The Thorold Dickinson Mystery

Thorold Dickinson was absolutely not an obsessive perfectionist

The rain that blows in sheets across the studio yard is lit only by flickering lamps that tower above a rattling chain-link fence. A lone figure scurries across the asphalt, hat pulled low against the gusting night. He takes the steps two at a time and, with a furtive glance over his shoulder, jams a key into the lock and wrenches open the door in one motion.

Inside the edit suite, the wind and rain are a whisper. Our man shakes off his overcoat and flicks familiar switches to conjur the sweet hum of machinery. Reverently, he takes three cans of film negative from the shelves and begins to copy them. It’s 1941. The film is the version of Gaslight you won’t have seen, and the figure stealing it is its director, Thorold Dickinson – the nearly man of British cinema.

Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook have that awkward "I'm-going-to-have-you-committed-to-an-asylum" conversation in Gaslight

What could possibly have brought this Oxford-educated Deacon’s son to the point of pirating his own work in the dead of night? Dickinson wasn’t a failure; by the time his own final credits rolled in 1984, he’d made some landmark British films, including The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1940) and The Queen of Spades (1949), and written the thoroughbred nostaligic flag-waver The Malta Story (1953). In the 1960s, he pushed the study of film as an artform, tutoring ground-breaking directors like Dony Levy and the influential critic Raymond Durgnat at the Slade, where he held Britain’s first ever professorship in film studies. But the Gaslight incident shows us Dickinson the outsider, even the rebel; a principled operator in a business in love with sharp practice and meteoric career paths but which increasingly shut out the

Dickinson had progesssed in a few years from editing austerity-era romcoms like Gracie Fields’ Sing As We Go to directing his first film. The High Command (1936), a controversial conspiracy thriller set among the Army top brass in West Africa, posits a colonial power structure riven with lies, betrayal and hypocrisy and peopled by a morally enfeebled elite for whom murder is simply another rung on the career ladder. Dickinson had a great source in Lewis Robinson’s novel, but budgetary problems and inexperience meant the film’s subject matter wasn’t its only problem: the movie was stilted, overly literal and displayed its tuppenny ha’penny production values at every turn.

The Arsenal Stadium Mystery: manager George Allison explains the advantages of Highbury's narrow pitch with a 1:1 scale replica

Real success came with The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, a frothy detective yarn surrounding a murder at the home of the Gunners that captures a free-spirited late 30s London rarely seen in films of the time and, sports fans, featured the real-life Arsenal squad of 1939. More importantly, it showed that the professorial Dickinson had commercial nous. When the director was offered an adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gas Light, he had just three weeks to prepare. The stage production had been dark enough, but Gaslight, the merciless, claustrophobic film that Dickinson forged with Anton Walbrook in the lead, was astounding. The story of a husband’s meticulous attempt to convince his wife of her insanity for the sake of his own avarice, the movie lives in literal and metaphorical shadow and the shifting weight of madness back and forth between the characters is palpable. The public loved it.

In fact, Gaslight was too good. Across the Atlantic, the success of the stage version on Broadway had prompted MGM to buy the US film rights. David O. Selznick had Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer on board and the studio giant wasn’t about to let a low budget British thriller upset the apple cart, no matter how well received it had been. MGM promptly bought the rights from British National and included a clause that, extreme as it was, illustrates the regard in which they held Dickinson’s film: all copies, and the negative, were to be destroyed. Dickinson’s reaction isn’t recorded, except in the survival of his film in the form of a single copy he secretly made just before the MGM heavies administered their coup de grace.

