The Wolf in Man

Here's a belated Halloween entry, about the not outstanding but quite good for what it is Amicus horror film The Beast Must Die (1974), which despite some ropey plotting and unconvincing special effects has a few interesting edges to it.Since werewolves are already covered here it seemed worth a go.

The Beast Must Die is built around the central gimmick that the audience is asked to guess who the werewolf is amongst those gathered at a millionaire's country mansion. The film breaks a quarter of the way through and offers the audience a few moments to weigh up the evidence in each suspect werewolf favour. As such the film can basically be boiled down to an Agatha Christie plot plus werewolf, although the audience participation gimmick is actually pointless thinking it through: the film-makers are asking the audience to do nothing more than they will already be doing anyway.

Calvin Lockhart plays the lead role, a sportsman who has transformed his country mansion into a panopticon, in which himself and his security team can sit at the centre and monitor the activities of his house guests through a bank of CCTV screens. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, The Conversation came out in the same year, suggesting this was the right time for paranoiac surveillance culture to really get going in the public imagination leading on from Watergate. Unusually for a British horror film (or any film of this era and probably since) the hero is black, depicted as arrogant and ruthless but not stupid or malicious, and shown as far more successful (financially, socially, physically) than his white house guests. Newcliffe's wife Caroline (Marlene Clark) is also black and not depicted stereotypically. Influential here perhaps are the possibilities of casting American lead actors for distribution in the USA, and the influence of blaxploitation that partially encouraged the casting of black actors in well-rounded and non-stereotyped roles (again concerns here were more likely financial than egalitarian, the marketing of films based on the breakdown of 'the audience' into analysable demographics). In much of the promotional material however Peter Cushing is emphasised over Lockhart, again possibly not dubious as placing Cushing on a horror movie poster is smart money, but still. Although the tension between Newcliffe and his houseguests is never expressed verbally as racial in nature, the possibility is there, a sense of resentment at Newcliffe's success compounded with racism.

From a different angle however, The Beast Must Die is maybe perceptive in that in order to accommodate to the ruling capitalist class traits such as race can be de-emphasised when presenting the right attitude and accoutrements. To do the things you must do you don't need to be anybody in particular. Here the image of Newcliffe, sitting behind his screens monitoring life in the enclosed world of the mansion, drifts towards the horror-film reality of shoot-to-kill lists and air-conditioned huts in the Arabia Peninsula. Newcliffe is prepared to kill anyone of the depersonalised figures who walk across the camera's field of vision, to track and kill them in the most productive sense possible; the image marries up well with Harry Lime's declaration about the ease of bumping off the black dots far below, although as the army can tell you the dots can be even closer than that and still be easy to take out with a button push of the controller. Newcliffe does not even spend most of his time watching the screens, subcontracting to a team of hired surveillance experts who keep watch from their hidden room at the top of the house while below Newcliffe entertains his guests.

The plot of the film is essentially fluff. The guests wander around the house, there are a few interesting character details, some appearances from a deeply unconvincing werewolf (in some scenes it is literally a big dog wandering onto set), and there are some words of wisdom from Cushing about the rule of werewolves and silver that doesn't stay quite consistent through the film. Not to spoil the reveal, the film ends with Newcliffe deciding to commit suicide after being infected from a werewolf bite. Here some of the racialised resentment perhaps becomes more apparent as Newcliffe is made to die for the folly of his success. In order to win, Newcliffe has had to destroy his entire life, not just himself but what he has worked for and what he has held dear. 

Robert Altman's 3 Women, Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Francis Bacon's Landscape and a conversation in a hotel in 1978

“See the cliffs again, be again between the cliffs and the sea, reeling shrinking with your hands over your ears, headlong, innocent, suspect, noxious” - Beckett

Concierge: Good evening sir, how was tonight’s event?

Screenwriter: …

Concierge: Sir?

Screenwriter: I had the worst conversation with a woman at a party. Just the worst. The kind of conversation where things slip out of your control before you’ve even opened you mouth. You watch the words skip down out of reach like goats on a hillside. Your self so exposed and yet strange. Just the worst.

Concierge: I’m sorry to hear that sir, but I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you’ve described, these things always sound worse to ourselves than to the other party.

Screenwriter: Yes sure, but this is different, this is important, this was at an industry party and things have a tendency to get around. No, things just do get around, you say something or do something at one of those things and it's like piss in the swimming pool, it’s everywhere, and you can’t get it back in the tube. The worst thing is, that wasn’t me last night. I don’t know what happened. I’m a writer, I control language and yet there I was talking to this girl and everything was totally, totally out of my control.

