kills one of his guards before jumping off the train. Now he's wanted for murdalization, also.
The movie switches gears after that opening scene. Now we're at a field depot at the edge of the Skittish moors, where three disparate travelers await cross-country transit by Land Rover. We've got novelist "Greg Parker" (Tony Britton), an overly inquisitive chap named "Pearson" (Robert Urquhart), and young "Sue Thomas" (Christina Gregg), who seems nervous during the very bumpy ride to the moors. The three are headed to Tredgar's Quarry, where an Inn is located. It's a getaway place, the kind of remote, inspirational venue where Parker the novelist can write his latest book. Pearson, the talkative chap, informs him that he's read every novel. He's a big fan. but boy is he nosy.
At first, because it's not explained, we think the trio are traveling together. Maybe they are part of the jailbreak team that is helping Jacko Thomas escape. But when they get to Mr. Tredgar's Inn, the mystery is cleared up, and we see they are separate. Sue Thomas checks in and is sent immediately to Tredgar's office, where she opens her suitcase, which is filled with money, and gives him a payoff of 500 lbs. She is the sister of Jacko, who is hiding out at the Inn, as prearranged with "Mr. Tredgar" (Eddie Byrne).
Pearson, the nosy chap, turns out to be a private detective. He's aware of Jacko's presence, but is hiding behind the impetus of serving divorce papers on Greg Parker, who contemplates suicide at the edge of the moors cliff upon receiving the notice. He changes his mind when Sue spots him and talks him down at the last second. Now they are an item, but she's still tied to her brother Jacko, who's protected her all their lives. They grew up in an orphanage, after being abandoned by their no-good father. Backstory details create a degree of sympathy for Jacko, though not for his crimes.
At the Inn, Mr. Tredgar employs a pair of, it is implied, inbred locals: "Sarah," (Sonia Dresdel), the middle-aged cook who is mute but not deaf, and the Inn's porter "Moses" (Edwin Richfield), a simpleton who is ultra-fundamentally Christian, quoting fire and brimstone with every suitcase he lugs up the stairs. When Moses finds out Jacko Thomas is staying there (his escape is all over the radio), he swears God will bring hellfire upon the place. He begs Mr. Tredgar to get rid of Jacko, but Tredgar is compromised himself, not only by the payoff he accepted from the Thomases, but because he's running a whiskey schumuggling operation with three big thugs assisting him. Because of the number of idiosyncratic personalities and side threads, it's a plot that could have multiple ways to unfold.
But, as always, it boils down to just a few characters, and Jacko gets into a life or death struggle with Moses after pushing the private eye Pearson off a cliff. Moses cannot tolerate murder, the ultimate sin, so he goes after Jacko with a pitchfork in the barn. You can't get more English Puritan than that: "Be gone, Devil! I banish thee!" Sue Thomas is meanwhile looking for escape, so she goes under the wing of Greg Parker, who by now is suspecting something has happened to Pearson, who has failed to show up for breakfast. A barge is waiting to tow Jacko and his sister Sue to a ship that will take them to "The Argentine", where, like the Nazis, they will live hidden at the bottom of the world, with all that money in their suitcase.
But after Jacko kills Moses, Greg Parker knows he has to stop him or die trying. Even Mr. Tredgar helps, after Jacko refuses to pay him. Two Big Thumbs Up, almost Two Huge if there weren't so many implausibilities, but the photography and moors location are both top-notch, as is William Lucas's performance as Jacko. We also love Christina Gregg, the model-turned-actress who we've seen in many films now, and who was kind of like a 1962 English Julia Roberts. The picture is razor sharp. ////
The previous night, in lieu of a Brit Flick (because we couldn't find one) we discovered instead an oddity. Have you ever heard of a TV movie called "Something Evil"(1972), directed by Steven Spielberg? I hadn't. I knew he did "Night Gallery" early in his career, and "Duel", but I didn't know he had other TV work. This one stars Darren McGavin and Sandy Dennis, playing "Paul" and "Marjorie Worden", a director of TV commercials and his artist wife. As it opens, they're parked in the New York countryside in Valencia. She's painting a watercolor of an old farmhouse in a field. A sign says "For Sale". Marjorie wants Paul to buy it. "It'll mean no European vacation," he tells her, and no private school for "Stevie" (Johnny Whittaker), their 12-year-old son.
