UNDER THE BEDS.

UNDER THE BEDS.

 Well I wasn’t around when Melbourne’s Coldicutt and Mathews were crossing swords with ASIO in the forties but I was there for the Great Red Scares of the 1950s.
 

Up to that point, the film people had all got along quite nicely in a we-all-did-in-Hitler-together atmosphere. The church groups ran BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and the leftists put on MONSIEUR VINCENT - on the principle that they were works of art. They’d go to one another’s Xmas parties.

The problem was that everyone showed the same forty odd  films. I kept  on seeing John
Huston’s WE WERE STRANGERS, BERLIN OLYMPICS, SPANISH EARTH or BACK OF BEYOND. The D.of I.’s THE QUEEN IN AUSTRALIA got a run because it was so much nicer than the (American owned) Movietone version. The British Film Institute publications and Penguin Film Review were Holy Writ,  even though a lot of their revered material - include nearly all Luchino Visconti or Luis Buñuel - hadn’t been aired here. Discussions centered on whether Eisenstein or Pudovkin was the true artist.

This was a bad fit with my own experience of cinema, derived from Newtown Majestic, The Capitol and judicious use of the kiddie matinees which had provided me with NANOOK OF THE NORTH, De Mille’s CRUSADES, the Fleischer Brothers and METROPOLIS. To these the Savoy added Jean Cocteau and Martine Carole. The Americans, with their veneration of David Wark Griffith and 1939 Hollywood seemed a better proposition.

I was as curious as the next man about the leftist material - the Russian SADKO, the American NATIVE LAND and SALT OF THE EARTH, the Chinese BUTTERFLY LOVERS on their new colour stock that was near impossible to splice. To this day I follow the career of Czechoslovakia’s Otaka Vavra with some fascination. However my interest quickened when John Howard Reid retaliated, showing a near complete Elia Kazan retrospective.

The big score seemed to be the old Hollywood movies on which the often battered Sixteen Millimetre prints looked like they would be our last glimpse of many notable titles - Litvak’s BLUES IN THE NIGHT, George Stevens’ MORE THE MERRIER, Boleslawski’s THEODORA GOES WILD. Bad guess actually. Though these never made it back onto projection screens, the new commercial TV companies bought three digit studio packages, which turned Australia into the best place in the world to see the early Hollywood sound film for a decade, even if  Nancy Carroll and John Gilbert were still ignored by the old Sight & Sound readers, soon joined by the newly minted Sam Fuller fans.

Then as now, there were unfamiliar movies tucked away in under-used libraries. One had a hundred or so US silents, many printed on the original tinted stock from the camera negatives – Sidney Franklin’s THE SAFETY CURTAIN, William S. Hart in RETURN OF DRAW EGAN and the William Seiter - Lewis Milestone LISTEN LESTER. Along with, these you could find Gallone’s ULTRIMI GIORNI DI POMPEII or the short films of William Cameron-Menzies, Danielle Darrieux in RETOUR À L’AUBE and a raft of intriguing British material - Conrad Veidt in UNDER THE RED ROBE, the Powell-Pressberger SMALL BACK ROOM, Doug Fairbanks in ACCUSED, Cary Grant in THE AMAZING QUEST or George Arliss in DR. SYN.

Some of these proved to be unique and would never be seen again.

All this changed brutally. As well as the ASIO spook activity, there was a fear of the Communist world in the local high art circles.  Many professionals were alarmed at the humiliation of creative people like Eisenstein and Shostakovich in Russia, where portraits painter teams, combining on group canvases of receptions, were considered to be the peak of Socialist Realism.

Whether Eisenstein was any less humiliated in Hollywood is speculative but concern over control passing from artists to doctrinaire bureaucrats is legitimate. The deterioration of the Czech film, after the ascent of the Communists, had been remarkable and, closer to our time, Mainland ownership of Hong Kong film has dropped it from being the world’s number two movie industry to nowhere. It didn’t take long for a mixture of Political Correctness and salaried bureaucracy to stifle the emerging seventies Australian film, either.