Concierge: I’m sorry to hear that sir, would you like to talk about it?

Screenwriter: Maybe. I said some stupid stuff though, I was trying to impress her, talk about the projects I was doing but then I realised that no one cares about these stupid little gigs, a scene here and a scene there on some useless studio-built production so I tried to bulk it out a bit, bring it somewhere unexpected and told her I was working on a radio play that I’m also directing.

Concierge: Well done sir that sounds like a fascinating project.

Screenwriter: But it isn’t! I mean, I’m not working on one! That’s really just the start of the problem too, I don’t know anything about these sorts of things either but this talking at the party was  just got out of hand. It continued to roll away from me down the hill and the words were coming from god knows where, but I started pitching this whole thing to this girl right then and there.

Concierge: Pitching the radio play which you haven’t written?

Screenwriter: Yes! It was about two characters from films last year, Altman’s 3 Women and The Last Wave directed by some Australian guy. I told her about how both of these films finished with the ending of the world in some manner, and some sort of direct transformation and obliteration of the characters.

Concierge: Obliteration sir?

Screenwriter: Yeah, they go up and out and change completely. There’s a guy in one and a girl in the other and the end of each film is a merging of the world around them into something alien and unearthly and they ascend to a higher plane but that wasn’t really the concern of my radio play, it was more like the run up. In my play these people, Chris and Willie are now in a place together, like everything else has merged together and it’s just them that bob up above it, like they both came up from a sinking ship or country and here they are, in this new space.

Concierge: In the water sir? In the sea?

Screenwriter: No, in a bar, like this one in this hotel and they’re here in a booth drinking whatever, drinking cokes and above them they realise is a painting and they have a conversation about this dumb painting and what it means to them and where they’re from and where they’ve been. That’s my radio play. Sounds utterly amazing and a money in the bank right! This aboriginal rock star and this lady that does sand paintings and hardly talks having a conversation about a painting!I’m probably ruined already!

Concierge: I’m sure its… oh… What was the painting of sir?

Screenwriter: It’s a painting I saw in a magazine the other day by Francis Bacon, it was shown in France. Usually, I don’t like his stuff, it’s so incredibly drab, but this I liked because its was really blue and looked modern, it was just called Landscape which is a really modern title so I put it in the story. I think. I’m not sure, it just wound up in the story, perhaps its the first painting I thought of, I should have put something better in but this was what came out. Like I said, those goats were frolicking and bounding down the hillside, I don’t know what was going on with my mouth. I just kept talking and this stuff kept coming and the girl, well the girl to her credit didn’t look as bored as she had every right to be. I mean, two stolen characters talking about a painting on the radio? That’s what I’m going to be know for, everyone’s going to think this is hilarious, utterly hilarious. The guys are going to get a lot of mileage out of that little story when its gets around, and it will get around soon if it hasn’t already, stories like that always do, with a few extra additions I imagine, everyone’s going to want to put their little flourish on my eulogy.

Concierge: What were they talking about?

Screenwriter: What? They’re talk about how I was trying to impress some girl in a bar with a pitch for an imaginary Swedish coffee advert that’s what they’ll say!

Concierge: No sir, I meant the two in the hotel bar drinking cokes, what did they say about the painting? You said they were talking about the painting, what did they say about it?

Screenwriter: What? Oh. Yes, I can’t remember. Something about space. No I remember now. I started with a discussion about the blue in the painting. The painting is mostly blue like I said, which is one of the reasons I like it, that guy’s paintings a normally a dirty yellow which I hate. Coincidentally, that is actually one of the reasons I didn’t like 3 Women very much either, I remember telling someone that about a month ago. I thought is looked like “a piss in the prairie”. The Last Wave though, I did like the cinematography on that. It was a bit more regular and looked a bit cheap, but there were some nice moments, and I loved the underwater shot at the end, all the rushing water and bubbles like a 60s surf movie. It made me think about how when a camera films under water it is enveloped. The camera doesn’t just look at something, it’s surrounded and it has this stuff all over it, not just the lens. It is effected. Held.

Concierge: Is this what the characters talked about sir?