Queen of Spades: utterly bonkers

The last minute rescue seems uncharateristically swashbuckling for the intelectual Dickinson, but he was never comfortable submitting to authority. His two other great films, the unsettling paranormal costumer The Queen of Spades (1949) (most recently lauded by Martin Scorsese) and the proto-terrorist thriller The Secret People (1952) both questioned received notions of right and wrong and divided opinion among critics and public. But the bare-knuckle morals of the industry had taken their toll and by 1960, with just nine features on his directorial resume including work for the Ministry of Information and an Israeli war movie, Dickinson had had enough of the men “who hold us all enmeshed in their bank balances, which inhibits and imprisons the artists and strangles ideas at birth" and moved into teaching film. As a director, his best work bears comparison with Powell & Pressburger and Carol Reed, but his stubborn adherance to his own course meant he has had to be rediscovered in the 21^st  century. His was an endearing commitment to personal values, summed up in his reply to David O. Selznick’s 2,500 word telegram of 1941, inviting him to come work in Hollywood: with contrasting brevity, it read “Sorry, there’s a war on.”

The Eyes Have It: Frank Thring

"I could have sworn it said Fancy Dress..."

Actors have endless ways to pretend. The best seduce the audience; those less blessed - the hams, hacks and journeyman - have always needed A Thing. They become great eating actors, expounding dialogue through mouthfuls of mashed potato, or unbeatable smoking thesps, jut-jawed and wreathed in blue fog. For some, like the late Australian legend Frank Thring, it was all about the eyes.

If you think you don’t know Frank, you’re wrong, at least if you’ve ever clockwatched through Ben-Hur or nursed a Sunday afternoon hangover while El Cid gives the Moors a bloody good thrashing yards from your bloated mug. Thring was the guy acting almost entirely from the nose up, a stiff, waxen-faced stage dummy vivified only by his burning gaze; the villain without whom no toga-buster or historical epic could do without. For a time in the ‘50s and '60s, Thring’s dual repertoire (incandescent rage/jaded perversion) made him a big star.

Thring's legendary upstaging of John Wayne's  'Roman soldier #2' in Ben-Hur

Little Frank was born into the buttoned-down Tunbridge Wells-with-flies that was 1930s Australia, the son of film studio boss Frank Snr whose Melbourne set-up was responsibie for a string of dire one reelers and gag-free slapstick knock-offs. In a town with no cheer, the privately educated showbiz scion was an outsider from the start. His early role as Lucifer in a TV ad betrayed a ready aptitude for camp devilry but it was on the London stage that Thring met his cloven-jawed destiny; audience member Kirk Douglas was so blown away by Thring’s scenery-chewing Titus Andronicus that he persuaded the Australian to jack in his Earls Court lodgings for Hollywood and a career as a villain of limited emotional range.

The playbill for Thring's breakout Salome. He was also the owner of the theatre company.

It was with Douglas that Thring made his great cinema breakthrough, as the scheming, jaded Aella in Richard Fleischer’s 1958 saga The Vikings. The part kicked off five golden years in which Thring played the scheming, jaded Pontius Pilate (Ben Hur); the scheming, jaded AI Kadir (El Cid) and the scheming, jaded, perverted Herod Antipas (King of Kings). By the time MGM were casting for that airbrushed, blow-dried Jesus-flick, Thring had already wowed Australian theatre critics with his interpretation of Herod in a Melbourne production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. But Hollywood's enthusiasm of to have him reprise the role on screen overlooked two key facts. First, Thring’s talent as a stage actor lay in his broad style, which swamped audiences in a tide of melodramatic charisma. Second, 1950s Australian critics claiming to have witnessed great theatre on Oz soil were more hopeful travellers than inhabitants of an artistic promised land. It soon became clear that Thring had no inclination to tone down his style. His standard act was to lounge and preen with hooded eyes and the expression of a lewd piranha, before bursting into action, striding screen right, eyes wide and flashing, declaiming with cut-glass enunciation his final dastardly business; resume throne, hood eyes, cut, print.

Thring could be discounted as just another second stringer were it not for clues to a deeper talent. On stage, he played opposite Olivier and was cast as Ahab by Orson Welles in the great man’s ill-fated experimental West End adaptation of Moby Dick. His turn in Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly in I970 is scaled for cinema and works beautifully.

The inflatable camera never took off

And away from the screen, Thring was just as endearingly, relentlessly expansive, a trait that made him an accidental national institution in his native Australia.