In the fifties Sydney, Neil Gunther’s Film User’s association set itself up to steer things away from the ubiquitous Soviet block material and Andrea, a now forgotten tabloid columnist, ran an item about finding a flier for the Sydney Film Society’s screening of a (shock horror) Polish film about YOUNG CHOPIN, on her seat at the Sydney Film Festival. “Non political, non sectarian I wonder", she fumed.

 This was a trigger for much name calling and finger pointing. Selecting the East German film DER RAT DER GÖTTER caused a split in the Sydney Film Society, with Robert J. Connell’s dissident faction scurrying off to start their own screenings at Anzac House.

I watched all this with some concern. I’d had good nights with Eddie Allison’s Realists or the Kings Cross Film Club, as well as the Catholics - not to mention the Christian Anti-Communist League, who had access to a killer library, including Project 20:  NIGHTMARE IN RED and Stuart Rosenberg’s QUESTION 7. I’d found them all amiable people.

The declining Sydney Film Society was a particular concern. The oldest group in the country, it had Stanley Hawes, John Heyer, Bruce Beresford and radio writer Colin Free on its board at different times. The Society had imported  INTOLERANCE and it was the one group to run regular, open previews of possible material.

I signed on, doing donkey work. To the standards (LAURA, JOURNAL D’UN CURÉ DE COMPAGNE, POTEMKIN with the then new Kruikov score) we added in some of the neglected films and continued to space this with politically sensitive material. The audience seemed as willing to be amused by Stalin as the comic sidekick in LENIN V OKTABRE,  as they were prepared to ponder the clerical anguish in Harald Braun’s NACHTWACHE  (Lutherans and Catholics combine post WW2). I premiered the Lindsay Anderson MARCH TO ALDERMASTON (good cause - dreary film) but never could get Clouzot’s MANON (founding Israel) or Mike Curtiz’ SANTA FE TRAIL (nasty abolitionists) into the schedule.

The Sydney Film Society did manage to draw respectable numbers for unfamiliar work, organised joint showings with other groups, created translations of items like Helmut Kaütner’s FILM OHNE TITEL, did 35mm. screenings on MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM and the Germi-Fellini CAMINO DELLA SPERANZA. They utilised collectors, with Don Harkness’ copy of the Syd Chaplin CHARLEY’S AUNT a hit. I suspect it was the world’s first such group to run any Anthony Mann.

Screenings became more frequent and numbers went back up, though never reaching those of the pre-confrontation days and it outlasted the disintegration of the breakaway group by many years.

These disputes were never really about politics. They were about personalities. The Anzac House lot themselves ran DER RAT DER GÖTTER - couldn’t find enough German films without it. The Sydney University Film Group dug its heels in against Film Users but refused to support the Sydney Film Society over the even more obvious red baiting.

It all became so acrimonious that many of the people, whose efforts and good will the film societies had coasted on, just went home to their TVs, never to return. It meant an end to the days of a the movement as a lobby of any consequence, though it had generated the Festivals, the AFI and a few of the country’s more influential critics. The Sydney specialist film scene’s debilitated condition caused the center to shift to Victoria, where film society types were more interested in the profits of the Melbourne Film Festival. They even still sustain a Clayton’s Cinémathèque there.

Ten years after, at the height of the Vietnam war, Keith Gow joked about the effect his work with warfies' film unit would have on his Film Australia security clearance and their unit covering L.B.J.’s motorcade said they filmed one of the staff throwing themselves in front of the Presidential limo. No one cared. That was the scariest part of all.

EPILOGUE: David Stratton’s Sydney Film Festival inherited a movie called SONS & DAUGHTERS, about the youth movement ‘Nam protest in San Francisco. Remembering the Andrea incident, the recently bearded director shifted from foot to foot. Everyone over twenty five stormed out in the first ten minutes and the sympathiser audience remaining cheered when Jane Fonda came on, cheered when Joan Baez came on, cheered when the Hells Angels came on - and suddenly went quiet, realising that the Angels were against the protesters and for the war. (“This is America!”) The rest of the film played in silence.