But Marjorie wants the house, and is okay with the necessary sacrifices. The owner, an overalled farmer named "Mr. Gehrmann" (Jeff Corey), says, "You folks oughta look at other properties. This one's a little bit strange." He's got a pentacle painted above the doorway "to keep out evil". Paul Worden thinks it's all a bunch of country bumpkin superstition, but Marjorie - as played by actress Dennis who specialized in kooky, nervous females - is already making pentacle pendants out of clay as soon as they move in. She paints and kilns them, then threads them with leather ties to hang around little Stevie's neck.
At night, the sound of a little girl crying is heard from the barn. Shades of "The Other", by the pre-King Thomas Tryon? Marjorie should know you don't go into an old barn when a child that's not yours cries at 3 am, but she does go inside, only to find a rat, and begins to suffer a nervous breakdown (which was in Sandy Dennis's contract and without which she would not have done the movie). Little Stevie (with Johnny Whittaker's patented mop of red hair) channels the unseen little girl's cries through a nightmare. Soon, his Mom is overprotecting, then scolding him, and she finally punishes him with an ass whooping, nearly breaking his arm in the process. The house is causing her to lose her mind. Stuff flies around Stevie's bedroom in a camera-spinning shot, the same one Spielberg, um, I mean Tobe Hooper, would use in "Poltergiest" 10 years later. It's amazing that Spielberg went from this movie, to "Duel," to "Jaws," to "Close Encounters" in a five year span. Yes, he's massively talented, but no one has ever had insider connections like Steven Spielberg and his connections have never been honestly divulged, I don't believe. It's likely they are military/industrial Defense Department-related like all the Laurel Canyon rock stars.
His talent is on early display here, as far as delivering the spook-house tension. Otherwise, the movie is entirely Sandy Dennis's. She's a Witchy Woman to begin with, so while Darren McGavin is shooting a TV commercial about a health food "apple bar" with a girl who can't sing, Dennis as Marjorie is at home on the farm, painting pentagram circles on the floor, and inquiring into the services of "Harry Lincoln" (Ralph Bellamy), a demonology expert who lives the next farm over and has a bat-guano crazy/scary nephew, who tries entering the Worden's house through the doggie door, in one of the more bizarre touches we've seen in TV movies.
There ain't much to the story beyond what is described. Supposedly there's a demon in the house, but for most of it, it just looks like Marjorie is going crazy. She keeps seeing a jar of red gobbeldigook in closets, but what it is or why it's there is never explained.
Nothing is in fact explained, it's just all tossed off at the end in pre-Exorcist fashion, and I hate to say it, but Freidkin must've seen this film. Again, the connections of Spielberg are cutting edge. He makes a half-baked "demonic possession" TV movie in 1972, and then "The Exorcist" comes out a year later.
Well anyhow, Ralph Bellamy does his overenthusiastic big dog act, that John Landis stole for "Trading Places" when he wanted to outdo Spielberg after he killed everybody in The Twilight Zone, which Spielberg produced.
This flick is scary, for sure, but there's no real reason for it to exist, as the script is made up on the spot. If they didn't have Sandy Dennis, they'd have no movie. But Two Bigs for the scares that go nowhere. The picture is in color and very good. ////
And that's all I know for tonight. My blogging music is "Birds" by the Dutch group Trace, featuring the blindingly fast keyboard work of the late Rick van der Linden. My late night is Handel's Arianna in Creta Opera. Can you believe Memorial Day weekend is almost upon us? The year is just flying by, and I wish you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxoxo :):)
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