He’s often described as ‘larger than Iife’, a euphemism for both boozehounds and homosexuals, clubs of which Thring was a wildly enthusiastic member. In the days before the words ‘Sydney’, ‘Mardi Gras’ and ‘relentless Hi-NRG beats’ became inseparable, Thring’s off-set catchphrase was ‘Bring me another boy, this one has burst!’ — a statement of outness that leaves ‘I’m free!’ sounding somewhat limp.

One Melbourne scenester of the 1970s recalled a moment that perfectly encapsulated the actor’s talent for dominating a scene even when no-one was filming: “We were at a house party and Frank stumbled in, dressed all in black, with an incredible amount of jewellery, wraparound sunglasses, and a tankard of what I think was scotch. He was perspiring freely and muttering. He looked appalling. Then he tripped over himself and fell through the glass coffee table. Someone tried to bring things back to normal by asking, ‘Didn’t you know Charlton Heston?’ ‘Know him?!’, Frank replied, ‘I was in him!’

1971: Derek Malcolm on Bertolucci's 'The Conformist'

Magnificent Malcontent: Ralph Bakshi

The fun also rises: Bakshi rocks the Hemingway look in deadly earnest

At  San Diego Comic Con in 2008, Ralph Bakshi sat on a panel discussing the hard times animators were up against. New technology and plummeting budgets had seen 'toon-jockies fall like anthropomorphic ninepins, and those that survived the cull were being treated like production line workers. Bakshi, who made the leap from studio animation on the likes of Deputy Dawg to the fuck-you blockbuster Fritz The Cat and the fuck-you satire Coonskin, might have been expected to have some sympathy for the beardy ink-shufflers in his audience hoping to learn how to put things right.

But his message was characteristically, enthusiastically bullish: “If I was young, I wouldn’t even get a job, I’d get a couple of computers and a bunch of guys, sit and eat crap for a year, we’d be millionaires the next year. You sit there crying about getting a job at Disney saying ‘oh, it’s all crumbling’. It’s not crumbling – you’re crumbling! You got these computers that can do the job for nothing and whaddaya do? You try to get a job with some asshole studio. If you guys sit there crying, I got no respect for you. I’m telling you, if you’re young and you can send your wife to work – go do it!”

Frodo and Gollum search out the Crack of Doom in Heavy Traffic

And Bakshi knows the score when it comes to going it alone – it’s been the foundation of his career and what he considers his downfall. His greatest works – Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and American Pop – followed from his decision to ditch a regular paycheque at Terry Toons and Paramount and let emotional honesty rule his filmmaking. His first independent film took Robert Crumb’s comic book Fritz The Cat as a starting point and created a rich visual and aural collage that both celebrated the late 60s counter-culture and lampooned its pretensions and growing dishonesty. The cute animals may have been familiar to audiences but it was the polar opposite of Disney, a corporation Bakshi loathed, and was the first animation to get an X rating. It made a mint at the box office and got the director access to the fat wallets of the studio suits. What Bakshi gave them over his next decade both sealed his fate in filmmaking and his reputation as one of the great inspirational malcontents not just of animation but of any film medium.

Despite Fritz's top notch screentest, Roeg eventually plumped for Mick Jagger

Heavy Traffic (1973) was a characteristically affectionate New York street story, blending Bakshi’s Brooklyn Jewish humour with Looney Toons violence and a Scorsese sensibility, while the follow-up Coonskin (1975) looked at racism and stereotyping in a calculatedly offensive style that even today is an uncomfortable watch. American Pop (1981), was a melancholy, rotoscoped saga of immigration told   through the music of four decades that foretold the end of a certain America on the cusp of the Reagan era. Aside from gleefully foul language and joyous sleaze, all shared a bravura technical style that merged live action backgrounds, photographic stills and animated characters ranging from the photorealistic to Tex Avery caricature.