Screenwriter: Yeah, no, a bit I think. No, really they were talking about the blue of the painting, how the blue is neither a solid depicted space or the empty space of the surface of the canvas, how it was both at once and something else entirely. I say they, but the way I pitched it to the girl, it was the girl in my story, Willie, that was saying all of this. She’s an artist in the Altman picture so it made sense to have her riff on Francis Bacon. Also I think I wanted to make her, the girl in the bar, aware that I’m all for strong intelligent female characters in my stories! Modern women! More modern than Altman’s women anyway! So she talks about this plane being a third space, neither the language of the painting ground nor the language of a pictorial space, another dimension. Then she starts talking about how this is like the film The Last Wave, which as you remember is the film that the other guy is from! I don’t know what happened there, I must have gotten confused or something but that’s where the story starting running so I just ran along side it trying desperately to keep the legs moving as fast as my body! Willie says this is like The Last Wave, that the “tribal space” of the aboriginal people in Sydney, that’s denied by the white population, is “just such a third space”.

Concierge: What does the other gentleman say about this sir?

Screenwriter: Good question! Well this guy agrees with her, he says that the whites can only comprehend there being two spaces, either the space of representation using of language of ideas, and a space of stuff, which he said was also a space of language anyway but that white people ignored that part too. I remember that at this point I nearly had him getting all righteous about the damage done to his people by the whites but I cooled it in time, I’m getting wary enough about that stuff, how it can come off ridiculous trying to write that sort of character. People are getting tired of it you know? So Chris, this aboriginal character, agrees that this third space is hidden, his explanation is that it is too large to be seen and regardless of this the whites have constructed a system for looking at the world that doesn't include it so they don’t see its there. He says they must know its there but they have an expression they use that sort of acknowledges something but then simultaneously negates it, puts it in a box to be dealt with… well the way I had this character say it in really calm tone it was as if this thing was never to be dealt with. The girl, the girl Willie that is, in my story, she pipes up here and starts talking again about the The Last Wave again. She says that this is just like the court room scene in the film. She says that the whites acknowledge the aborigine people, how they feel this guilt about displacing and killing them,but not enough to actually do anything different for them, so they make these verbal concessions that box up the problem, appearing to address it but effectively putting it into a void. She talks about how the whites can’t be seen to refute the aboriginal people’s beliefs publicly so they say that aboriginal law only applies to a certain kind of aboriginal person which they call “Tribal” and how this means an uncivilised exotic sort of person.

Concierge: Are the aborigines in that film not all “tribal” then?

Screenwriter: Not in the film no, and I had the character talk about this a bit more actually. In the film the whites can’t declare out and out that what the aborigines believe in is untrue so they have it only apply to these “Tribals”. What’s really important about the definition of a “Tribal” is that they are not here. The film takes place in Sydney and the story makes it clear that “Tribals” are always “other”, of rather, “doubly other” they are firstly not white and they are also not here. “There are no tribals in the city” is something that’s said a few times in The Last Wave, the tribal people live somewhere else. The aborigines are therefore something else and beholden to the rules that the whites put to them.

Concierge: Why is that important sir?

Screenwriter: Well this is a good bit! I’m pretty impressed with this myself, the girl Willie says something like “this is important because the aboriginal spirituality is not just a belief system but a metaphysics”. She goes on to explain that tribal people believe not just in abstracts but in physical, actual manifestations of things. They believe not just in a different ideology but in a different physical orchestration of the world. Willie talks us through a scene in the film where Chris describes how his family is able to contact him when they need his help by affecting his body. He gets asked by someone how this happens, and in response he pulls at the skin on his forearm and says it is like that.

Concierge: Like a pinch?

Screenwriter: more like a tic in the muscle. I liked that scene in the film so I had Willie talk about it some more, and so she elaborates. She says that this is like the blue space in the painting, its neither the language of representation or the language of the physical thing. Its something else entirely which isn’t language, it is the Real. She goes on a bit about The Last Wave, how it’s a development of Lovecraft’s stories but better, and how the power underneath everything, the power that’s indescribable is always this immense things beyond language of all kinds, how its too big for the words to wrap around it so they just can’t. She says we just walk around what she describes as a “huge sleeping tiger” oblivious because it’s too big for us to acknowledge it, we can’t find it’s edges. It is really quite a monologue that she launches into here, I think with the right actress it could be real award material. At one point she sticks her fingers in her Coke and dribbles the liquid on the table top and it’s a really visceral scene. Willie talks about water surface tension in order to describe the blue plane in Bacon’s painting, how it it pulls tight to the edges of everything else, rather then existing behind or in front of it. Willie says that it is a plane which can’t be broken and that actions at one point directly affect all the other edges. She says this is just like the plane which exists between Chris and his family. She says this is just like the plane that exists between all things past and future and how they all meet now.