It’s not easy being trendy.

Barrie Pattison – this article first appeared in Australian Film Files.

Michael Winner.

The System : Reed and David Hemmings (standing) 

At his zenith, Michael Winner upset one of the mix technicians, who turned round and said “Michael, why are you such a shit?” Winner looked back and offered “In fifty years people will think of me as a nice guy, George - and no one will remember who you were.”

Well, now Michael Winner has died and he is being recalled with affection and the only reason we remember George is that he once sassed Michael Winner.

It’s hard to make the connection between the flamboyant Young Turk of British movies and the TV food critic personality, who published an autobiography with a picture of himself with the Queen at his National Police Memorial.

Winner’s path was not an unfamiliar one. He came from Jewish wealth and privilege (Michael Apted claimed to be the first British working class movie director - which is rough on Ken Hughes, who started as re-wind boy at Harrow Road Prince of Wales) and having an MA, he used that background to by-pass the usual process of clambering up through the ranks of TV or establishing as a celebrity writer, actor or Theater personality.  He put family money into productions if they let him direct and plowed through awful shorts, quota crime features, pop movies, a nudist flick and a Mikado fresh out of copyright. He was the youngest director in British movies.

Michael Winner.

However something happened with Michael Winner. Starting with West 11, his films connected. The Carry Ons and Naval Sagas were already faltering but Winner’s films were more involving than the new working class realist cinema the critics were celebrating. With The System, where Winner first fielded Hammer horror star Oliver Reed, writer Peter Draper and cameraman Nicholas Roeg, he was offering a picture of a Britain not divided by class or crippled by memories of a faded empire but more fundamentally dysfunctional. In his films, Reed might organise the seduction of Brighton tourist crumpet, steal the Crown Jewels or take to his Ad Agency desk with an ax, like the one Michael Gothard uses in Herostratus,  but he will be engulfed by self-loathing by the ending. The military of his You Must Be Joking or the Oxford Dons of  Winner’s masterpiece I’ll Never Forget Whats’is Name are treated with equal contempt. For these films and this statement to come out of the Britain of the 1960s was arresting.

Winner’s similarly disenchanted The Games curiously was one of the English trio that sparked the rise of Australian filming - along with Walkabout and Wake in Fright.

For the main part, he didn’t make it into the NFT, the Classic Repetory Cinemas or Hampstead Everyman, though London’s Films and Filming, where Winner had written and whose editor was alleged to be on a payback to include his name in every issue, did take him with a deserved seriousness. It was only in the ‘States that his work was noted.

Came 1969 and the British film industry went into arrest and its established talent headed for Hollywood or washed about in dodgy Euro Trash movies.

However Michael Winner proved the most adaptable of the British exports, to the dismay of his admirers watching Stone Killers or The Sentinel. The director wasn’t worried, with an association with the Go Go boys at Globus, or Burt Lancaster and Charles Bronson to keep him busy. Challenged on his new profile, he commented that he was genuinely disturbed that British film, which accounted for much of his best work, had disintegrated.

In this period he made one of the most alarming films of all time, his Bronson thriller  Death Wish, spun off the subway vigilante incident.

 There was more to come in movies - Lancaster and Alain Delon together, Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, Anthony Hopkins in Alan Aykbourn - to add to his work with Orson Welles and Marlon Brando - but this was muted for the film maker who had come closest to being a Shakespearean fool telling us about a society where  “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.”

The Michael Winner who boasted about blowing up cars in Piccadilly circus and commissioned a giant hoarding that said “Michael Winner hates self publicity” was more endearing and more fun than the jolly TV celebrity of his last years. 

Whether, as Michael Caine suggested, there was a sensitive artist hidden behind the bombast, there was certainly a unique talent.

Barrie Pattison 2013