American Pop: Bakshi hates rotoscope (apparently)

Technical innovations were secondary. “I hate rotoscope” Bakshi once declared, comparing the technique that he’s most associated with to being stalked by one of his ex-wives. Yet it’s his finessing of that technique for which he is best known, with his version of The Lord of The Rings (1978) using an antediluvian CGI that remains the basis of current computer animation. Looking at the shiny worlds of Pixar, echoes of Bakshi’s technique are barely evident but look at the recent Beowulf, in which Ray Winstone was transformed into Sean Bean, thus negating the need to hire Sean Bean, and there are rich similarities between that early, eerily half-animated Rings and the mix of live actors and CGI that’s currently being touted as the latest Saviour of Cinema™. In fact, Bakshi's Tolkien movie is an aberation in the great maverick’s career, a project that was close to his heart but fettered by numerous interests and which only appeared to offer the freedom to achieve his interior vision. The experience planted the seeds of disillusion. “It burnt me out,” he said later, “it was the hardest thing I ever had to do; to do two and a half  hours of animation in a year. It took more out of me then I got back.”

Bakshi catches up on reviews for The Lovely Bones

For Bakshi, film is about heart and soul, not the mechanics of the process, which may explain why some of his work looks as though it was knocked out between a whisky breakfast and elevenses on the goonpipe. But he brought a depth to cartoons that stemmed from wider literary influences, like Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn, Kerouac and William Burroughs and cinematic innovators like Eisenstein. He came of age in the East Village of the Sixties and, if the iconoclastic spirit of the time and place drove his creativity in the Seventies, it’s also the reason he hasn’t released a feature since 1992’s bowdlerised chump nugget Cool World: disappointment with the world lies too heavily with him.

Bakshi often gives the impression that it was the industry that tired him, that it was the corporate bullshit that burned him out. But on the rare occasions he’s spoken about his stop-start attempts to return to filmmaking with the The Last Days of Coney Island it’s clear his long hiatus has been influenced by America’s wider malaise.


His story is the disappointment and frustration of the counter culture writ large and it’s the loss of hope, freedom and moral purpose in America as much as petty studio politics that makes it impossible for him to return to the screen. Coney Island was to have been about a place where entertainment, joy and possibility flourished briefly before ending in ruin. The ‘last days’ of the title are those of America, an America Bakshi loved but which he considers lost. Today, Bakshi confines himself to paint and canvas and a return to cinema seems sadly unlikely. And yet the tough-talking, articulate artist remains as forthright as ever. Speaking just before the US presidential elections of 2008, he was unequivicoal on the state of his nation: “What we are now disgusts me. I’m trying to hold on to what we should be.” 

Enzo Castellari, glorious basterd

On the eve of his seventieth birthday, LA Weekly called Enzo Castellari an ‘Italian drive-in god’, thus betraying how little they know of a country where a ‘drive-in’ means a sparsely populated piazza and I Vitelloni projected onto the vest of the fattest man in the village. The next day, the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles threw him a huge birthday party. It was a measure of the affection he enjoys in his homeland.

Until recently barely known outside Italy, Castellari has been the latest in a long line of laudable, if increasingly random, attempts by Quentin Tarantino to prompt a re-examination of popular cinema outside of the US. His remake of Castellari’s 1978 WWII western, The Inglorious Bastards, had the fan-boys salivating but it would be a tragedy if the director remains known only as Tarantino’s latest prank monkey.

The Killers (1946) gets a subtle makeover

 Castellari’s film career has spanned thirty years and more than twenty features, all of them kinetic, violent, sentimental and possessed of a bizarre, at times juvenile, sense of the absurd. He grew up in the Rome of the 1940s, surrounded by the cinematic legacy of fascism, which provided a movie-making infrastructure but allowed little in the way of experimentation. When Italian cinema regained it vitality in the 1950s, Castellari, like Sergio Leone, was too busy drinking in the American westerns and gangster flicks flooding the country to pay much attention to the blossoming neo-realist movement then shooting on the city’s streets. His cinema would be escapist, shamelessly populist and often spectacularly derivative  - but it would somehow remain wilfully, unmistakeably European.