Concierge: You don’t have the other chap talk very much in this script do you sir?

Screenwriter: No, you’re right, he doesn’t talk much. I liked the idea of this girl who doesn’t say word one in her own film, having all this stuff to say after the film’s over, I mean after 3 Women is over. It's like she spent that Robert Altman movie in the margins of the story as an object working something out that had nothing much to do with the other characters, and then in my radio play it’s ready to be articulated, with this other guy and with the Francis Bacon painting. One point of the triangle of 3 Women also forms another triangle in a different dimension, like a repeating pattern. That’s quite nice actually, I’ll remember that.

Concierge: So was that the end of your pitch sir?

Screenwriter: Yes. No actually, there’s a sort of coda at the end. They sit slulping their cokes for a bit longer. They play a Jimi Hendrix cover of Ray Charles’ What’d I Say on the jukebox and talk about its importance in the history of Rock and Roll along with some other things I can't remember. Old jokes mainly, they laugh a lot and it’s cozy. Then after a pause the Chris character looks at the painting again and says the pampas grass looking landscape in the centre is a figure, but not a representation of a figure made out of the land, he says it is a figure as a gesture, an “ever changing roster of forces in a state of hyper-chaos”. He says this is a bit like the instability of character in 3 Women, how no one character is able to keep their “self” constant and how they all begin to collapse and grow and merge in a non-linear manner both through misleading stories told about one character by another but also through the film’s direction which fragments the identities of the characters, leaving them uncertain by exploiting the cracks in the medium itself. He says this is what makes that film great. He finishes by saying that the use and merging of the crack in the medium and cracks within the narrative are what make Robert Altman such an important director. He says the same could be said for Bacon, and probably sometimes for the Australian guy that did The Last Wave too.

Concierge:…

Screenwriter: …

Concierge: Is there anything I can get you sir?

Screenwriter: No, nothing thanks, I’ll go up to my room now I think. Good night.

Concierge: See you in the morning sir, sleep well.

Warning! Polarity Reversing

How precarious life in Britain was in the 1970’s. Without really knowing it, we were under attack from all angles, a relentless barrage of aggression that made the Blitz look like a disagreement over bric a brac at a jumble sale. As most of us went about our business (buying paraffin, listening to Slade records, going on strike, wearing massive trousers, smoking) our sceptered isle was a secret war zone, our lives and way of life threatened from under the sea, under the ground, from the future, from the distant past and from the farthest, coldest, darkest recesses of intergalactic space.

As a child, I would lay awake and wonder what would become of us if it wasn’t for Dr. Who. Exiled to Earth, he was the one thing that stopped us time and again from invasion, subjugation, annihilation - and he didn’t even really want to be here. Imagine the UK without the Doctor, and in short time we’d have been over-run by animated inanimate objects, held to ransom by aliens, taken over by an ancient race of reptiles, then ravaged by a savage war of conquest between those self-same reptiles and their ruthless aquatic cousins, mankind reduced to hapless observers, slaves, forgotten, impotent witnesses to the end of civilisation as we knew it.

Not surprisingly, I hero-worshipped the 900 year old alien responsible for keeping me alive and sought to pay him tribute by watching his struggles of a Saturday tea time, buying his chocolate and keeping the wrappers, eating his cereal, wearing his badges and, most of all, obsessively reading his annual reports which were published each year in time for Christmas.

There is no-one that has ever had as big an influence on me as the Third Doctor, including family members, which is not so much a reflection on them as an indicator of the sort of person I would grow up to be: fickle, and more interested in the imaginary and ephemeral than the here and now, the there and then, the mundane nuts, boring bolts and less than riveting rivets of real life. It’s desperately sad, of course, I know that but the pitiful nature of that revelation doesn’t negate its truth.

Dr. Who taught me that life is tentative, random, fragile: one minute you’re riding your bike to work, the next you’re being blown away by a dapper shop dummy. It also taught me that, as a species, we’re nowhere, not ancient, not adaptable, technologically backward, fatally vulnerable, helpless.

In a time when plastic flowers and sofas could, and did, kill, we needed a much older, far wiser head to watch our backs. I miss that. Precarious life might have been back then, but I felt safe, reassured. Now, I’m permanently on edge, and life is revealed as a game of cards on an oil rig, soon to be interrupted by a heat ray wielding terrapin with a wet vest and murder in mind.

Unmann-Wittering.