Steve Crook

Thanks for that. Nice to see Emeric getting some recognition for a change. Powell was always the first to say that he couldn't have done what he did without Emeric. But the auteur theory still makes it hard for many people to appreciate that film-making is a cooperative venture. Especially the way that The Archers did it.

Emeric wrote original stories for the majority of the films they made together. He also acted as producer, soothing feathers ruffled by Michael, and he also assisted and made suggestions to the editor. Particularly as regards the music soundtrack as he was a musician himself.

With the scripts, Emeric always knew what he wanted the characters to say, but sometimes he didn't know the correct idiom, so Micky often helped with that.

Although Micky was the only director, Emeric was usually on the studio floor or close at hand so that if any last minute changes were made he was on hand to ensure that it fitted into the story properly. And there often were late changes on Archers films if something wasn't working as well as they wanted or if someone had a good idea it was discussed and was often incorporated.

Archers films really were a cooperative venture by a team of people, who were all at the top of their game and had often been working together across quite a few films. And it was all done without much interference from the studio. They were trusted and just left to get on with it.

Scorsese has described them as "Experimental film-makers working inside a totally commercial system"

Steve

Steve Crook

But even 49P was slightly subversive in that it had one of the minorities killing one of the master race (shooting him on the sea-plane). And it also had a good Nazi as well as other good Germans (like the Hutterites)

Steve

DB7

I would read the article first. I'll bet you £50 the author would have been up in arms had he been a reviewer circa the release of Peeping Tom. Conservative with a small c.

Rob Compton

Yes, but that was getting on for fifty years ago.

Even the Telegraph has changed rather a lot in those fifty years. Why not try reading a copy? Of course it follows a conservative line (small "c") but not blindly, by any means.
rgds
Rob

penfold

For the record, the Daily Telegraph's release review was not as bad as some of the others..but they have to be seen to be believed.
Daily Telegraph; 9th April 1960
Review by Campbell Dixon
Horrible Hobby
The word for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (Plaza, "X") is, quite simply, nasty. Its concern is, fashionably, with voyeurisme, the central character being a young man who likes to kill women while recording their reactions during the process with a cine-camera.
His idea of a pleasant evening, apparently, is to play back the films thus obtained in his attic laboratory along with tape-recordings of intimate conversations and unpleasant episodes from his own childhood, thus getting up, I suppose, enough enthusiasm to go out and murder a new subject.
As well as being as unpleasant as they come, the film is also silly, probability never being established, although those concerned would, no doubt, defend themselves by saying it is to be taken with a pinch of salt as a satire on the psychological sort of thriller.
Some scenes finding their fun in the behaviour of film actresses and directors do, in fact, momentarily amuse. They arrive from the psychopath being employed as a camera-man at some film studios.
It takes him some time to get the pretty stand-in (Moira Shearer) defunct in a trunk, but then he's ready to knock off one of the models he photographs in the nude as a hobby before he turns his attention to the girl down-stairs (Anna Massey)
So it goes on towards his own suicide, with telling touches of sadism, masochism, voyeurism and the rest, all of which appear to be invoked just for the hell of it. Altogether a work of great "curiosity" as the book trade would say. Sick minds will be highly stimulated.


This and the rest are at The Killer Reviews

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Steve Crook

They just didn't get it did they? :
And thanks to young penfold for gathering most of those Killer Reviews.
Although note that many of the trade reviews were quite supportive and thought it'd be a good film to show.

And some, like David Robinson, wrote a reasonable review for the Monthly Film Bulletin and a scathing review for the Financial Times.

Steve

penfold

A tad unfair, there Steve; he says much the same things in both pieces; and by the time of the MFB publication he has had that extra month to reflect....mind you, I think he more or less stands by the review today. He admires the film technically, and what it tries to say; it doesn't mean he actually likes it.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

DB7

I wonder what the author of the original article made of CH4's The Seven Sins of England, a collection of working-class Romford chavs and binge-drinkers spouting Elizabethan prose is an interesting contrast - and all credit to the non-actors; they pull it off with aplomb. (especially the roofer waiting for a CT scan who breaks down crying)

batman

Eric Portman 'A Canterbury Tale'

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"