Make no mistake, Castellari’s efforts are often gimcrack knock-offs of Hollywood blockbusters (hmm, what could 1973’s The Marseilles Connection have been referencing?) and have all the nuanced panache of a breakfast Sambuca. But having grown up in post-war Italy, Castellari knew how to make a little go a long way, a talent that put him in on the ground floor of some of the most striking new work. While only the most dedicated Castellaristo would place him in the same league as Leone or Peckinpah, his work on the Django and Trinity series helped create a wholly new cinematic language.

Ever the maverick, though, Castellari was unable to resist indulging his faith in the power of slapstick and shoddy spectacular to rescue otherwise hopelessly misfiring actioners. His gleeful willingness to get down with the ridiculous reached its apogee in the jaw-dropping 1976 western Cipolla Colt, starring an equally enthusiastic Franco Nero as the titular onion farmer threatened by Big Railroad’s landgrab. Colt fights back in his unique fashion, using the power of rank onion-breath and speeded-up action sequences to strike a blow for the little guy, all the while spurred on by Roman accented obscenities from his talking horse. Not content with having Nero confound his heroic image, Castellari also cast the sublimely bland Martin Balsam as a fascistic railroad boss with a clockwork hand. Fans loved the camped-up Nazi overtones but in fact Castellari’s subversion ran deeper: Balsam’s character actually referenced a popular liquer commercial of the time which itself featured a mechanically enhanced bon viveur rocking the drunken Gestapo vibe.

Horsing around: Franco Nero in Cipolla Colt, probably not at all making a mental note to fire his agent

Castellari’s Western career enjoyed a brief resuscitation in the early 1990s, when you could make a movie in the former Soviet Union for a fistful of cloned Switch cards and some sausages wrapped in newspaper. Unable to pass up a bargain, the director took his whole travelling circus, including regular leading man Franco Nero, out East where he helped give birth to the Borscht Western with Jonathan Of The Bears (1993), his own take on Dances With Wolves. Shot for a piffling £5 million, the movie extras snaffled a cool £2.50 a day, with gin-fizz sweeteners for the huge cast of midgets in attendance. Hundreds of Russian cavalrymen were borrowed from the local barracks to be transformed into the injun-tusslin’ US 7^th Cavalry by allowing each man a reasonably priced cowboy hat.

That was the high water mark of Castellari’s adventures in the Leone-meets-Looney Tunes world born of the late ‘60s Trinity films. But the work he carried off with most aplomb was his series of coarse cop movies of the ‘70s, most notably the ambitious pair of The Marseilles Connection and The Heroin Busters (1977). These capers are certainly nasty and possessed of the required air of sleaze but they’re not exactly gialli. They kick-started a style of European crime thriller that owed more to The Getaway and Bullitt than to the detective procedurals of the ‘60s. More, they seemed to spring from the turbulent streets of the time; during the planning of Marseilles, the Red Brigades gunning down of a Milan police commissioner was even worked into the plot.

This. Is. SPAAAAAAAR!

As with his overcooked spaghetti westerns, Castellari here created something new in the world of the Euro-pudding; gangster flicks that reflected the insanity in the air, replete with the stylish, theatrical violence being run out for real on the streets - not least by Rome’s very own bad boys of the Banda dalle Magliana, who, fittingly, would later get a movie of their own (Romanzo Criminale , 2005) that owed not a little to Castellari’s legacy.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

How some of those colourful Castellari titles got the monochrome treatment

Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (Cold Eyes Of Fear, 1977) was released as Desperate Moments

Sette Winchester Per Un Massacro (Seven Winchesters For A Massacre, 1968) hit the screens, sadly, as Renegade Riders

I Tre Che Sconvoisero Il West – Vado, Vedo, e Sparo (The Three That Upset The West – I Came, I Saw, I Shot! 1968) hit the brevity buffer as One Dollar Too Many

And a genuine improvement…

Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato (That Damned Armoured Train, 1978) was famously re-titled The Inglorious Bastards